Victory for tech giants on EU data laws
Last updated: October 25, 2013 7:57 pm
Victory for tech giants on EU data laws
By James Fontanella-Khan in Brussels
Google, Facebook and other US tech giants have won an
important victory against EU efforts to restrict the sharing of customer data
after UK Prime Minister David Cameron persuaded the bloc to postpone the
introduction of tougher privacy rules by at least a year.
The climbdown is a blow to advocates of stricter data
protection standards, especially as it comes amid an international scandal that
has seen the US
accused of snooping on EU leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
millions of European citizens.
The delay will give US
companies – as well as the Obama administration, which has been frantically
lobbying for the reforms to be watered down – the opportunity to make their
case more forcefully once the attention shifts away from the US spy scandal, said some EU
officials and privacy advocates.
“It looks like we won,” said an executive at a large US tech
company. “When we saw the story about Merkel’s phone being tapped and that 35
leaders’ phones were also compromised, we thought we were going to lose . . . Britain ’s
common sense prevailed.”
Tech lobbyists were alarmed this week when the European
Parliament decided to amend the EU’s draft data privacy legislation to limit
the US ’s
ability to obtain information on EU citizens. The measure had been stripped
from the original proposal, made by the European Commission in January 2012,
after intense lobbying from US officials.
US companies also want to scrap – or at least reduce –
sanctions for breaching any new regulations, which could cost companies such as
Google, Facebook and Amazon dearly. The parliament increased the fines
originally proposed by the commission to 5 per cent of annual global revenues
or €100m, whichever is greater.
Senior EU officials said Mr Cameron had spearheaded
efforts to get the date moved to 2015. “They [the UK ]
don’t like the directive as it is,” said a top Brussels official. “It is burdensome, they
say. They wanted to have a reference to more timely adoption. So the compromise
was therefore the reference to 2015.”
Mr Cameron initially opposed setting any deadline but
agreed to compromise on 2015 after France ,
Italy and Poland pushed
for the proposal to be completed before European elections in May 2014.
Ms Merkel on Wednesday accused the US of tapping her phone, prompting her to launch
a separate initiative with France
to renegotiate their intelligence services’ co-operation with Washington .
“The delay was demanded by the US , because they believe that they
can get everything they want out of the ongoing trade discussions. So, it is
both an opportunity to water down the proposals directly and also indirectly,”
said Joe McNamee, director of European Digital Rights, a privacy campaign
group.
One of David Cameron’s aides said on Friday that he had
“no idea” whether the prime minister had discussed the data protection rules
with Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, who sits on the prime minister’s
business advisory board.
But he insisted that Google was “not the reason why” the
prime minister had fought against early adoption of the rules. “As offered it
contains huge extra burdens on businesses so there has to be some changes to
it, that is why we got it removed.”
Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council president, said
on Friday that several countries had been concerned that a rushed proposal
could harm businesses that heavily depended on personal customer data.
“What is the problem? . . . It is a complex task not only related
to the already difficult issues of protecting privacy but it also [has] an
impact on business, so we have to study this carefully,” said Mr Van Rompuy.
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Rigby in London
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