Danny O’Brien of EFF wrote:
Today is Data Privacy Day (also known as Data Protection Day), an international festival of our right to control our own personal information and to protect our communications from unchecked surveillance.
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We need to also make sure that politicians don’t increase the vulnerability of our data by increasing the amount of data that is kept. Already, regulators have started framing “data retention”, the compulsory storage of private data for far longer than is necessary, as the solution to law enforcement and national security access to personal data. Data retention is the opposite of data protection. It raises the chances of the catastrophic loss of privacy, with no benefit for the people it endangers.
It’s been a bad year for data protection. Perhaps 2014 is when we start fixing the data privacy problems that 2013 highlighted. It’ll take more than one day, though, to ensure that those fixes don’t make matters worse.
Read more on EFF.