MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Germany is permitted to make its own decisions on whether to tighten national rules on storing user data, the European Commission said Wednesday, refuting claims that the EC had taken the country to court over privacy violations.
"We are aware that data retention is often the subject of a very sensitive, ideological debate and that sometimes there can be a temptation to draw the European Commission into these debates. The European Commission is not ready to play this game," the EU executive body stated.
The German parliament has been promoting new laws for online data storage, insisting that telecom and Internet user data of German citizens should only be stored in Germany. The move came over a year after the EU Court of Justice invalidated an EU-wide Data Retention Directive.
"As the European Commission has repeatedly said since the European Court of Justice annulled the EU Data Retention Directive: the decision of whether or not to introduce national data retention laws is a national decision. The European Commission has no intention to go back on this statement or reopen old discussions," it stressed.
This past spring, Germany was rocked by revelations that US intelligence agency NSA had been bulk collecting data on Germans using a Bavarian monitoring post.