Brussels, 18/11/2005 (Agence Europe) - In a letter to Belgian ALDE MEP Antoine Duquesne on 9 November, AmCham EU, the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union, expresses concern about freedom of information and freedom to supply services in the EU's draft telecoms data retention directive. 'Many of the largest e-mail services are provided by the Internet. While many email service providers are in the United States, these services are available from providers in any country in the world. The vast majority of such public services are subsidised by advertising, and therefore, there are few if any checks on the veracity of personal data provided by users when registering for such a service. In other words, it would be entirely trivial for a user to mask their identity or avoid services that would be subject to the proposed retention obligations,' explains Simon Hampton, chair of the AmCham's Digital Economy Committee, in the letter, going on: 'By contrast, large global companies with private email networks that are connected to the global Internet for business purposes may be deterred by the privacy implications of a retention scheme that targets retention of email traffic data. Enterprise email data centres such as for those financial services or healthcare related industries may be deterred by potential retention of data regarding their sensitive but otherwise law-abiding correspondence. These industries may choose to locate data centres in region that would not be subject to the proposed retention obligations, which would pose an obvious competitive disadvantage to the European single market. Irrespective of the implications for public or industry email traffic, it is without a doubt that for those EU-based services included in the proposed directive, the costs of email traffic data retention would be astronomical. This is simply due to the huge volume of email correspondence daily on a global basis…Additionally, … a conservative current estimate is that 50% of global email traffic is spam, and traffic data for this percentage would be retained as well.'
AmCham further explains: 'most providers do not see a business need to retain email data. Unlike telephony, emails are not billed on an individual basis. Some providers may retain small amounts of email-related data for anti-spam diagnostic or enforcement purposes but, given the huge volumes involved, the periods of retention are only up to a week. The proposals would therefore represent a dramatic (26-times) increase in the data to be retained for certain providers and are even more onerous for many more than do not engage in limited retention at all.' Data retention is on the agenda for the 1/2 December JHA Council.