Data protection violations may be part of audits under competition law. This was decided by the European Court of Justice in a ruling published yesterday. The background is a dispute between Meta Ireland and the German Federal Cartel Office. In addition, the Luxembourg judges also ruled on a second important issue: Tracking on third-party sites […]
The EMFA should actually guarantee freedom of the media throughout the EU. In particular, the violent deaths of Ján Kuciak in Slovakia and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta highlighted the urgency of better protection. Events in Hungary, Poland and Greece, where governments used controversial measures to harass individual journalists, such as spyware deployments, increased the […]
Online retailer Zalando has filed a complaint with the European Court against its classification as a “Very Large Online Platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The company made the announcement on Tuesday. The company objects to the classification on several grounds.Robert Gentz, founder and co-managing director of Zalando, cites the classification based on user […]
It is the largest investment ever made by the semiconductor industry in Germany. Intel’s chip factory in Magdeburg is to cost a total of €33 billion. €9.9 billion of this is to flow in the form of a subsidy. The aim of the operation from a German and European perspective: to secure essential parts of […]
A state-backed Chinese hacker group allegedly spied on critical US infrastructure. According to Western intelligence services and Microsoft, the attackers, called “Volt Typhoon,” are believed to have targeted telecommunications networks and transport hubs, among other things. The US software company assumes with “medium probability” that the attackers are a group considered to be Chinese and […]
Yesterday evening, the EU member states agreed on changes to criminal sanctions. In the Permanent Representatives Committee (Coreper), the member states agreed on minimum standards with which sanction violations are to be punished in the respective national criminal law. The Commission’s proposal was made before Russia attacked Ukraine.German Economics Minister Robert Habeck is pleased with […]
Data protection is to blame if something is not working. This argument has been put forward regularly in recent years, not always with good reason. But data protection often gets in the way. This is precisely what was intended: In principle, everyone should be able to determine the conditions under which data about him or […]
Ten years have passed since Edward Snowden gave documents about US data-mining programs to investigative journalists. “Spying among friends, that’s not possible at all”, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had said back then. Admittedly, this did not correspond to reality, not even in Europe. But the basic idea of European data protection law is exactly that.The […]
The United Kingdom is making a second attempt at a data protection regulation that is slightly different from the EU’s. In March, it had withdrawn its first controversial version of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill from the Sunak government in Westminster. At the same time, however, it introduced a new version, the Data […]
Mr. Wiewiórowski, what has the General Data Protection Regulation achieved for the average European?We have succeeded in creating an overarching legal system for the whole of Europe. Meaning we have the same level of protection for personal data, regardless of the provider’s location in Europe. For average Europeans, that means they can always take their […]