Wednesday
21st Oct 2020
The EU Commission wants to reduce cancer rates in Europe. So it's imperative this week's chemicals strategy properly regulates substances that can cause cancer - despite the efforts of the chemicals lobby, which has spent years successfully preventing tough action.
Recent weeks have seen a sudden flare-up in anti-mask protests and coronavirus-denial - posing questions on how to regulate social media.
The micro-targeting of narrow, homogenous groups of people with very specific messages that exploit their vulnerabilities, makes it easier than ever to distort political debate, pushing people deeper into their echo chambers and stimulating single-issue voting.
The European Commission has concluded that code of practice to fight disinformation fails to guarantee enough transparency and accountability from tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter - saying it is time to go beyond this self-regulatory mechanism.
Facebook and other big US firms have no intention of respecting the landmark ruling by the EU's highest court on data transfers to the US. The court in July dramatically scrapped Privacy Shield, citing US surveillance concerns.
The European Commission hopes to have 30m doses of AstraZeneca's potential coronavirus vaccine before the end of this year, to be distributed on a population-based pro-rata basis among the 27 EU countries - until the 300m doses negotiated arrive.
A crossparty group of British MPs urged the government to consider removing Huawei from the country's 5G networks as soon as 2025 saying there is "clear evidence of collusion" between Huawei and the Chinese state.
Amazon is leading an assault on workers' rights in Europe, using big data and surveillance to crush efforts by workers to improve their conditions. It's symptomatic of a climate of impunity around breaches of privacy that benefit corporations over workers.
The European Court of Justice is due to decide whether the Belgian data protection watchdog can pursue legal action against Facebook - after the social media network was found guilty of breaching Belgian privacy legislation some five years ago.
Facebook, a US tech giant known for abusing its users' private data, has filed a complaint at the EU court in Luxembourg, saying the EU Commission's data request was too broad and would affect its employees' medical and financial information.
In contrast to campaign posters on the street or ads on TV, other voters have no way of knowing what paid political messaging their fellow citizens are seeing. People become siphoned off from each other and societal divides might harden.
The EU's top court ruled that the EU-US data-transfer pact fails to protect EU citizens' rights to privacy - following a legal challenge from Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems against Facebook. Washington said it was "deeply disappointed" with the ruling.
Facebook PR chief Nick Clegg tried to make us believe that it is comparable to a phone company. Nothing could be further from the truth. His company decides which messages users see. It literally "ranks" content.
Members of the committee on civil liberties widely supported a moratorium on facial recognition for law enforcement purposes, just after the EU data watchdog backed earlier this week the ban on this technology in public spaces.
Remarkably, this means that the US now has stricter regulation for facial recognition software than the European Union.
The commission's two-year review also indicates that the authorities based in Ireland and Luxembourg - European headquarters to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon - need a substantial boost in resources.
A new report by the European Commission reveals that measures taken by online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to increase transparency in political advertising were "not sufficient".
At the height of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests last fall, for example, hashtags relating to the protests appeared abundantly on platforms like Twitter. On TikTok, however, the same hashtags yielded scant results and almost no signs of unrest.
EU health ministers will discuss on Friday plans to have the Commission negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on behalf of EU countries, make advaced payments and secure enough vaccines for Europeans.
The EU Commission plans a vaccine stategy to make sure all citizens have access to it once it is ready, while it is also seeking to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on securing the vaccine.
While Covid-19 brings China one step closer to technology-perfected authoritarianism through improvised health apps and real-time surveillance, Europe is busy looking inward.
'The current standard for vaccines is to be kept at two to eight degrees and that is really tough in many developing countries when it can be up to 50 degrees outside,' warn experts on the challenges facing low-income countries.
This week the EU's data protection rules (known as the GDPR) are two-years old. While the controversial GDPR was intended to offer greater privacy rights, it has also been abused by some authorities to muzzle a free press.
The angriest citizens can turn to protests or violence, leading governments to increase control and monitoring of platforms, reinforcing the problem. This painful point has to be made to stop the EU repeating China's mistake of top-down internet regulation.
Professionals most in need, not national hoarders, should get the first shots of any future coronavirus vaccine, the EU's medicines regulator has said.
The coronavirus has highlighted the debate over the ethics and legality of facial-recognition technologies and mass surveillance across Europe.
Authorities have already released or plan to roll out contact-tracing apps across the EU. However, the coronavirus pandemic has brought into focus the risks of these surveillance technologies - and their potential negative impact on human rights.
Once again, a large corporation seems set to win, with global public health losing out.
Doctors and nurses around the world are asking tech giants to correct the record on health misinformation and tweak their algorithms which decide what people get to see on social media platforms.
The app would need to be paired with more than 100,000 daily tests in order to have effect. And far more than 60 percent of the population will need to use the app in order for it to be effective.
Chinese spies have targeted Belgian biological warfare experts, vaccine-maker GSK, and other high-tech firms in the country, Belgium's intelligence service suspects.
The EU's disease prevention agency says more funds will be needed to shore up surveillance of infectious diseases, which it wants to make less reliant on humans.
The commissioner for the digital portfolio, Margrethe Vestager, warned that "without the technology, it will be very difficult to open [society] to the degree that we all want" - since new outbreaks might surge back until there is a vaccine.
