BRUSSELS – (MintPress) – A handful of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have copy-pasted amendments made by major U.S. corporations directly into the European Union’s new data protection draft law, it was recently revealed.
The alarm bell was rung by an Austrian law student, Max Schrems, who came to prominence in 2011 when he challenged Facebook to remove all his personal data from the Internet; he now runs a pro-transparency group called Europe vs Facebook.
Schrems noticed striking similarities between proposed amendments by some MEPs and lobby papers written by representatives of companies like Amazon, eBay, the American Chamber of Commerce and the European Banking Federation. It soon became obvious that several MEPs had simply copied entire paragraphs from lobby papers into their own suggestions for amending the draft law.
About a year ago, in January 2012, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding presented a draft for a new “EU Data Protection Regulation” with a view to update an 18-year-old directive and bring it in line with the latest technologies. Reding also proposed a draft directive on the protection of citizen’s law enforcement data (such as police records). The two proposals are meant to uniformly apply throughout the EU and are treated as a package. They are currently being discussed in the European Parliament and in the Council of Ministers, the two EU co-legislators.
During the presentation of the reform she made at that time, Reding especially stressed the benefits of the new law for EU citizens. Among the novelties destined to ensure greater privacy rights for individuals are the “right to be forgotten” and the need to have a person’s explicit consent before using his personal data. For the first time, the text also added serious enforcement of users’ rights – in particular penalties of up to 2 percent of global turnover or the possibility for users to directly sue a company in courts. As a result, the draft regulation has been generally welcomed by privacy advocates, even if they thought some improvements could be made.
But even before the official publication of the first draft, the IT industry had already started its lobbying activities. Most of it is coming from American IT giants and associations in which major companies are organized. Their amendments aim at weakening the Commission’s draft by removing safeguards and introducing terminology that is more open to interpretation in favor of industry. According to Schrems, the IT giants “try to punch holes into the law, so that they can later slip through them.”
Unseen levels of lobbying
The U.S. industry is especially critical of the “right to be forgotten,” of the need to require a person’s explicit consent before using his personal data and of the possible fines that could be imposed to companies that do not respect the legislation. They want to remove or weaken the provisions that limit the processing or the sharing of the data; to lower the penalties; and to limit citizens’ “right of access.”
As a consequence, Brussels has seen unprecedented lobbying efforts by industry and government, particularly from the United States. American companies are well organized; Amazon has made a 41-page document with amendment proposals. The American Chamber of Commerce has a 89-page document, including very specific and detailed proposals for change. These documents are clear and well written, making it very easy for some MEPs to just copy-paste parts of them. The phenomenon is so widespread that data journalists decided to create a special Internet platform where citizens can find the lobby papers’ with the parts copied into the draft regulation and the names of the MEPs who proposed them.
It’s not only American corporations that have been heavily involved in the lobbying activities, The U.S. government is also weighing in. European Digital Rights (EDRI), an alliance of 35 privacy and civil rights organizations throughout Europe, recently published an internal memo directed at the EU in which the U.S. government very clearly says what they expect from the EU:
“Above all, given the complex and unpredictable effects the EU legislation may have and the enormous implications for global trade and security, a careful, thorough examination of all of the potential consequences should be carried out and the legislation revised to ensure that security and commerce are not adversely effected,” the U.S. note says, revealing how the American government is trying to interfere with the internal EU legislative procedure. Additionally, it shows that the U.S. government is clearly more concerned with business and security than with a citizen’s right to privacy.
The U.S. government opposes the “right to be forgotten” provision which would force companies to immediately delete personal data upon request. It says the EU needs to review the right to be forgotten and a related “right to erasure” clause in the draft law because it would stymies industry innovation. How the “right to be forgotten” would affect innovation remains unclear.
The lobbying has been such that several members of the European Parliament have complained in recent weeks and months over “extreme levels of lobbying,” which some claimed to be more than they have ever seen before. Recently, Eva Lichtenberger, an Austrian MEP from the Green Party, called it “one of the biggest lobby wars of all times.” The rapporteur of the European Parliament, Jan-Philipp Albrecht, a German Green, said in an interview: “We have the impression that we are facing one of the broadest lobbying campaigns in the European Parliament.”
Big step backward
Rather late, a number of European civil rights organizations have taken actions; they have started a campaign to resist the companies’ lobbying and to raise awareness among the general public on the importance of protecting their personal data. Even U.S. civil rights and consumer organizations have massively voiced criticism of the lobbying by the Obama administration and protested against this type of influence in Europe – they are hoping that stricter protection in the EU will have a ripple effect in the United States.
They recently sent a letter to the American government to voice their concern.
“We expect leadership from those who represent the United States overseas and we expect that the views of American consumers and privacy advocates, not simply business leaders, will be conveyed to your counterparts. Enactment of robust privacy legislation in the United States should be a top priority for the Administration.”
In a nutshell, American IT giants, as well as the U.S. government, currently are trying to lobby away Europeans’ fundamental right to privacy. And they have apparently been quite successful in doing so. The result is that the EU legislative process, which will define privacy protection in the EU for the next 10 or 20 years, now runs the risk of being a big step backward instead of forward. According to Schrems — “the IT industry is about to kill our fundamental right to data protection and privacy and some Parliamentarians apparently do not even notice when assisting them.”
For others, these events illustrate a wider problem in Europe: the “democratic deficit,” as it has been called. According to Anna Fielder, Trustee of Privacy International, “revelations like these add fuel to the fire of existing concerns about the democratic deficit in the European Union. Certain companies will always be willing and able to throw millions of dollars behind lobbying efforts to ensure that new legislation doesn’t interfere with their business models – particularly if those models are dependent on invading people’s rights to privacy and data protection. We would hope that MEPs are taking all sides of the argument into account when making law, not just the richest and most powerful corporate interests.”