EU proposal puts confidential communications data at risk

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

Civil liberties groups La Quadrature du Net, European Digital Rights
(EDRi), AK Vorrat, and Netzpolitik.org are urging the European Parliament
to heed advice given by the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter
Hustinx and scrap plans dubbed “voluntary data retention”.

“A proposal currently discussed in the European Parliament as part of the
‘telecom package’ would allow providers to collect a potentially unlimited
amount of sensitive, confidential communications data including our
telephone and e-mail contacts, the geographic position of our mobile
phones and the websites we visit on the Internet”, warns Patrick Breyer of
German privacy watchdog AK Vorrat. “Apart from the creation of vast data
pools that could go far beyond what is being collected under the directive
on data retention, the proposal would also permit the passing on of
traffic data to other companies for ‘security purposes’. We must not let a
potentially unlimited amount of confidential data be exposed to risks of
disclosure or abuse in this way.”

“This proposal is lobbied for under the guise of ‘security’, but what it
really means is that users and citizens would have no expectation of
privacy on the Internet anymore,” adds Ralf Bendrath from EDRi. “This is a
clear breach of the European tradition of considering privacy a
fundamental human right.”

In a paper published earlier this month, European Data Protection
Supervisor Peter Hustinx joined the critics, warning the proposal would
constitute a “risk of abuse” and “may be interpreted as enabling the
collection and processing of traffic data for security purposes for an
unspecified period of time.”[1] Hustinx reached “the conclusion that the
best outcome would be for the proposed Article 6.6(a) to be deleted
altogether” – a view firmly shared by La Quadrature du Net, EDRi,
netzpolitik.org and AK Vorrat.

“A few months before the elections, citizens will have the opportunity to
see if the Members of European Parliament are willing to protect their
privacy”, declares Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the citizen’s
initiative La Quadrature du Net. “Every citizen should inform their MEPs
and ask them to massively reject this article 6 (6a) of the ePrivacy
directive. Other crucial issues about content and network neutrality are
at stake as well.[2] We must remind MEPs that they were elected to protect
Europeans’ fundamental rights and freedom rather than abolishing them in
favour of particular interests.”

In a letter of September last year, 11 German civil liberties,
journalists, lawyers and consumer protection organisations “urgently”
asked the Commission, the Council and Parliament to scrap the proposed
article 6 (6a) and “maintain the successful regulation of traffic data”
which they say has “proven to constitute the best guarantee for our safety
in information society.”[3]

References:

[1]http://www.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/site/mySite/shared/Documents/Consultation/Opinions/2009/09-01-09_ePricacy_2_EN.pdf
[2]http://www.laquadrature.net/files/20081208_LaQuadrature_letter-rapporteurs-tp-second-reading_EN.pdf

[3]http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/271/79/lang,en/

Background paper by Working Group on Data Retention:
http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/images/wg_esecurity_position.pdf