The activity of Art 29. Working Group
The starting point of the presentation was Directive 95/46/EC Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Art. 29. of the Directive establishes the Working Party, which shall have advisory status and act independently. It shall be composed of the representatives of the supervisory authority of all Member States, a representative of the Community institutions, and a representative of the Commission.
The activity of the Working Party are the following: examines questions relating to the uniform application of data protection, gives opinion to the Commission, gives advise to the Commission on any proposed amendment to this Directive, gives an opinion on codes of conduct drawn up at community level. It shall furthermore inform the Commission about the arisen divergences relating the equivalence of the protection, on its own initiative it makes recommendations, which shall be forwarded to the Commission. Finally, it shall inform the Member States and make an annual report and forward it to the Commission, Parliament and to the Council.
Directive 2002/58/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on privacy and electronic communications also contains the application of certain provisions of Directive 95/46/EC.
The presentation introduced CIRCA, which is the website of the European institutions, the subgroups of the Working Party.
As the 2008-2009 working programme of the Working Party says, it has to face three major challenges, in particular: how to improve the impact of the data protection directive and the role of the working party; the impact of new technologies; the global environment (international transfer of data, global privacy and jurisdiction). The relevant issues therefore are the better imlpication of the data protection directive, ensuring data protection in international transfers, ensuring data protection in relation to new technologies, making the Working Party more effective, and topical issues.
There was an interesting and important Opinion (1/2008) on data protection issues relating to search engines. In the context of the Directive on the Electronic Commerce (2000/31/EC) search engines have been denoted as a type of information society service, namely information location tools. The Working Party is using this categorisation as the point of departure. The primary focus of the Working Party in this Opinion is on search engine providers who follow the dominant search engine business model, based on advertising. This focus includes all the major well konwn search engines, in addition to specialised search engines such as, which focus on personal profiling and meta search engines that present and possibly regroup the results of the existing search engines. This Opinion does not adress functions embedded on websites for the purpose of searching only the website’s own domain.
The presentation analyses the legal framework of the Opinion, the possibly types of these data and the lawfulness of processing these data. Some issues to be solved by the industry are data retention, further processing for different purposes, cookies, anonymisation and data correlation across services. As Mr. Halmos emphasized on the importance of the privacy policy, mainly in connection with the obligations and rights of the data subjects.