On Data Protection day 2014, Vice-President Reding called for a "data protection compact for Europe" - eight principles that should govern the way data is processed by the public and the private sector.

Two years after the European Commission proposed a major reform of the EU’s data protection rules, Vice-President Reding called for full speed on data protection in 2014, saying "Europe must act decisively to establish a robust data protection framework that can be the gold standard for the world. Otherwise others will move first and impose their standards on us." Speaking about national security programmes and their implications for data protection, Vice-President Reding said it is essential that Europe get its own house in order. "National security should be invoked sparingly.

According to the documents, leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) collects vast amounts of data from fibre-optic systems. The scale of the operation is massive, and the use of the data, also shared with the NSA is a big concern.

The project called Tempora aims to attach probes on 90% of the cables running through the UK. In the last 5 heart Tempora is half way - it has access to 200 fibre-optic cables (including the transatlantic traffic), collecting and analysing data from 46 of them. This adds up to 600 million “communication events” daily when full content of transmissions is preserved for 3 days and metadata for 30.