Complex and possibly irreversible legal initiatives  - that normally take years to be debated and responsively shaped  - are being implemented overnight.

The Covid-19 pandemic is challenging public health, economic and social life across Europe. Yet aspiring authoritarians are living a dream. Pandemic is a perfect excuse to interpret basic rights at will.

Will this crisis finally change how social media make editorial decisions?

On 19 March 2020, the Israeli High Court of Justice rendered temporary orders that put checks and balances on wide-ranging emergency tracking and surveillance regulation issued by the government.

Law professor Niva Elkin-Koren on the adequate balance between preserving the public’s health and protecting individual rights in time of the pandemic.

Focusing on whether data-intensive technologies used in political campaigning are accurate and effective misses the point about their larger role in politics. This piece briefly addresses the popular question of “Does it work?” and suggests a series of questions and provocations that aim to more holistically capture the extent of tech-led disruption in a time of creeping voter surveillance.   

More and more researchers argue that online technologies manipulate human users and, therefore, undermine their autonomy. This view of online technology, however, fails conceptually.

While conducting research on YouTube’s algorithms, three researchers discovered that YouTube’s recommendations had created a community of sexually suggestive channels. When they shared their findings with The New York Times, YouTube implemented changes, and US lawmakers demanded consequences.

Recent case-law of the European Court of Justice has substantially widened the notion of “data controller" in unclear and potentially onerous ways for a range of actors involved in personal data processing. This has worrying implications for data subjects who may be characterised as controllers, and for emergent decentralised and privacy protective technologies.