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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EDRi-gram, 8 September 2021
In the first post-summer edition of the EDRi-gram, we are excited to announce EDRi's new staff members who have recently become part of the team. Join us in welcoming Fenya Fischler, who will be our Membership and Community Officer & Belén Luna, our new Campaigns Officer! We are also celebrating a big milestone in our signature collection to ban biometric mass surveillance as 60 000 people have signed the #ReclaimYourFace petition (hurray)
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EFF to Council of Europe: Flawed Cross Border Police Surveillance Treaty Needs Fixing
EDRi member Electronic Frontier Foundations (EFF) has joined European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), and other civil society organizations in recommending 20 solid, comprehensive steps to strengthen human rights protections in the new cross border surveillance draft treaty that is under review by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The recommendations aim to ensure that the draft treaty, which grants broad, intrusive police powers to access user information in criminal cross border investigations, contains a robust baseline to safeguard privacy and data protection.
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EU: €5 million for new wiretapping technologies
The European Commission has made €5 million available for research projects that aim to help law enforcement authorities maintain the ability to intercept telecommunications – something which is threatened by the adoption of new technologies such as 5G networks and “edge computing”.
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UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal finds the regime for bulk communications data to be incompatible with EU law
The UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal issued a declaration in EDRi member Privacy International's challenge to the bulk communications data regime, finding UK legislation to be incompatible with EU law.
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Facebook’s dominance makes it difficult to question the truth
What we as a society understand as true is changeable, and questioning the truth can only be done with a healthy public debate. But the dominance of the platforms that facilitate our public debate makes difficult.
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Member in the Spotlight: Xnet
EDRi's member Xnet is an activist project working and proposing advanced solutions in fields related to digital rights and networked democracy.
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Move fast and break Big Tech’s power
The surveillance-based business model of the dominant technology companies is based on extracting as much personal information and profiling as possible to target individuals, on- and offline. Over time, Big Tech corporations build a frighteningly detailed picture about billions of individuals—and that knowledge directly translates into (market) power.
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Who, What, Why? Your guide to all things ECI! #ReclaimYourFace
Calling all digital rights heroes: EDRi needs your support! As part of the Reclaim Your Face campaign, we are running a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) to ban biometric mass surveillance practices in the EU. To be successful, we need to collect 1 million signatures. Read more to find out how we keep ECI data safe, and how your signature can make a big difference.
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Romani rights and biometric mass surveillance
The rights of Romani people should be an important topic for anyone that cares about digital rights. In this blog, hear from experts in Roma, Sinti and digital rights about why facial recognition is an important issue (and what the rest of the digital rights community can learn), and check out the Reclaim Your Face campaign’s first ever resource in the Sinti language!
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iSpy with my little eye: Apple’s u-turn on privacy sets a precedent and threatens everyone’s security
Apple has just announced significant changes to their privacy settings for messaging and cloud services: first, it will scan all images sent by child accounts; second, it will scan all photos as they are being uploaded to iCloud. With these changes, Apple is threatening everyone’s privacy, security and confidentiality.
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Can the EU Digital Services Act contest the power of Big Tech’s algorithms?
A progressive report on the Digital Services Act (DSA) adopted by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) in the European Parliament in July is the first major improvement of the draft law presented by the European Commission in December. MEPs expressed support for default protections from tracking and profiling for the purposes of advertising and recommending or ranking content. Now the ball is in the court of the leading committee on internal market and consumer protection (IMCO), which received 1313 pages of amendments to be voted in November. EDRi's member Panoptykon Foundation explores if the Parliament would succeed in adopting a position that will contest the power of dominant online platforms which shape the digital public sphere in line with their commercial interests, at the expense of individuals and societies.
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Europe’s Data Retention Saga and its Risks for Digital Rights
It seems that despite several Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decisions in this area, the data retention saga is unlikely to come to an end any time soon. After the invalidation of its previous instrument, the 2006 Data Retention Directive, the European Commission is currently trying to devise a new plan for the retention of traffic and location data for law enforcement and security purposes in the European Union (EU). The Commission stands at a crossroad: to intervene or not to intervene, that is the question.
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