EU Data Protection: Proposed Amendments Written by US Lobbyists

There are layers upon layers of problems here.<p>1. EU democracy and governance is not great. Very few europeans have any understanding of how the EU legislative process works or feel like they have anything to do with it.<p>2. Lobbying is increasingly making a mockery of consultation as an idea.<p>3. These laws are pretty technical and the people making them have no understanding of the issues. They don't need lobbyists to make stupid laws. See the UK/EU cookie laws for an example. They mandated that all sites must have <i>nag screens.</i> They cost the economy money. Annoy all european website users and achieved <i>absolutely nothing useful.</i> Malice may have had some role, but incompetence had a bigger one in that case.<p>I wish the EU would think creatively about its whole legislative process.

The wording in any data protection act within the EU should be strongly anti-US. It's been shown many times that the US government does not consider data held in the US or by US corps on non-US citizens to be protected at all.

The audaciousness of taking those lobbyists' demands word-for-word and expecting nobody to find out in this day and age is pretty shocking.

I am involved in some FOIA at the moment. It seems to me thus far that, at least at times, the EU Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has been well meaning but have been actively sidelined by other, pro-American-outcome parts of the European beast. For example, see: <a href="http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/edps" rel="nofollow">http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/edps</a>

Somebody should make a kickstarter for political lobbying.<p>Then, somebody could start a project to raise funding for writing new patent laws, and based on funding thresholds there'd be a certain amount of lobbyist facetime with congresspeople, "draft legislation" provided, etc. Why should big companies be the only ones playing that game?<p>It'd be like the White House petition system, but with some results - even if they're just congressional awareness.

The title of this has been changed and is wildly misleading.<p>New <i>AMENDMENTS</i> being proposed by <i>some</i> MEPs are taken from lobbyists. These are amendments to the presently extremely pro-consumer proposal that are trying to water it down.