Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-03-10-Speech-1-107"
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"en.20080310.18.1-107"2
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"Mr President, Mr Vice-President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, the Internet is a great boon. None of us can imagine working without this new technology today. It also permits exchanges of data on a staggering scale. Nothing, however, is perfect, and the imperfections become clear when billions of file records are stored over long periods of time.
On the case under examination, Commissioner Frattini made it clear that the legal framework of the European Union had to be activated to examine the merger of Google and DoubleClick. We shall await the findings of that examination and then draw our political conclusions.
This does, however, beg the basic question as to how we deal with data protection on the Internet, because user companies, large or small, are not indifferent to the way in which their data are protected. There are no easy answers, because at the heart of this issue is the unanswered question whether an Internet Protocol address constitutes personal information. In the case of providers that allocate static addresses it does, but with a multitude of other providers the IP address does not automatically reveal the user’s identity. In such cases, we believe there is actually a net loss of data protection, because collected data can even be disclosed to third parties.
Whether legal rules are needed must always be judged in the light of necessity and proportionality. Users, of course, obtain a host of benefits by publishing their data. The crucial point is that they take a conscious decision to pass on their data and that they can determine how the said data may be used. This means that users must have information rights, that is to say the right to be told what data pertaining to them are stored, and there must therefore be clear rules governing the transfer and sale of data to third parties.
For this reason, we should begin with voluntary commitments, ideally adopting a transatlantic approach – because we simply cannot regulate the Internet in the absence of common global initiatives – and if the voluntary commitments prove inadequate, we shall then have to discuss legal measures too."@en1
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