The European Commission wants to scrap the patchwork of national rules governing what music and movies consumers can download from the Internet, and instead create one marketplace for everyone in the European Union, commissioners Vivane Reding and Meglana Kuneva said Tuesday.
The European Parliament signed up to a plan Wednesday to introduce computerized biometric passports including people's fingerprints as well as their photographs, despite criticism from civil liberties groups and security experts who argue that the move is flawed on technical grounds.
Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening.
Critics of the agreement allowing European passengers' personal data to be shared with US authorities have just under a month to reshape the accord before it comes into force, said Stavros Lambrinidis, vice president of the European Parliament's civil liberties committee.
I was talking with some CIOs last week about the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise. One of them made the intriguing comment that Web 2.0 — with all its mashups, syndications, consumable services, and instant gratification — enables customers to more easily "show disrespect for long-established corporate business processes".
European data protection officials are expanding their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy, after initially targeting Google last month, European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx said in an interview.
Governments around the world were urged to cooperate more in their fight against the proliferation of spam, or unsolicited e-mail, at a conference Monday organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).