EU ePrivacy Regulation Proposal Falls Short of Parliament’s Expectations
The European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs commissioned a study to assess the European Commission’s draft e-Privacy Regulation, which was published in January 2017. The e-Privacy Regulation aims to harmonise privacy rules across the EU in the area of electronic communications, but the study has found that the draft e-Privacy Regulation does not as far as the GDPR in some respects. This contrasts with many other views expressed publicly, which regarded the Commission’s draft as a tightening of the GDPR regime. A central theme of the study, which was carried out by academics of the IViR Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, is the need to protect privacy of correspondence regardless of medium or any other factor. The EU legislative institutions are urged to pay extra attention to four areas in which it is felt that there is insufficient protection of the right to privacy and confidentiality of communications. We explore these issues in the following post.
