e-ignite

Well, this is a rather strange story. According to Beta News, the EU are planning to introduce a tax on SMS Text Messages and Emails. But this is a strange thing to be on a privacy and security blog surely? Well, not quite…

The basics of the story are that the EU need to raise funds and in order to do so, they are looking at charging $0.015 per SMS message and $0.000001 for each email you send. So far it’s not clear whether the users will have to pay this (less likely IMO) or the service providers. But this will increase either the charges the user has to pay, or increase the advertising required on a free email page. It’s annoying to say the least.

However, the main concern is, yet again, privacy.

In order to prove that you’ve sent an email and therefore to charge you, a copy of the email (or at least some fairly detailed logging) will be required and this will have to be kept somewhere. This is a billing system, and therefore would be potentially easier to access than the EU’s logs of all email and net traffic. Does this mean that the information is available to more people? Can law enforcement or other agencies access the information without a correct court order? This is a real concern.

Personally, I have been more and more shocked recently by the EU’s newest laws that basically eliminate your privacy. However, a lot of this stems from the UK’s presidency of the EU. For example, did you know that it was the UK Government (namely Tony Blair) that pushed through this law requiring all European ISPs to keep all email and net traffic data for a period of up to two years? And again, their reasoning for it was the prevention of terrorism (see my frank opinion about this argument in this article). It is becoming more and more difficult for you to protect your privacy with regard to electronic forms of communication, and I am genuinely concerned that this taxation plan may be more than just a revenue increasing venture. In the EU, we already have to pay VAT on phone calls, SMS text messages and our Internet Connection charges, so why should the EU introduce yet another tax? Is it a revenue generation, or is it something more sinister? Yet another effort to track what everyone does on the web?

Perhaps the single most frightening question to ask yourself is this: Is there actually anything you could do about it if it is?