The EU E-Privacy Directive: A Monstrous Attempt to Starve the Cookie Monster?

Uncovering the Flop of the EU Cookie Law

In 2002, the European Union (EU) introduced the ePrivacy Directive to regulate the usage of online tracking technologies. Its aim is to make tracking mechanisms explicit while increasing privacy awareness in users. It mandates websites to ask for explicit consent before using any kind of profiling methodology, e.g., cookies. Starting from 2013 the Directive is mandatory, and now most of Europea...

Taming the Cookie Monster

A Study on the Lack of Enforcement of Data Protection Acts

Data privacy is a fundamental human right, not only according to the EU perspective. Each EU state implements sophisticated data protection acts. Nevertheless, there are frequent media reports on data privacy violations. The scientific and the political community assume that data protection acts suffer from a lack of enforcement. This paper is an interdisciplinary study that examines this hypot...

Facebook and Its EU Users - Applicability of the EU Data Protection Law to US Based SNS

The present paper examines the problem of applicable data protection law in a relationship between EU users and non-EU based Social Networking Site (SNS). The analysis will be conducted on the example of Facebook, which is one of the most popular SNS. The goal of the paper is to examine whether European users of Facebook can rely on their national data protection legislations in case of a priva...

Data Protection Regimes in Africa: too far from the European ‘adequacy’ standard?

Over four decades of the development of data protection laws, the world has witnessed data protection regimes finally arriving in Africa. At present, there are eleven African countries out of 54 with comprehensive data protection legislation. These are Cape Verde (22 January 2001), Seychelles (24 December 2003), Burkina Faso (20 April 2004), Mauritius (17 June 2004), Tunisia (27 July 2004), Sen...