EU draft privacy law is useless, say digital rights orgs

Activists have leaked the latest draft of Europe’s planned data protection law – which is supposed to safeguard Europeans’ personal information when in the hands of businesses and governments, reports The Register

“The proposed rules have been agreed by the European Parliament. Now Euro nations’ government ministers, who sit on the Council of the European Union, are tearing the text apart, and rewriting large chunks of it.

The 305-page document obtained and published by Privacy International, EDRi, Access and the Panoptykon Foundation – shows the changes put forward by the council. The four civil-liberties groups say ministers are effectively ruining any chance of real data protection in the EU.”

Luckily, this latest leaked text is not final:

“Ministers have vowed to agree a common position in the first half of this year, but careful reading of the endnotes shows some national ministers are still at odds with the notion of privacy.”