Freedom Not Fear 2011/Brussels/report-privacy-slot

experiences from the privacy slot

introduction

the people of the heinrich boell foundation were nice. we could enter at 8:30 and we were able to adjust to the room, to get the feeling of the room and think about where seat ourselves and our guests.

the atmosphere was in the building was open, we were able to move freely, could share kitchen in the floor and nobody cared about us (meant in a positive sense).

with me were three others - after having the first guest two more were joining, while having that second date once again two more came in and for our last meeting four more people joined us.

werner stengg

in the first conversation we had werner stengg from DG MARKT, an austrian from the commission, dealing with e-commerce. more e-commerce, purchasing more beyond the national borders, more "trust" and so are his subjects. a friendly man, professional, for 16 years in brussels' business. we were (also in the other interviews) bad prepared and after a short introductions from ourselves we asked him to give us an personal introduction within 5-10 minutes, giving us the chance to pick up some interesting points and discussing on it. with this tactic we talked (within others) about only harmless looking personal data collected with e-commerce. about the right to pay anonymously and the neccessity to pay not only via credit cards or via internet, the need of an not-internet-option. we also talked about general things as how directives get to life, how negotiating in practice works.

andrea glorioso

immediately thereafter andrea glorioso, italian assistants from Nicole Dewandre of DG INFSO followed. an open person, who gave us the opportunity to have a look in personal opinions beyond official statements. we started as before. introduction from ours, then 5-10 minutes statements of his person&work. looking for a string to knit on, finding it and starting discussing. it was about data protection, educating awareness of ones own sensitive personal data, data as a currency, the hypocrisy of an "impact assessment" according to caring about personal data and ended at at unfortunately very short discussion about data retention and how to get rid off. he stressed to be open to meet us again - as a group or as single persons.

joe mcnamee

soon came over for less then half an hour joe mcnamee, quite out of breath, giving us short introduction about his point of view to the data retention topic.

it was 12:10 and we still had three quarters of an hour of time until last guest, mrs. marieke schaake, a dutch "liberal".

up to this point the mood was good and constructively.

marietje schaake

mrs schaake arised a little bit tense and cramped (just my personal impression). talks went to copyright and payment-questions, acta and so on. with only 10 minutes retaining on our time limit i tried put the pnr-topic on the table but mrs. schaake didn't want to discuss about that because she is not in details, as she told us. giving her a direct question she had to confess that she would have to vote about it very soon and at this point of discussion it seems as if i gave her unfriendly response and forced an aggressive atmosphere, which i did not remarked. telling her that i am having doubts on how our "democratical system" works and that it feels strange to me, having a parlamentarian who does not want to listen to arguments on a topic that she has to vote about i leaded the discussion far away from technical contents which made some of our group angry (as they told me afterwards). about this time the power blackout occured which made mrs. schaak stay a little bit longer with us (she doesnt like to make 10 levels of stairs to her bureau!) and she told us several times that she does not like to leave us in a unhappy or displeased atmosphere. well - it relaxed a little bit but kept cool alltogether.

personal conclusion

i made a mistake and i am sorry for that, which doesnt mean that i regret my questions at all but it was wrong, to talk about this in our group who was not interested in general debates in majority.

-michael.