European Commission Criticized And Sued For Breaching Its Own Data Protection Laws

In what is being described as a series of ironic and twisted events, the European Commission is being sued for failing to follow its own data protection laws.

The branch of the EU is being accused of breaching its own laws that were originally outlined for data protection.

A citizen from Germany has gone as far as alleging how the regulatory body has been busy transferring data belonging to citizens into the US, after extracting it from one of its own websites.

The German organization named EuGD offers support for so many customers in regards to making sure consumers’ rights stand guarded and are protected at all times. But they have been receiving reports from one German national over the failure of following the GDPR, which they consider alarming.

The news of users’ personal data being shared is definitely a huge shocker for obvious reasons. And while many people may be arguing about how the GDPR shouldn’t be affecting nations like Germany directly, they’re designed to follow a similar set of regulations that more or less resembles the GDPR.

Moreover, both legislations have been designed using assistance from the Commission.

There was a recently published press release that went as far as claiming how the cloud service that’s based in the US was able to transfer personal data such as IP addresses to another unsafe nation after a phone call was made to the website for the registration of an event taking place in that location.

It was appalling to see how there were no safeguarding rules being followed in this regard and just not enough data protection was present to prevent such incidents from ever taking place again.

The EuGD further elaborated upon how the event in focus was the Conference For Europe’s Future and it was being hosted by the AWS. Hence, anyone coming forward and asking for registration would now be unknowingly giving out their IP addresses to those located in the US.

Let’s not forget how certain data transfers between the European Union and the US were already dubbed to be illegal by the EU’s Court of Justice as per a previously declared ruling.

The court spoke out boldly against how the laws for data protection in America were clearly inadequate and that would give so many US-based authorities the chance to gain access to the information of EU citizens, without having any interference from judicial supervision.

This lawsuit has also gone on to mention how the EC’s website manages to link the login service of apps like Facebook. And that’s quite interesting because, at the moment, a regulatory body in Ireland is trying to carry out an investigation about whether Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are transferring user data from the EU to the US as per the regulations outlined.

This new lawsuit is being deemed as one that serves as a clear warning that the European Commission isn’t following rules and how so many European users’ data could be at stake of getting passed on to others without users' consent being taken.

H/T: Euractiv

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World