Re:Upcoming EU data law will make Europe tricky for Facebook
by buro9 on Thursday November 10, 2011 @11:04AM
(#3220537)
Not obvious.
The data protection laws in Europe are enforcement laws and provide detailed instruction on the enforcement of the treaties that make up the "European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms"... basically what is referred to as just "Human Rights".
As governments and companies in Europe keep finding, no laws trump that EU treaty.
A wikipedia licence won't cut it.
Further the 1995 data protection laws already stated that any data which could identify the person is covered. That definitely includes meta data, hence my comment about needing to disassociate the data to anonymise it. A person can request any identifying information be deleted, including pseudonyms as it's conceivable that a pseudonym used on multiple services is identifying.
Which leaves anonymous contributions to a project... then how can you continue to enforce anti-spam/troll policies when most of the existing methods rely on spotting the spammers/trolls based on signals from IP, user-agent, emails, usage... if you can identify a spammer, then you can identify a person (given access to enough data), and therefore it's identifying.
These new proposals strengthen the existing laws, which are actually already pretty good. I'm basically saying that there is an edge case here, and it could lead to problems. The law being black and white needs exceptions clarified in writing and not left to assumption.
The data protection laws in Europe are enforcement laws and provide detailed instruction on the enforcement of the treaties that make up the "European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms"... basically what is referred to as just "Human Rights".
As governments and companies in Europe keep finding, no laws trump that EU treaty.
A wikipedia licence won't cut it.
Further the 1995 data protection laws already stated that any data which could identify the person is covered. That definitely includes meta data, hence my comment about needing to disassociate the data to anonymise it. A person can request any identifying information be deleted, including pseudonyms as it's conceivable that a pseudonym used on multiple services is identifying.
Which leaves anonymous contributions to a project... then how can you continue to enforce anti-spam/troll policies when most of the existing methods rely on spotting the spammers/trolls based on signals from IP, user-agent, emails, usage... if you can identify a spammer, then you can identify a person (given access to enough data), and therefore it's identifying.
These new proposals strengthen the existing laws, which are actually already pretty good. I'm basically saying that there is an edge case here, and it could lead to problems. The law being black and white needs exceptions clarified in writing and not left to assumption.