Commissioner sets out privacy rights priorities There is a clear need to reassert users’ trust by being more transparent about data collection activities. We need to generate awareness amongst consumers that their data is being traded, and establish certain possibilities for user control. More than 4 out of 5 young internet users believe that their personal information is somehow used without their knowledge and shared with third parties without their agreement. They are right.

The new reality is that, on the internet consumers are in fact paying for services with their personal data and their exposure to ads. This amounts to a new kind of commercial exchange contractually established by the privacy policy. We must require of privacy policies that they submit to the same fairness and transparency standards that are commonly accepted in commercial contracts.

The status quo is not an option. Currently, consumers have little awareness of what data is being collected, how and when it is being collected and what it is used for. And they are also not able to control this process. The current opt-out systems are partial, sometimes nowhere to be found, they are difficult or cumbersome and most of all, they are unstable. Avoiding tracking is currently technically difficult if not impossible.

Privacy policies are not always easily accessible and there are even cases where the user is asked to submit personal data before the privacy policy is disclosed to them.

The terms of privacy policies do not all seem fair at first sight. There will for instance often be a clause whereby you agree that the web service shares your data with commercial partners that apply their own terms and conditions to the handling of your data. You do not know who these partners are, where to find them, let alone whether they have a privacy policy at all. But you are signing up to give these unnamed people your data.

A social network recently included without warning a clause in their terms and conditions that amounted to users rescinding ownership of all their content in their favour. This is a social network site taking ownership of your personal photo albums. Although regulators did not react people obviously thought the clause was not fair and the uproar of users and the threat of legal action has led the platform to rethink this clause.

It will not be a secret to this audience that people do not normally read contract terms of online services. In fact, in this case, it took 175 million users for one of them to notice the change. Are we willing to delegate onto consumers the full task of monitoring the internet for abuses in the existing myriad of incomprehensible policies?

We must establish the principles of transparency, clear language, opt-in or opt-out options that are meaningful and easy to use. I am talking about the right to have a stable contract and the right to withdraw. And I am also talking about fair clauses and the right to participate in economic activity without selling your whole self indiscriminately as commercial fodder to the entire world.

Source for text and illustration, © European Communities, 1995-2009

• Commissioner Kuneva
• Speech