The European Parliament’s civil liberties committee voted Monday night to allow profiling of “pseudonymous” data, but digital rights groups say that safeguards to protect data are not sufficient.

The committee vote was on the latest amendments to the proposed E.U. Data Protection Regulation, which was put forward by Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in 2012 and has provoked some of the heaviest lobbying seen in Brussels in years. The text voted on Monday had been through almost 4,000 amendments.

“The combination of Articles 6 and 20 amounts to a badly drafted license to profile without consent,” warned EDRi director Joe McNamee. […]

This “legitimate interest” exception appears in Article 6, which reads: “Processing of personal data shall be lawful if processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller, and which meet the reasonable expectations of the data subject based on his or her relationship with the controller.” This could turn ‘legitimate interest’ into the main legal basis for processing,” said Jeremie Zimmermann of La Quadrature du Net in a statement.

“A lot of other compromise amendments reached by members of the different political groups are actually good. For instance, those providing that consent must be explicit, that data must be fairly processed or that citizens must keep them under their control; but these good compromise amendments could be almost useless if the compromise amendments made on Article 6 and 20 are adopted,” Zimmermann added. […]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2056582/european-parliament-votes-to-perm...