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The EU should regulate AI on the basis of rights, not risks
EDRi's member Access Now explains why the upcoming legislative proposal on AI should be a rights-based law, like the GDPR. The European Commission must not compromise our rights by substituting a mere risk mitigation exercise by the very actors with a vested interest in rolling out this technology.
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Czech Big Brother Awards awards worst privacy culprits
EDRi's member IuRe has recognised the most intrusive authorities, companies and technologies for the sixteenth time in a row at the Big Brother Awards. This year's awards were closely linked to the pandemic. Many nominations emerged as a part of the fight against COVID-19, limiting privacy in order to limit the spread of the virus.
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EDRi challenges expansion of police surveillance via Prüm
The Prüm framework permits police forces of EU Member States to exchange DNA files, fingerprints, vehicle data via a decentralised system. The European Commission and the Council are pushing for a “Next Generation Prüm” in which facial images, firearms data, driving licenses, extracts of police records, data about third-country nationals and many additional types of data could be shared via the system.
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Trust is a two-way street: the UK’s digital identity framework
Trust is a two-way street, and while the British government’s digital identity trust framework definitely makes steps in the right direction, those efforts need to be accompanied by a commitment to transparency and integrity, says EDRi's member Open Rights Group in response to the government's policy paper on UK’s digital identity and attributes trust framework.
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Delete first, think later
The proposed Digital Services Act wants to push online platforms to quickly remove illegal content. But it uses a sledgehammer on a most intricate challenge: moderating online speech. The result would crush freedom of expression instead of enabling it. This is the second blog post in a new series dedicated to the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
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This is the EU’s chance to stop racism in artificial intelligence
Human rights mustn’t come second in the race to innovate, they should rather define innovations that better humanity. The European Commission's upcoming proposal may be the last opportunity to prevent harmful uses of AI-powered technologies, many of which are already marginalising Europe's racialised communities.
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116 MEPs agree – we need AI red lines to put people over profit
In light of the upcoming proposal for the regulation of artificial intelligence in Europe, 116 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have written to the European Commission’s leaders in support of EDRi’s letter calling for red lines on uses of AI that compromise fundamental rights.
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Eurodac database repurposed to surveil migrants
Eurodac is the EU database used to store asylum seekers’ and refugees’ data, as well as certain categories of “irregular” migrants. By the end of 2019, the EU stored almost 6 million peoples’ fingerprint sets in the database. Research show how legislative developments transform the Eurodac database into “a powerful tool for mass surveillance”, endangering migrants' fundamental human rights.
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Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. In this post, EDRi's member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful.
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#ReclaimYourFace and help prevent the end of privacy as we know it!
Facial recognition and other biometric surveillance threatens the core of our right to privacy and data protection by surveilling and judging us. This is why across Europe, we’re calling to ban biometric mass surveillance practices. We’re counting on EU citizens to sign our ECI petition, and on everyone to spread the word and make sure that European governments cannot ignore our demand.
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Why Facebook’s proposed hate speech policy on Zionism would only add fuel to the fire
Pressured to combat surging hate speech and anti-Semitism on its platform, Facebook is looking into how it should moderate the use of the word “Zionist,” and whether to add the term as a protected category under its hate speech policy. EDRi's member Access Now doesn’t think that is a good idea, particularly given Facebook’s inability to strictly adhere to human rights principles in its content moderation practices.
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Electronic Frontier Norway (EFN) reports “Shinigami Eyes” to the Norwegian DPA for violation of GDPR
EDRi member Electronic Frontier Norway (EFN) found that the use of the program “Shinigami Eyes” and the operation of the database it uses constitute multiple violations of the GDPR and its Norwegian implementation. The most egregious of these being the clear violation of Article 9 which prohibits the registrations of people’s political views, philosophical convictions and physical persons sexual relations or sexual orientations etc.
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