Planned EU laws to regulate electronic mail and use of the Internet could give police forces too much power to hold personal information, civil liberties groups said on Friday.
The bill is the final element of a package to modernize EU telecommunications law and aims to protect the confidentiality of electronic communication such as e-mails and Internet transactions and to protect consumers.
But privacy advocates say provisions regulating police access to electronic data are too vague and could lead to large-scale storage of data for long periods of time.
This would be potentially damaging for the EU's prized privacy rights and also costly for telecoms operators.
"Wide data retention powers for law enforcement authorities, especially if they were used on a routine basis and on a large part of the population, could have disastrous consequences for the most sensitive and confidential types of personal data," a coalition of 40 civil liberties organisations said in a letter sent to European Parliament President Pat Cox.
The 626-member assembly is expected to cast its final vote on the bill on May 29. To become law, the bill needs joint approval by parliament and EU governments.
The text calls for immediate erasure of electronic data by operators after the period needed for billing purposes, but says governments can force operators to store data for a longer period of time if deemed necessary for security reasons.
The European Parliament had earlier amended the law to limit access to electronic data by public authorities to the strict minimum.
But this move was criticised by EU governments, who said authorities needed to use electronic data in fighting crime and terrorism, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks on the US.
Fearing that this legislative clash would ultimately kill the bill, the two biggest parliamentary groups have now aligned themselves with the member states.
"It would be a difficult thing to do," Brooks Tigner, press and communications officer for European telecoms association ETNO, said of storing the data. "Even putting the cost issue aside, it would be a monumental task."
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