ISSUE 2

COMNET-IT News

Data Protection Legislation in Europe

The Eight Principle of the new UK Data Protection Act (necessitated by the 1995 European Data Protection Directive) states:

"Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area (EEA) unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedom of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data".

Since "processing" includes obtaining or recording information that is intended to be automatically processed, gathering information or data is of itself processing. There would be little point in having data protection rules in Europe if they could be circumvented by transferring the Personal Data to somewhere with less demanding rules. This then may limit the scope for the export of high volume data entry tasks - European insurance companies used to bundle up their information enquiry forms and send these to the Philippines, where staff costs were much less, for the transcription of responses and the production of appropriate customer quotations. There will be many other examples of data transfer which are now subject to protection.

There are 18 countries in the EEA none of which is a member of the Commonwealth so the above ruling which came into force on 28th October 1998 may soon impact information exchange between European and Commonwealth nations. Detail on the European Directive may be found at:

europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/index_ob.htm

Text of the UK enactment of the Data Protection Act 1998 may be found at:

www.homeoffice.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm

Legislation On-line

The website mentioned above is a good example of using the Internet to solve the old problem of disseminating the mass of information arising in government. At www.homeoffice.gov.uk/acts the British Government has really "got its act together" and is now committed to including all new legislation on-line within days of the same being approved by Parliament. The official version of acts and statutes is still available for purchase from HMSO; major libraries around UK should still stock the hard copy, but in terms of accessibility and timeliness this is a huge advance.

Large, cold and lonely?

Are these the factors that lead to a country having intensive Internet use?

According to the Internet Industry Almanac these were the highest proportions up to 1997:

Finland 245 Internet users per thousand; Norway 231; Iceland 227; U.S. 203. The first three enjoy long dark winters and all four have large land masses relevant to their populations.

Next in the table are Australia 178 and New Zealand 156, followed by Canada 149 and Sweden 147. All these also have relatively large open spaces relative to numbers of people. The pattern is interrupted only by Singapore 141 before we see Denmark 126 and Switzerland 107. So Nordics plus Alpine hold 6 out of the top 11 places, while 10 of the 11 have low population densities. After this the model breaks down, with UK 100, Netherlands 89, Hong Kong 65 and Japan 63.

The latest figure for How Many Online? is 153.25 million. The breakdown is shown below: