Few days ago I spoke with Brian O'Donovan @rte.ie on #AIAct implementation "There needs to be an urgency from the Government not only to set up the required governance mechanism for the regulators, but also to provide the resources so that regulators can do their jobs" www.rte.ie/news/busines...

we at @aial.ie, are investigating amplification/censorship on X/twitter in EU. what are major EU: -politicians & regulators -journalists -influencers & public intellectuals, with high visibility/influence on X, across both left & right political ideologies we're interested in existing datasets too

Our new investigation: Ireland's own goal Almost every department of the Irish Government and local authorities have installed Chinese surveillance systems. It is hard to travel in Ireland without being tracked by China’s Hikvision surveillance system. www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

EU tech legislation is simultaneously not complicated and too complicated Not complicated because the texts are mostly clear and comprehensible. Very complicated because some, much or all of each law is not implemented in 28 different and unpredictable ways. (27+COM)

None of the nine bodies in #Ireland which will receive additional powers through the #EU #AIAct to protect fundamental rights have received additional resources from the Irish government. Without #AI knowledge (technical and legal), they can't use these powers. www.iccl.ie/news/ireland...

Also @abeba.bsky.social and McGann, large models of what? doi.org/10.1016/j.la...

Oh, also this: arxiv.org/abs/2107.14042

In less than 3 weeks, #Ireland should begin enforcement of prohibitions under the #AIAct. But the State admits that it does not know who the regulators will be. Ireland’s poor tech enforcement record is likely to continue with AI unless the State takes immediate action www.iccl.ie/news/who-is-...

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

@iccl.bsky.social urges the Irish government to urgently designate the regulators to enforce AI Act prohibitions. EU AI Act prohibitions, applied since 2 Feb, will be enforceable in less than a month. But there is still no clarity on who the regulators will be. www.iccl.ie/news/ireland...

Fantastic from @signal.org to block Microsoft from taking screenshots of Signal messages in Windows 11. This addresses an issue I had raised last month in the BBC news article. signal.org/blog/signal-...

Have you noticed the small blue circle? WhatsApp defends 'optional' AI tool that can't be turned off www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Quoted in @grahamjfraser.bsky.social's article in BBC News yesterday on WhatsApp forcing people to use GenAI.

A gem of a piece from @pboehler.net "The hardest lesson I've learned is that journalism doesn't matter just because we say it does." I think this lesson applies to many other professions. www.pboehler.net/theory-of-se...

This piece from @spignal.bsky.social is brilliant. www.economist.com/europe/2025/... "It [Europe] is a place blessed with walkable cities, long life expectancies and vaccinated kids who do not need to be trained to dodge school shooters."

My piece in The Guardian this morning: EU race to rearm is pointless if hostile foreign powers can still use online algorithms to boost authoritarians to power across Europe. Europe’s new “Democracy Shield” should immediately shut them down. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Journalists please consider signing this letter that @alexfanta.bsky.social @jeancomte.bsky.social have put together to address the systemic delays and broad application of exception to not provides access to documents under Regulation 1049/2001 (FOI law). docs.google.com/document/d/1...

"The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage" “They are worried about the US getting into the commission systems” The same @ec.europa.eu uses Microsoft and Amazon Cloud services.Espionage risk? www.ft.com/content/20d0...

Quoted in BBC News today. Microsoft redeploys recall. Still a privacy nightmare. Microsoft is relying on "one opt-in to rule them all" approach 1. Once you opt-in to Recall, you have to opt-out of specific apps to prevent Microsoft from capturing sensitive information. www.bbc.com/news/article...

"The European Commission’s AI Continent Action Plan is closer to fiction than reality. Steeped in hype, the EU will burn more fossil fuels, rinse and repeat the past, all in the name of leadership." My piece on @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/the-eu-ai-co...

My follow-up piece for @euobserver.com. #Bullshit generator for archive access and the lack of procurement process for #AI at European Parliament. "When you want facts, you do not ask the gossiper. When you want facts, you do not ask generative AI." euobserver.com/digital/are5...

More proof that EuroStack approach is needed but also demonstrates the size of the shift that needs to occur. @krisshrishak.bsky.social follows up his @iccl.bsky.social work showing EUParl unit head appearing in AWS promo videos (while Amazon is banned from lobbying): euobserver.com/digital/are5...

rushing to deploy things when you want to do 'sovereign cloud' but don't have strong acceptance tests

Taking traffic and defunding publishers has been Google's business model for years, well before AI Overviews. It was the strategy with AMP, with summary boxes, with voice assistants, with Chrome. You can have Google or you can have the Web — you can't have both.

@krisshrishak.bsky.social @techpolicypress.bsky.social points out in the example of Ireland, how the current frame of mind of perceiving AI as an inescapable economic revolution steamrolls over communities, serving the few at the cost of the many: www.techpolicy.press/will-ireland...

Last year @europarl.europa.eu Archive unit head appeared in promo videos for Anthropic when EP began using #Anthropic's #AI model @iccl.bsky.social Enforce investigated There are no contracts. No impact assessment. Blind faith in Constitutional AI and #Amazon lock-in www.iccl.ie/press-releas...

I'm looking for a postdoc to work on justice-oriented audit frameworks. Closing date April 30, 2025. pls share widely

This framing in the @irishtimes.com is revealing "Providing IT infrastructure for the likes of Amazon and Meta is key for our economy, but environmental costs worry opponents" How dependent is Ireland on Big Tech? The environmental costs should worry everyone. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

WorldCoin case shows that regulators will not turn a blind eye to privacy washing. My piece on the Communications of the @acm.org cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/pri...

My new piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social on Ireland's more data centre and more data approach to AI that is fed by Big Tech's narrative and framing. www.techpolicy.press/will-ireland...

The call for submissions for the Re-Imagining Cryptography & Privacy Workshop (ReCAP 2025) is now available on our website: recapworkshop.online Deadline: April 10, 2025. We welcome work and perspectives from social scientists, humanities scholars, community organizations, and technologists!

Delighted with the #privacywashing through #PETs seminar last week at Dagstuhl org w/ @carmelatroncoso.bsky.social @emilianodc.com @strufe.bsky.social We had excellent senior researchers. We were also fortunate that young researchers who will shape the field joined us. 1/ www.dagstuhl.de/25112

Ireland has designated eight authorities as the regulators to enforce the #EU #AIAct with a distributed structure involving a lead regulator (yet to be designated). More authorities may be added later. @iccl.bsky.social had recommended such a structure in July 2024. www.gov.ie/en/press-rel...

I wonder if this is a typo in the #EU #AI Act in Annex VIII Section C paragraph 5. eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024...

I wonder if the the recent decision from the Bavarian DPA (BayLDA) might be the first #privacywashing through #PETs that has been assessed by a data protection authority. www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files...

I am excited to co-organise #Dagstuhl seminar next month on #privacywashing through #PETs and the need for a privacy evaluation framework to prevent #privacywashing. www.dagstuhl.de/en/seminars/...

Hmmm... The person who says "this [AI training using pirated books] is what OpenAI does with GPT3, what Google does with PALM, and what Deepmind does with Chinchilla…so we will do it to[o]” Is this the same person who co-founded Mistral AI? Did Mistral AI also use copyrighted material? @egair.eu

Do the new EU's AI Act guidelines provide legal clarity for an AI system definition and prohibitions? Kris Shashak breaks it down.

My new piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social on the EU Commission Guidelines on #AI system definition and prohibitions. www.techpolicy.press/eu-ai-act-tr...

The report shows that energy demand from data centres is growing enormously, and represents around half of all electricity demand in the Dublin area (!!). My own research has shown the really significant threat data centres are placing on Ireland's climate obligations. www.ucc.ie/en/epmg/rese...

Ireland's energy regulator today published a long-awaited policy governing the connection of new data centres. Astonishingly, the policy makes NO provision for regulating the GHG emissions arising from data centres - which all evidence points to is very substantial - and actually..

Great short 2023 essay by @harikunzru.bsky.social tracing the dots between tech-libertarian and market-extremist plans to escape the state and exit democracy, touching on his own past at Wired and Mute Mag and how they dealt with "The Californian Ideology" back in 1995: harpers.org/archive/2023...

CFPB's former chief technologist issues an urgent warning to the court that several years' worth of sensitive data is about to be destroyed, with damaging consequences storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc at the district court in Wyoming raises interesting questions about AI literacy and training. If a similar case was brought to a court in the #EU, I wonder if the training provided in this case fulfils "sufficient level of #AI literacy of their staff" ( #AIAct, Art 4). 1/

Letter from civil society organizations, companies, and cybersecurity experts calling on the UK Home Office to rescind its demand that Apple create a backdoor into its end-to-end encrypted services. I have signed it. Sign-ons are open till 20 Feb www.globalencryption.org/2025/02/join...

@ec.europa.eu guidelines on the definition of AI systems fails to provide clarity. We highlight three points in the guidelines: 1. Logistic regression is within the scope of the definition 2. Contradiction between a Recital and the guidelines 3. Strange reasoning www.iccl.ie/news/ai-syst...

As the USA goes about removing "barriers" to its "leadership" (vs China) in AI, they might want to have some proper regulations. China has more regulation for AI than US. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Physiogamy --> AI --> labour market success prediction? Another physiogamy paper. This "leverages machine learning techniques to infer the Big 5 personality traits from facial images" to predict labour market success. What? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

A couple of short reports from me on (1) bias evaluation, and (2) data subject rights in the context of AI models. Thanks to the European Data Protection Board and especially Amandine Jambert for steering the process. www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-too...