cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52834195
“If adopted, these amendments would not simplify compliance but hollow out the GDPR’s and ePrivacy’s core guarantees: purpose limitation, accountability, and independent oversight,” Itxaso Dominguez de Olazabal, from the European Digital Rights group, told EUobserver.
The draft includes adjustments to what is considered “personal data,” a key component of the GDPR and protected by Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
Contacted 3 MEPs that seem sensible enough to oppose the suggestion.
The commission pitched the Digital Omnibus as simplifying and streamlining digital regulations to relieve the regulatory burden for digital services and AI systems, with a specific focus on helping small-to medium-sized businesses in Europe; however, the draft proposal goes further than expected.
won’t somebody think of the poor “AI” companies? 😢
Helping small to medium-sized businesses in Europe
Yyeeaa as if these small companies are the ones that yelled in favor of this. The lady at my local grocery shop always told me how it would be easier for her to do her job if this change in GDPR made it through…
I think the point is that the EU isn’t participating in the software industry, including AI, at all.
My grandpappy started this here AI company with a handful of GPUs he whittled himself, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let big gobmint regulations cost us the family business!
Looks like somebody has been promised by a one or more large Tech firms a very highly paid non-executive board membership, millionaire speech circuit engagement or gold plated “consulting” gig when their time in the Commission is over…
Mind you, by now that kind of exchange of “favours” is tradition for the members of the EU Commission.
Could you name a few?
Legally there are no Corrupt EU Commissioners. To be deemed Corrupt there would have to be actual evidence of Corruption (such as recordings of meetings were they explicitly promised to use their power in a certain way, in exchange for some form of payment, which normally only the Police has powers to obtain), them being subsequently charged and a Court Of Law convicting them for the crime of Corruption.
None of them was ever just investigated for Corruption, much less convicted so pointing fingers at any one of the them explicitly and saying that they’re Corrupt would be Libel, which in my country (which by the way, is pretty Corrupt, with actual ex-government members convicted of Corruption) is an actual Crime prosecuted by the local Prosecution Office, not merely a civil lawsuit for damages.
So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel. Obviously I’m not going to do that.
What there is are various coincidences of EU Commissioners which acted in very positive ways towards certain industries and then after leaving the Commission went to work for those Industries making a lot of money, even thought they had no background in them (never before had worked in said Industries, no Educational training for said Industries).
Since the police never investigates it, all there are are such coincidences of commissioners ending up in gold plated gigs in the industries they helped whilst they were commissioners.
I’m not going to put my head of the nose for you by naming names (I’m not a Legal expert so don’t want to risk committing the Crime of Libel by doing so). I suggest you start by looking into were the EU commissioners during the 2008 Crash (during which the commission was very pro-Finance) ended up working afterwards.
I didn’t ask for ”corrupt comissioners”, but those who have moved from comission to those positions. There is nothing illegal in pointing those out.
Well, for merely commissioners that moved from the commission to those positions, the first example that comes to my mind is the head of the EU Commission during the 2008 Crash and it’s aftermath, who went to Goldman Sachs afterwards and is still there today.
During his time in the Commission they were very pro-Finance in the way they handled the aftermath of the Crash with him personally pushing frequently for measures were EU money was used to unconditionally helped the interests of large Financial Industry companies, and Goldman Sachs is one of the largest companies and massively benefited from, amongst other things, near-defaulting Greek Treasuries were bought from the private sector by the EU.
There’s even a scandal with him were, whilst working at Goldman Sachs, he broke the EU rules on lobbying by using his access card to EU buildings - which he was entitled to have as an ex-Head of the Commission - to simply enter into those buildings and waltz over to the offices of sitting EU officials to lobby for Goldman Sachs. The EU ended up revoking his access privileges, the first and only time that has happened for an ex-EU Commissioner.
Humanity really can’t progress anywhere with capitalism running so rampant. Every corpo needs to go, or it will be like trying to sail against the wind.
Humanity is progressing all the time one way or another. Also corporation is a word with far wider meaning than often used, a university is a corporation, a security service is a corporation, a military is a corporation with plenty of subcorporations with their own esprit de corps, and even a network of friends playing DND is a corporation, not even talking about religious sects.
And all these corporations function, in regards to cronyism and and quid-pro-quo and silent erosion of mechanisms aimed at transparency and resilience, in absolutely the same way.
So - even in this interpretation there were people agreeing with you, which are now called “not proper communism”, who have ruined all the corporations they could find, have built their own one corporation aimed at first taking power and then fixing the world, it has diverged in a few directions, fostering under their umbrella a few other corporations along the way, and in the end result the territories which those people controlled are still pretty corporate. Except with very peculiar backbones of their organized crime, with traits of a religious sect, which can be traced back to those revolutionaries. There are even a few secret services which have been abolished or merged into other secret services, but in fact still function and their members elect their leaders. It’s scary, ironic, even beautiful, and honestly I respect those people who can keep a tradition even if membership in their structure has nothing to do with money and power anymore.
But you should notice how when trying to build a social mechanism to impose your will upon the world, like, for example, to kill all corporations, you are building a corporation.
I’ve used more words than needed to say this.
True.
That is however a pretty hard and time consuming change, so to me it makes sense that in the meanwhile we take steps to reduce the harm caused by the system still in place, not least by cracking down hard on Corruption and Conflicts Of Interest and closing the legal loopholes that allow certain politicians to stay within the Law whilst purposefully using today the power they have been delegated to do favors for others who have promised them monetary payback for it tomorrow.
If you’re drowning now you don’t put all your hopes on the ship that might be coming but isn’t even visible yet.
Every goddamn day there’s some new BS showing up.
Well shit, do we EU citizens have any say in this ?
I believe the EU Parliament has to approve this so they can block it, and that’s elected by Proportional Vote and we all have MEPs there who, unlike national parliamentarians in countries without Proportional Vote (which are most of them) have to worry more about the public opinion in their nation turning against them.
So if this shit ever makes its way to the EU Parliament (were the EU Commission will try to make it pass quietly), contact your country’s MEPs and show you’re well aware of it.
I did contact 3 MEPs from the comitee belonging to “Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs” and seem sensible enough to oppose that.
Contact your local MEP. Ask your local MP or Deputy or whatever you call them to push the relevant minister to oppose it. It’s not great, but you do have a say.
lol sure
Have we ever?
Yes. It worked with Chat Control (even though it wouldnt have passed anyway. Didnt even go to voting.)
It didn’t go to voting because it wouldn’t have passed, and it wouldn’t have passed because of public backlash causing important countries for the vote to back out.
Your comment makes it sound as if it wouldn’t have passed without public backlash
I guess Daddy Trump gets his wish afterall. Spineless cowards …
Here’s the un-paywalled link: https://archive.is/je5sj
Fascists in council. Only one way to deal with those…
What about this is fascism?
Anything you don’t like can be called that.
I can think of a few. Always the same outcome tho.
Make those motherfuckers’ phone lines burn!
This is what happens when you act for no reason like you’re better than the US.
First they laughed at Russians
Then they laughed at Chinese
Now they laugh at Americans and Brits
Who’s gonna laugh the last?
No system is good enough to prevent abuse and dismantling of democracy. Europeans already lose footing and need radical action to stop repeating same mistakes. Authoritarians are already knocking on the doors, and they will not be quiet.
Be quiet, the grown-ups are talking.
Omfg, is there anything that we can do?
Vote wisely.
…
No no just kidding whatever your vote is it doesn’t matter in the end
This message brought to you by anti-democracy coalition. “Anti-democracy coalition - whatever you do just please don’t participate in democracy”
Whilst I do not agree with the spirit of the message of the previous poster, I must point out that specifically the EU Comission - from were this came - is not elected but nominated, and the nomination is one big horse trading shit show several levels removed from voters, were everybody but the head of it is chosen by the Council Of Ministers (which only represents EU National Governments , not National Parliaments) so the whole thing is maybe slightly more “democratic” than nominations for the Chinese Politburo.
(If there is one thing that needs changing in the EU political structures, it’s the crooked, rotten shit show that’s the EU Commission).
That said, the EU Parliament which can stop most of this shit, is elected and it’s even via Proportional Vote so there is no mathematical rigging at all to make some votes count more than others (unlike in First Past The Post Power Duopoly countries like the US or Britain) and hence voting in the EU Election does matter.
As much as all of us may hate it - it’s true. The only scenario in which democracy functions is one where all, or at the very least the majority of voters make their own decisions, based on objective information. This is not the case.
While it’s always great to contribute, no matter how little, we cannot deny reality here. Your vote is welcome and appreciated, but the truth is it won’t change anything. Voting only gets you so far when the vast majority of people are brainwashed and just pick whatever their media outlet of ‘choice’ tells them to pick.
You don’t know how the European Union is run. This not even a representative regime
This bullshit needs to stop. Grow the fuck up
Ah yes, just keep voting, it will work this time, I swear!
Or take a page from the yellow vests, make them piss themelves.
Yeah, not voting works super great to keep the fascists out of power, just ask the Americans!
One without the other is never enough
Or you know, in case I have to spell it out.
Just straight up tear up the government, no voting necessary.
Guess I’ll kms lol
Such a shame. 😕
Doesn’t seem terribly surprising to me, the existing rules make it very hard to make use of data for AI training in the EU. Other parts of the world have looser restrictions and they’re developing AI like gangbusters as a result. The EU needed to either loosen up too or accept this entire sector of information tech being foreign-controlled, which would have its own major privacy and security problems.
Suck my digital shaft.
Because you will not get access to my stuff.“Massive trillion dollar corporations are behaving absolutely fucking atrociously, so we need to do the same” is such an awful take that it makes me doubt the legitimacy of this user account.
It’s the tradeoff that’s happening. Maybe you’ve alternative solutions?
Well, if you want a peacful and legal version of the Gestapo that we can implement to one-up them, I have suggestions.
You’re not going to beat the Americans at their own game. It’s a society that does not respect the rule of law, does not believe in true market competition and does not believe in democracy.
If you think I am acting out, consider the following point: recently Meta was found to have directly (in a premeditated manner) promoted scams/frauds that netted them $16B in commission in a single year. We all know that nothing will be done about this even under a hypothetical centre-right US government.
How do we know that? Well was anything done about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour in the 90s?
But for me, the real irony is the polemics about competition and “free market”. In a real free market, MS, Meta, Google would not have hundreds of billions of dollar to burn because competition would drive profit margins to a state of approaching zero. Zuck would not be able to burn $45 B on his weird and disgusting Metaverse Mii autosexuality fetish.
Not a fan of the leadership of China, but I genuinely do believe that one area that we can learn from them is how to deal with oligarchs.
How do we deal with oligarchs including Xi?
Xi is not an oligarch, to my knowledge, he has always worked in the CCP.
As if the GDPR was a barrier to IP theft
Did you read the article? It says that making AI training easier is a key purpose of these changes.
GDPR is a barrier for EU companies only
Why should any of us approve of making things easier for technofascists?
Did I say you should approve of it? I’m just explaining why it comes as no surprise to me.
Why do you presume that all AI advancement is purely by technofascists?
The kind of “AI advancement” that requires stripping away privacy rights is definitely done by technofascists.
And my point was they’re already doing this in the face of regulation.
See, my first thought would be to crack down on the tech parasites that are ruining out society instead of changing the law to accommodate them. But I’m just a dumb American who lives in a place where corporations are allowed to do whatever they want including killing whistleblowers, but I’m sure that the fascist parties taking power in Europe won’t do that.
Then why change the rules? The article’s author seems quite convinced that this will make AI training easier.
Because they want to strip the right to privacy so they can better monetize
Naive to think the GDPR is stopping anyone now.
Naive to think the GDPR is stopping anyone now.
So again, why change the rules? If the GDPR is already ineffective there’s no need to loosen it more.
Are you asking me why some in Europe want to make it legal? Because they’re already doing it, just they want to make it legal
Make sense?
Sounds like the problem is lack of enforcement of the existing laws rather than the existing laws being bad.
To provide an extreme example, just because there’s a wave of murders doesn’t mean murder should be made legal.
There is nothing stopping the EU from going the DeepSeek route and just stealing the finished LLM’s from American companies. But the truth is that the EU shouldn’t want to have all these data centers training generative models. The us is already dedicating 4% of our electricity production to them, with people in states along the Great Lakes and Eastern seaboard seeing massive increases in their electric bills to pay for them (~30% for me in Ohio, ~75% for my brother in Virginia). I can understand if you are a technocratic neoliberal in the EU parliament that is taking bribes from tech firms why you would want this, but for anyone paying attention, rhe promises tech companies are making to burn hundreds billions of euros while gutting privacy, 🔏IP, and consumer protections at the top of the bubble makes no sense.
DeepSeek is it’s own model, designed and trained from ground up. It’s a novel architecture even. Impressive work.
It’s not a ‘stolen from the US’ model.
There does appear to be something special going on in the EU in that we can’t seem to participate on a technological level since the 80s. Making the block industrially irrelevant, which has had grave geopolitical consequences already.
Deepseek was trained from scratch.
That aside, you’re basically describing the second option I presented; letting everyone else do the AI thing instead.
Copyright is the bigger problem. The lack of a sensible Fair Use equivalent makes a lot of “tech” impossible. GDPR is a problem, too, but for AI it is the smaller problem. The media sees itself as benefitting from the broken copyright laws, while GDPR cuts into their profits. So that’s why the public discussion is completely skewed.
It’s a given that the EU’s reliance on foreign IT companies will increase. Europe is deeply committed to this copyright ideology, that demands limiting and controlling the sharing of information. It’s not just a legal but a cultural commitment, as can be seen in these discussions on Lemmy. Look for reforms to the Data Act. That’s the latest expansion of this anti-enlightenment nonsense and it really has the potential to turbocharge the damage to the existing industry.
Removed by mod
There really is no need for this rudeness. I’m sure you can make your point without resorting to this kind of language. Please see rule 3 and let’s try not to turn into reddit (Clarification: I am not a mod or trying to impersonate one. This is just my opinion).
*threat of ban: “meh”
*threat of redditification: “oh shit, oh shit”
I explain why I think the thing the article is about is happening, I get pummelled with downvotes because people don’t like the thing I’m explaining. Someone calls me a retard, they get as many upvotes as I got downvotes. Seems like we’re already in a pretty bad spot.
I suspect people disliked both of the approaches you suggested, or thought it was a false dilemma fallacy, but downvotes rarely come with explanations.
The guy explained the rational he didn’t say it was his personal view that it should be done.
And even if was his view we shouldn’t be down voting things based on whether you agree or not. We should do it on whether it adds to the discussion.
The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.
The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.
Amen. A large fraction of the people on lemmy lack empathy and the ability to consider other viewpoints in general. Very anti-social, close minded crowd.
Yeah, the downvote button isn’t even being used as an “I disagree with this” button in this case, it’s an “I hate the general concept this comment is about” button. And now you’re getting downvoted too for pointing that out.
Guess I should have just said “boy howdy do I ever hate AI, good thing it’s a bubble and everything will go right back to the way things were when it pops” and raked in the upvotes instead.
Explaining something no one asked to be explained without providing an opinion on the subject itself reads like tacit approval. On a subject such as this - "reduce your privacy for the benefit of AI companies that are some number of:
- monopolies that should have been busted many times over
- run by evil, greedy people who do not consider safety for the entire world when developing these things (reference Musk saying there’s a chance these destroy the world but that he’d rather be alive to see it happen than not contribute to the destruction)
- companies aiming not to better the world in anyway but explicitly pursue money at any real cost to the human lives they’re actively stealing from or attempting to invalidate." - it’s no surprise the comment is unpopular and gets downvoted.
If I stopped my comment there I’d get voted on based on my explanation of what just happened assuming I was pro-this process because that’s human nature (or maybe it’s a byproduct of modern media discourse where they ask questions but don’t answer them and expect you to fill in the blanks (look at most of conservative media when it’s dog whistling or talking about data around crime or what have you)).
I don’t think someone should be voted into the ground for explaining something, but I also think every online comment should do it’s best to make a stand on the core subject they’re discussing. We are in dire times and being a bystander let’s evil people win.
So practicing what I’m preaching: Privacy laws should absolutely not be reduced for the benefit of AI companies. We should create regulations and safety rails around AI companies so they practice ethically and safely, which won’t happen in the US.
Explaining something no one asked to be explained without providing an opinion on the subject itself reads like tacit approval.
Do some people’s brains really work like that? I prefer it when people simply describe a problem, instead of making it all tribal and mixing reality with opinion!
