Giovanni Buttarelli
A 10-point plan to reboot the data industrial complex for the common good
A posthumous manifesto by Giovanni Buttarelli, who until his death this summer was Europe’s chief data protection regulator, seeks to join the dots of surveillance capitalism’s rapacious colonization of human…
Europe’s top data protection regulator, Giovanni Buttarelli, has died
Europe’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, has died. His passing yesterday, aged 62, was announced by his office today — which writes: It is with the deepest regret that we…
Libra, Facebook’s global digital currency plan, is fuzzy on privacy, watchdogs warn
Privacy commissioners from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australasia have put their names to a joint statement raising concerns about a lack of clarity from Facebook over how data protection…
A modest proposal to make apps suck less
As the landscape for designing and building technology continues to evolve, so should the process for designing such systems. Whether it’s for investing or helping to build a product, it’s…
Is Europe closing in on an antitrust fix for surveillance technologists?
The German Federal Cartel Office’s decision to order Facebook to change how it processes users’ personal data this week is a sign the antitrust tide could at last be turning against…
Featured Article
Big tech must not reframe digital ethics in its image
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data. The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And…
Apple’s Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the ‘data industrial complex’
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized against people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has…
Facebook hires former UK Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, as global policy chief
Facebook has confirmed it has hired the former leader of the UK’s former third largest political party — Nick Clegg of the middle ground Liberal Democrats — to head up…
Audit Facebook and overhaul competition law, say MEPs responding to breach scandals
After holding a series of hearings in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal this summer, and attending a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg himself in May, the European…
ePrivacy: An overview of Europe’s other big privacy rule change
Gather round. The EU has a plan for a big update to privacy laws that could have a major impact on current Internet business models. Um, I thought Europe just…
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Europe is drawing fresh battle lines around the ethics of big data
It’s been just over four months since Europe’s tough new privacy framework came into force. You might believe that little of substance has changed for big tech’s data-hungry smooth operators since then — beyond firing out a wave of privacy policy update spam, and putting up a fresh cluster of consent pop-ups that are just…
