What an amazing campaign video about #Meta #SpyGlasses from @bitsoffreedom@chaos.social ❣️
Filmed in front of the Meta offices in #Amsterdam featuring real Meta employees. :)
Remote
Jan Penfrat
@ilumium@eupolicy.social
mastodon 4.6.9Policy guy @edri@eupolicy.social, working on platform regulation, content moderation, data protection and surveillance ads in Europe. For 15+ years in the Brussels maze.
Digital security trainer, Chief Degoogliser, cyclist, lover of the outdoors. Formerly writing for Golem.de.
Views my own.
Pronouns: he/him
#DSA #DMA #Surveillance #Decentralisation #Policy #Privacy #DataProtection #Cycling & #Bikepacking
3074 Followers
2150 Following
50 Posts
Joined June 25, 2022
Matrix ID:
@jan:penfrat.net
PGP public key:
Cycling far away:
Boosted by @gvenema@fairmove.net
So, the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu has rolled out @element@mastodon.matrix.org chat as a backup system to their default #Teams for the 33k officials.
One official defended the new #Matrix-based system on an internal chat, according to Politico, by saying Teams wasn't as secure because "all we have is a guarantee that #Microslop [sic!] will not peek inside," and how can anyone not love that official.
#DigitalSovereignty #DigitalSecurity #e2ee
Now it's official: On Thursday, the EU Commission will propose a new law they call the #KIDSAct. It will ban young people from a range of different online services and be enforced by the Commission themselves.
What a waste of political capital and legislative resources.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-to-propose-new-legislation-on-minors-protection-on-thursday/
#MinorsProtection #ChildRights #OnlineSafety #DigitalRights
But but but blah blah blah something about "fair use." 😠
https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admits-llms-are-destroying-the-web-and-built-on-theft/
Die @tagesschau@ard.social hat schön aufgeschrieben, wie #Merz beim #Sommerinterview lügt und trügt bis sich die Balken biegen, auch wenn sie das beim #Faktencheck sehr diplomatisch nicht Lügen nennen, sondern mit "irreführend", " nicht nachvollziehbar" und "ungenau" beschreiben.
https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/sommerinterview-faktencheck-merz-100.html
Oh for fuck's sake what is wrong with these people?
" #Calibre 9.14 introduces more #AI features, including the ability to generate #book covers using AI with different cover styles such as #romance, #scifi, pulp #fiction, etc., as well as #Anthropic and #Grok backends for #Claude and Grok models..."
I love Calibre and have used it for many years but what it needs is a UI facelift, not this. 🤦♂️
https://9to5linux.com/calibre-9-14-open-source-e-book-manager-is-out-with-more-ai-features
#genAI #AIslop #foss
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
This week I spoke to a room full of non-techy NGO people and for the first time there were more folks with #Fediverse than #Threads accounts in the room 🎉
Me: Yay the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu has a new #AISafety team under the #AIAct to make sure #AI is not harmful.
Also me: Oh no, their number 1 core concerns is AI enabling a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack. 🙄
What a waste of public resources.
Replying to
@rysiek@mstdn.social Also, dear @mullvadnet@mastodon.online, you of all companies should know that you don't get to pick-and-choose the human rights you like and to whom they can apply. Your CEO (and in extension the company) is either supporting *all* human rights universally for *all people*, including the right to asylum and to live free of discrimination, or you don't support them at all.
You can't just support #privacy and #FreeSpeech, shit on the rest and claim to be pro-human rights.
#Wsocial : We don't do #ElonMusk. #Nazis are very welcome on our platform but they must be European.
@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu President: Yay, we'll join Wsocial the new European unicorn or something! 🎉
#BuyEuropean #DigitalSovereignty
While #France and #Spain are burning, #Bangladesh received a record 412.3mm (!) of rainfall in 24 hours. Unprecedented rainfall across #Asia brings flash floods and typhoons as a result of climate breakdown.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/28/extreme-rainfall-asia-flash-floods-typhoons-climate-change
#ClimateCrisis
Gotta love how the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu press conference video stream about the #DigitalSovereignty package is hosted by #AWS.
Also: everyone who wants to access any EU law online needs to run #Amazon's #JavaScript on their device. 🤷
Important reminder that tech solutions like #encryption, panic buttons, and duress #passwords alone are unlikely to save us from #authoritarianism.
#Democracy and #HumanRights need organising and real-world resistance to be protected.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/us-accuses-american-of-allegedly-wiping-his-phone-using-a-duress-password-during-border-search/
RE: https://hamishcampbell.com/the-eus-tech-sovereignty-plan/
So well put: " #OpenSource is not simply a collection of code repositories, it survives because communities maintain it.
"The danger is that #Europe treats open source as a procurement strategy rather than a social ecosystem.
"Beyond #sovereignty is the deeper question – not whether Europe controls its technology stack. The deeper question is whether citizens control the systems that shape their lives."
On invitation of a member of the European Parliament I'm sitting in a room to discuss the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu's attempt to dismantle people's #GDPR / #privacy rights.
3 participants from civil society
1 academic
20 industry lobbyists
Of course corpos all want to weaken #consent and make sure people don't understand how their #PersonalData is being processed.
Edit: 3x civil society :)
RE: @Vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net
"A #browser that browses for you is like paying a #robot to go out for dinner with your friends and give you a summary of the evening when it gets home" is one of the best comparisons of #AI use I've read so far.
RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@digitaleu/116991569328960213
What about a policy that stops us burning fossil fuels so we don't need all those "smarter adaptation strategies"? Just an idea.
Quoting
The best thing we can save is our planet 🌍
With Destination Earth, the EU is creating a highly accurate digital replica of our planet to better understand climate change, predict its impacts, and design smarter adaptation strategies.
Discover how: http://destination-earth.eu
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/117025201149070216
It's never been easier to use a deGoogled phone than today. #DigitalSelfdetermination
Quoting
Ready to #deGoogle 💯 per cent?
We've reviewed European smartphones that help you go Google-free in 2026. 🇪🇺
Which one is your favorite?
➡️ https://tuta.com/blog/degoogled-phones
#DiDay #didit
RE: https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/116894635345643401
Oh my, @heiseonline@social.heise.de you should really know better than peddling #Anthropic's PR bullshit and selling it as "research."
No, #Claude does not "lie" or "cheat" and has no "consciousness" or "secret thoughts" just because the company makes those claims.
Is this supposed to be tech journalism or just copy-pasting industry press releases?
(Maybe something for @mystery_ai_hype_theater to disect?)
I don't know if anyone here has read #Project2031, a made-up #fantasy plot in which physical and environmental boundaries don't exist, #cybersecurity works like in Sandra Bullock's "The Net", and only radical "far-right and far-left populists" can possibly be anti-AI.
The plot could be a B-movie but is sold as foretelling the future if Europe doesn't go "all in" with the #AI tech bros.
It's so bad I feel uncomfortable linking to it.
Who would have thought that #surveillance cameras in public spaces would be abused by men, eh sorry I meant creeps.
In other news, Belgian #police has since recently gained warrantless real-time access to 21,000 surveillance cameras in trains, subways, trams, busses, and stations. What could possibly go wrong. 😓
You know something is off in your #democracy if somebody complying with a court order is considered newsworthy.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@ppcland/116882926455601689
This is the kind of dumb assessment bred by the #BuyEuropean narrative:
The #DigitalMarketsAct led to the #Mozilla #Firefox browser to gain 6 million EU users and we whine about it not being "European."
And no need to reply how terrible Mozilla's decision often are, I'm aware. But they currently maintain the only reasonably successful alternative engine to #BigTech and it's #FOSS. Of course this should be celebrated.
Replying to
@_elena@mastodon.social Oh thank you for sharing this Elena. Only 13 minutes to create an account. At least now there is officially a social platform where onboarding is harder than on the Fediverse. 🎉
Revealed: how #Europe’s most powerful #farming lobby killed EU’s #pesticide law
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/16/how-europe-most-powerful-farming-lobby-copa-cogeca-killed-eu-pesticide-law
#ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice #lobbying #nature #biodiversity #agriculture
RE: @cnes@social.numerique.gouv.fr
Europe: We have successfully launched our public response to the US billionaire-dominated space race! We've used this #Ariane6 launch to put... ehm *checks notes*... put 36 #satellites from this other US billionaire into space. 🤷
RE: @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu
It's great that the European Commission take another #DSA non-compliance decision. There is so much infringement of the law out there, this is very necessary.
But a 200m EUR fine is laughable. That's worth less than a few days of net profit for #Temu's holding PDD. It could have been 6% of annual global turnover, or 2.8 billion EUR.
With these ridiculously low fines the DSA will never be respected by #BigTech.
Dear journalists. "Cyber" is not a thing. Which means "What tech sovereignty means for cyber" is not a headline.
Yes I'm looking at you #PoliticoEurope.
Brilliant analysis by @corporateeurope@mstdn.social and @lobbycontrol@bewegung.social of how much money large corporations spend on influencing laws in Europe.
No surprise: #BigTech dominates again.
I mean the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu really should not grant any company 1-2 high-level #lobbying meetings every month for 12 years straight. This can only lead to dangerous over-representation.
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2026/06/eu-corporate-lobby-league-2026
RE: @researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host
About time! Although triple-digit millions sounds too low to me to have a dissuasive effect.
Replying to
@Gina@fosstodon.org Yes! The Open Source Strategy is by far the best part of this Package IMHO, and it explicitly acknowledges the importance of existing #FOSS communities like around @Mastodon@mastodon.social and #Linux. 🎉
The legislative (arguably more important) rest of the Package (#CADA), however, is mostly a massive spending spree of public money into the #AI and data centre industry. Very sad. 😥
#DigitalSovereignty
Replying to
@_elena@mastodon.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al Maybe this #W thing will not be big after all :)
Politico's Eliza "attempted to obtain an account, which requires support from W. After a 40-minute call and the help of the company’s Chief Technology Officer, Mario Nakic and a technologist from its #identification app, she managed to open one. But she is now locked out (...) because she had tried to get verified so many times (...), and, apparently, W doesn’t allow you to change your #password unless you have enabled #biometrics."
My 6-year just old saw a picture of an oil drilling tower and asked me why there was an #EiffelTower in the desert and I could only agree.
Crucial op-ed in @lemonde@mastodon.social by @commissionerHR@mastodon.social :
"Les droits humains ne sont pas une récompense pour bonne conduite, ni un jeu à somme nulle, où la sécurité d’un groupe exigerait qu’un autre en soit privé. Ils sont détenus à égalité par chacun, au seul titre de notre commune humanité."
Another pretty cool #NGO #job opening:
Digital #Campaigner @ #Foxglove
https://www.foxglove.org.uk/news/jobs/digital-campaigner/
#fedijobs #campaigning
Replying to
The proposal explicitly suggests:
"It takes time for a #ZeroDay #vulnerability to be remedied through patches by manufacturers following publication by the Office for Information Security (#BSI); the Intelligence Service (#BND) can use this time to carry out important work. If the BSI is asked to share findings immediately, the time between internal processing, notification to manufacturers, patch provision & installation may be long enough to exploit it for valuable work."
Oh nice, is this something @Fairphone@social.weho.st and other ethical phone makers could build as well?
If @nextcloud@mastodon.xyz #Talk was built on the @matrix@mastodon.matrix.org protocol that would solve a big conundrum for me.
Is Friedrich Merz Germany's Liz Truss?
Replying to
@a53bdb@mastodon.social
"Carriers should only be able to determine the district in which the user is located, instead of the street and house number," sounds more like a few meters to me. Pretty relevant for location privacy.
@circus_maximus@social.anoxinon.de @Fairphone@social.weho.st
Replying to
@pistachiopesto.bsky.social Hmmm, I'm reading this headline a in a completely new light now. :)
Replying to
Okay maybe we have to wait for the judgement itself as the Court's press release kind of leaves it open if the Court has assessed the question whether #Meta #Marketplace is a CPS or if it stopped with finding the EC has not sufficiently assessed this.
In which case the EC could try again. #DMA
Replying to
@slimbook@linuxrocks.online Great thank you! Will hold new orders then until a new Elemental 14" becomes available. If ever you have an approx timeline you can share that would be super helpful. 🙏
I look forward to participating in one of the more interesting #competition policy and law conferences out there: the #ECForum Brussels in June.