Privacy and data protection
Privacy and data protection are essential for us to live, connect, work, create, organise and more. Governments and companies have long used mass surveillance for control trying to legitimise snooping for health, security or other reasons. The near-total digitisation of our lives has made it easier to control, profile and profit from our attention, data, bodies and behaviours in ways that are very difficult for us to understand and challenge. European data protection standards such as the GDPR are a good step forward but we need more to effectively ensure enforcement and protection against unlawful surveillance practices.
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European Parliament calls loud and clear for a ban on biometric mass surveillance in AI Act
After our timely advocacy actions with over 70 organisations, the amendments to the IMCO - LIBE Committee Report for the Artificial Intelligence Act clearly state the need for a ban on Remote Biometric Identification. In fact, 24 individual MEPs representing 158 MEPs, demand a complete ban on biometric mass surveillance practices. Now we need to keep up the pressure at European and national levels to ensure that when the AI Act is officially passed, likely in 2023 or 2024, it bans biometric mass surveillance.
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Gmail creates “Spam Emails”, despite CJEU judgment
On 24 August, EDRi member noyb.eu filed a complaint against Google with the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL). The tech giant has repeatedly ignored the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling on direct marketing emails and used its email platform Gmail to send unsolicited advertising emails without valid consent of the users.
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EDRi-gram, 14 September
“What you’re saying is, for me to own a car and to drive, I have to submit that my photo and information are going to be used for policing purposes across the entire EU… Are we all walking around as citizens? Or are we all walking around as suspects?”. The European Commission’s Prüm II proposal fails to put in place vital safeguards designed to protect all of us from state over-reach and authoritarian mass surveillance practices. Check out more in the EDRi-gram.
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Don’t restrict encryption before alternatives have been explored, says advisory council
The Dutch cabinet should explore alternative regulatory avenues for access to encrypted data, according to its chief advisory council for cyber security. The advice is very interesting for a number of reasons.
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Position Paper: New EU law amplifies risks of state over-reach and mass surveillance
The EDRi network published its position paper on the proposed Regulation on automated data exchange for police cooperation (“Prüm II”). The European Commission’s Prüm II proposal fails to put in place vital safeguards designed to protect all of us from state overreach and authoritarian mass surveillance practices. In the worst case scenario, we may no longer be able to walk freely on our streets as the new law would treat large parts of the population as a criminal before proven otherwise.
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EU Digital Services Act brings us closer to an inclusive, equitable internet
Strong enforcement of the DSA can bring human rights improvements, but real alternatives to the current dominant surveillance business model are still needed
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EDRi-gram, 6 July 2022
“Use of digital technologies is taken as a given, and yet for a variety of reasons almost one-fifth of Czech households do not have internet access and a quarter of adults do not have a smartphone. Regrettably, in Czech media there is not much discussion about this and other challenges of the digital era.” ― Hynek Trojánek, PR coordinator for the Promoting Human Rights in the Digital Era
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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep
In the past few years, the pandemic and the shift to working from home have bolstered the use of remote surveillance software to monitor employees. In 2020, global demand for employee monitoring software increased 108 per cent by April and 70 per cent by May 2020 compared to pre-pandemic times. At the same time, search engine queries for "How to monitor employees working from home" increased by 1,705 per cent in April and 652 per cent in May 2020 compared to the previous year.
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The UK Data Reform Bill and the British Bill of Rights: a tragedy in two acts
The dust hasn’t settled since plans to undermine everyone’s right to data protection were announced, but the UK Government are at it again. Plans to ditch the Human Rights Act in the UK were just unveiled, in a combined effort to steamroll the rule of law and the freedoms we have always taken for granted. EDRi member Open Rights Group explains how the impact of this constitutional butchery reverberates in data protection, and why both the Data Reform Bill and the Bill of Rights follow a common thread.
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Good news: Dutch secret services destroy unlawfully stored information on millions of innocent citizens
The secret services store information on millions of citizens that they are no longer by law allowed to have. EDRi member Bits of Freefom filed a complaint about this with the supervisor. The supervisor stated on June 15, 2022, that the data must be destroyed.
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Challenging the use of GPS tags to monitor asylum seekers in the UK
The latest rollout of GPS tags to monitor migrants is another step in creating a 'hostile environment' for asylum seekers in the UK.
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Mass surveillance of external travellers may go on, says EU’s highest court
On 21 June 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in case C-817/19 Ligue des droits humains from Belgium which challenged the validity of the Passenger Name Records (PNR) Directive. Regrettably, the PNR Directive as such was found to be compatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
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