APADOR-CH, together with several other Romanian NGOs, initiated a protest against the government's decision to adopt a law that requires the registration of all persons who buy prepaid phone cards. This law proposal was passed only one day after the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) 8th of April 2014, in which it invalidated the European Parliament’s Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention of data of phone and Internet users- also known as the "Big Brother Directive"- on the grounds that it was a severe and disproportionate intrusion into the fundamental rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data.

This decision of the Romanian Government is the fourth attempt in the last three years to impose such regulations (find a chronology here [in Romanian]). The project is ambiguous and can influence many more areas than prepaid phone cards. For example, all citizens that connect to free Wi-Fi systems will have to be identified; all the 10 million pre-paid phone card users will have to register within six months from the date of the adoption of the law, otherwise their service will have to be disabled; user registration is done in uncertain terms, e.g. information on who will have access to databases or on why the Personal Numerical Code is necessary is not available.

The signatories of the protest initiated by APADOR-CH consider that the law proposal adopted by the Government on the 9th of April, 2014 is as disproportionate as the recently invalidated European Directive because, under the pretext of protecting national security, all citizens are considered suspicious and are supervised in an Orwellian style, typical of totalitarian societies .

The protest was put forward to MPs, who were asked not to adopt the law and to make all efforts to repeal the other national laws that have resulted from the Big Brother Directive.