EU clamping down on business privacy breaches with steep fines

The European Commission, in the face of their previous sanctions against Facebook are finalising new privacy protection rules, stating that companies could be fined up to 5% of their global sales for violation.

Marking the first time the data protection legislation has been updated since 1995, the new rulings apply to the mishandling of the data of customers, suppliers or employees.  On top of this, as they could apply to foreign companies with branches within the EU, that means the world isn't out of the grasp of these new privacy laws.

The proposals look set to bring the Data Protection Act into the cloud computing era, as it would significantly increase EU power against when companies sell customer data to third party companies (can see why Facebook got hit pretty hard last week by Europe and the FTC).  Under new rules, companies would have 24 hours to report any data breach to the respective authorities and parties that could be affected.  Yes, this would mean that Sony would be paying billions for the PSN outage, if this were in place.

So out of those to be hit pretty hard by thise, we can make the safe assumption that both social networks, gaming platforms and analytical companies are going to be hit pretty hard in the wallet.  But as legislation could take up to four years for implementation, due to resistance within the EU, we best get comfortable setting up 2-step verification for Gmail and keeping passwords varied

Source: Financial Times