UK backs Google & Facebook with call for Brussels to ease data protection rules
The UK has teamed up with nine other countries; including the US and Germany, to urge Brussels to ease proposed data protection rules which would hit top technology firms such as Facebook and Google.
The tech giants are increasingly concerned about the adverse effect such legislation would have on their business by apply fines of as much as 2% of global turnover for data breaches.
Instead the UK’s Information Commissioner is proposing that individual countries retain the freedom to implement the law as they see fit with a spokesperson stating: “If you have a butcher whose data processing only affects 20 local people, you need to be able to treat an infringement there differently from a company with private health records.”
A timetable for the implementation of the new rules was due to have been drawn up in June but would have taken years to be implemented.
EC justice minister Viviane Reding had proposed a ‘right to be forgotten’ for people who wanted to force companies to delete all data held on them but Google has taken issue with this, saying that it would create holes in their historical record and disrupt its stores of data.