Web giants face fresh EU threat

An EU group is demanding that search engines, social networks and cloud computing services should be forced to adhere to the proposed European data protection reforms.
The move, which is likely to be fiercely resisted by Internet giants Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft, is among a number of changes in an official response by the European Economic & Social Committee (EESC).
The EESC, which represents economic and social interest groups, said the Commission’s approach to reform needed to be “more in line with the needs and expectations of the public”.
Two aspects the committee repeatedly criticises are ‘vague wording’ and the number of ‘exceptions’ in the proposals. It also wants it changed from a directive to a regulation, which is the UK’s favoured option, as it allows for greater flexibility in how the laws are implemented in each member state.
In order to conform with what consumers expected from a data protection law, the rules should be “applied more systematically to certain fields of economic and social activity”, including direct marketing, e-commerce, employment relationships and surveillance.
In addition, data provided “voluntarily” by individuals on social networks should not be excluded from protection, as could be inferred from the current draft.
In its opinion, the EESC said that search engines should be covered by the law as the majority of their revenue comes from targeted advertising, as a result of the data they hold on visitors to their sites.
“The same should go for the sites of servers providing storage space and, in some cases, cloud computing software that can collect data on users for commercial ends,” the EESC said. “The same should also apply to personal information published on social networks which, in accordance with the right to be forgotten, should allow data subjects to modify or erase such information or to request the deletion of their personal pages as well as links to other high-traffic sites where that information is reproduced or discussed.”