Data protection standards
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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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116 MEPs agree – we need AI red lines to put people over profit
In light of the upcoming proposal for the regulation of artificial intelligence in Europe, 116 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have written to the European Commission’s leaders in support of EDRi’s letter calling for red lines on uses of AI that compromise fundamental rights.
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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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Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. In this post, EDRi's member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful.
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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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At a glance: Does the EU Digital Services Act protect freedom of expression?
The Digital Services Act is in many ways an ambitious piece of legislation that seeks to make ‘Big Tech’ accountable to public authorities through new significant transparency and due diligence obligations. It also contains many provisions that could help protect users’ fundamental rights. Whether it will be successful at protecting freedom of expression from undue restrictions or reining in the power of Big Tech rather than cementing it, is, however, questionable. EDRi's member ARTICLE 19 share its first thoughts on why.
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“Anytime and anywhere”: Vaccination, immunity certificates, and the permanent pandemic
The deployment of vaccines, and in particular any “immunity passport” or certificate linked to the vaccination, must respect human rights. EDRi's member Privacy International (PI) reveals some of the broader human rights, ethical and societal implications of vaccination "passports".
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Targeted Online: How Big Tech’s business model sells your deepest secrets for profit
Surveillance-based advertising which is currently the business model used by Google, Facebook and many others is harmful to people and to society as a whole because it encourages the spread of disinformation. It's also bad for the media who lose control of their ad space and suffer from decreasing revenue as a result.
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Surveillance-based advertising: An industry broken by design and by default
Most online advertising today relies on huge amounts of personal data extracted from people without their knowledge. EDRi’s new guide book “Targeted Online” sheds light on this opaque data industry and explores how EU law should regulate it. This is the first blog post in a new series dedicated to the EU’s proposed Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
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ePrivacy strikes back
“And when we woke up, the ePrivacy Regulation was still there”, could be the EU bubble version of the famous micro-tale. Four years after the main text protecting privacy and confidentiality of people in the EU was proposed, Member States have finally given the green light to finalise the adoption. But, where will this lead us?
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ECI: putting people’s voices before corporate greed
On 17 February 2021, EDRi with a coalition of 40 human rights and social justice groups launched a unique, officially-recognised EU petition, called a “European Citizens’ Initiative” (ECI). Here, we explain why and how this ECI is a powerful tool for our Reclaim Your Face campaign that aims to ban biometric mass surveillance, as well as for our wider European advocacy against harmful uses of artificial intelligence-based technologies.
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Italy proposes age verification and digital identities for accessing social media
EDRi member Hermes Center sheds light on the current case against TikTok in Italy, where three solutions are circulating on how to make sure that children will not access certain online contents unless supervised by their guardians.
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