The French data protection supervisory authority CNIL imposed a total of €210 million in fines in two lawsuits against Google and Facebook on December 31st, the authority has now announced. Of this, €150 million is attributable to Google and 60 million to Facebook. In the case of Google, the CNIL considers the European subsidiary and […]
The spyware Pegasus by controversial Israeli provider NSO Group is causing more and more allegations of abuse of power among EU states. Three cases in Poland, in particular, are currently raising many questions for its government. The suspicion: Polish authorities may have used the powerful spyware illegally against undesirable actors. Watergate on the Vistula? Representatives […]
The General Data Protection Regulation was supposed to ensure a uniform level of protection and enforcement of data privacy, but the Data Protection Commission (DPC) in the Republic of Ireland in particular has been the subject of repeated criticism. This is because the supervisory authority is responsible for the European offshoots of digital giants such […]
It was – perhaps after maple syrup – the most successful Canadian product. Anyone who was anyone had the small companion from Research in Motion in their pocket between 2000 and 2012: a Blackberry.Barack Obama was a Blackberry user; in post-millennial movies, the small devices with keyboards were omnipresent. And they were also allowed to […]
Institutional communication is a difficult affair as it is. Can an institution talk? Speak? Does it have a life of its own? Of course not, but the people who communicate on its behalf do. And they, too, are looking forward to the upcoming days of contemplation, rest, reflection, and lockdowns in the company of their […]
It is clear that parts of the digital department of the Federal Ministry of Economics will move to the BMDV. Negotiations on this have not yet been concluded, but in the future, the BMDV, with two departments under the new State Secretary Stefan Schnorr, will be in charge of digital infrastructure issues on the one […]
How can large international companies be effectively persuaded to pay appropriate taxes? This question has been on the minds of many for years. And not least in the European Union, where some states use tax structuring schemes to profit disproportionately from the profits of companies in other countries.Examples of this intra-European competition were the controversial […]
Olaf Scholz made his inaugural visit to Rome yesterday. There, the German Chancellor not only praised Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s competence but also agreed on a joint “action plan” for better cooperation, initially without giving details. Who gets to discuss which parts of European climate policy is decided not least by Charles Michel. The President […]
As expected, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology formally pre-announced the second “Important Project of Common European Interest” (IPCEI) in the field of microelectronics to the European Commission yesterday on behalf of the participating member states. A total of 20 of the 27 member states have expressed interest in participating in this second IPCEI. […]
The French data protection regulator CNIL has formally ordered facial recognition software company Clearview AI to stop collecting and processing data from France. Clearview has processed 10 billion photos worldwide from publicly available sources on the web for its algorithms largely without the consent of the subjects of the data. According to the CNIL, Clearview’s […]