Will the U.S. PRISM Scandal Strenghten European Laws

European online private data concerns have been a touchy subject for some time now, as European Union officials seem to be unable to reach a clear decision on the form the law should have.

So far, the new regulations leave much to be desired as far as actual user protection goes as they seem to favor businesses more.

According to some data, tech companies would be scrutini zed by regulators only if there were risks to individuals, such as identity theft or discrimination. Well, that leaves the door open for a whole lot of types of misconducts that these companies would not be held responsible for.

Silicon Valley companies and the pressure they put on legislators are to blame for how weak these rules are.

First off, the companies that are responsible for the form the law is about to take in Europe are the same names that are now being accused of silently giving access to user data to the NSA.

That means Google, Facebook and Microsoft, to name just a few from a long list. However, while even the U.S. government, < a target="_blank" href="http://news.softpedia.com/news/Obama-on-PRISM-The-Program-Doesn-t-Apply-to-U-S-Citizens-359478.shtml">president and NSA director admitted to the program, these companies are still denying ever having agreed to such a thing.

Well, they’re a bit hard to trust at this point as they’ve lost some of their credibility thanks to the carefully-crafted PRISM-involvement denials that were obviously leaving a lot of room for interpretation.

Secondly, it seems unlikely that your data is safe anywhere on the Internet, whether it’s the social networks, emails or cloud services.

There are chances that the European legislation will str engthen as politicians fear backlash from the population as the PRISM scandal grows, but there are also chances the U.S. Internet giants are going to win the battle anyway.

It would be nice, of course to get a bullet-point list from these companies or the NSA or any other entity in the world that is collecting such private data (including UK’s Government Communications Headquarters that’s been linked to PRISM since June 2010) with the things they’re actually looking for so we all know they’re not reading our emails word-by-word.

Of course, that’s not going to ever happen.