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A brief history of personal data protection regulation in Europe<\/h2>\n
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You may already know about ePrivacy Regulation, or at least have heard of it. Public consultation was conducted in the EU, and it\u2019s already been discussed in many of the European media. Here we summarize how the story of ePrivacy in Europe began.<\/p>\n
The Internet started growing rapidly in the 1990s, and with it, the volume of user data has grown as well. Companies developed new ways to acquire and process that data, which became a valuable commodity. The more user data a company has, and the more effectively it analyzes the data, the more accurately that company can target consumers, selling products by showing users ads based on the data the users generate.<\/p>\n
The European Commission began to pay special attention to everything concerning this sphere and how and by whom the data was used. The situation clearly required legal regulation on a higher level than had existed before. The first act on personal data protection was the Data Protection Directive. Its definition of personal data<\/em><\/em> was somewhat vague, so 21 years later, in April 2016, it was replaced by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The regulation aims to strictly define and categorize personal data, as well as to unify and strengthen the rules of protection of EU citizens\u2019 data \u2014 be it genetic, intellectual, cultural, economic, or social information. Examples include IP addresses, customer names, phones, supplier records, staff records, and much more.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And then came ePrivacy Regulation, which takes effect in May 2018 and adds regulation to the GDPR. Its precepts are largely similar to those of the GDPR; the main difference is that the ePrivacy Regulation divides personal data into two huge parts: content data (text messages, pictures, languages used, etc.) and metadata \u2014 \u201cdata about the data,\u201d the information about the content files. For example, for Web pages, metadata include keywords, cookies, fingerprint files, and so forth. Metadata is hugely important for anyone who wants to define somebody on the Net, track them, and analyze their behavior.<\/p>\n Though this slide is from another talk at Chaos Communication Congress it explains how important metadata is nowadays<\/p><\/div>\n ePrivacy Regulation\u2019s guiding principle regarding all types of user data on the Net is: \u201cPrivacy by default.\u201d That means:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Since the Regulation\u2019s proposal in January 2017, European society has engaged in great debates about it. Europe\u2019s largest media as well as representatives of Internet businesses have expressed the common point of view that the Regulation is not only not helpful for users, but also user-unfriendly and nonproductive.<\/p>\n Industry lobbyists on ePrivacy in the EU, such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), DigitalEurope, the European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA), the European Magazine Media Association (EMMA), and more (members of these organizations include such companies as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft; the largest European digital, advertising, and PR agencies; and media companies), started an Internet campaign against the regulation. It is called \u201cLike a Bad Movie,\u201d<\/a> and it imagines a world with ePrivacy Regulation in effect. They claim that the regulation\u2019s approval will hurt users and the Internet as a whole. Its claims:<\/p>\n The lobbyists\u2019 overarching point is that the Regulation threatens data-driven business models, and so the lobby is fighting it hard<\/a>. Of the 41 lobby meetings on ePrivacy held with EU Commissioners in 2016, 36 were with corporate interests. As a result, the final proposal of the regulation \u2014 what we have now \u2014 is already missing some things that were in the draft. For example, its definition of metadata is vague, and the proposal to ensure default e-privacy settings on computer equipment was excluded.<\/p>\nDefining the new ePrivacy Regulation<\/h3>\n
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The battlefield<\/h3>\n
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