COUNCIL OF THE EU PUBLISHES A NEW DRAFT E-PRIVACY REGULATION

08.01.2021

The Council of the European Union released a new draft version of the ePrivacy Regulation concerning the respect for private life and the protection of personal data in electronic communications and repealing Directive 2002/58/EC. The European Commission approved a first draft of the ePrivacy Regulation in January 2017.  The draft regulation has since then been under discussion in the Council.

The regulation aims to safeguard the privacy of the end-users, the confidentiality of their communications, and the integrity of their devices.  These requirements and limitations will apply uniformly in all EU Member States.  However, the territorial scope of the draft regulation is widened so that it also applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the EEA, but established in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.

The most important amendment is the possibility to process electronic communications metadata and to use processing and storage capabilities of terminal equipment and the collection of information from end-user’s terminal for further compatible processing, fully aligned with Articles 5 (1) (b) and 6 (4) of GDPR with further compatible processing. Also the new draft of the ePrivacy Regulation now includes new limitations on the sharing of anonymized statistical electronic communications data.

Lastly, while the GDPR standard of processing are inserted for the “performance of a contract” in the e-Privacy Regulation through the draft regulation, service providers are authorised to access data on the end-users’ devices where necessary for the performance of a contract.

You can read the full text of the Proposal Regulation here.

Should you have any queries and/or remarks, please do not hesitate to contact us. 

 

Kind regards,

Zumbul Attorneys-at-Law

info@zumbul.av.tr