Ian Brown 🇮🇨 🦣 🦋
@1Br0wn
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💻 regulation/policy (🔑 #privacy 🗳) ⛷🚴🏻♂️🥾🗺 Visiting Prof @CTS_FGV 👨🏫 Formerly Principal Scientific Officer @dcms Prof @oiioxford 🦋 @ianbrown .tech
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Joined December 2008
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🚨 My new report with
@AdaLovelaceInst
for the 🇬🇧 govt is out: Allocating accountability in AI supply chains. I hope it’s useful for policymakers and others working on
#AI
regulation around the world. Thanks to everyone who contributed! 🌍 🤖
#AIAct
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‘Tesco and Sainsbury’s, Britain’s two biggest supermarkets, are making an estimated £300 million a year from selling information about their customers’ shopping habits and choices to consumer giants and TV’
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“No one should be at the mercy of an algorithm they don’t control, which was not designed to safeguard their interests, and which tracks their behaviour to collect personal data and keep them hooked” -
@antonioguterres
👏🏻
Algorithms should not control what people see, UN chief says, launching Global Principles for Information Integrity
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‘The Home Office’s enthusiasm for biometric surveillance is considered so great that
@ICOnews
classifies it as an “ongoing risk”, ranked alongside the “still unknown” effects of the use of the technology in shops.’
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Love to hear unelected legislator “Lord” Bethell tell
@mer_edith
she doesn’t need to worry about safety & security as the UK parliament is on it. Maybe this open letter expanding on these concerns from 71 British academics might be worth reading 🤨
@mer__edith
Hi Meredith. Thank you for reaching out. I'd be glad to discuss this before Third Reading. As you will remember from the very detailed scrutiny of the bill, Parliament did not agree that the bill was "undermining the safety & security of the UK's core infrastructure & basic
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‘One powerful argument explaining how to seize back “the means of computation” is made by
@Doctorow
in his latest book The Internet Con… for encouraging real consumer choice and greater competition’ —
#interoperability
!
#DMA
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Rishi Sunak: AI presents existential risks. But the UK won’t “rush to regulate it” 🤔 (Note to PM: regulation and innovation are not the binary opposites your tech bro friends would like you to believe)
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If Google really believes “browser and device makers have a choice, and they choose Google”, why are they paying them tens of billions of dollars to do so? 🧐This is as absurd an excuse as “competition is only a click away” on the user side 🤪
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As the EU moves towards banning facial recognition in public spaces [] it’s astonishing to see the UK government and
@metpoliceuk
pushing as hard as they can to mainstream its deployment without any legal backing (beyond stealthy UK_GDPR changes)
#AIAct
He's right - facial recognition is transformative!
It will transform us into a dangerously authoritarian state.
#StopFacialRecognition
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New blog post: Apple and Microsoft fight
#DigitalMarketsAct
designation of iMessage and Bing (the European Commission should fight back) 🍿
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Fascinating: “privacy developers are anticipating that users are just as likely to want to avoid personalization when it’s free of individualized tracking as they are to avoid personalization based on an individual identifier” 👀
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Excellent analysis by
@Caffar3Cristina
: “We are not facing extinction from
#AI
, but a form of Groundhog Day. The corporate playbook we have seen unfold in the past decade is playing out again.”
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Thanks
@Caffar3Cristina
for a packed day of really rich discussion of competition, trade and industrial policy; the Digital Markets Act;
#AI
and competition; and much more
@BruxConf2024
! Here are my notes
#DMA
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Google and some of Europe’s largest telecoms operators have called on 🇪🇺 to designate iMessage as a “core”
#DMA
service in a letter to
@ThierryBreton
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“I don’t know why we would invite all the biggest monopolists in the world to come and give Congress tips on how to help them make more money and then close it to the public” -
@HawleyMO
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“There was just a lot of smoke and mirrors. We were promising something that would realistically require another 30 years of research and development before it would ever be ready to see the light of day.”
#Babylon
#AI
#healthcare
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🇬🇧 Prosecution disclosure of evidence arrangements are not just sustainable — they are essential to justice (as defence access to raw, seriously unreliable
#Encrochat
data has shown)
@NCA_UK
Calls for government to address legal barriers, citing
#OnlineSafetyAct
and contrast with
#ComputerMisuseAct
and
#CPIA
, both introduced in the 1990s. The rise of data means current
#disclosure
arrangements are unsustainable.
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Slightly confused article which doesn’t even mention the
#GDPR
explicitly 😕 but is a useful reminder than many people will be just as unhappy about their phones “knowing” sensitive information for ads as ad brokers — as Google is busy building into Chrome
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‘Apple is launching this feature exclusively in the UK due to the existence of an interoperable open banking standard in the country. The path to getting a feature like this in other regions, like the US, is much less clear.’
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Along similar lines, it’s amazing how many discussions of
#AI
policy proceed as if we haven’t been debating many of the core issues since the 1980s
I'm often struck by how little straightforward common sense is applied to AI policy. At a talk I did yesterday, someone asked "which human rights" should be respected by AI developers, as if it's a pick and mix situation, when the obvious answer is "all of them, all of the time"
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Farage tries to play Mr Toad [] but really, he is the Lord Haw-Haw of our era []
Which person Farage has endorsed makes him look worst?
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'The EU is firmly attached to cash. € cash is protected and secured as “legal tender” by all 27 EU member states in the EU treaties. According to the 🇪🇺 Court of Justice…measures that aim or bring about the legal or factual abolition of cash are not permitted’
#DigitalEuro
Die 🇪🇺EU steht fest zum 💶Bargeld. Das Euro-Bargeld ist von allen 27 EU-Mitgliedstaaten in den EU-Verträgen als „gesetzliches Zahlungsmittel“ geschützt und abgesichert. Maßnahmen, die die rechtliche oder faktische Abschaffung des Bargelds bezwecken oder bewirken, sind nicht
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How timely that the
@EUCouncil
failed to pass this proposal just this morning, thanks to a huge campaign by civil society activists and parliamentarians. The battle continues...
Wild times at the
@EU_EDPS
20th anniversary summit:
EU Commissioner for Justice
@VeraJourova
has said the EC proposal for the
#CSARegulation
would break encryption, and that this is right because of the need to protect children. This is the first time I've *ever* heard the...
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“The decision is likely to hinge on how Apple and the EU define the market in which iMessage operates.” But the DMA is written to not be susceptible to these endless competition economics games 🧐 and I certainly can’t see how iMessage won’t be designated as a
#DMA
#NIICS
“New competition in Digital Marleys with
#DMA
”, and Apple and Microsoft say flagship services not popular enough to be ‘gatekeepers’
@EPPGroup
@CDU_CSU_EP
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“The world’s richest man acts like the sole stakeholder in X, entitled to immolate a company for which he paid $44bn. But that ignores employees and users dependent on the company for a pay cheque or a forum to share mainstream news and views.”
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Vague ministerial commitments in speeches to the House of Lords are no substitute for making the text of statutes clear before they are approved by legislators
#OnlineSafetyBill
#encryption
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These (well-based) privacy fears can surely be significantly addressed using privacy by design, not mentioned in article, alongside GDPR/legal protections?
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Disinformation, undersea cable surveillance and sabotage too >> Killings, coups and chaos: inside Putin’s secret spy war on Europe
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See this just-published, complementary long read from
@mariafarrell
and
@robinberjon
: We Need To Rewild The Internet
"The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists."
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Coming next: Paul Atreides takes on the House Harkonnen’s abuse of a dominant position in spice (indispensable for interstellar travel!) in Dune 2: Refusal to Supply 😉
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More
#DMA
questions on
#Microsoft
, which “earlier this year said more than 300mn people use
#Teams
at least once a month” (EU figures pls).
#Cloud
competitors said it “has squeezed billions of extra 💵 out of its customers through its licensing terms.”
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Is the incentive which is finally strong enough to “fix” citation “hallucinations” in LLM-academic bullshit-generation going to be… making it harder to detect said 💩?
Hah! So this is a first for me. This article attributes the following (entirely spurious) claims to me from an article I never published. Do I get the citation credits?
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‘Individuals’ names or addresses are never revealed through a process called anonymisation or pseudonymisation, but a “clean room” can match specific shoppers, or small groups of shoppers, with specific television viewers and work out when they are likely to be the same person.’
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What a momentous quarter-century! I still remember meeting Ross,
@GusHosein
,
@CasparBowden
(RIP) and others as we founded FIPR (and I later ran it). Sad to be away during this celebration 🎉
The Foundation for Information Policy Research has been engaged in the crypto wars, and in policy tussles from medical privacy to AI regulation, for 25 years now. Celebration on November 30! Time to ask: what's changed and what's next?
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🇬🇧 Supermarkets will pay police to scan shoplifters’ faces
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1. Meta’s leaked LLaMA (and similar LLMs) are “terrif[ying]”, “incredibly potent artificial intelligence software”. Could we please keep a sense of proportion about advanced autocomplete?
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Wild hyperbole from
@TheJusticeDept
at today’s Transatlantic Data Transfers conference. If the EU took analysis of the problems of the UK and US adequacy decisions seriously, it would end up isolated “like North Korea” 🤣
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“If it were possible to die from cringe, LinkedIn’s demented hustle culture and vapid thought leadership would be the terminating trigger.” 🤣
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What a profoundly banal 25-year profile of Google from
@thetimes
. Competition is only a click away, you know! And Brin & Page were such japesters as PhD students 🥱 No wonder politicians still have such trouble understanding the sector
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My biggest q after reading this excellent paper was the importance for future
#AI
development of genuinely
#open
large models (rather than tweaks of BigTech’s). This EC initiative could be one component (at appropriate scale) of such a project 🤔
The European Commission will present an initiative to open up European supercomputers to
#AI
start-ups at the beginning of next year, according to an early draft of the Work Programme. Also on the digital agenda are an EU space law and a strategy on the space data economy.
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And irredeemably frames “open sourcing”
#AI
as similar to uncontrolled spreading of nuclear (chemical/biological/radiological) weapons. Really, Rishi Sunak’s principal AI adviser?
Someone recently described 'open sourcing' of AI model weights to me as 'irreversible proliferation' and it's stuck with me as an important framing. Proliferation of capabilities can be very positive - democratises access etc - but also - significantly harder to reverse.
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@UKHouseofLords
So: still put the powers into statute; don't make any meaningful concessions even on those powers; tell people "not to worry,
@Ofcom
will be very cautious in using them" -- then wait until a more politically convenient movement to do so? No thanks 😠 /cc
@mer__edith
@wcathcart
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The first realistic article I’ve read about Israel and Gaza, from former 🇬🇧 ambassador to the UN (and MI6 chief) John Sawers
Israel must know that destroying Hamas is beyond its reach
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Unfortunate only one non-US firm designated >> “although Gmail, Outlook and Samsung Internet Browser meet the thresholds…Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung provided sufficiently justified arguments showing that these services do not qualify as gateways” 🤨
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“While rising inequality is rightly linked to tax policies and debt, we can no longer overlook the crucial role of corporate monopolies in transferring wealth from the working and middle classes to the top 0.1%.”
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‘56% of voters now believe
#Brexit
has been bad for the UK economy as a whole, compared with just 12% who believe it has been economically beneficial.’ << What are the 12% smoking? Quantifying the Barnum effect…
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“[
@CMAgovUK
] concludes that the [AI foundation model] market can be more competitive, as long as developers can access everything they need on fair commercial terms. But it is difficult to see quite how this will happen without serious intervention.”
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Circular firing squad spotted! ‘Meta and Microsoft want Brussels regulators to reject the iPhone maker’s proposals to satisfy the bloc’s Digital Markets Act and extract more concessions.’
#DMA
All I'd add: I am a *bit* more optimistic than
@games_fray
, esp. if the gatekeepers can be encouraged into a circular firing squad 😁 (in terms of private enforcement action and political pressure on the EC and politicians.) And maybe we need a
@NOYBeu
for
#DMA
enforcement 🤨
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So random 🤷🏻♂️ (the civil servants working on the Online Safety Act for the last 5+ years must be rubbing their eyes) .
Rishi Sunak considers curbing social media use for under-16s
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“You can be anxious as hell about big tech having access to your data. But actually, it is your cohabitees, your family, roommates and parents who are the all-seeing eye.”
#Ring
The real horror of Halloween? The all-seeing eye of the smart doorbell
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.
@NoraNiLoideain
points out it’s problematic the
@EU_Commission
is not properly playing its role as “guardian of the treaties”, in its “light-touch” evaluation of UK and US adequacy agreements, data retention law, etc. This leaves
@EUCourtPress
with too much to do
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Musk has become dangerously demented by the good works of one of the world’s most positively impactful philanthropists of the last 50 years, including in digital rights (full disclosure: and has supported some of my projects)
One of the richest and most powerful men in the world also happens to be an antisemite
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Big downside of state-by-state enforcement (pushed on the GDPR by the
@eucouncil
legal service, as I recall): incentives for lax enforcement (<cough> Ireland). Recognised in DMA/DSA enforcement at
@EU_Commission
level, but more work by
@EU_EDPB
needed…
A classic problem of metagovernance. The spirit of the rules is to hold power to account. But with member states unwilling to enact this, the rules become mere instruments, and bureacracy trumps accountability.
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This is a helpful if partial recounting of a whole series of demented (and contradictory)
#AI
and
#EA
fantasies now driving the trillion-dollar tech industry, and many other business and govt fanboys (like
@rishisunak
) 😵💫
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Helpful analysis by Alba Ribera Martínez of the just-published Facebook Messenger
#DMA
#interoperability
decision by
@EU_Commission
. Meta has until 7 Sept to publish its reference offer (then three months to implement it, once taken up by a competitor)
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Rather than pandering to racists, perhaps the government could celebrate the success of UK universities in attracting foreign students, and ensure they and their domestic counterparts and neighbours get adequate housing, healthcare etc.? 🤷🏻♂️
If we want to control immigration, we need to find a better way to fund our universities. My column on why their dependence on international students is undermining the value of degrees.
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‘Amazon’s ruse of selling ads alongside search results on its retail site—something it began doing little more than a decade ago—will earn around $45bn this year, more than the entire global newspaper industry did.’
yeah, business models that depend on ads will change and shift but the question is how:
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Sierra Leone has some really stunning beaches and rainforest south of its capital, Freetown. Sad to see tourism hasn’t yet recovered from the civil war 🙁 But I can highly recommend !
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It is striking how much time the crews spend on surveillance, overflying potential targets sometimes for days (or longer). That’s one function I imagine will be rapidly automated using AI, as well as more capable low earth orbit satellites 🤔
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‘Artificial intelligence is poised to hand more power to the biggest technology companies, such as Google, and will create a “tsunami” of job losses at publishers, the chief executive of News Corporation has warned.’
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As iMessage becomes interoperable with Android’s default messenger via RCS, will we see a drop in the popularity of separate messaging apps? 🧐 (Assume here they will make E2E encryption work and Apple stops trying to uglify non-platform messages.)
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The
@ElectoralCommUK
itself admits there is not an issue with voting fraud in Britain. It naively let its concerns *some* voters think ID would make voting more secure be turned into a Labour-supporting-voter-exclusion tool by the
@Conservatives
😱
The weasel words of the government's response - that these measures "stamp out THE POTENTIAL for voter fraud" - tell you pretty much all you need to know.
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I mean, talk about "patronising tech-blather from self-appointed visionaries"... (To be fair, he was "elected" as a hereditary peer by... the other hereditary peers in the House of Lords 😑)
We've had 30 years of patronising tech-blather from self-appointed visionaries talking about "ending freedom", "chilling innovation", blah-dee-blah. And we've ended up with a toxic internet.
The particularly unpersuasive catastrophising from Signal senior management is a case
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I have mixed feelings about my first experience of an online training course (it’s so much easier to be interactive in person). But it does have one clear advantage… 😎
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‘anonymised data of US, UK and other citizens will be transferred there.’ It also sounds like stricter state aid rules are needed to prevent AI firms milking governments relentlessly
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“The lesson is brutal and short: human rights are not universal and international law is arbitrarily applied.”
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Meta’s
@OversightBoard
apparently wants to be involved in 🇪🇺
#DigitalServicesAct
processes []. It could start by following the
#GDPR
...
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Best legal analysis I’ve seen, from
@technollama
🦙 A Scanner Darkly: Copyright Liability and Exceptions in Artificial Intelligence Inputs and Outputs
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Some thoughts from
@stefanhunt
and colleagues on where the
@CMAgovUK
foundation model competition report could have gone further 👀
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The impact of disinformation in elections is much more nuanced (and limited) than this kind of statement implies. See my review of the evidence last year:
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"However, the
#OnlineSafetyBill
will still give
@Ofcom
powers to require platforms to develop or source new technology” 🤨
The UK government has "privately acknowledged" there is "no current technology" that can scan e2ee messages without undermining privacy.
I guess they finally get it
Tbh I never expected this to go through, but only because you lot made the case so well
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Now Chrome is a
#DMA
“gatekeeper” service, I’m fascinated whether we see more users leaving in response to changes like the ‘privacy sandbox’ (“Did any user in the world want a user-tracking and ad platform baked directly into their browser? Probably not”)
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In a leaked letter,
@EP_SingleMarket
wants
@EU_Commission
“to pay particular attention to full & timely enforcement of the
#interoperability
obligations for gatekeepers under
#DMA
Article 7, including the possibility of extension…to cover social networking services” h/t
@ilumium
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“Brussels will only consider readmitting Britain once both main parties are on board. And the Conservatives, after their looming election defeat, will probably complete their transformation into a minoritarian far-right party”
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“What’s new in this update?
#WhatsApp
is working on complying with new EU regulations by developing support for chat
#interoperability
, and it will be available in a future update of the app!”
#DMA
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New from
@douwekorff
: The
@EU_EDPS
Opinion is a well-meant but ultimately futile and doomed attempt to put parts of a thing – the
@EU_Commission
’s proposed framework for financial data sharing – into a box – the GDPR – from which it is designed to escape
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Good to see an EU politician will be at the
#AISafetySummit
to explain what ACTUAL regulation of EXISTING
#AI
harms looks like…
#AIAct
NEW: To the resc-EU? Ursula von der Leyen likely to attend Sunak’s AI summit as snubs pile up (looking at you, Macron👀).
According to two EU officials, the German politician will attend next week's event. Final decision coming today.
w/
@markscott82
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“Netanyahu will be gone. The only question is how much damage he will cause on the way out. All of the people of consequence in Israel have zero faith in him.” -Israeli lawyer Daniel Seidemann
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One of the single most useful features of this platform… gone 💩 (I tend to post news articles now on Mastodon anyway, if you wondered where they went!)
#enshitification
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+Proud, humbled, honoured… it’s a new class of adjectives!
Why are so many people on LinkedIn so thrilled and delighted all the time?
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With
#DPD
(1995)/
#GDPR
(2016) first, of course. And EU, please don’t trash this well-deserved positive reputation by trampling on encryption with your “Child Sexual Abuse Material Regulation” plans []
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And yet we are supposed to jam it into every organisational orifice possible (for the lolz) 🤔
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An eruption of sanity at the
#AISafetySummit
(PS it isn't likely to try to kill you in most of our lifetimes, either)
There is a growing chorus of voices here at the AI Summit calling for a focus on the more immediate, close-to-home threats posed by AI. It's more likely to replace you in your job or discriminate against you in an insurance quote than it is to try to kill you (at the moment!)
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@j2bryson
@HelenaMalikova
@mathver
@KarenCroxson
UK tribunal fundamentally wrong on Clearview /cc
@k_irion
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