Neelie Kroes (below), European commissioner for digital
matters, who said: 'If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite
frustrated with my government right now.'
European businesses are likely to abandon the
services of American internet providers because of the National Security Agency
surveillance scandal, the European commission has warned.
Neelie Kroes (left), the commission vice-president who
speaks on digital affairs, predicted that providers of cloud services, which
allow users to store and access data on remote servers, could suffer
significant loss of business if clients fear the security of their material is
under threat.
The warning came as it appeared that the Americans
and the Europeans were to start investigating alleged breaches of data privacy
in the EU as well as US intelligence and espionage practices.
Despite threats from France to delay long-awaited
EU-US negotiations on a new transatlantic free trade pact, scheduled to open in
Washington on Monday, EU ambassadors in Brussels reached a consensus on
Thursday to go ahead with the talks.
They could not yet agree, however, on how to respond
to a US offer of parallel talks on the NSA scandal, the Prism and Tempora
programmes and issues of more traditional espionage arising from reports of how
US agencies bugged and tapped the offices and embassies of the EU and several
member states.
Dalia GrybauskaitÄ—, the president of Lithuania, said
on Thursday that she was not seeking an apology from the Americans. Lithuania
takes over the rotating six-month EU presidency this week.
While no decision had yet been taken, she said she
hoped the EU-US talks on electronic surveillance would also be launched on
Monday and run concurrently. Since much of the alleged US hovering up of
telephone and internet traffic in Europe is assumed to amount to commercial and
industrial espionage, the two parallel sets of talks will affect one another. Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment