Merkel wants EU data protection pact

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has called for a strict European agreement on data protection requiring all internet service providers to reveal what personal information they have stored, and to whom they have made it available, Financial Times reported.

The fundamental law should ensure that companies such as Facebook and Google would be subject to the same strict privacy rules in all EU member states, and not simply obey national legislation in the country where they are registered, she said.

Ms Merkel has faced sharp criticism in recent days for failing to take decisive action to protect German internet users from the comprehensive surveillance of internet and telecommunications traffic alleged to have been conducted by US and British intelligence services.

"Internet companies which are operating in Europe, such as Facebook and Google, must give European countries the information about whom they have given data to," she said.

The first requirement was to complete negotiations on a common European data protection law, on which Germany would take "a very strict position". She said that although Germany had its own "very good data protection law", a company like Facebook which was registered in Ireland was only subject to Irish law.

Other European countries, such as the UK, had "a very different philosophy" about data protection, and very different laws granting intelligence services access to communications traffic. "We must have an intensive discussion to discover what is reasonable," she said. The German position would be that "the end does not always justify the means" in collecting intelligence information.

In the clearest indication to date that Ms Merkel believes the US may have contravened Germany's data protection laws, she said: "I expect a clear promise from the American government, that in the future they will observe German law on German territory. We are friendly partners. We are in a defence alliance and we must be able to rely on each other."