Last week saw a break for Weekly Picks. Unfortunately Türkiye, my home, was hit with two earthquakes of magnitudes of more than 7.5 in a matter of hours. The earthquake affected 15 million people imminently. We mourn the lives lost. Here is more on the issue, and how you can help. Please consider helping and sharing with others.
Though it was hard to focus with so much going on and occupying our minds, what happened in IT Law this week? Let’s see…
🔏 Data Protection & Privacy
The CJEU issued its judgement that a decision authorising telephone tapping need not contain individualised reasons. Shocking yes, but there is a fine print: the above is the case where the decision is based on a detailed and substantiated request from the competent prosecution authority and the reasons for the authorisation can be easily and unambiguously deduced from a cross-reading of the application and the authorisation.
The European Commission has announced a decision to refer various Member States to the CJEU for failing to transpose the Open Data Directive. As per the announcement Belgium, Bulgaria, Latvia, and the Netherlands have failed to implement the rules on open data and public sector data re-use. Maybe they were exhausted with the sheer amount of data regulation. And just maybe, you CAN have too much of a good thing, and quantity ≠ quality. You get the idea.
🔐 Cybersecurity
The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (“ENISA”) and the Computer Emergency Response Team of all EU institutions (“CERT-EU”) issued a joint publication with recommendations to public and private sector organisations against particular threats. The publication draws attention to Advanced Persistant Threats (“APTs”) that have recently been conducting malicious cyber activities against business and governments in the EU. Advice to follow common cyber hygiene recommendations, i.e. previously published best practices and corresponding security guidance. The publication focuses on prevention, detection of, and response to cyber attacks.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
The Council of Europe has made its draft Convention on AI public. An initial glance sees suggestions of importance fundamental principles of ethical AI and safeguards.
Speaking of ethical AI, OpenAI has issued a statement on current ethical challenges with the now household-bot ChatGPT and their approaches. The statement acknowledges that ChatGPT can produce biased outputs, and explains how it is trained and how they are improving their policies and guidelines to finetune the model.
🛒 E-Commerce & Digital Consumer
A very important Digital Services Act (“DSA”) deadlined was reached on the 17th of February. Article 24(2) requires providers of online platforms or online search engines to publish information on the average monthly active recipients of service (“AMARS”) in the EU. This provides for the determination of very large online platforms (“VLOPs”) and very large online search engines (“VLOSEs”). Martin Husovec of LSE has initiated a google sheets where you can see (and update upon request) platforms and their declared AMARs in one single page. Some of them seem to be underselling themselves, 45 million users isn’t a lot of people, people.
The Transparency Centre was launched by the signatories of the EU 2022 Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation. The centre, comprised of voluntary patforms is a non-governmental organisation, and aims “to counter the threat of disinformation and misinformation”. Signatories of the Code of Practice published for the first time the baseline reports on how they turn the commitments from the Code into practice. This means platforms providing insight and initial data such as: how much advertising revenue flowing to disinformation actors was prevented, number or value of political ads accepted and labelled or rejected, instances of manipulative behaviours detected, and information about the impact of fact-checking. EU citizens, researchers and NGOs will be able to access online information about their efforts combating disinformation.
The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) announced the creation of the Office of Technology (“OT”). The OT will be providing “technical expertise across agency matters and strengthen the agency’s ability to enforce the nation’s competition and consumer protection laws.” The OT will be supporting law enforcement investigations and actions through development of new investigative techniwues and analysis of data. Emerging technologies and the speed with which technology has developed in recent years, we’ve all said it at some point-because it’s true. Here’s to more to research for IT Law enthusiasts 🥳
📡 Telecoms
The European Commission announces “roam like at home” agreement with Ukraine. The move will mean Ukrainian visitors pay no additional charges to use their mobile phones in the EU. A step towards the free roaming area, a step towards EU?
👾 Blockchain & Crypto-Assets
The European Commission has launched the European Regulatory Sandbox for Blockchain. The project aims to facilitate the cross-border dialogue with and between regulators and supervisors on the one hand, and companies or public authorities on the other hand. Through this, use case developers will be able to present their business case to receive legal guidance from regulators, while supervisors will be able to enhance their knowledge in the area. Lessons learnt will then be shared between participating regulators, and finally the European Commission will be able to identify best practices. Lots of news for weekly picks loading I’d wager.
🎩 Competition
The European Commission has cleared a creation of a joint venture by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone. The joint venture will be offering a platform to support brands and publishers’ digital marketing and advertising activities. The joint venture will facilitate generation of a digital code for each user (subject to consent), that would allow brands and publishers to recognize users (pseudonymised) on their websites and tailor their content to specific users’ groups. I have so many questions, so stay tuned.
📄 Recommended Readings
Here is a concise list –in no particular order– of recent publications that caught my eye this week that may be of interest.
Faux ami? Interrogating the normative coherence of ‘digital constitutionalism’ by Róisín Á Costello.
Using Experimental Evidence to Improve Delegated Enforcement by Lenka Fiala & Martin Husovec.
I am in no way affiliated with the authors or publishers in sharing these, and I try to include mostly open access publications due to, well you know, accessibility of knowledge and science.
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