EU/US : OBAMA NOT ENDORSING PRIVACY BY DESIGN' FOR ONLINE DATA.

As the US and the EU start to discuss their new proposals to protect personal data in the digital world, President Barack Obama's top policy advisor on the issue has admitted the president does not endorse privacy by design' or privacy by default'. This is the concept whereby companies that store online personal data, such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, would be legally obliged to design their services and products in a way that protects consumers' privacy - for example by ensuring that online advertisers cannot track their browsing behaviour. At a heated luncheon discussion hosted by the European Institute in Washington DC, on 21 March, Daniel Weitzner, deputy chief technology officer for internet policy at the White House, said that privacy by design' was not part of the data privacy white paper first unveiled by the president on 23 February.

Weitzner's comments surprised his fellow panellists, including German MEP Alexander Alvaro (ALDE), who was in Washington with a delegation fromthe European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE), and Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation. With the white paper only recently released, the discussion was an opportunity to drill down into such policy details. The EU will also have to broach this issue, the European Commission having proposed, in January, a regulation to update the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Weitzner's remarks were precipitated by an explosive presentation from Christopher Soghoian, an...