Tag: EU

The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee has approved the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a text that solidifies the EU’s leadership in developing user-centric data protection rules.

On December 2nd 2015, Access Now policy analyst Estelle Massé delivered a speech at the European Parliament on mass surveillance in the EU.

Last week, the UK Court of Appeal sent the David Davis data retention case to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for clarification. How the CJEU responds could have implications for data retention across the EU.

Much of the world’s digital economy relies on the free flow of data. So when a European court recently struck down an agreement known as “Safe Harbor,” which authorized data transfers between the United States and Europe, it sent shock waves across the Atlantic. Now companies and even governments are trying to figure out what to do.

Today, the European Parliament adopted the second report on the implementation of a “European Digital Habeas Corpus” examining the state of play of surveillance programmes. The non-binding report finds that there hasn’t been sufficient action taken to reform surveillance practices that affect individual rights. It also criticises the establishment of new surveillance measures in a large number of EU countries. Finally, the report calls for member states to drop charges against Edward Snowden and grant him whistleblower protection.

Earlier this year, the three major European institutions reached an agreement in the Telecoms Single Market trialogue, where lawmakers made several ambitious promises. Among them was the promise to enshrine Net Neutrality rules concretely into EU law. The aim: to guarantee Europeans the “most comprehensive open internet rules,” and to prevent fragmenting equitable cross-border internet services that are in a single market. However, as it stands, the legislation is not yet clear enough to realize these grand ambitions.

Tomorrow, the EU Court of Justice will determine whether the national Data Protection authority can conduct an independent assessment of a decision in the so-called Schrems case, which deals with Facebook’s transfer of user data between its subsidiary in Ireland and the parent company in the United States.