The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), a consultative body of the European Union, has published an opinion in which it recommends that search engines, social networks and certain cloud computing services should be covered by imminent reforms to European Union data protection laws. The opinion states that the reforms should take into consideration current economic and social activity.
The EESC advises that the data protection laws should cover search engines due to the advertising revenues that they generate by using data they have collected about Internet users, and that social networks and cloud computing software should be similarly dealt with as they can also collect user data to be used for commercial advantage.