Updated EU privacy laws will motivate businesses to embed data protection

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Paul Nemitz, European Commission director of fundamental rights and citizenship, told the audience of the International Association of Privacy Professionals conference that the aim of new privacy legislation is to “create trust".

The majority of the speakers at the conference, which took place in Brussels on December 12th, were confident the European Union (EU) would pass the new privacy directive, which would mean that the EU’s 28 member states would then change their domestic laws as early as 2015.

The proposed law would begin in 2014 and be fully in effect from 2016. The EU has recommended the replacement of the Data Protection Directive with a single law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The EU decided that this change was needed as current laws do not consider technological developments, like social networks and cloud computing.

Mr Nemitz dismissed other speaker’s worries about the potential regulatory costs to business – citing one estimate that U.S. cloud companies such as Amazon and Google have already lost around $30 billion (£18.4 billion) in business from European firms, as they fear that their data may be scrutinised by the government.

The widely reported revelations about how the National Security Agency (NSA) collected personal data on billions of people across the world has caused European consumers to feel bitter resentment towards America. In his speech, Mr Nemitz predicted that EU privacy protection would actually work in favour of EU enterprises.

According to the website DataInformed, Mr Nemitz said: “I believe privacy will become a competitive advantage for European companies.

“There are millions of U.S. and Chinese middle-class consumers who do not want to be constantly tracked and analysed without knowing what happens to their data and their money.”

The proposed GDPR law contains 90 articles regulating privacy and protection, based on the premise that control of an individual’s personal data is a fundamental human right. To reflect this, the GDPR law includes the right to consent, the right to access, and the “right to be forgotten”.

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