Our work
EDRi is the biggest European network defending rights and freedoms online. We work to to challenge private and state actors who abuse their power to control or manipulate the public. We do so by advocating for robust and enforced laws, informing and mobilising people, promoting a healthy and accountable technology market, and building a movement of organisations and individuals committed to digital rights and freedoms in a connected world.
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Huge protest against corruption & surveillance in Macedonia
The political crisis in Macedonia deepened on 12 April when the President Gjorgi Ivanov announced that he would issue a blanket pardon to 56 politicians suspected of involvement in serious crimes. Over the last eight days, tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets of the capital city Skopje and about a dozen other […]
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Countering terrorism, a.k.a. the biggest human rights threat of 2016
United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and Human rights, Ben Emmerson said “the central challenge for human rights in 2016 [is] ensuring governments continue to support a human rights agenda” while seeking to end terrorism. The European Union is also faced with this challenge. In the EU, there is currently a proposal for a […]
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Trilogues: the system that undermines EU democracy and transparency
Most of the legislation of the European Union (EU) is today adopted using an informal, non-democratic, non-accountable and non-transparent process. This mechanism is known in the EU bubble as “trilogues” or “trialogues”. Trilogues are a set of informal negotiations between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission to fast-track […]
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Press Release: Vote on Data Protection and Passenger Name Record package
The European Parliament looks set to adopt two proposals on data protection and a proposal on the profiling of air passengers (PNR, Passenger Name Records) tomorrow, 14 April. The two data protection proposals seek to protect our fundamental right to privacy. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) covers the protection of personal data across all […]
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Special report: Poland’s secret services are still using and abusing telecom and Internet data
With almost two million requests for telecommunication data and more than two thousand requests for Internet data concerning Polish citizens in 2015, it is clear that the access to metadata in Poland by the country’s secret services is still out of control. Compared to 2014, the Polish Panoptykon Foundation found that the number of requests […]
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EDRi joins open letter asking for an ambitious copyright reform
In light of the planned copyright reform by the European Commission, EDRi today (7 April, 2016) sent an open letter addressed to President Juncker, First Vice-President Timmermans, Vice-President Ansip and other commissioners. In the letter, we demand an ambitious copyright reform that “that upholds and strengthens fundamental principles such as the limitation of intermediaries’ liability […]
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The lobby-tomy 4: Innovation is the magic word
If there is one term that seems to be popular in the current political climate, it’s “innovation.” Lobbying is about convincing policy makers of the importance of your position. But is innovation really a good argument? The new European data protection regulation is the most lobbied piece of legislation thus far because the subject is […]
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Opt me out of location – campaign and report against mobile tracking
Open Rights Group, a UK member of EDRi has launched a campaign to enable people to opt out of location and web traffic tracking by their mobile providers. The campaign includes a tool to help people find out how to opt out, which is usually quite hard to find information about. The campaign is backed […]
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Commission launches consultations on ancillary copyright and panorama
It is time for new courses in the EU copyright reform menu: How about a neighbouring right for publishers and an EU-wide panorama exception? In December, Commissioner Oettinger presented the what could only be described as the “appetiser”: Citizens should be able to access subscribed streaming services when going on holiday in the EU (imagine, […]
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Intelligence organisations get more surveillance powers in Romania
The past few months brought Romania three different surveillance proposals which blatantly increase the powers of the already excessively powerful Romanian intelligence organisations. 1. The first proposal is the new cybersecurity bill that we’ve already covered in past EDRi-gram articles. It would put computer and network security almost entirely under the purview of the many […]
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Swedish Supreme Court rules against Freedom of Panorama
Wikimedia’s Swedish chapter was sued in 2013 by BUS (Visual Arts Copyright Society in Sweden) for the site Offentligkonst.se, a site where you can upload your own images of public art so that others can easily find them. BUS claimed that Wikimedia Sweden violated copyright law by publishing images of public artwork online. The Supreme […]
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CJEU hearing on the EU Canada PNR agreement: Still shady
The European Court of Justice (CJEU) had a hearing on 5 April to decide about the referral made on 25 November by the European Parliament on the EU-Canada agreement on Passenger Name Records (PNR). Passenger Name Records (PNR) include information provided by passengers and collected by air carriers for commercial purposes, such as, but not […]
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