Facebook, Data Privacy, and the EU
Companies that handle or transfer data must be extremely careful that they are abiding by the laws of the jurisdictions that the data passes through. Data protection issues will only become more prevalent with the increased use of cloud computing, since a company may not even actually know where the data is being stored. The most contentious arena for this issue is definitely in the EU. Data passing out of the European Union to other countries creates a headache for companies that must abide by its stringent rules.
Now the EU is cracking down on social sites such as Facebook:
"European regulators are investigating whether the practice of posting photos, videos and other information about people on sites such as Facebook without their consent is a breach of privacy laws.
The probes by the German and Swiss privacy watchdogs are still preliminary and would not have immediate consequences elsewhere. However, Weichert said the issue is being discussed with other data protection officials in the 27-nation European Union, which in 2000 declared privacy a fundamental right that companies and governments must respect.
The European stance differs strongly from the self-regulatory, free market approach favored in the United States, where Web companies have flourished by offering users free services if they provide personal information to help advertising target them better, according to Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen."
The US and the EU take fundamentally different approaches to data protection, and companies must ensure that they are abiding by the data protection laws of each jurisdiction. We will discuss more in the coming weeks on how companies can properly transfer and process data in both jurisdictions.
