Here's another thing I didn't need today: "Digital Omnibus". EU antitrust chief Henna Virkkunen will present to the EU Commission on November 19th a series of amendments to European data protection guardrails, which would substantially weaken GDPR and other privacy protections, and explicitly allow large AI companies unlimited access to the data of EU citizens and even to their digital devices. This is done in order to "placate US industry" (yes, seriously), and proposed through a stealthy "fast-track procedure", which we know of only because some media outlets obtained a leaked draft of the proposal.
Tommaso Gagliardoni's Homepage
"Digital Omnibus" is not a catchy term, we need something better. I propose "Digital Omnirape".
Here are some scary quotes:
According to the plans, Google, Meta Platforms, OpenAI and other tech companies may be allowed to use Europeans' personal data to train their AI models based on legitimate interest. In addition, companies may be exempted from the ban on processing special categories of personal data [religious or political beliefs, ethnicity, sexual preferences, or health data].
Companies can now remotely access personal data on your device for [...] "legitimate interest". Consequently, it would be a possible reading of the law that companies such as Google can use data from any Android apps to train it's [sic] Gemini AI.
One massive change (on German demand) is to limit the use of data subject rights (like access to data, rectification or deletion) to "data protection purposes" only. Conversely, this means that if an employee uses an access request in a labor dispute over unpaid hours โ for example, to obtain a record of the hours they have worked โ the employer could reject it as "abusive". The same would be true for journalists or researchers.
#digitalomnibus #digitalomnirape #omnirape #eu #politics #gdpr #privacy #ai #google #meta #facebook #openai #ml #lobbying
