A 360° view on tech world
European Union lawmakers are on track to ban the use of remote biometric surveillance for general law enforcement purposes. However that hasn’t stopped parliamentarians in France voting to deploy AI to monitor public spaces for suspicious behavior during the 2024 Paris Olympics. On Thursday the parliament approved a plan to use automated behavioral surveillance of […]
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In its latest piece of strategic litigation, the precision-punching European privacy rights campaign group noyb has used data donated by users of the ‘Who Targets me‘ browser extension, which analyzes political microtargeting on Facebook, to build a case against every political party in Germany — for what it alleges is unlawful processing of voters’ personal […]
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Austria’s data protection authority has found that use of Meta’s tracking technologies violated EU data protection law as personal data was transferred to the US where the information was at risk from government surveillance. The finding flows from a swathe of complaints filed by European privacy rights group noyb, back in August 2020, which also […]
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In the latest blow to Meta’s consentless behavioral ad-targeting business in Europe, a Dutch court has found the social media giant’s Irish subsidiary did not have a lawful basis to process local users’ data for ad targeting. Dutch privacy advocacy group, the Data Privacy Foundation (DPS), along with a local consumer protection not-for-profit, Consumentenbond, filed […]
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The UK government has asked the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to review TikTok in a move that could prefigure a ban on the app on government devices. Speaking to Sky News, security minister Tom Tugendhat said the government has asked the NCSC to look into the popular video sharing app — telling the broadcaster […]
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Secure messaging apps are lining up to opposite measures in the UK government’s Online Safety Bill (OSB) they argue will do the opposite of promoting online safety by undermining the robust encryption web users rely upon to safeguard their communications. Meta-owned WhatsApp, the not-for-profit Signal Foundation behind the Signal app, Element, which operates the decentalized […]
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Turns out the UK government, under current prime minister Rishi Sunak, is not replacing the GDPR, as Michelle Donelan, his secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, implied last October — when as a fresh-in-post digital secretary under a different PM, she paused the flagship data protection reform, saying the government wanted to rethink its […]
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Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has followed Microsoft and Google to become the latest veteran search player to dip its beak in the generative AI trend — announcing the launch today in beta of an AI-powered summarization feature, called DuckAssist, which can directly answer straightforward search queries for users. DDG says it’s drawing on natural language […]
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Twitter has ruffled more regulatory feathers in the European Union by going ahead with a rollout of a much criticized paid verification feature without informing its lead data protection watchdog ahead of time — despite previously saying it would. The product, known as Twitter Blue, lets users pay to get a blue check market on […]
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Metaverse hype was hanging like a multicolored fog over the Mobile World Congress (MWC) connectivity trade show in Barcelona this week. Conference organizer, the GSMA’s, program pitched attendees into a smorgasbord of metaverse-themed discussions — most of which seemed designed to generate maximum FOMO, as a parade of tech evangelists took to the stage in […]
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