🚨Results are in: #EU Parliament has upheld its ban on most forms of public facial recognition in the #AIAct, as well as biometric categorisation of sensitive characteristics & emotion recognition in key sectors! This is a landmark step against biometric mass surveillance! But..

3/5 So what is in banned in the European Parliament's position? ✅ALL live facial recognition and other biometric identification in public spaces ✅retrospective uses in public spaces - in principle* ✅discriminatory biometric categorisation

4/5 ...as well as: ✅emotion recognition in schools, workplaces, at borders or by police ✅scraping the internet for facial recognition databases What's out? ❌automated behavioural detection in public ❌"targeted" retrospective uses by police, with a warrant ❌migration use

Love that the Markup is giving this systemic issue the attention it deserves.

Welcome Apple! Affirming the longstanding expert consensus: Encryption works for all or it’s broken for all. There’s no safe, private way to conduct mass surveillance. & no amount of magical thinking or specious claims will alter this stubborn reality. bbc.com/news/technolog…

.@RankingRights's preliminary standards are an ambitious roadmap for #GenerativeAI to be truly #HumanRights-respecting. They expect services to disclose numbers of refused prompts, do due diligence on the foundation models they use, and more. rankingdigitalrights.org/mini-report/in…

We’re constantly surrounded by the Gen AI hype machine and doomsday scenarios from tech bros. So proud of our work at Ranking Digital Rights and Zak Rogoff charting the way forward to ensure these technologies are built respecting users’ rights. rankingdigitalrights.org/mini-report/in…

NEW: The global supply chain for digital surveillance tech is growing thanks to Russian companies building tools to track people online and on phones. One tool logs metadata for calls on encrypted apps like Signal & WhatsApp. w/Aaron Krolik & Paul Mozur 孟建國 nytimes.com/2023/07/03/tec…

Exactly! The stakes are high. This, again, is why the mass surveillance provisions in the UK's Online Safety Bill must be amended. There is no such thing as a safe backdoor: if the 'good guys' can get in, so can hackers, hostile states, and those wishing to do harm.

Last week I had the pleasure to join this amazing group of scholars, practitioners, advocates, and specialists on platform regulation. Lot’s learned (and also to be thought out). Looking forward to keeping in touch with everyone!

Today 150 civil society organisations are calling on the European Union to prioritise people's rights in the #AIAct in the political trilogues This means - accountability measures, preventing harmful AI used by police/ migration, and pushing back on corporate lobbying 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

The Public Fund Civil Internet Policy Initiative partnered w/ Ranking Digital Rights to use RDR’s methodology in examining how tech companies in Central Asia perform when it comes to respecting human rights & protecting users. Leandro Ucciferri explores the findings: rankingdigitalrights.org/2023/07/14/rdr…

In the name of "tech accountability" we're seeing regulation across the globe that drastically expands gov (and private) surveillance. This fails to curb the pathologies of Big Tech's concentrated power & grows the harms of the tech biz model -- while claiming to check them.

Dear Commissioner Thierry Breton, Please clarify that the DSA is not a tool for censorship. Freedom of expression issues are often deeply contextual. But internet shutdowns or arbitrary social media blockings are never proportionate. accessnow.org/press-release/…

In June, Ranking Digital Rights published preliminary standards for generative #ArtificialIntelligence, which we then used to develop a new set of indicators that RDR and others can employ in evaluating generative #AI developers’ commitment to your #DigitalRights. rankingdigitalrights.org/2023/07/26/pro…