The EU has been pushing heavily for a new law on data privacy - of which "right to be forgotten" is a key component - since it proposed guidelines in January 2012.
The European commission will publish a draft law on data privacy that aims to ensure instant message and internet-voice-call services face similar security and privacy rules to those governing SMS text messages, mobile calls and landline calls.
Europe may be on the brink of passing what some tech firms and entrepreneurs view as a stifling law on data protection and the rights of consumers to have their data destroyed.
-- David Lazarus: A proposed law on data security seems to provide anything but.
Last year the European court of justice struck down an EU law on data retention and ruled that "blanket" storage of EU citizens' data violated their human rights.
The court ruled that Google was a "data controller" under the 19-year-old European law on data protection, which gives individuals strong rights over data that others hold on them.
Since the 1970s a law on the registration of personal data was in preparation.
GW Graeme Wearden (@graemewearden) Vivian Reding: We need 1 law on data protection across Europe.
And while, as you point out, the operations have been legal under American law, German law on data espionage has likely been broken, literally millions of times.
And then, perhaps, they will emulate the forthright Mrs. Reding, currently under intense scrutiny by the techies who have so changed our lives for proposing to overhaul existing European law on data protection.
