EU proposes tougher online privacy rules

ONLINE messaging and e-mail services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Gmail will face tough new rules on how they can track users under a proposal presented by the European Union executive yesterday.

They will have to guarantee the confidentiality of their customers’ conversations and ask for their consent before tracking them online to serve them personalised ads.

The European Commission proposal extends some rules that now only apply to telecom operators to web companies offering calls and messages using the internet, seeking to close a perceived regulatory gap between the telecoms industry and mainly US internet giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Yesterday’s proposal will allow telecom companies to use customer metadata – such as the duration and location of calls – to provide additional services and make more money, something they are barred from doing under the current rules.

However, the telecoms industry said the proposal still imposed stricter obligations on it than on web companies.

“Unlike others, telcos risk being prevented from expanding consumer choice by using traffic and location data for big data analytics, IoT (Internet of Things) and connected driving services,” the director-general of European telecoms lobby ETNO, Lise Fuhr, said.

The e-privacy law review will also require web browsers to ask users upon installation whether they want to allow websites to place cookies on their browsers.

A leaked previous version would have forced browsers to set the default settings as not allowing cookies.