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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Terrorist Content Online Regulation: Time to get things right
Closed-door negotiations (“trilogues”) on the Regulation to prevent the dissemination of terrorist content continue in Brussels. After our open letter from December things have moved on fairly slowly at first, but, recently, new texts are quickly being discussed in order to try to reach an agreement soon. Nonetheless, according to MEP Patrick Breyer, many key issues remain open for discussion.
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Stuck under a cloud of suspicion: Profiling in the EU
As facial recognition technologies are gradually rolled out in police departments across Europe, anti-racism groups blow the whistle on the discriminatory over-policing of racialised communities linked to the increasing use of new technologies by law enforcement agents.
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Germany: Invading refugees’ phones – security or population control?
In its new study, EDRi member Society for Civil Rights (GFF) examines how German authorities sniff out refugees’ phones. The aim of “data carrier evaluation” is supposed to be determining a person’s identity and their country of origin. However, in reality, it violates refugees’ rights and does not produce any meaningful results.
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Accountable Migration Tech: Transparency, governance and oversight
Migration continues to dominate headlines around the world. For example, given the currently deteriorating situation at the border between Greece and Turkey, with reports of increasingly repressive measures to turn people away, new technologies already play a part in border surveillance and decision-making at the border.
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Security Information Service wins the Czech Big Brother Awards
The Czech Big Brother Award (BBA) 2019 winners are the Czech Security Information Service (BIS), the antivirus company Avast, and the energy company PRE. Positive prize of Edward Snowden went to the city of Prague.
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E-evidence and human rights: The Parliament is not quite there yet
The European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) is currently busy working out a compromise between its different political groups in order to establish a common position on the “e-evidence” Regulation.
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ECtHR: UK Police data retention scheme violated the right to privacy
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Immigration, iris-scanning and iBorderCTRL
Technologies like automated decision-making, biometrics, and unpiloted drones are increasingly controlling migration and affecting millions of people on the move. This second blog post in our series on AI and migration highlights some of these uses, to show the very real impacts on people’s lives, exacerbated by a lack of meaningful governance and oversight mechanisms […]
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Click here to allow notifications in cross-border access to data
From a fundamental rights perspective, it’s essential that the proposal enabling cross-border access to data for criminal proceedings (“e-evidence”) includes a notification mechanism. However, this requirement of a notification seems to be out of the question for those advocating for “efficiency” of cross-border criminal investigations, even if that means abandoning the most basic procedural safeguards […]
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Swedish law enforcement given the permission to hack
On 18 February 2020, the Swedish parliament passed a law that enables Swedish law enforcement to hack into devices such as mobile phones and computers that the police thinks a suspect might use. As with the recent new data retention law only one party (and one member of another party) voted against the resolution (286-26 […]
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Romania: Mandatory SIM registration declared unconstitutional, again
On 18 February 2020, the Romanian Constitutional Court unanimously declared unconstitutional a new legislative act adopted in September 2019 introducing mandatory SIM card registration. The legislative act in question was an emergency ordinance issued by the Government which wanted to introduce this obligation as a measure “to improve the operation of the 112 emergency service […]
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The impact of competition law on your digital rights
This is the first article in a series dealing with competition law and Big Tech. The aim of the series is to look at what competition law has achieved when it comes to protecting our digital rights, where it has failed to deliver on its promises, and how to remedy this. This series will first […]
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