by Ian Brown and Douwe Korff
Forthcoming reports for the EU by two former Italian prime ministers, “Super” Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta, are likely to be very influential on the next European Commission and Parliament. Here are some potentially far-reaching tech regulation-related comments they’ve made so far.
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As well as the Belgian Data Protection Authority decision I criticised earlier this week, it appears the French DPA has issued similar guidance on the use of personal data to train AI models. My detailed analysis below shows that, in relation to purpose-specific AI systems, it makes no sense: the training of the system cannot be separated from the ultimate purpose of the system. This has a major bearing on the issue of compatibility.
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On 15 March, the Belgian Data Protection Authority issued a decision under the GDPR on the use, by a bank, of the transaction data of its customers to build direct marketing data models. This analysis shows why that decision was fundamentally flawed.
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Both the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority, and the European Commission’s Competition DG are looking for very senior “digital” experts for senior management roles. Unfortunately I think it’s a mistake to combine the two, as very few people have experience of both.
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This morning, I’ve been giving evidence to the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee on the Digital Markets Act (which the committee led on). Alongside Epic Games, we discussed the provisions requiring “gatekeeper” tech firms (currently, Apple, Google and Microsoft) to enable users to install apps from outside the gatekeeper’s own app stores.
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Wikimedia has blocked anyone using Virtual Private Networks, including Apple’s Private Relay service, from editing pages — even when logged in 😬 It’s easier to block wiki-vandals if they can’t easily hop from one IP address to another. But it means anyone using a VPN to protect their privacy — including Tor and Apple’s Private Relay — is collateral damage.
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What I’m missing most from Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and X is auto-translation. Manual translation doesn’t work well in a scrolling feed model, because you’re less likely to pause on foreign language posts to manually translate them.
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I hesitated even in linking to this preposterous article. But its definition of ‘end-to-end’ encryption as requiring ‘identical endpoints’ is not one I’ve seen before (and my PhD title literally includes the phrase!)
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Android, iOS and Windows have all been designated as gatekeeper operating systems (OSes) under the Digital Markets Act. Does this mean they must support direct installation of third-party apps?
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More from the ongoing saga of the side dish! On Friday, European Commission Margrethe Vestager gave a speech to the College of Europe where she hit back at unfavourable comparisons of the EU’s approach to digital market competition with the antitrust hipsters in Washington DC. I sadly found it disappointing.
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