Over the past few days it has been reported in various places that the European Union is extending its privacy investigations to include music players, meaning that Microsoft is in the frame again, this time alongside Real. The reports, however, are not strictly true (we accept that headline-hungry sub-editors will have had something to do with them). The EU is indeed looking at media players, but it is doing so as part of a far wider-ranging effort to nail down privacy protection policy and its implementation.
A little less sexy, perhaps, but more significant. The soundbite that got them all going appears in a working document of the Data Protection Working Party of the European Commission, whose brief is to figure out, on an ongoing basis, how EU law on data protection should be applied. As new technologies and new implementations come along, it considers them and how they should fit into law that already exists. And actually, this does sound like a most excellent job, part blue-skying about weird new Internet stuff, part evolving the law to cater for it.
News source: The Register - Europe data laws to cover media player 'spyware'
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