Policy Observatory

The French data protection authority, the CNIL, has issued the company with a formal notice to comply with European data protection law or face possible sanctions.

Facebook has been given three months to make the changes deemed necessary by the CNIL.

On June 9, two major Dutch business lobby organizations expressed privacy concerns in a letter to the Minister of Economic Affairs and the Minister of Security and Justice (source document in Dutch) regarding the implementation of the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive. The Directive requires EU member states to establish a register of ultimate beneficiary owners ("UBOs"), which would contain information about persons holding at least 25 percent of the voting rights or capital interest in a company.

Under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page.

In a joint letter, 73 organisations from 31 countries call on the European Telecom Regulators to uphold net neutrality in their current negotiations about the future of the Internet in Europe.

After 2 years the EU adopted a net neutrality law which leaves many core questions up for interpretation. The Telecom Single Market regulation was adopted in October 2015 in second reading in the European Parliament.

The Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communication (BEREC) and the 28 telecom regulators are currently negotiating guidelines that clarify the recently adopted ambigous European net neutrality law. The regulators have time until August 2016 to publish their final guidelines and will hold a public consultation in June to July.

Read also the letter of the 73 organizations addressed to the BEREC.
 

New EU data protection rules which aim to give citizens back control of their personal data and create a high, uniform level of data protection across the EU fit for the digital era was given their final approval by MEPs on Thursday. The reform also sets minimum standards on use of data for policing and judicial purposes.

The text of the General Data Protection Regulation has been published and it is available here.