EDRi-gram, 14 July 2021
Whilst EU laws say that each of us is innocent until proven guilty, the prevalence of biometric mass surveillance practices across Europe flips this on its head. Each of us is treated as suspicious until ‘proven’ innocent, by often discriminatory and persecutory deployments of systems that never should have been rolled out in the first place.
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EDRi-gram, 14 July 2021
Whilst EU laws say that each of us is innocent until proven guilty, the prevalence of biometric mass surveillance practices across Europe flips this on its head. Each of us is treated as suspicious until ‘proven’ innocent, by often discriminatory and persecutory deployments of systems that never should have been rolled out in the first place.
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EDRi-gram, 30 June 2021
Covid 19 brought the often invisible power of tech into sharp focus as it fostered the digitalisation of our lives forcing us to rely more heavily on technology to meet all our needs. In response, EDRi emphasised that measures taken should not lead to discrimination of any form, and governments must remain vigilant to the disproportionate harms that marginalised groups can face.
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The #PaperBagSociety challenge
The #PaperBagSociety is a social media challenge part of the #ReclaimYourFace campaign that invites everyone to share online the impact of living life with a paperbag on the head. With it, we aim to raise awareness of how ridiculous is to avoid facial recognition technologies in public spaces and why we need to build an alternative future, free from biometric mass surveillance.
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EDRis interactive Annual Report: A year in review of the digital rights field
Despite a challenging year, the European Digital Rights network has been relentlessly working to advocate for better digital policies, challenge creepy surveillance, inform and mobilise people across Europe. Read more about the need of digital rights and our impact in 2020 in our newly launched interactive Annual Report.
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Workplace, public space: workers organising in the age of facial recognition
‘Surveillance capitalism’ is increasingly threatening workers’ collective action and the human right to public protest.
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EDRi joins 178 organisations in global call to ban biometric surveillance
From protesters taking to the streets in Slovenia, to the subways of São Paulo; from so-called “smart cities” in India, to children entering French high schools; from EU border control experiments, to the racialised over-policing of people of colour in the US. In each of these examples, people around the world are increasingly and pervasively being subjected to toxic biometric surveillance. This is why EDRi has joined the global Ban Biometric Surveillance coalition, to build on our work in Europe as part of the powerful Reclaim Your Face campaign.
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EDRi-gram, 16 June 2021
Some surveillance technologies are so dangerous that they inevitably cause far more problems than they solve. The use of facial recognition and remote biometric technologies in publicly accessible spaces enables mass surveillance and discriminatory targeted surveillance. In such cases, the potential for abuse is too great, and the consequences too severe. We must ban such practices once and for all.
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European Commission ignores civil society concerns and sides with creative industries
Today is a sad day for Europe. Instead of listening to reason and arguments, the European Commission itself brought up in front of the CJEU, the backroom political influence of the entertainment industry has won once again. Clearly “earmarking” content means preferring the economic interests of a few powerful actors over the fundamental rights of a whole generation.
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The urgent need to #reclaimyourface
The rise of automated video surveillance is often touted as a quick, easy, and efficient solution to complex societal problems. In reality, roll-outs of facial recognition and other biometric mass surveillance tools constitute a systematic invasion into people’s fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. Like with uses of toxic chemicals, these toxic uses of biometric surveillance technologies need to be banned across Europe.
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New win against biometric mass surveillance in Germany
In November 2020, reporters at Netzpolitik.org revealed that the city of Karlsruhe wanted to establish a smart video surveillance system in the city centre. The plan involved an AI system that would analyse the behaviour of passers-by and automatically identify conspicuous behaviour. After the intervention of EDRi-member CCC the project was buried in May 2021.
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Challenge against Clearview AI in Europe
This legal challenge relates to complaints filed with 5 European data protection authorities against Clearview AI, Inc. ("Clearview"), a facial recognition technology company building a gigantic database of faces.
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EDRi-gram, 2 June 2021
The GDPR is still in its infancy, and while it is too soon to consider revisions to the law, EU regulators and decision-makers have the power to improve enforcement and fulfil its promise for vindicating data protection rights and spurring the development of privacy-protecting business models. The past three years hold important lessons for decision-makers and regulators to leverage to deliver on that promise. A lot is at stake.
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