On 9 and 10 November 2010 the representatives of the EDRi-member Panoptykon Foundation met with the representatives of the European Commission in order to discuss the evaluation of the Data Retention Directive (DRD) and the rationale behind the regime of blanket data retention

Five years ago data retention directive was adopted, introducing mandatory retention of the telecommunications of all citizens and resident of European Union. Since that time privacy movement against data retention in many European states has risen, national constitutional courts in Romania, Czech Republic and Germany have declared data retention laws illegal and case against directive is pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union. Civil society representatives, including Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation), discuss problems regarding data retention directive, its evaluation and actions taken and needed to be taken to change European law in accordance with human rights.

The Polish digital rights group Panoptykon Foundation recently published harrowing findings regarding abuses of Poland’s mandatory data retention law. Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Panoptykon obtained documents that reveal that in 2011, Polish authorities requested users’ traffic data retained by telcos and ISPs over 1.85 million times — half a million times more than in 2010. These findings underscore fundamental flaws in the Polish mandatory data retention law that was fast-tracked in legislation without public debate in 2009.

Why do we need the data protection reform? How to protect right to personal data in new digital age? Could new, more harmonized law lead to better and more up-to-date protection? Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation), Kirsten Fiedler (European Digital Rights) and Jan Albrecht (member of the European Parliament) discuss main problematic issues in current data protection framework (based on data protection directive from 1995) and solutions proposed by civil society and European Commission for the new regulation.

Do we really need data protection in this world? Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation) and Jérémie Zimmermann (La Quadrature du Net) talk about usage of data collected in Internet by private companies and changes that new data protection regulation could bring, including explicit consent for data processing as a rule, information about data processing presented in clear manner, regulation of profiling and privacy by default concept.