The next version of Europe’s data protection laws are set to be formally announced by Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
The new laws, set to be ratified by member states by 2014-2015,will include harsh new penalties for companies that flout the laws, as well as patching transatlantic flaws between U.S. law and existing European law, including legal overlaps such as those made by FISA and the USA PATRIOT Act.
Though a late-November 2011 draft of the new laws were leaked, and a lot has remained the same, many of the details have been revised. Many Web companies will also feel the heat, even if they are not headquartered in Europe.
The Patriot Act can be invoked on U.S.-headquartered companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, forcing their Europe-based subsidiaries to hand over European data back to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.
Late last year, ZDNet received a copy of the draft European Union Data Protection Directive, version 56, dated November 29th, 2011. Measures included the “right to be forgotten” allowing the more fluid exporting of data, and increased accountability for cloud-service providers to fall under many of the same obligations as organisations that outsource their data.
The document outlined penalties that could enable the European Commission to impose fines of up to 5 percent of a company’s global financial turnover. such as Google or Facebook were found to break the new laws. But Reuters report that this figure was brought down in later revisions of the draft laws to two percent.
Currently, the bar is set in Europe’s antitrust fines. A company can be fined up to 10 percent of its global annual turnover should it be in breach of Europe’s antitrust laws.
Such Web firms, like Google and Facebook, have set up opposition to the new laws which could threaten how they function in the European region. Because they operate within Europe, they are bound by European laws, as well as the laws of their often U.S.-headquartered offices.
Live coverage on the announcement of Europe’s new data protection laws will be announced here on Wednesday.
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