Katitza Rodriguez of EFF comments on Data Privacy Day 2011 and then writes:
EFF calls upon governments worldwide to:
Repeal the EU Data Retention Directive, and any mandatory data retention regime that requires ISP to preemptively record traffic data about the online activities of millions of citizens who haven’t committed any crime.
Provide strong safeguards against government intrusion of individuals’ information stored in third party providers, especially cloud service providers.
Provide strong safeguards against government intrusion of individuals’ transactional data such as the location of your cell phone, click stream data revealing the web sites you visit, and search logs indicating what you searched when using search engines. Monitoring of this information is just as invasive as reading your email or listening to your phone calls.
These long-overdue reforms would be a first attempt to bring privacy protection back in line with the strong policies and traditions first established by International Human Rights Law.
Read more on EFF.