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BRUSSELS — Europe got closer to a full-on ban on facial recognition in public spaces and reining in ChatGPT after lawmakers adopted a strengthened version of the EU's artificial intelligence rulebook on Thursday.

Members of the European Parliament in the internal market and civil liberties committees passed their compromise text for the Artificial Intelligence Act, first floated by the European Commission in April 2021. The text was backed by an 84-7 vote, with 12 abstentions.

MEPs agreed on a blanket ban on remote biometric identification — AI-aided techniques, such as facial recognition, to recognize individuals from pictures or footage — in public venues, both in real-time and after the fact, in a departure from both the Commission's original proposal and the position backed in Council by EU member countries. The issue was hotly debated among leading lawmakers thrashing out the text, with the center-right Christian Democrats fiercely opposing the ban.

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We will all soon get into the habit of using AI tools for help with everyday problems and tasks. We should get in the habit of questioning the motives, incentives, and capabilities behind them, too.

Imagine you’re using an AI chatbot to plan a vacation. Did it suggest a particular resort because it knows your preferences, or because the company is getting a kickback from the hotel chain? Later, when you’re using another AI chatbot to learn about a complex economic issue, is the chatbot reflecting your politics or the politics of the company that trained it?

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New technologies come with new risks, and the impact of cyber-attacks through digital products has increased dramatically in recent years. Increasingly, consumers have fallen victim to security flaws linked to digital products such as baby monitors, robo-vacuum cleaners, Wi-Fi routers and alarm systems. For businesses, the importance of ensuring that digital products in the supply chain are secure has become pivotal, considering three in five vendors have already lost money owing to product security gaps. The European Commission's proposal for a regulation, the 'cyber-resilience act', therefore aims to impose cybersecurity obligations on all products with digital elements whose intended and foreseeable use includes direct or indirect data connection to a device or network. The proposal introduces cybersecurity by design and by default principles and imposes a duty of care for the lifecycle of products. The Council and Parliament are currently working on defining their respective positions. Second edition. The 'EU Legislation in Progress' briefings are updated at key stages in the legislative procedure.

• Once approved, they will be the world’s first rules on Artificial Intelligence
• MEPs include bans on biometric surveillance, emotion recognition, predictive policing AI systems
• Tailor-made regimes for general-purpose AI and foundation models like GPT
• The right to make complaints about AI systems

To ensure a human-centric and ethical development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Europe, MEPs endorsed new transparency and risk-management rules for AI systems.

On Thursday, the Internal Market Committee and the Civil Liberties Committee adopted a draft negotiating mandate on the first ever rules for Artificial Intelligence with 84 votes in favour, 7 against and 12 abstentions. In their amendments to the Commission’s proposal, MEPs aim to ensure that AI systems are overseen by people, are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly. They also want to have a uniform definition for AI designed to be technology-neutral, so that it can apply to the AI systems of today and tomorrow.

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The European Parliament’s leading parliamentary committees have green-lighted the AI Act in a vote on Thursday (11 May), paving the way for plenary adoption in mid-June.

The AI Act is a flagship legislation to regulate Artificial Intelligence based on its potential to cause harm. On Thursday, the Parliament’s Civil Liberties and Internal Market committees jointly adopted the text by large majority.

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Today, the Commission has launched the Semiconductor Alert System, a new pilot system to monitor the semiconductor supply chain.

The pilot allows stakeholders to raise awareness on any critical disruption along the semiconductors' value chain and helps the Commission to gather information needed to establish a precise assessment of risks and to quickly react to any potential crisis situation via the European Semiconductor Expert Group.

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EU lawmakers have been finalising the text of the AI regulation ahead of the vote in the leading parliamentary committees on Thursday (11 May).

The AI Act is a landmark legislative proposal to regulate Artificial Intelligence based on its potential to cause harm. The members of the European Parliaments (MEPs) spearheading the file shared a fine-tuned version of the compromise amendments on Friday (5 May).

The compromises, seen by EURACTIV, reflect a broader political agreement reached at the end of April but also include last-minute changes and important details on how the deal has been operationalised.

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Key Highlights

Nym protects privacy at the network layer by encrypting and relaying your internet traffic through a multi-layered network called a mixnet. In each layer of the mixnet, mix nodes mix your internet traffic with that of other users, making communications private and hiding your metadata (IP address, who you talk to, when and where, and more).

The Nym mixnet is incentivized and decentralized. Users pay a fee in NYM to send their data through the mixnet. By pledging an initial bond of NYM, anyone can run a mix node. Node runners are then rewarded in NYM tokens based on good quality of service, doing the work of mixing packets and providing privacy for the end users. This is called ‘proof of mixing,’ similar to how Bitcoin rewards miners for mining new blocks. The reward mechanism enables the mixnet to scale and decentralize.

Nym can work with any application. From Bitcoin to ZCash, no current “layer 1” blockchain provides “layer 0 privacy” for the peer-to-peer broadcasts used in every transaction. Nym can provide network-level privacy for any blockchain and other generic applications. From Bitcoin to instant messaging, developers can build their applications on top of Nym for network layer and metadata protection of their users.

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Is the grass greener on the other side? We’re not sure, but the sky is most certainly bluer. It’s been over a year since Elon Musk announced his bid to buy Twitter, and those who opposed the sale have tried setting up shop on platforms like Mastodon, Substack Notes, T2… but none of these Twitter alternatives have really captured lightning in a bottle like Bluesky.

Bluesky remains invite-only in its beta, but as more people get on the site, the hype around it is growing — though as we know from apps like Clubhouse, the hype might not last forever. In the meantime, Bluesky now has around 50,000 users, but according to estimates from data.ai, the app has been downloaded more than 375,000 times. So many people are trying to get an invite that they’ve started popping up for sale on eBay (we would advise against making that purchase).

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Today, the Commission has launched a consultation on draft rules on how independent audits should be conducted under the Digital Services Act (DSA) for Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs). graphic showing a photo of a person using a laptop with digital symbols projected on top of it iStock photo Getty images plus The consultation will run until 2 June. After gathering public feedback, the Commission intends to adopt the rules before the end of the year.

Independent audits are essential to help the Commission to assess compliance with all obligations under the DSA. Rigorous independent audits are an important accountability tool for the DSA and reflect best practices in many other regulated sectors, such as in financial services.

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Lawmakers in the European Parliament are poised to expand the scope of artificial intelligence systems covered under an upcoming regulation. A transatlantic clash can still be avoided, writes Hadrien Pouget.

Hadrien Pouget is a visiting research analyst in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

European parliamentarians are considering additions to the initial Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act’s draft lists of either prohibited or high-risk applications.

The AI Act’s main thrust is to require programmers working on high-risk applications to document, test and take other safety measures.

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The EDPS has issued five Opinions on the European Commission’s Recommendations to open negotiations for International Agreements on the exchange of personal data between Europol, the EU Agency for Law Enforcement, and the competent authorities of five Latin American countries: Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico to fight serious crime and terrorism.

The EDPS Opinions aim to provide advice on further developing data protection safeguards in these future International Agreements so that individuals’ personal data is protected according to EU standards.

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