EDRi-gram, 13 November 2025

What has the EDRi network been up to over the past few weeks? Find out the latest digital rights news in our bi-weekly newsletter. In this edition: Halloween is over… but digital rights horrors remain

By EDRi · November 13, 2025

Halloween might be over, but digital rights horrors are here to stay. Yes, we are talking EU’s Digital Omnibus coming up next week.

Recent leaks about the proposal paint a deeply troubling picture. What’s being presented as a simple “technical streamlining” of EU digital laws is, in reality, a covert attempt to dismantle Europe’s strongest safeguards against digital threats: the GDPR, the AI Act and ePrivacy. These are the protections that keep everyone’s data secure, hold governments accountable, prevent AI systems from making life-altering decisions about individuals, and shield our societies from pervasive surveillance.

Together with other 126 civil society organisations, trade unions, and defenders of the public interest, we have written to the European Commission to express our grave concern over the forthcoming Digital Omnibus proposal. Unless the European Commission changes course, this could mark the biggest rollback of digital fundamental rights in EU history.

This issue could not be more urgent. An investigation from netzpolitik.org reads like a dystopian thriller: in Belgium, 278 million records of mobile phone locations were traded by shady data brokers. What was once sold for advertising is now a tool for tracking, profiling and surveillance: a(nother) proof that the AdTech industry’s obsession with data extraction has built an infrastructure of constant observation. Commercial and state surveillance feed off each other, exposing how fragile our privacy truly is. This case only shows the need for strong enforcement of existing rules, such as the EU’s landmark GDPR.

From Europol’s expanding powers to AI Act loopholes that fuel surveillance creep, our rights are caught in a storm of deregulation, data grab and corporate capture. But not all is foregone, we stand together to face the monsters.

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