French parliament votes for biometric surveillance at Paris Olympics

French parliament votes for biometric surveillance at Paris Olympics

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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Facebook political microtargeting at center of GDPR complaints in Germany

Facebook political microtargeting at center of GDPR complaints in Germany

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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Meta’s first human rights report is largely self-congratulatory

Use of Meta tracking tools found to breach EU rules on data transfers

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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Facebook’s behavioral ads lacked legal basis, Dutch court rules

Facebook’s behavioral ads lacked legal basis, Dutch court rules

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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WhatsApp extends time limit to delete a message to 60 hours

Secure messaging apps line up to warn UK’s Online Safety Bill risks web security

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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UK takes another bite at post-Brexit data protection reform — with ‘new GDPR’

UK takes another bite at post-Brexit data protection reform — with ‘new GDPR’

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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With Project Clover, TikTok touts new EU data privacy and security efforts

With Project Clover, TikTok touts new EU data privacy and security efforts

TikTok is doubling down on its European charm offensive today as it looks to counter a rising tide of political discontent with the popular short-form video-hosting platform. A new program called Project Clover will serve to create “a secure enclave for European TikTok user data,” wrote Theo Bertram, TikTok’s European VP of government relations and […]

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DuckDuckGo dabbles with AI search

DuckDuckGo dabbles with AI search

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 safety head suggests further ‘identity verification’ beyond paid verification may later be required

Twitter Blue’s quiet rollout in EU frets watchdog over lack of notice

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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