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Carsten Ullrich

Council of Europe - ETS No. 185 - Convention on Cybercrime - 0 views

conventions.coe.int/...185.htm

ETS council europe convention cybercrime human rights collaboration standards surveillance

shared by Carsten Ullrich on 17 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Recognising the need for co-operation between States and private industry
  • need to protect legitimate interests
  • roper balance between the interests of law enforcement and respect for fundamental human rights
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  • right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, and the rights concerning the respect for privacy;
  • United Nations, the OECD
  • European Union and the G8
  • establish as criminal offences under its domestic law,
  • producing child pornography
  •   offering or making available child pornography
  • distributing or transmitting
  • procuring
  • possessing
  • expeditious preservation of traffic data is available
  • expeditious disclosure to the Party’s competent authority,
Carsten Ullrich

EUR-Lex - COM:2017:795:FIN - EN - EUR-Lex - 0 views

eur-lex.europa.eu/...TXT

products intermediary liability standards

shared by Carsten Ullrich on 21 Dec 17 - Cached
  • . In e-commerce in particular, market surveillance authorities have great difficulty tracing non-compliant products imported into the Union and identifying the responsible entity within their jurisdiction.
  • In its 2017 work programme 4 , the Commission announced an initiative to strengthen product compliance and enforcement Union harmonisation legislation on products, as part of the 'Goods Package'. The initiative is to address the increasing amount of non-compliant products on the Union market while offering incentives to boost regulatory compliance and ensuring fair and equal treatment that will benefit of businesses and citizens.
  • The development of e-commerce is also due to a great extent to the proliferation of information society service providers, normally through platforms and for remuneration, which offer intermediary services by storing third party content, but without exercising any control over such content, thus not acting on behalf of an economic operator. Removal of content regarding non-compliant products or where it is not feasible blocking access to non-compliant products offered through their services should be without prejudice to the rules laid down in Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council 55 . In particular, no general obligation should be imposed on service providers to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor should a general obligation be imposed upon them to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. Furthermore, hosting service providers should not be held liable as long as they do not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and are not aware of the facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent.
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  • Those powers should be sufficiently robust to tackle the enforcement challenges of Union harmonisation legislation, along with the challenges of e-commerce and the digital environment and to prevent economic operators from exploiting gaps in the enforcement system by relocating to Member States whose market surveillance authorities are not equipped to tackle unlawful practices. In particular, the powers should ensure that information and evidence can be exchanged between competent authorities so that enforcement can be undertaken equally in all Member States.
  • Compliance rates by Member State/sectors and for e-commerce and imports (improvements in availability and quality of information in Member State enforcement strategies, progress in reduction of compliance gaps)
  • (3) low deterrence of the current enforcement tools, notably with respect to imports from third countries and e-commerce
  • (4) important information gaps (i.e. lack of awareness of rules by businesses and little transparency as regards product compliance)
Carsten Ullrich

Algorithm Transparency: How to Eat the Cake and Have It Too - European Law Blog - 0 views

europeanlawblog.eu/...o-eat-the-cake-and-have-it-too

algorithms transparency regulation platform DSA eu Germany

shared by Carsten Ullrich on 11 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • While AI tools still exist in a relative legal vacuum, this blog post explores: 1) the extent of protection granted to algorithms as trade secrets with exceptions of overriding public interest; 2) how the new generation of regulations on the EU and national levels attempt to provide algorithm transparency while preserving trade secrecy; and 3) why the latter development is not a futile endeavour. 
  • most complex algorithms dominating our lives (including those developed by Google and Facebook), are proprietary, i.e. shielded as trade secrets, while only a negligible minority of algorithms are open source. 
  • Article 2 of the EU Trade Secrets Directive
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  • However, the protection granted by the Directive is not absolute. Article 1(2)(b), bolstered by Recital 11, concedes that secrecy will take a back seat if the ‘Union or national rules require trade secret holders to disclose, for reasons of public interest, information, including trade secrets, to the public or to administrative or judicial authorities for the performance of the duties of those authorities’. 
  • With regard to trade secrets in general, in the Microsoft case, the CJEU held that a refusal by Microsoft to share interoperability information with a competitor constituted a breach of Article 102 TFEU.
  • Although trade secrets remained protected from the public and competitors, Google had to disclose Page Rank parameters to the Commission as the administrative authority for the performance of its investigative duties. It is possible that a similar examination will take place in the recently launched probe in Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers. 
  • For instance, in February 2020, the District Court of the Hague held that the System Risk Indication algorithm that the Dutch government used to detect fraud in areas such as benefits, allowances, and taxes, violated the right to privacy (Article 8 ECHR), inter alia, because it was not transparent enough, i.e. the government has neither publicized the risk model and indicators that make up the risk model, nor submitted them to the Court (para 6 (49)).
  • Article 22 still remains one of the most unenforceable provisions of the GDPR. Some scholars (see, e.g. Wachter) question the existence of such a right to explanation altogether claiming that if the right does not withstand the balancing against trade secrets, it is of little value.
  • In 2019, to ensure competition in the platform economy, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation. To create a level playing field between businesses, the Regulation for the first time mandates the platforms to disclose to the businesses the main parameters of the ranking systems they employ, i.e. ‘algorithmic sequencing, rating or review mechanisms, visual highlights, or other saliency tools’ while recognising the protection of algorithms by the Trade Secrets Directive (Article 1(5)).
  • The recent Guidelines on ranking transparency by the European Commission interpret the ‘main parameters’ to mean ‘what drove the design of the algorithm in the first place’ (para 41).
  • The German Interstate Media Law that entered into force in October 2020, transposes the revised Audio-Visual Services Directive, but also goes well beyond the Directive in tackling automated decision-making that leads to prioritization and recommendation of content.
  • This obligation to ‘explain the algorithm’ makes it the first national law that, in ensuring fairness for all journalistic and editorial offers, also aims more generally at diversity of opinion and information in the digital space – a distinct human rights dimension. If the provision proves enforceable, it might serve as an example for other Member States to emulate. 
  • Lastly, the draft DSA grants the newly introduced Digital Service Coordinators, the Commission, as well as vetted researchers (under conditions to be specified) the powers of data access to ensure compliance with the DSA. The core of this right, however, is undermined in Article 31(6), which effectively allows the platforms to refuse such access based on trade secrecy concerns. 
  • This shows that although addressing algorithms in a horizontal instrument is a move in the right direction, to make it enforceable, the final DSA, as well as any ensuing guidelines, should differentiate between three tiers of disclosure: 1) full disclosure – granting supervisory bodies the right of access, which may not be refused by the IP owners, to all confidential information; 2) limited disclosure – granting vetted researchers the right of access limited in time and scope, with legal guarantees for protection of trade secrecy; and 3) explanation of main parameters – granting individuals information in accessible language without prejudice to trade secrets. 
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