"Google is not obliged to delete personal information from its search results, even when that information damages an individual's reputation, an adviser to the European court of justice has decided."
"Europe's top rights body has said mass surveillance practices are a fundamental threat to human rights and violate the right to privacy enshrined in European law."
"A series of senior European MPs have been approached in recent days by individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls.
Those tricked include Rihards Kols, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of Latvia's parliament, as well as MPs from Estonia and Lithuania. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, has also said he was targeted."
"But the movement to legally protect leisure time is gaining ground. The European parliament voted overwhelmingly last month in favour of a resolution calling on the European commission to propose a law allowing those who work digitally to disconnect outside their working hours."
""To my knowledge, this is the first instance in which a European DPA has imposed a ban on a contact-tracing app already in use in light of national developments regarding contagion levels," he told us. "It is thus possible that other European DPAs will impose similar bans in the future and demand that contact-tracing apps be changed as soon as contagion levels substantially decrease also in other parts of Europe. Norway has currently one of the lowest contagion levels in Europe.""
"The European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies including emotional recognition but with three exceptions, according to Breton.
It would mean police would be able to use the invasive technologies only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack, the need to search for victims and in the prosecution of serious crime."
Six convoys of semi-automated "smart" trucks arrived in Rotterdam's harbour on Wednesday after an experiment its organisers say will revolutionise future road transport on Europe's busy highways.
More than a dozen self-driving trucks made by six of Europe's largest manufacturers arrived in the port in so-called "truck platoons" around midday, said Eric Jonnaert, president of the umbrella body representing DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo."
"Why has Bitcoin become so popular? One possible explanation is that exploding interest in Bitcoin over the past several days is being driven by economic uncertainty in Europe. Fearful of an earlier proposed European Union plan to partially fund a Cypriot bailout by imposing new taxes on Cypriots' bank deposits, goes the theory, some Cypriots (and Spaniards, for similar reasons) flocked to Bitcoin to attempt an escape from the clutches of potential taxes."
"95% of the US population, 93% of Europeans and 92% of Asians can't do "level three" tasks like "You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability" -- tasks where "use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit.""
"A financial crime database used by banks has been "leaked" on to the net.
World-Check Risk Screening contains details about people and organisations suspected of being involved in terrorism, organised crime and money laundering, among other offences.
Access is supposed to be restricted under European privacy law"
"Schools in the UK have experimented with fingerprinting pupils then using that data for tasks including library books and lunch payments.
However, the European Commission has questioned the practice, including whether schools can make it compulsory and whether parents can challenge it in court."
"Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the "right to be forgotten".
The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down."
"Jimmy Wales said it was dangerous to have companies decide what should and should not be allowed to appear on the internet. His comments came after the bosses of the leading search engines met the heads of European data watchdogs on Thursday."
"Anybody who uses digital equipment is put under some form of surveillance. It seems to me that that cannot happen without consent, it cannot happen without the consent of populations. So, my message to the lawmakers is: please protect us.""
"On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether "the best" have to relinquish that title entirely."
"The judges considered three aspects of digital surveillance: bulk interception of communications, intelligence sharing and obtaining of communications data from communications service providers.
By a majority of five to two votes, the Strasbourg judges found that GCHQ's bulk interception regime violated article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees privacy, because there were said to be insufficient safeguards, and rules governing the selection of "related communications data" were deemed to be inadequate."
"Under the proposal, online platforms would have to spend hundreds of millions of euros on algorithmic copyright filters that would compare everything users tried to post with a database of supposedly copyrighted works, which anyone could add anything to, and block any suspected matches. This would snuff out all the small EU competitors to America's Big Tech giants, and put all Europeans' communications under threat of arbitrary censorship by balky, unaccountable, easily abused algorithms."
"The Court found that the fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in some circumstances, the public interest interest in access to Information. The European Court affirmed the judgment of the Spanish Data Protection Agency which upheld press freedoms and rejected a request to have the article concerning personal bankruptcy removed from the web site of the press organization."
"A "massive anti-vaccination campaign" has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation.
Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked."