Speak Up on the EU’s Data Protection Directive

The European Commission is seeking public comment on revision to the European Union’s 1995 Data Protection Directive.

In his post “Europe Revisiting Privacy Laws is Opportunity, Not Catastrophe” CDT’s Project on Consumer Privacy Director Justin Brookman writes the following:

The Directive, now 15 years old, provides the kind of cross-industry, baseline privacy protections that don’t exist in the United States, but it has been long criticized as being inconsistently applied and erratically enforced. As a result, European companies have been limited in their ability to take advantage of services such as distributed cloud computing that allow international processors to more cheaply and efficiently store data.

Click here to submit comments to the European Commission

Comment deadline: January 15, 2011

CDT plans to issue its own comments to the report soon.

For more information on submitting comments, as well as background on the 1995 Data Protective Directive, see this press release.