EU-Digest: EU citizens much better protected against corporate intrusion than US

EU-Digest Special report

EU citizens much better protected against corporate intrusion than US

Yale law professor James Whitman wrote in a paper titled “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty : "One’s privacy, like other aspects of one’s honor, is not a market commodity that can simply be sold.” European courts and lawmakers are conteniously wrestling with the implications of technology and privacy, often coming to conclusions that are foreign to their American counterparts.In many parts of Europe: Personal information cannot be collected without consumers’ permission, and they have the right to review the data and correct inaccuracies. * Companies that process data must register their activities with the government. * Employers cannot read workers’ private e-mail. * Personal information cannot be shared by companies or across borders without express permission from the data subject. * Checkout clerks cannot ask for shoppers’ phone numbers. Those rights, and many others, stem from The European Union Directive on Data Protection of 1995, which mandated that each EU nation pass a national privacy law and create a Data Protection Authority to protect citizens' privacy and investigate attacks on it.

National laws come in several flavors, and emanate from varied traditions. But taken together, they are the backbone of a basic European principle: Privacy is a human right. In this very clear declaration, Europe ventures far from the pro-business approach taken by U.S. lawmakers.

European privacy laws are so different from those in the US because the Europeans reserve their deepest distrust for corporations, while Americans are far more concerned about the government invading their privacy. At present they have both invading their lives.