On Data Protection Day, 28 January 2011, and after 10 months of efforts, we published the European Privacy & Human Rights 2010 report (“EPHR”), a collective work that investigates the European landscape of national privacy and data protection laws and regulations, as well as any other laws or recent developments that have had an impact on privacy, in particular over the last two years. The research field encompasses jurisdictions of all 27 EU Member States, two EFTA countries (Norway and Switzerland), three EU accession candidate countries (Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey), and the EU itself as a jurisdiction.
The study presents an overview of European privacy and data protection laws and developments in 33 reports, each available in English and translated into the country’s official language. It is accompanied by a comparative legal and policy analysis of privacy topics, with its particular methodology, criteria and metrics and key findings, as well as a privacy ranking of all countries surveyed, a summary of country developments, and privacy resources.
Privacy ranking chart based upon "European Privacy & Human Rights 2010" (EPHR Project/Privacy International)
Privacy ranking based upon "European Privacy & Human Rights 2010" (EPHR Project/Privacy International)
The “EPHR 2010″ report is part of a broader project that comprises 3 action areas:
- action area 1: the report itself;
- action area 2: the dissemination of information and its publication on multiple online and offline platforms, and
- action area 3: the development of innovative awareness-raising campaigns.
The last two are yet to be finished over the next 6 months. The video above is one of the first outputs of “action area 2″. You can find more information about the EPHR project from the presentation I gave last February 2010 in Barcelona, and about the video here.
Many people contributed to this report: first of all, my colleague Matteo Bonfanti, with whom I completed and edited all country reports; more than 90 privacy and data protection experts from 32 countries all over Europe: colleagues, academics, privacy advocates and lawyers; the research teams at Privacy International (Gus Hosein, Alexander Hanff and others , who built the comparative legal and policy analysis) and at the Center for Media and Communication Studies of the Central European University (my colleague Kristina Irion in particular, who also coordinates the whole EPHR project). Last but not least, the European Commission’s Special Programme “Fundamental Rights and Citizenship (2007-2013)” funded most of this project, including the video. Without their help, none of this would probably have seen the light of day.
The EPHR report builds upon the legacy of EPIC & Privacy International’s Privacy & Human Rights survey, to which more than 300 privacy experts from all over the world have participated over more than a decade, making this survey the world’s most comprehensive report on privacy and data protection ever published.
