The EU Commission is tasked with producing proposals to reform the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive by the end of January 2012. This is the EU law upon which the UK Data Protection Act 1998 is based. A joint statement by the EU Commission Vice President and the German Federal Minister for consumer protection states:
It is a major modernisation with profound effects on how data privacy is treated in the EU and beyond.
Data of EU consumers should be strongly protected wherever they live in the EU and wherever processing of their data is taking place.
Service provision to EU consumers from wherever should be subject to EU DP law otherwise no business should be done with the EU internal market. Social networks, and cloud computing are singled out for specific mention.
Explicit consent should be obtained for processing. This follows the Article 29 Working Party Opinion on Consent published on 13 July 2011.
EU consumers should have the right to delete data at any time especially that posted by themselves on the internet.
The press release MEMO/11/762 is available from the Europa Press Releases Rapid web page at http://bit.ly/tUXZ3h
The Article 29 Working Party Opinion on Consent is available at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2011/wp187_en.pdf
We can confirm that the proposal for the review of the EU Directive (95/46/EC) has been delayed until late February/March. There are a number of issues within the draft regulation that require to be resolved and the Commissioner in charge of the review is still undecided on certain points, therefore, the draft regulation remains a work in progress at this point in time.
JISC Legal will provide further information once the official draft regulation is available.