[terhechte]

One big difference, though, is that this does not happen in secret. Everybody knows about it, and the member states can decide to implement it. Thus the voter could even (in theory) vote for a party that pleads to not implement said directive.

Though I think, again, the biggest difference is that it did not happen in secrecy but in a open and more democratic manner.

[dvdkhlng]

Also, the collection has to be implemented by each communication company itself (as opposed to by the police or secret service), so no central storage of data and no easy data-mining and network-building across the data sets of indviduals.

And you have all the usual data protection rights like requesting a full copy of all stored data from each company. In theory you should also always be informed afterwards when your data was retrieved due to a warrant.

That said, I'm still very much against this kind of data collection. Data protection starts at data parsimony. And you never know who'll have access and who watches the watchers etc.