All posts tagged: Data protection

Capitals cool on Brussels age-check app  – POLITICO

Capitals cool on Brussels age-check app  – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Digital ID kerfuffle  The app the Commission issued this month is the latest hiccup in a years-long effort to get tech apps up and running to check the age of internet users.   Brussels and EU member capitals have already spent two years working on “digital identity wallets,” which should be available across Europe by the end of 2026.   But the EU executive announced last July it would roll out a “mini-wallet” designed to help tech platforms check the age of their users, as worries mounted about the impact of social media on the health of children. The mini-wallet was meant to come out before the broader digital ID apps; it’s the one the Commission showcased in mid-April and is officially recommending to countries this week.   Countries that were already working on their own digital ID apps, like Denmark, France, Greece and Spain, were selected to be frontrunners in testing the mini-wallet.   According to Poland’s Digital Affairs State Secretary Dariusz Standerski, the new app is “secondary” and “complementary” to the broader digital ID wallet the country has been working on. That wallet “will always be the primary way” to verify people’s age online, he said in an interview. The Commission’s tech architecture underlying the app is designed to ensure that national applications …

Anthropic’s AI hacking tech triggers concern in German cyber agency – POLITICO

Anthropic’s AI hacking tech triggers concern in German cyber agency – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Anthropic announced on Tuesday evening that it shared its latest model with a newly formed group of 12 cybersecurity firms and 40 other unnamed organizations to scan and stress-test their systems. Experts fear the model, if used for malicious purposes, could lead to massive cybersecurity breaches across the tech supply chain. BSI has not yet directly tested the tool, Plattner said in a written statement, but the agency had conversations with developers that had have given it “meaningful insight” into how the Mythos model works. Cyber officials have dialed up their warnings in recent months that AI tools are getting better at finding cyber flaws. The head of the EU’s cyber agency ENISA in February described the impact of AI on cybersecurity as an oncoming “storm.” According to Plattner, the German cyber chief, Anthropic’s new Mythos model means “we may reach a point in the medium term where unknown, classical software vulnerabilities simply cease to exist.” Source link

EU blames major cybercrime group for cloud infrastructure breach – POLITICO

EU blames major cybercrime group for cloud infrastructure breach – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

The Commission reported the incident last Friday, having discovered it earlier in the week. The attack affected the Commission’s public website platform europa.eu based on Amazon Web Services. Data pertaining to at least 29 other EU entities may be affected, CERT-EU said. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters earlier this week that the data in question was “potentially already in the public domain.” The technical analysis on Thursday confirmed reports that the notorious cybercriminal group ShinyHunters sold the data, which the hackers claimed included “data dumps of mail servers, confidential documents, contracts and much more sensitive material.” “On March 28, the data extortion group ShinyHunters made the stolen data publicly available on their dark web leak site,” CERT-EU said. “The published dataset was approximately 91.7 GB compressed (340 GB uncompressed),” it added. Source link

MEPs told to leave phone at home for China trip – POLITICO

MEPs told to leave phone at home for China trip – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

A Parliament spokesperson said that “all necessary preventive and reactive measures are in place to ensure the security and safety of MEPs and [European Parliament] staff during official missions.” Both lawmakers and officials have been given “briefings, training and assistance regarding security,” they added. The European Parliament has used burner phones and security pouches to protect devices like mobile phones before, including on a trip to Hungary last year, POLITICO first reported. Other European Union institutions have beefed up their protections against cyberespionage, too. One senior official, granted anonymity to disclose details about security policy, told POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook that the Council of the EU had guidelines stating that “no electronics are taken to the U.S. or China … When this is not possible, the electronics that are brought back must be wiped.” Commission officials heading to the United States have also been issued burner phones and basic laptops to avoid espionage risks, the Financial Times reported last year. Source link

MEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material – POLITICO

MEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

The center-right European People’s Party (EPP) mounted a last-ditch attempt to keep the scanning rules alive by filing an amendment to Thursday’s vote that would have aligned Parliament’s position with that of capitals. But lawmakers voted against the EPP’s suggested fix, deepening the rift between privacy proponents and child rights defenders. Leaders of Parliament’s political groups got a letter from four European commissioners on Wednesday, urging them to solve the issue and allow their members to break ranks in the crucial vote, POLITICO first reported. Merz, speaking in the country’s parliament on Wednesday, also called for the law to be extended. Large platforms Meta (which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Snapchat, Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) said in a joint statement last week that the EU’s inability to reach a deal was “irresponsible.” “Failure to act will reduce the legal clarity that has enabled companies for nearly 20 years to voluntarily detect and report known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in interpersonal communication services,” the tech giants said, pushing for a solution …

Spain’s Sánchez launches AI tool to track hate speech on social media – POLITICO

Spain’s Sánchez launches AI tool to track hate speech on social media – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday unveiled a new government AI tool that will rank social media sites based on how much hate speech they host. “If hate is already dangerous, social networks have turned it into a weapon of mass polarization that ends up seeping into everyday life,” Sánchez said at an International Summit against Hate and Digital Harassment. “Today social networks are a failed state,” he said. The new system, known as HODIO, will analyze large volumes of publicly available activity on social media to measure the scale and spread of online hate speech. The data will be used to track how hateful content evolves and spreads on platforms, and will feed into a public ranking comparing how much hate speech circulates on major networks. Source link

Germany’s privacy chief gets sidelined as intel services bulk up – POLITICO

Germany’s privacy chief gets sidelined as intel services bulk up – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Berlin’s plan to empower intelligence services comes as European leaders grow increasingly concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump could move to halt American intelligence sharing with Europe. To keep German spies in check, the country’s privacy regulator started a legal challenge against the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) after it refused to share details of how it hacked electronic devices of foreigners abroad and gathered data. On Thursday, an administrative court ruled the privacy regulator didn’t have legal standing to pursue the case, redirecting it to file a complaint with Germany’s chancellery instead. The ruling means “areas free from oversight will emerge” within German spy agencies, Specht-Riemenschneider said, calling the agencies’ data processing practices “secretive.” Germany’s BND has historically been far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere, due to intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy and security services Gestapo and SS. The agency was put under the oversight of the chancellery and bound to a strict parliamentary control mechanism. Germany’s …

TikTok starts court battle to save China ties – POLITICO

TikTok starts court battle to save China ties – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

The company, which is owned by Chinese giant ByteDance, is challenging a €530 million fine by the Irish regulator last year, when officials found it had allowed Chinese staff to access Europeans’ data — but failed “to verify, guarantee and demonstrate” that the data was properly protected. The Irish regulator wants TikTok to shut off data flows to China, unless it can prove its user information is safe from Beijing’s invasive surveillance and intelligence laws. The case is a major test for Europe’s privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and how it protects Europeans when their data is transferred to China. It comes as Europe is facing transatlantic pressure, forcing the bloc to revisit trade ties with Beijing, despite long-held security concerns over the Chinese government’s data snooping practices. Lawyers faced off Tuesday in Dublin’s top courts building, for the start of a grueling 10-day hearing, sparring over how to interpret the limits of Chinese laws and the merits of TikTok’s data practices. “The consequences of [the Irish regulator’s] decision are immense, even …

Spain is handing ‘crown jewels’ to Huawei, lawmakers warn – POLITICO

Spain is handing ‘crown jewels’ to Huawei, lawmakers warn – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

The Spanish government has defended the contract it struck for storing wiretaps. Spain’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that the government had awarded a contract to “European companies,” which then bought storage products. “There is no risk to security, technological and legal sovereignty, nor is there any foreign interference or threat to the custody of evidence,” the ministry said. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told the Spanish parliament last September that Telefónica, the country’s telecom champion, operated a state surveillance system called SITEL and that storage “cabinets” had been integrated into that system.   Bloomberg reported last July that Huawei equipment is not used for classified information, with one government official saying the storage “represents a minor part of a watertight, audited, isolated and certified system.” On Monday, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a prominent member of the European Parliament for the Socialists and Democrats group and a member of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchéz’s party in Spain, defended Madrid’s contract and pushed back on EU moves to intervene on the issue. In terms of “security, espionage, or …

Brussels’ privacy reforms stumble out the gate – POLITICO

Brussels’ privacy reforms stumble out the gate – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

The Commission in November presented its “digital omnibus” plan as part of a bigger overhaul of data and AI laws that seeks to boost AI technology in Europe. It is one of (so far) 10 so-called omnibuses that aim to slash red tape and boost European competitiveness proposed by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission. The new document, dated Feb. 20, was prepared by the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, currently held by Cyprus, and serves as a basis for national governments to negotiate a joint position on the privacy reforms. The Cypriots took aim at a core change to the data protection rulebook: how the law defines personal data. If approved, the change would move troves of data out of the scope of privacy protections. The revision sought to adapt the GDPR to a recent ruling by the EU’s top court (SRB v EDPS), which found that sometimes “pseudonymized” data, where a person’s details are obscured so they can’t be easily identified, could move it outside the strict privacy guardrails of the GDPR. That …