European Data Protection Day: Six organisations call for better privacy in communications!

No tracking without consent! No tracking walls!

In recital 20 of the current working draft, the Council of the European Union has replaced an "and" with an "or" and by this seemingly small chang, reversed important safeguards. Instead of consent and transparent information, highly invasive tracking will be possible with consent or transparent information. This implies that users may be coerced to decide if they want to subject themselves to commercial surveillance or not to access the service. Under these circumstances, the ePrivacy Regulation would end up lowering standards agreed under the GDPR. This change must be reversed – in the recital and in corresponding articles as well.

The EU Parliament had provided for a ban on tracking walls in Art. 8 paragraph 2 a. The Council of the European Union did not add a similar paragraph. Tracking walls only allow access to a page if the user gives their consent to a large number of his data being processed. Under these circumstances, consent will be forced and meaningless. Therefore, we request the prohibition of tracking walls.

No private data retention!

The current Directive allows the processing of metadata only for strictly limited purposes. The EU Council now wants to weaken these provisions. Instead of improving the protection of our communications data, the Council wants to give telecommunications providers more opportunities to surveil us. When and where we communicate with whom is nobody's business! Although telecommunications providers will only be allowed to store this data pseudonymously, this does not effectively protect users. Pseudonyms can be traced back and associated with a person. The pseudonymous data collection may still be used to trace individuals and lay bare the most intimate details of their life. We demand the deletion Article 6 (2a)! The changes in Article 6 (2) have to be withdrawn.