Technology

Meta has recently started using the personal data of Europeans for AI training. Contrary to its GDPR obligations, Meta hasn’t asked for consent in advance. Instead, the company claims to have a ‘legitimate interest’ outweighing the fundamental right to privacy. A key argument in favour of such a ‘legitimate interest’ is the reasonable expectations of users. This begs the question: do people want this to happen? To find out more, noyb has commissioned the Gallup Institute to conduct a study among 1,000 Meta users in Germany. The results are clear: While almost 75% of users heard of Meta’s plans, only 7% actually want their data to be used for AI training. This also means that at least 68 million people never heard about the change.

Full PDF Report.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40035733

Around the world, discussions about digital sovereignty are intensifying. Governments, institutions, companies and civil society are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of controlling their own digital infrastructure. From concerns about data protection and vendor lock-in to questions of political autonomy, the topic has moved from niche circles to mainstream policy debates. In our new Digital Sovereignty Index, we show how countries compare in digital independence!

[...]

Nextcloud developed the Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI): a simple metric to illustrate how much self hosted collaboration applications are actively used across nearly 60 countries. It represents the relative amount of deployments of self-hosted productivity & collaboration tools per 100,000 citizens, compared to other countries.

[...]

Here is a more detailed description: https://nextcloud.com/blog/digital-sovereignty-index-how-countries-compare-in-digital-independence/

Library of Congress Statement:

• Hackernews.
• Reddit.

Hackernews.

• The Government has secretly allowed police forces to search over 150 million UK passport and immigration database photos with “Orwellian” facial recognition technology for 6 years.
• The number of searches of the passport database has “skyrocketed” from 2 in 2020 to 417 in 2023. 16 searches of the immigration database were made in 2023, increasing almost sevenfold to 102 in 2024.
• Campaigners to institute legal action, claiming it is an “historic breach of the right to privacy”.
• Former minister Sir David Davis MP says “It’s outrageous that parliamentarians and the public have been kept in the dark about this extraordinary surveillance system”.

Hackernews.