Google Data Chief Says ‘Flawed’ EU Privacy Law Is Dead
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-08/google-data-chief-says-flawed-eu-privacy-law-is-dead.html
“Europe’s much-ballyhooed, and much-flawed, proposal to re-write its privacy laws for the next 20 years collapsed,” Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Mountain View, California-based Google, said in a blog post today. “The old draft is dead, and something else will eventually be resurrected in its place.”
EU nations have dragged their heels over measures that could empower regulators to levy fines of as much as 100 million euros ($136 million) against technology companies for privacy violations when they process EU citizens’ data. U.S. firms from Google to Facebook Inc. (FB) would be covered by the law.
This is “another try of Fleischer to kill the data-protection regulation by calling it dead,” said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green Party politician who has steered the draft EU law through the European Parliament. The “EU would have already agreed if Google wouldn’t fight every regulation” with hundreds of millions of dollars “for lobbyists in Washington D.C. and Brussels.”
Fleischer’s comments come a day after EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding showed no interest in dropping the rules she first proposed two years ago. In a speech yesterday, she said the 28-nation bloc must “move full speed ahead” toward clinching a deal on data protection.