Tag: european union

Google and Facebook must pay media for content reuse, says Australia

The Australia government has said it will adopt a mandatory code to require tech giants such as Google and Facebook to pay local media for reusing their content. The requirement for them to share ad revenue with domestic publishers was reported earlier by Reuters. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg published an opinion…

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Digital mapping of coronavirus contacts will have key role in lifting Europe’s lockdown, says Commission

The European Commission has set out a plan for co-ordinating the lifting of regional coronavirus restrictions that includes a role for digital tools — in what the EU executive couches as “a robust system of reporting and contact tracing”. However it has reiterated that such tools must “fully respect data…

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Cookie consent still a compliance trash-fire in latest watchdog peek

The latest confirmation of the online tracking industry’s continued flouting of EU privacy laws which — at least on paper — are supposed to protect citizens from consent-less digital surveillance comes by via Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC). The watchdog did a sweep survey of around 40 popular websites last…

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Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location history

Google is giving the world a clearer glimpse of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic. In a…

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An EU coalition of techies is backing a “privacy-preserving” standard for COVID-19 contacts tracing

A European coalition of techies and scientists drawn from at least eight countries, and led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI), is working on contacts-tracing proximity technology for COVID-19 that’s designed to comply with the region’s strict privacy rules — officially unveiling the effort today. China-style individual-level…

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Telco metadata grab is for modelling COVID-19 spread, not tracking citizens, says EC

As part of its response to the public health emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission has been leaning on Europe’s telcos to share aggregate location data on their users. “The Commission kick-started a discussion with mobile phone operators about the provision of aggregated and anonymised mobile phone…

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