EU Parliament green-lights the creation of the Common Identity Repository (CIR), a gigantic biometrics database. […]
Ever since plans to create this shared biometrics database have been made public last year, privacy advocates have criticized the EU,…

CNIL agrees with complaints brought by activists: user consent is insufficient.
Google has been fined €50 million (~$57 million) by French regulators, the first major penalty under a sweeping new European Union privacy law known as…

Patents recently issued to Google provide a window into their development activities. While it’s no guarantee of a future product, it is a sure indication of what’s of interest to them. What we’ve given up…

With its proposed legislation to proactively monitor customer data online, and so “prevent the dissemination of terrorist content”, the European Commission is targeting the wrong players and asking Europe’s cloud infrastructure companies to do something…

Police in the UK want to predict serious violent crime using artificial intelligence, New Scientist can reveal. The idea is that individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counselling, to avert…

Microsoft broke Euro privacy rules by carrying out the “large scale and covert” gathering of private data through its Office apps.
That’s according to a report out this month [PDF] that was commissioned by the Dutch…

Documents alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social…

Surveillance capitalism and targeted advertising have become the norm on the internet, and it’s hurting all of us.
In his testimony to the US Senate last spring, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that his company doesn’t…

A new report from Stanford University shows that most commenters were knowledgeable about the issue and very much in favor of keeping the protections.
After removing all duplicate and fake comments filed with the Federal Communications…

Millions of people face the prospect of being scanned by police facial recognition technology that has sparked human rights concerns.
The controversial software, which officers use to identify suspects, has been found to be “staggeringly inaccurate”,…