The European Commission has been accused of a massive rollback of the EU's digital rules after announcing proposals to delay central parts of the Artificial Intelligence Act and water down its landmark data protection regulation. If agreed, the changes would make it easier for tech firms to use personal data to train AI models without asking for consent, and try to end cookie banner fatigue by reducing the number times internet users have to give their permission to being tracked on the internet.
Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage. Under Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, EU laws to tackle tech giants have been either not applied or delayed, for fear of offending Donald Trump. Now leaked documents reveal that the European Commission plans to gut a central part of Europe's digital rulebook. This will hurt Europe's innovators and hand the future of Europe's tech sovereignty to US firms.
As first reported by MLex, the EC's proposed legislative changes are manifold, and in Noyb's view these would poke so many holes in existing rules to "make [GDPR] overall unusable for most cases." The EC is planning to introduce the "Digital Omnibus" package on November 19, introducing amendments to legislation covering AI regulation, cybersecurity, data protection, and privacy.
A coalition of reporters obtained the dataset, offered as a free sample from a data broker, containing 278 million location data points from the phones of millions of people around Belgium. Much of the location data is uploaded by ordinary apps installed on a person's phones, which is sold to data brokers. Those data brokers then sell that data to governments and militaries.
The complaint focuses largely on Clearview's apparent disregard for fines from France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK. Aside from the UK - where Clearview recently lost its appeal of a $10 million fine from the Information Commissioner's Office - the company has yet to pay other fines totaling more than $100 million, Noyb claims. "EU data protection authorities did not come up with a way to enforce its fines and bans against the US company, allowing Clearview AI to effectively dodge the law," said Noyb in its announcement today.
We are a Berlin company with international employees working on decentral collaborative AI services in real estate. We change how people live and work, by making buildings think and act adaptive to occupant needs. It is not another App. We save highest possible energy and run AI in compliance with GDPR. We look for developers who know AI on edge as well as power of Edge&Cloud.
Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's (Apra's) CPS 230 standard have led organisations to become "really obsessed" with the 72-hour notification window following a data breach, according to Shannon Murphy, global security and risk strategist at Trend Micro.
You can't outsource accountability, but many organizations are doing just that, often without even realizing it. This is especially the case when it comes to data. As businesses rely more heavily on third-party suppliers to store, move, and manage their data, the risk of something going wrong multiplies. Whether that's compliance, the ability to restore lost data, or susceptibility to cyber attack.
Under the GDPR, "personal data" is broadly defined and includes both directly identifiable information (e.g., names, contact details) and indirectly identifiable information (e.g., IP address, unique IDs). "Pseudonymous data" constitutes personal data if individuals can be identified using "reasonably likely" means - taking into account all objective factors such as cost, time, and available technology. By contrast, "anonymous data" is information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable individual.
We fully comply with the GDPR, ensuring your personal data is protected and handled transparently. We only collect publicly available information and you have rights to access, rectify, erase, and restrict processing of your data.
One of the headlining features of Apple's new AirPods Pro 3 was the ability to translate incoming audio in real time, but it seems the feature won't work in the European Union at launch. On its official page detailing the features available on iOS 26, the company said EU residents or those with EU Apple IDs won't be able to use live translation, which is powered by Apple Intelligence and will also be coming to AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2.
On September 1, France's CNIL imposed a fine of EUR 325M on Google for displaying advertisements between Gmail users' emails without their consent and for placing cookies when creating Google accounts, without valid consent of French users. Following a complaint filed by the organization None Of Your Business on August 24, 2022, the CNIL conducted several inspections between 2022 and 2023 on Gmail messaging service and on the process of creating a Google account.
Meta has agreed for the first time to stop using the personal data of a specific individual for targeted advertising, as part of a negotiated settlement with human rights campaigner Tanya O'Carroll.