A proposal for EU-wide data protection regulation

A top lawmaker on Tuesday proposed harmonizing European Union privacy rules so that an Internet company could operate across the 27-country bloc as long as its data protection policies had been approved by a single member state. Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission, said unnecessary hurdles created by privacy rules that date to 1995, when the Internet was in its infancy, were costing companies €2.3 billion, or $3.1 billion, a year as regulators in 27 different nations applied their own rules. She said an overhaul of the privacy regulations was crucial to increasing the competitiveness of the European economy to help it surmount the crisis. Ms. Reding said she planned to detail her plans in January in what is expected to be a sweeping overhaul of the 16-year-old Data Protection Directive. Internet companies, which would be most immediately affected by the new rules, have been urging E.U. lawmakers to simplify the existing practice, and mostly welcomed her proposals Tuesday. During a separate speech, Ms. Reding said Tuesday that she wanted to give users of social networks and other Web services greater control by, for example, letting them delete personal data or move it to other sites more easily. Companies like Facebook have generally resisted such proposals, fearing this could undermine the development of services like targeted advertising, which relies on the mining of consumer data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/a-proposal-for-eu-wide-data-protection-regulation.html?_r=1