Naked Citizens: Protect your Privacy!

After a little sit down and maybe once everyone had covered themselves up a bit, you’d probably want to find out just why all these people had turned up at your door. You’ve just put yourself in the shoes of your MEPs who are receiving postbags full of cards just like this one.

People from across Europe are sending postcards like this to their MEPs asking them to support new proposals protecting our privacy and giving us control over what happens to our data.

Join them right now – click here to send your postcard! You can choose the message and how it looks and everything.

Big business isn’t standing by though. They are flooding the normal democratic process with lobbying to get the plans watered down and strip us of our right to privacy. It wants to keep on profiting from our most intimate data.

Take Everything Everywhere, reported this week to be selling the data of their 27 million mobile customersto the polling company Ipsos MORI. EE customers’ personal details could have been revealed to the police without their consent. EE say that the data has been anonymised but it is often possible to re-identify people from anonymised data.

Phone companies like EE have been pushing particularly hard against the new data protection plans. It’s not hard to see why. They wouldn’t be able sell their customers’ data without their consent.

As they stand, the new regulations would help make sure we control what happens to our data, not the big corporations making money from data about our personal lives. Here’s what the new laws would mean for you. 

• You’d be able to decide who gets access to your data, what they can do with it and who they can give it to. You could delete your data or move it wherever you like, whenever you like.
• Your data would be protected whenever you could be identified. This includes so-called pseudonymous data that could still single you out despite being stripped of personal identifiers such as names and addresses.
• Services that want to use your data would have to get your explicit consent beforehand so there’d be no more vague or easy-to-misunderstand ‘agreements.’
• There would be severe penalties when the rules were broken to help deter companies from misusing your data and infringing your privacy.

But all this is under threat. If the big corporations and their armies of lobbyists get their way, the new law won’t have any teeth and companies will just keep on invading your privacy.

Help stop their full frontal assault on our personal data! Please send a postcard to your MEPs.

Read more about the amendments to the Data Protection regulations that would threaten citizens’ privacy in this report put together by digital rights organisations from around Europe.