Industry Press Releases

EU Commissioner, Viviane Reding Speaks on Data Protection at Digital Enlightenment Forum

Jun 25. 2012
11:06
by
CEPIC_2
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EU Comisssioner Viviane Reding spoke at the Digital Enightenment Forum in Luxembourg on the importance of "Forging a high level of data protection for Europe in the brave new digital world".

Commissioner Reding began by detailing the background to the data protection debate, stating The world has changed profoundly since 1995 – the year the existing EU data protection framework was adopted. We now live in a world of immense communication possibilities. We can update our friends and family on our every move and real time. We have access to an infinite pool of knowledge through highly refined search engines and we can entrust our private data to a cloud service provider without ever having to worry about storage space.

She continued, Our current data protection rules already contain solid data protection principles. But they were drawn up in 1990 and adopted in 1995, when only 1% of the EU population was using the Internet. In 1995 a 28.8 Kilobytes per second modem cost more than 500 euros, Amazon and eBay were still being launched and the founder of Facebook was only 11 years old! It would still be 3 years before the arrival of Google and other household names. But gone are the days of mobile phones the size of bricks and punched card computer programming! Today, just as your computing operating systems and smartphones need regular updates to take new technological developments into account, our data protection rules also needed to be modernised. So we are updating our rules to ensure that they continue to protect individuals in this brave new digital world.

  • The full speech can be read here.