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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Computers are binary, people are not: how AI systems undermine LGBTQ identity
Companies and governments are already using AI systems to make decisions that lead to discrimination. When police or government officials rely on them to determine who they should watch, interrogate, or arrest — or even “predict” who will violate the law in the future — there are serious and sometimes fatal consequences. EDRi's member Access Now explain how AI can automate LGBTQ oppression.
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Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Rights: Document Pool
Find in this doc pool all EDRi analyses and documents related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and fundamental rights
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EDRi-gram, 7 April 2021
Reflecting on the increased challenges to our digital rights, we realised how imperative it is that the field truly reflects everyone in European society. This means improving representation in the digital rights field, but more crucially undoing the power structures preventing us from protecting digital rights for everybody. Approaching digital rights through the lens of decoloniality invites us to interrogate how digital space is occupied, the people who are displaced, and the mechanisms of extraction it requires to exist. This process requires extra work, extra care, extra patience, extra humility as we interrogate that what seems natural.
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Everyone wants to encourage encryption, except for one minister
The Department of Justice and Security in the Netherlands seems to be holding on to the idea that it is possible to weaken encryption "just a little". Simultaneously, the parliament and a monster alliance of organizations tells the minister over and over again: it's impossible. EDRi's member Bits of Freedom sheds some light on the on-going debate on the question.
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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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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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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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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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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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CJEU upholds strict requirements for law enforcement access to electronic communications metadata
Traffic and location data may allow precise conclusions to be drawn about the persons involved, e.g. their social relationships or the social environments frequented by them. In most cases, the CJEU has only allowed access to such data for serious crimes. However, the CJEU ruled that access to retained data is only allowed in cases of serious crime when the access implies a serious interference, and in all criminal cases when the access does not imply a serious interference.
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