A government investigation that was presented on Wednesday wants to limit the constitutional protection of the search services that post personal information in databases on the Internet. Services such as Ratsit, MrKoll and Lexbase can, among other things, be used by criminals to map victims and they can also cause privacy damage to individuals, according to the government and the police.
They currently have constitutional protection, but the investigator believes that their activities are far from how the law is supposed to work. Therefore, it is now proposed that they should be exempted from legal protection and could disappear. Freedom of expression expert Nils Funcke is critical of this.
– I am deeply concerned when you break something that has been regulated in the constitution and put it into ordinary law, he says.
The warning: Don’t survive this
The proposals will now go out for consultation, but Nils Funcke sees great risks with it.
– The risk with this is that it will be an authority that will assess whether a database is considered to live up to these three criteria that the investigator stated. It is about, among other things, the scope and who it is aimed at and what information is being published, he says and continues:
– This paves the way for these databases, which are incredibly central to the media and to authorities that do background checks, that they will be forced to shut down. If they are to meet these requirements that exist, they will not be able to do it, they will not survive this.
Strömmer’s words: There is a problem
Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer (M) believes that some type of measure is needed to protect crime victims from criminals.
– I think you must be able to see that de facto privacy-sensitive information about individuals is very easily accessible. Among other things, it has had consequences that gang criminals map crime victims, for example elderly people who are exposed to fraud. Is that a problem? Yes, it is, he says.