Update on ePrivacy Regulation

The council of the European Union’s Bulgarian presidency has released a progress report on the draft ePrivacy Regulation ahead of a council meeting June 8th, 2018.

The ePrivacy Regulation (Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications) should replace the current ePrivacy Directive and was originally intended to enter into force together with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May, 25th 2018.

The report offers several updates including its scope and link to the GDPR, processing of electronic communications content and metadata, among others. Latter mentioned has been one of the main concerns of the Member States. The balance between privacy and innovation regarding processing of metadata seems to be a key aspect of the ePrivacy Regulation.

Furthermore, significant changes of privacy settings according to the future Art. 10 are important for the Commission. The providers of software are only obliged to inform the end-users about the settings and the way the end-users may use them, at the time of installation or first usage and when updates change the privacy settings.

The report ends with three questions for the policy debate at the TTE Council on June 8th. Among others, the versions relating to the permitted processing of metadata and the protection of terminal equipment and privacy settings are open for discussion if it is an acceptable basis to move forward.