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Under a slightly adapted title – Reforming European Data Protection Law – this volume brings together 16 chapters offering conceptual analyses, highlighting issues, proposing solutions, and discussing practices regarding privacy and data protection.

This book on privacy and data protection offers readers conceptual analysis as well as thoughtful discussion of issues, practices, and solutions. It features results of the seventh annual International Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, CPDP 2014, held in Brussels January 2014.The book first examines profiling, a persistent core issue of data protection and privacy. It covers the emergence of profiling technologies, on-line behavioral tracking, and the impact of profiling on fundamental rights and values. Next, the book looks at preventing privacy risks and harms through impact assessments. It contains discussions on the tools and methodologies for impact assessments as well as case studies.The book then goes on to cover the purported trade-off between privacy and security, ways to support privacy and data protection, and the controversial right to be forgotten, which offers individuals a means to oppose the often persistent digital memory of the web. Written during the process of the fundamental revision of the current EU data protection law by the Data Protection Package proposed by the European Commission, this interdisciplinary book presents both daring and prospective approaches. It will serve as an insightful resource for readers with an interest in privacy and data protection.

This volume brings together 16 chapters offering conceptual analyses, highlighting issues, proposing solutions, and discussing practices regarding privacy and data protection.

Preface: Serge Gutwirth, Ronald Leenes, Paul De Hert & Yves Poullet.- Chapter 1: Surveillance, profiling and prediction.- 1. We are all connected to Facebook...by Facebook: Arnold Roosendaal.- 2. Behavioural tracking on the Internet: Claude Castelluccia.- 3. Privacy for loan applicants versus predictive ower for Loan Providers: is it possible to bridge the gap?: Charlene Jennett, Miguel Malheiros, Sacha Brostoff and M. Angela Sasse.- 4. Cookie wars: how new data profiling and targeting techniques threaten citizens and consumers in the "Big Data" era: Jeffrey Chester.- 5. Examining governmental data mining and its alternatives - A methodology for policy responses: Tal Zarsky.- 6. Managing suspicion and privacy in police information systems: Vlad Niculescu-Dinca.- Chapter 2: Regulation, enforcement and security: 7. The set up of data protection authorities as a new regulatory approach.: Philip Schuetz.- 8. Information sharing in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: Franziska Boehm.- 9. The Adequacy of an EU-US Partnership: Els De Busser.- 10. Law Enforcement in the Clouds: is the Data Protection Legal Framework up to the task?: Maria Grazia Porcedda.- 11. Privacy self-regulation through awareness? A critical investigation into the market structure of the security field.: Carla Ilten, Daniel Guagnin and Leon Hempel.- Chapter 3 Concepts and prospection: 12. Privacy penetration testing- how to establish trust in your cloud provider: Christian W. Probst, M. Angela Sasse, Wolter Pieters, Trajce Dimkov, Erik Luysterborg and Michel Arnaud 18.- 13. Review of the Data Protection Directive: is there need (and room) for a new concept of personal data?: Mario Viola De Azevedo Cunha.- 14. Towards a European eID regulatory framework. Challenges in constructing a legal framework for the protection and management of electronic identities: Norberto Nuno Gomes De Andrade.- 15. From the protection of data to the protection of individuals : extending the application of non discrimination principles: Daniel Le Metayer and Julien Le Clainche.- 16. On the principle of privacy by design and its limits: technology, ethics and the rule of law: Ugo Pagallo.- 17. The right to forget, the right to be forgotten. Personal reflections on the fate of personal data in the information society: Ivan Szekely.

If privacy is a cornerstone of democracy,1 then democracy is in trouble. Especially since the advent of the computer, the encroachments on privacy have proliferated. Terrorist attacks in the early 21st century have given governments all the justifications they need to bolster national security by forcing telecom companies to retain telephone records, to justify warrantless eavesdropping on our phone calls, to examine our bank records, to fuse personally identifiable information from multiple sources, to profile citizens to determine who presents a risk to the established order. Many companies have either aided and abetted governmental efforts or engaged in their own surreptitious amassing of the details of our lives. Personal data in real time has become the fuel of today’s economy.

This chapter starts by identifying the basic principles behind data protection law and showing how these principles might affect the choice or even admissibility of the use of certain types of biometrics. We conclude that currently only data relating to identified or identifiable persons are protected. We will argue that the use of second generation biometrics will have to lead to a re-assessment of this traditional data protection approach. We then focus on the case of biometric profiling: existing legal mechanisms cannot offer European citizens effective protection against it. The latter has led to a call for widening the protection currently granted through the regulation of ‘unsollicited communications’ via the new notion of ‘unsollicited adjustments’. This notion of ‘unsollicited adjustments’ would close a legal loophole allowing a situation in which objects that seemingly have a neutral guiding function, in practice secretly track individuals to surreptitiously adapt their performance based on undisclosed criteria. Second generation biometrics applied in real life situations can lead to forms of profiling that leave some of the rights for individual unprotected. We argue that approaching new phenomena such as profiling with heavy prohibitions may block progress or lead to a situation where the prohibitions are not respected. A more subtle approach will render better results and in the regulation of profiling, opacity (prescriptive rules) and transparency tools (making data handling visible and data handlers accountable) can each have their own role to play. In a normative weighing of privacy and other interests, some intrusions will turn out just to be too threatening for fundamental rights whilst others will be accepted and submitted to the legal conditions of transparency and accountability.

This contribution looks at the concept of privacy impact assessments (PIA) from a human rights viewpoint within the European context. It explores the possibilities and limits of PIA by identifying the useful elements in the case law of the European Court on Human Rights with regard to the right to privacy as contained in Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

In this final, concluding chapter, we present our key findings and recommendations from the contributors to this book for privacy impact assessment (PIA) policy and practice. They are addressed to those who undertake PIAs and those who set policy with regard to the use of PIAs. Not surprisingly, we do recommend much wider use of PIAs in the public and private sectors.

This timely interdisciplinary work on current developments in ICT and privacy/data protection, coincides as it does with the rethinking of the Data Protection Directive, the contentious debates on data sharing with the USA (SWIFT, PNR) and the judicial and political resistance against data retention. The authors of the contributions focus on particular and pertinent issues from the perspective of their different disciplines which range from the legal through sociology, surveillance studies and technology assessment, to computer sciences. Such issues include cutting-edge developments in the field of cloud computing, ambient intelligence and PETs; data retention, PNR-agreements, property in personal data and the right to personal identity; electronic road tolling, HIV-related information, criminal records and teenager's online conduct, to name but a few.

On 15 March 2006, the Data Retention Directive, demanding the retention of telecommunications data for a period of six months up to two years, was adopted. Since then, this seemingly straightforward directive has 'generated' quite an impressive number of court judgments. They range from the European Court of Justice to the administrative (e.g. Germany and Bulgaria) and constitutional courts (e.g. Romania) of some Member-States. In particular, the judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court, delivered on 2 March 2010, has already caught the attention of several commentators, from civil society, lawyers, journalists and politicians. In the judgment, the Court annuls the German implementation laws of the Data Retention Directive. This paper has two main goals. On the one side, it aims at offering a first critical overview of this important judgment, highlighting some of the key features of the ruling and its main similarities and divergences with other similar judgments. On the other side, given the relevance of the issues at stake, it aims at contextualizing the judgment in the wider framework of European data processing and protection debates, assuming a critical posture on the increasing emphasis on proportionality as the "golden criterion" to assess and limit surveillance practices.

The right to respect for private life is developed in European legal frameworks through different legal notions and instruments. One of such mechanisms for privacy protection, constantly backed up by the European Union (EU) legislator for already more than a decade, is the regulation of so-called unsolicited communications. This contribution explores this EU approach and argues that, in the light of current and upcoming developments, a profound revision of the notion might be needed. More concretely, it concludes that there is a need to move from a regulation of unsolicited communications to the regulation of unsolicited ‘adjustments’ (i.e., automatic adaptations of software or devices).

In this chapter, we present a review of threats and vulnerabilities that could afflict society and individuals in the AmI world in the context of the key policy issues of privacy, identity, trust, security and digital divide. We define a threat as the potential for one or more unwanted consequences caused by a circumstance, capability, action or event that could be harmful to a system or person. Threats can be caused naturally, accidentally or intentionally. In essence, a threat is a ubiquitous phenomenon. A vulnerability is a flaw or weakness in a system’s design, its implementation, operation or management that could be exploited to violate the system and, consequently, cause a threat. Vulnerabilities may have different dimensions: technical, functional or behavioural.1

Chapter 5 identified safeguards against the threats and vulnerabilities affecting privacy, identity, trust, security and the digital divide in an AmI world. In this chapter, we offer to particular stakeholders several specific recommendations some of which flow from the safeguards identified above.

This chapter provides an overview of ambient intelligence in order to set the stage for the subsequent identification and discussion of threats, vulnerabilities and safeguards In this chapter, we provide a somewhat high-level description of the key technologies that are crucial to the development and deployment of ambient intelligence. The development and deployment of AmI are being propelled by certain visions of the future, which we reference in this chapter. For the most part, the development and deployment are taking place in a rather structured context composed of visions, scenarios, roadmaps, strategic research agendas, platforms and projects. We highlight the most important of these.