Today, 30 November 2021, 115 civil society organisations, including epicenter.works and European Digital Rights (EDRi) launched a collective statement to call for an Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) which foregrounds fundamental rights.
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The European net neutrality rules are being reformed to fix one of the biggest loopholes in the EU‘s framework: Zero-Rating. epicenter.works together with EDRi and others has been vocal about the dangers of Zero-Rating, a practice by which telecoms companies discriminate between online services by making some data traffic more expensive than other such traffic.
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Contribution by: Jesper Lund, Chairman EDRi member, IT-Political Association of Denmark
Europe’s highest court has put an end to a long-standing legal battle around the EU’s Net Neutrality Regulation. In a landmark judgement published last week, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) confirmed what EDRi and its members have argued for years: that zero rating is illegal under EU law because it violates the neutrality obligations of internet access providers.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung | Der Spiegel
At the start of the trial against security adviser Julian Hessenthaler, who played a key role in the making of the so-called Ibiza video1, 18 Austrian and international human rights organisations express their concern that his excessive criminal prosecution could – intentionally – have a deterring effect on future sources or whistleblowers and the exercise of freedom of opinion, freedom of the press and freedom of information.
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As we do every summer, we are publishing our annual transparency report. The pandemic year of 2020 was one of the most turbulent, busiest, but also one of the most exciting years in the association’s history.
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Research is important. Using research as a cover to obtain unchecked access to sensitive official data is not.
epicenter.works/Rizar.photo
The civil rights NGO epicenter.works protested in front of the A1 Telekom Austria Group’s building yesterday to raise awareness of the involvement of the partially state-owned company in the Internet shutdowns in Belarus that unfolded around the controversial election of the long-term dictator Lukaschenka. The protest was accompanied by attacks by the company against the non-profit NGO.
Today, the European Parliament votes on the interinstitutional compromise text on the regulation(s) on the EU Digital COVID Certificate (EU DCC, also known as the Digital Green Certificate and the European Green Pass). The proposed legislation regulates the “framework for the issuance, verification and acceptance of interoperable certificates on vaccination, testing and recovery” with aim of facilitating free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Today the European Commission has published guidelines for the implementation of the Copyright Directive which undermines users’ protections.
Even though its effects are very visible, the ePrivacy Directive is hardly known to the wider public. Cookie consent dialogues, familiar to every web user, are often associated with GDPR and widely complained about since 2018. However, they are really a consequence of the ePrivacy Directive's "cookie clause", Article 5(3), which was added to the Directive already in 2009.