Bob Lindsay, Privacy Director for Hewlett-Packard (HP) Europe, explains that the restriction “isn’t killing the business, but it is slowing its evolution.” It is rumoured that the big hitters in the IT industry (including Microsoft, Google, HP and Oracle) are currently lobbying for EU laws to be loosened.
In September 2009, John Vassallo, Microsoft’s Associate General Counsel in Brussels, asked the EU to introduce varying levels of privacy restrictions to different kinds of data. Almost a year later, and the restrictions show no sign of being lifted.
An alternative is to make cloud computing more secure. At HP's Labs in Bristol, research is underway to devise new ways of encrypting data before it is sent into the cloud. The hope is that this will address the privacy concerns of European governments. This software is named "HP Privacy Advisor" and HP plans to begin testing this new software that complies with European privacy laws this year.
