The Washington Post asks what may be the ultimate question of our times. "Whether the largest social media companies have become so critical to public debate that being banned or blacklisted by them — whether you're an elected official, a dissident, or even just a private citizen who runs afoul of their content policies — amounts to a form of modern-day censorship."

Also to be remembered with eIDAS, it’s not only about electronic identification, but heavily on digital signing. A good analysis including ‘failures’, derogations and national deviations is available here.

The draft report offers recommendations for stakeholders about using digital health hardware and software to gather information from remote trial participants - in other words: telehealth is increasingly accepted even in clinical trial.

In this policy brief we review the EU policy debate on access and use of data in view of the upcoming Data Act. We provide arguments against the introduction of new property rights–including the sui generis database right–in favor of strengthening data access rights.

Why have the effects of COVID-19 been so unevenly geographically distributed in the United States? This paper investigates the role of social capital as a mediating factor for the spread of the virus. Because social capital is associated with greater trust and relationships within a community, it could endow individuals with a greater concern for others, thereby leading to more hygienic practices and social distancing.

EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency.

A new tech boom is disrupting medicine: Health care is turning into a consumer product. We investigate in this podcast how wearable trackers, such as the Fitbit or Apple Watch, could transform health care.

This report unpacks and looks at the human consequences of these governance flaws, from speed and access to security and privacy of online information. It details how these flaws especially impact those who are already subject to surveillance or structural inequities, such as an activist texting meeting times on WhatsApp, or a low-income senior looking for a vaccine appointment. Crucially, the report offers recommendations to civil society, corporations, governments, and academics on how to align internet governance with the public interest, including calling on governance organizations to employ human rights impact assessments into the evaluations of norms and standards.

The last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, NASA and the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) confirmed today. 2021 ranks as the sixth hottest year on record, the agencies said, as global average temperatures trend upward. Rankings aside, there were plenty of red flags throughout 2021 to show us how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes. "The fact is that we've now kind of moved into a new regime ... this is likely the warmest decade in many, many hundreds, maybe 1000s of years," says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There's enough change that it's having impacts locally."

In a groundbreaking decision, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ("Datenschutzbehörde" or "DSB") has decided on a model case by noyb that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. This is the first decision on the 101 model complaints filed by noyb in the wake of the so-called "Schrems II" decision.

The European Parliament announced it “…reached a provisional agreement on a new law to promote the availability of data and build a trustworthy environment to facilitate its use for research and the creation of innovative new services and products.” What does the Data Governance Act mean to the ToIP framework and the SSI community?

Individuals have undergone a process of Personal Data Gentrification, as data ownership has shifted from individuals to service providers and data consumers, as if the data is worth nothing to the individuals; these new owners then harness the data to obtain large profits. In this paper, we propose Personal Data Enfranchisement as a middle ground, empowering individuals to control the sharing of their personal information to shift the business flows of personal information. Based on these insights, we propose a model to gradually and incrementally make a shift from our current situation towards one of Personal Data Enfranchisement.