Fergie's Tech Blog

European ministers promise data retention agreement

Simon Taylor writes in InfoWorld:

European Union home affairs ministers have promised that in October they will agree on a set of Europe-wide rules requiring companies to store phone call and e-mail data. The pledge was made at an emergency meeting of ministers in Brussels on Wednesday in response to the bombings in London last week which killed over 50 people.

The data rules, which have been under discussion by E.U. ministers since April last year, are highly controversial because of fears that they would infringe data privacy rules and impose excessive costs on industry.

But France's interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday dismissed objections that the cost of the rules would be too high. "What would cost us dear would be to have innocent victims," he said. He said that telephone records had played an important part in identifying and arresting terrorist suspects in the UK, France, Spain and Germany.

posted by Fergie @ 7/13/2005 01:32:00 PM