I have written before about the concern about the Phorm system of opening packets of data to assess what browsers are up to in order to produce targetted adverts. The European Commission has now, according to the BBC, has started proceedings against Britain for the way that trials of Phorm were allowed.
To many of us it is clear that users have not given permission for their communications to be read by third parties. Why did the UK Government not try to stop the trial? Could it be that Gordon Brown's Government would like to be able to use this new service for their own purposes?
I work in Social Media in the capital of Europe in Brussels. There is a trend in European culture and legal actions towards protection of private personal data, whereas in North American online culture and legal structure, the trend is more towards the protection of online copyright and content ownership and credit. I think that the UK, already an EU Member State with a history of several concerns regarding State sovereignty being superseded by EU institutions, may have finally forced a real show down with the European Court of Justice. The UK has been there before (over maintaining the UK measurements, of all things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyr), and struck a "let's do both UK and EU labeling". But this time, I think it will be much harder to strike a compromise. You can't maintain privacy while not maintaining it.
Posted by: Linda_Margaret | April 15, 2009 at 11:13 AM