The new ePrivacy Regulation (ePR) or also known as “Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning the respect for private life and the protection of personal data in electronic communications and repealing Directive 2002/58/EC (Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications).”. Is a proposal from the EU, which will try and bring more privacy to the digital world and end users, ultimately with the goal of regaining the trust of its citizens with their data in the digital world. The ePrivacy Regulation will not replace the GDPR in any way, but in turn fill out some blanks and make the EUs Data & Privacy regulations more concrete.
In our opinion this has been long due as we have seen many companies over the years loose massive amounts of customer data due to a breach or other companies selling this customer data to third parties. Now with the ePR the proposed penalties for noncompliance would be up to €20 million or, in the case of an undertaking, up to 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.
But here comes something that has not been talked about much, which we find is the most important thing for our customers and any security/privacy enthusiast in the new ePrivacy Regulation.
“The ePrivacy Regulation shouldn’t be limited to the tapping of personal data by companies, though. Intervention on the state side should also be strongly regulated by ePrivacy. An end-to-end encryption should be obligatory: All data transmissions should be fully encrypted and not viewable by governments. The introduction of backdoors is also to be forbidden: Backdoors that the manufacturer built to grant access for a government would be illegal.”
Now this is indeed great news, as this means governments will have a much harder time intercepting traffic in the future and carrying out surveillance campaigns on EU citizens.
Sadly, we cannot say when the EU will release the proposal and it will take full effect as it is still under some heavy criticism.
We will keep you all up to date as soon as we know more.