It’s just over a year since the European Union’s executive proposed legislation aimed at encouraging widespread sharing and reuse of industrial data and protected public sector data-sets — such as health data, environment, energy, agriculture, mobility, finance, manufacturing, public administration and skills. Now co-legislators reached agreement on the DGA after trilogue discussions, paving the way for formal adoption once the Council and Parliament vote to approval the final text.

The latest update on the trilogue negotiations for the Data Governance Act is available here.

Here we will overview a few of the topics covered at IIW33 in Oct 2021, and review of the strong and weak signals discernible in the collective discussion.

Rights groups petitioned Israel's top court on Monday to repeal new COVID-19 measures that authorize the country's domestic intelligence service to use counter-terrorism phone tracking technology to contain the spread of the Omicron virus variant. Announcing the emergency measures on Saturday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the phone tracking would be used to locate carriers of the new and potentially more contagious variant in order to curb its transmission to others. Israeli rights groups say the emergency measures violate previous Supreme Court rulings over such surveillance, used on-and-off by the country's Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency since March, 2020.

Putting children and their rights at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution: Policymakers need to start considering the impact smart connected toys (SCTs) have on children. Equipped with sensors, data processing capacities, and connectivity, SCTs targeting children increasingly penetrate pervasively personal environments. The network of SCTs forms the Internet of Toys (IoToys) and often increases children's engagement and playtime experience.

As part of our AI for children project, UNICEF has developed this policy guidance to promote children's rights in government and private sector AI policies and practices, and to raise awareness of how AI systems can uphold or undermine these rights. The policy guidance explores AI systems, and considers the ways in which they impact children.

Germany's incoming government is throwing its weight behind a ban on the use of biometric identification technologies such as facial recognition in public places.

The EU's Artificial Intelligence Act, proposed in April, creates product safety rules for "high risk" AI that is likely to cause harm to humans. It also bans certain "unacceptable" AI uses, such as social scoring and restricts the use of remote biometric identification in public places from law enforcement, unless it is to fight serious crime, such as terrorism. The AI Act's prohibitions are some of the bill's most contentious articles, and many European countries have yet to decide what they think. Germany's support of a ban could rally other countries to the same view.