European Digital Rights

🧐 Curious to understand how opaque supply chains operate in the shadowy #spyware market? IrpiMedia has just published a great investigation on Dataflow Security, an Italian exploit developer with strong - and growing - ties to Israel’s intelligence and cyber industry. Their business is built around discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities that, once supplied to their clients, escape their creators’ control. This article is a great glimpse inside the opaque supply chain behind the spyware market, an unregulated, shadowy business that poses a risk to our collective cybersecurity. ➡️ https://lnkd.in/erje-uu4 🚫 The EU should not allow such a model to operate within its internal market. This is a part of our collective demands to EU lawmakers as we urge them to protect safe and secure communication. Join us in asking lawmakers to Keep It Safe and Secure at the link in the comments!

🚫 WE SAY NO TO PALANTIR 🚫 We're proud to join 120+ organisations across Europe in calling on our governments and the European Commission to scrap all existing public sector contracts with Palantir. It's time to: ✔️Terminate contracts with Palantir and say NO to future public contracts ✔️Develop alternatives that safeguard people from mass surveillance ✔️Protect democracy by investing in people, not corporations  Read the open letter here: https://lnkd.in/eSYHSY2v

🤩 #PrivacyCamp26 is right around the corner and we're excited to share the the final programme with you! Check out the programme ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eCd8rbb5 Over many inspiring panels, interactive workshops and ground-breaking documentaries, we’ll come together to explore the forces shaping our digital present and future, and dive into the theme ⚡ The Origins of Future Technologies: Towards communities of digital self-determination ⚡ We’ll hear from digital rights advocates, activists, academics, policy-makers and communities from Europe and beyond, bringing different perspectives into conversation and challenging the assumptions behind today’s dominant visions of technological progress and “sovereignty”. There’ll be plenty to discuss, but also great opportunities to meet allies, exchange ideas and linking struggles along the way! There's still time to join us! Register before October 6 to secure your spot ✅ https://lnkd.in/eTetKMCa

🤔 How many ‘scores’ did you get today? A bank might have assessed how ‘risky’ you are to give a home loan to. A platform has definitely ranked the content you’re going to view. A potential employer might have use an algorithm to sort your CV. An automated system at border control might have decided you need an additional security check. These are examples of AI-powered social-scoring that are affecting your life every day, often to your detriment. The more vulnerable you are, the worse you fare 📈 🚨 Now, EU’s #deregulation drive risks further turning us into subjects of an authoritarian-scoring society, where algorithms control whether we are able to get a job, buy a house, cross a border, and more. Through the ‘digital omnibus’, Brussels is considering weakening key #GDPR safeguards that protect us from automated decision-making. 🖋️ Read an op-ed by Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, PhD. for EUobserver about this potentially disastrous proposal and what’s at stake for our lives ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eNE4CD27

🚨 EU governments could be just days away from agreeing to a deal on the #DigitalOmnibus on Data that would weaken some of the basic protections people rely on under the GDPR, such as knowing who is using their data and why, being able to ask what data a company holds about them, and objecting to certain uses or expecting it to be kept secure. Two things are especially worrying: ⚠️ AI gets special treatment. The Council text would explicitly open the door to using 'legitimate interest' for AI development and operation, making it easier to justify the reuse of huge amounts of personal data. ⚠️ The same data could end up protected under the GDPR in one part of the chain and outside the GDPR in another. Same person, same information, different level of rights protection depending on who is holding it. That is a recipe for confusion, loopholes and years of legal fights over whether the GDPR applies at all. And who is best placed to benefit from looser rules? Not the small EU company starting from scratch but the companies that already sit on enormous amounts of data, mainly Big Tech. All of this is happening while governments are talking about protecting children online and huge AI risks - this contradiction should worry us. Member States should slow this down before 'simplification' turns into something much bigger and scarier 🚫

🛑 President Ursula von der Leyen’s #SOTEU announcement on age-gating and banning children’s access to online spaces comes with no surprise. 📝 There is a fundamental problem with the approach: you won’t be making harmful platform safer by preventing young people from using them, you can only achieve that by regulating the platforms in the very first place. The #EUKidsAct was leaked, and while some of the proposed measures make sense and should arguably protect everyone regardless of age, others risk causing new harm through blanket age restrictions by: ⚠️ Undermining children’s rights to information, participation, communication, expression and identity-building. But also everyone else’s! 🤖 Creating privacy and cybersecurity risks, as age assurance requires every person to prove their age simply to access online spaces. 🚫 Making a precedent for exclusion, where age-assurance infrastructure could eventually be used to restrict access to other forms of sensitive or politically contested information. Young people themselves say: 🗣️ “To achieve safer digital environments, we must confront the systems that produce harm, not remove those most affected by it. Don’t build a digital world for us, build it with us, so it becomes one we want to inherit.” 🛠️ We already have more proportionate tools. The EU’s #DSA provides mechanisms to address systemic risks and platform design. And the upcoming #DFA offers an opportunity to tackle manipulative and addictive design more directly, for all regardless of age, and beyond social media platforms. European Commission, we have a checklist for you if you *truly* want to ensure children’s digital safety: ✅ Protecting children’s rights to privacy, information, participation and expression ✅ Making platforms safer, regulating addictive and manipulative design for all ✅ Holding platforms accountable for their systemic risks ✅ Strengthening the enforcement of the #DSA ✅ Offering age-related protection rather than imposing measures that are neither necessary nor proportionate, let alone evidence-based. More ➡️ https://lnkd.in/gJCjbMUj

The #SOTEU is just few minutes away! As the European Commission prepares to unveil its EU-wide plan for child safety on social media, we joined other European youth-led organisations in reminding Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: a ban is not the solution! Our message is simple: ban harmful, addictive features, not children. Read more in our joint op-ed with youth organisations across Europe ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eTRztJqH

Age verification is having a moment in Brussels. But before we start checking who’s old enough to scroll, we should ask why scrolling is so hard to stop 👀 Our 🇵🇹 member D3 has brought the first class-action lawsuits of their kind in the EU against Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube over what it describes as “addictive design”. The cases challenge features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, persistent notifications, personalised algorithmic recommendations and gamification, all designed to keep us engaged for longer 😵💫 And yes, children and young people may be particularly vulnerable to these features, but the attention economy has all of us in its sights. The EU must seize the opportunity to tackle the business models and design practices that exploit vulnerabilities and manipulate behaviour, rather than simply asking users, parents or children to navigate around them. Age-gating an unsafe environment doesn’t make the environment safe. With the #DFA, 🇪🇺 lawmakers have an opportunity to build a digital space designed not to exploit anyone’s attention in the first place. More about it ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/eq7iuhA3

We were thrilled to meet and discuss data protection and the crucial role that EDPS - European Data Protection Supervisor and civil society like EDRi play in shaping a digital future that puts fundamental rights, privacy and people at its heart. 🇪🇺 Europe’s digital transformation must go hand in hand with strong protections for our rights. Together, we can help ensure that it does!