Topic: COMPUTER - on October 10, 2003 at 11:42:26 PM CEST
Europe's New High-Tech Role: Playing Privacy Cop to World
Last year General Motors Corp. set out to update its electronic company phone book, so that with a few keystrokes its engineers in, say, Taiwan could look up colleagues in Germany. But an unanticipated problem came in the way: Europe's strict privacy laws.
Employee office phone numbers were their "personal" information, European authorities said. Bob Rothman, the car maker's chief privacy officer, knew what that meant: sending numbers outside the EU would require months of legal work through GM's global operations -- or the company would be risking a criminal offense in some European countries. Not even GM's U.S. headquarters could know the phone numbers, if the company didn't take some measures first.
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