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Sections of Creuse road network return to 90 km/h
First included as part of a broader law on tax changes passed in December, the French government will now be able to trawl social media for evidence of tax avoidance, the constitutional court has ruled. Despite opposition from human rights' groups and the French data protection authority, customs and tax officials will be allowed to review users' online profiles, posts and pictures for evidence of undisclosed income. increases the state's online surveillance powers. Opposing the changes, the country's data watchdog CNIL, known in Europe for being a staunch defender of privacy rights, said that while it recognised that the government's aims were legitimate, the new policy would pose risks for individual freedoms.
“An experiment without any goals is a joke,” said Arthur Messaud, a legal expert at French internet freedom advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. Tax authorities to trawl social media profiles
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for any subsequent increase in serious accidents.
The Creuse is the latest department to take this chance and has unveiled plans to raise the speed limit to 90 km/h on 445 kilometres of the department's secondary road network, around 10% of the total. The president of the conseil départemental de la Creuse, Valérie Simonet, made the announcement on France Bleu radio: “The road network has been greatly improved, and has benefitted from significant investment. The roads affected by the proposed changes are wide and with clear road markings... it is a common sense proposition.”
The Creuse will not be the first department to roll back the changes, however. That honour goes to Haute-Marne in eastern France, which raised the speed limit on 200 kilometres of its network in January. The departmental council made the decision to revert to the higher limit without waiting for advice from the road safety commission, but council president Nicolas Lacroix said that he had submitted the necessary accident reports for the roads in question before making the change.
The decision has been criticised as being “populist” in a department that had a particularly active gilets jaunes movement, but the move was defended by Mr Lacroix: “Here, your car is your life. If you lose your licence, you risk losing your job too. In this department, we did not see an improvement in accident rates since the drop to 80 km/h.” With a number of departments planning similar changes, opponents and road safety campaigners are worried about the consequences of the speed limit varying so often on the road network. “We should keep a national standard. If one department is 80 km/h and the neighbouring department is at 90 km/h, this will quickly become unmanageable,” said Jean-Luc Chenut, departmental president of the Ille-etVilaine department. ■
In its ruling, the court acknowledged that users' privacy and freedom of expression could potentially be compromised and applied caveats to the legislation. It said authorities would have to ensure that password-protected content was off limits and that they would only be able to use public information pertaining to the person divulging it online. They also insisted that regulators would have to closely monitor how the data was being exploited.
The mass collection of data is part of a three-year online monitoring experiment by the French government and greatly
Budget Minister Gérald Darmanin has called the new rules “one more tool to fight fraud” and warned tax avoiders: “If you say you're not a fiscal resident in France and you keep posting pictures on Instagram from France, there might be an issue... I’d like to point out that there is nothing extraordinary here, other countries are already doing it, such as the United States or Britain since 2010 for example.” ■
