European Parliament tagged posts

April 25, 2015,  EU General Data Protection Regulation, European Commission, European Parliament  No comments

In the media this week there’s been a fair amount of speculation as to when the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is likely to see the light of day. Some commentators are speculating that sign-off by the European Parliament, Council of Ministers and the European Commission won’t happen until Spring 2016.

Earlier this year, a joint statement by EC vice president Andrus Ansip and EU Commissioner Věra Jourová indicated that GDPR could become law by the end of 2015. Perhaps this was wishful thinking?

And this week, some 60 pressure groups including the UK’s Open Rights Group, Liberty, the Dutch Consumer Council and US Electronic Privacy Information Centre have wr...

March 1, 2015,  EU General Data Protection Regulation, News  No comments

Guenther Oettinger, Europe’s digital economy chief and the German representative on the European Commission has delivered a stark warning to Google and Facebook that they must either comply with the principles of the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or face being thrown out of the single market.

Oettinger accused the tech giants of using “an electronic vacuum cleaner” to collect and then target advertising using detailed information of users often without their knowledge or consent.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Oettinger said: “The Americans are in the lead, they’ve got the data, the business models and so the power.”

He predicted t...

January 10, 2015,  News, Social marketing practice  No comments

Impatience with the progress of the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is starting to grow within the European Union.

A recent joint declaration adopted by representatives of the German, Austrian, Belgian, Croatian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Luxembourg, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Romanian, UK, Slovakian and Swedish  parliaments called on European legislators to adopt the GDPR “by 2015”.

German Green MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, vice chairman of the civil liberties committee at the European Parliament warned this week that failure to agree on the new security and data protection rules was “bad for democracy” as this left European citizens exposed...

December 30, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, News  No comments

Current law

Under EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), organisations and companies are prohibited from transmitting or instigating the transmission of unsolicited electronic communications to consumers for the purposes of direct marketing unless the person receiving those communications has provided prior consent for the messages to be sent.

Companies also mustn’t disguise or conceal their identity in the messages or use invalid addresses where recipients of the messages would send responses to ask for the messages to stop being sent.

Marketers can send direct marketing via electronic mail to consumers if they have “obtained the contact details of th...

November 22, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

Since the Millennium, social media has grown from teenage fad into an essential communication platform at such unprecedented speed that it’s left the development of privacy laws and regulations in its wake.

A new report by India-based analysts Avendus puts this into context on a global perspective.

There are now over 2.4 billion internet users in the world of which 1.5 billion access the internet through their mobile devices either as a primary or a supplementary device; the penetration of smartphones are expected to grow at a CAGR of 20% to reach 2...