Privacy

The EU parliament has backed a call for tighter regulations on behavioral ads (aka microtargeting) in favor of less intrusive, contextual forms of advertising — urging Commission lawmakers to also assess further regulatory options, including looking at a phase-out leading to a full ban. MEPs

The European Union has switched on cross-border interoperability for a first batch of COVID-19 contacts tracing apps that use Bluetooth proximity to calculate the exposure risk of smartphone users after a pilot of the system last month. National apps whose backends are now linked through the gatewa

Facebook’s lead data regulator in Europe has opened another two probes into its business empire — both focused on how the Instagram platform processes children’s information. The action by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), reported earlier by the Telegraph, comes m

The deadline for Europe to make a call on the Google-Fitbit merger has been pushed out again — with EU regulators now having until January 8, 2021, to take a decision. The latest change to the provisional deadline, spotted earlier by Reuters, could be the result of one of the parties asking f

A flagship framework for gathering Internet users’ consent for targeting with behavioral ads — which is designed by ad industry body, the IAB Europe — fails to meet the required legal standards of data protection, according to findings by its EU data supervisor. The Belgian DPA

"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">Year after year, a lack of transparency in how ad traffic is sourced, sold and measured is cited by advertisers as a source of frustration and a barrier to entry in working with various providers. But despite progress on the protection and privacy of data through laws l

There are plenty of reasons to doubt that the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust report will mark a turning point in the digital economy. In the end, it lacked true bipartisan support. Yet we can still marvel at the extent of left-right agreement over its central finding: The big tech compan

France's data regulator CNIL has issued some recommendations for French services that handle health data, as Mediapart first reported. Those services should avoid using American cloud hosting companies altogether, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Those recommendati

The goal of Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event on December 2-3, 2020, is to gather the world's top experts who are applying advanced technologies, notably AI, to the future of accessibility and assistive tech for people who are blind or visually impaired. Today we're excited to roll

Remember ‘Do Not Track‘? The tracker-loving adtech industry hopes you don’t recall that decade+ doomed attempt to bake user-friendly privacy controls into browsers. But a coalition of privacy-forward tech companies, publishers and advocacy groups has taken the wraps off of a push

Big tech has responded to the mammoth antitrust report put out by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday with blanket denials there’s any monopolistic behaviour or competitive imbalances to see here. Below is a quick run down of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s rebuttals.

Europe’s top court has delivered another slap-down to indiscriminate government mass surveillance regimes. In a ruling today the CJEU has made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude EU Member States from the need to comply with general principles of EU law such as proportiona

European lawmakers are considering new rules for Internet giants that could include forcing them to share data with smaller rivals and/or put narrow limits on how they can use data in a bid to level the digital playing field. Other ideas in the mix are a ban on dominant platforms favoring their own

Google has offered a second round of concessions to try to persuade European regulators to clear its acquisition of wearables maker Fitbit. The deal has been stalled by concerns over its impact on consumer privacy and competition in the wearables market. Last week the deadline for E