Information democracy
Powerful companies and governments control the way the internet and new technologies are deployed. These actors blur the lines on corporate power in ways that have tremendous impact on people and democracies. The dominant business model of ‘Big tech’ platforms is based on surveillance, polarization and power imbalances. This ‘surveillance capitalism’ has had a global impact on democracy. For example, state and private actors can use the internet and technologies to spread political disinformation, to manipulate electoral results, to attack human rights defenders and to limit civic space.
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Campaign against surveillance: Nobody will tell you when they will follow you
The rapid growth of new technologies has been of “benefit” to secret services. However, it seems that the law has lacked behind showing its inability to reflect the new methods of surveillance used by secret services around the world. EDRi's member Panoptykon Foundation has launched a campaign in Poland to show the problem of unscrutinised powers of secret services.
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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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EDRi-gram, 24 March 2021
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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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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EDRi-gram, 10 March 2021
Unless we take strong action, people in Europe could soon face the end of our privacy and anonymity in public spaces as we know it. We need to rise against the growing use of sinister, unnecessary and disproportionate technologies in our public spaces which abuse our faces. 34,000+ incredible supporters have already joined the fight by officially signing our formal “European Citizens’ Initiative”. Help us reach one million signatures by spreading the word, mobilising your friends and family and even writing to your national or European Parliamentary representatives.
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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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Targeted Online: How Big Tech’s business model sells your deepest secrets for profit
Surveillance-based advertising which is currently the business model used by Google, Facebook and many others is harmful to people and to society as a whole because it encourages the spread of disinformation. It's also bad for the media who lose control of their ad space and suffer from decreasing revenue as a result.
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Surveillance-based advertising: An industry broken by design and by default
Most online advertising today relies on huge amounts of personal data extracted from people without their knowledge. EDRi’s new guide book “Targeted Online” sheds light on this opaque data industry and explores how EU law should regulate it. This is the first blog post in a new series dedicated to the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
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EDRi-gram, 24 February 2021
For years, the EDRi network has exposed how people’s most sensitive identifying characteristics like our faces, fingerprints or the way we walk are unlawfully harvested on an industrial scale by European governments and corporations to make unfair judgements about us without our knowledge. Now, with the launch of our Reclaim Your Face campaign’s European Citizens’ Initiative, we are increasing the pressure on lawmakers to put our rights ahead of big businesses’ profits.
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