Myth 2: It won’t affect the right to privacy or data protection since no personal data will be used

Defenders of upload filters claim that this type of filter is not illegal according to relevant CJEU case law (Scarlet vs. SABAM and SABAM vs. Netlog) because the proposed filter does not involve any privacy invasion or collection of personal data. According to the filtering cheerleaders, the technology will just check the identifier of the file, not the content or the identity of who uploaded the file. This does not make sense because it would be impossible to have a complaints mechanism without knowing who uploaded the file.

There are other data protection and privacy concerns: The proposed new “ancillary copyright” creates a new right to prohibit the upload of any piece of text that is longer than any previously published “snippet”. To enforce this right, every phrase being uploaded would need to be automatically checked against the database of 20 years of press publications. A filter that reads every single text uploaded to the internet – which could be tweets, comments on social networks or blogposts, could not conceivably be anything other than a severe breach of privacy rights!