If true, this update is astonishing. The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump. This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.

Kleiner Ö1-Beitrag über meine aktuelle Studie im Auftrag der @arbeiterkammer.at, es geht um Beschäftigtenüberwachung im Außendienst, Apps als digitale Peitsche und Stress im der Heimkrankenpflege. Irgendwann dann wieder mit weniger Wiener Dialekt ;) oe1.orf.at/programm/202...

Langdon Winner (1997) on "cyberlibertarianism, a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics": dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Don't use Copilot für anything with numbers in Excel ,)

More than 40% of 543 data brokers registered under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) failed to respond to data access requests, "in an apparent violation of the CCPA". "Consumer Beware!", the "first large-scale, systematic study of CCPA compliance": arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21914

So, a German court said the German federal DPA cannot ban German government agencies from running FB pages (aka jointly processing data unlawfully for Meta's benefit), because whatever, and because only DPC Ireland, which hasn’t done anything relevant in years, could.

So, a German court said the German federal DPA cannot ban German government agencies from running FB pages (aka jointly processing data unlawfully for Meta's benefit), because whatever, and because only DPC Ireland, which hasn’t done anything relevant in years, could.

"Resilience and Resistance in Times of Deregulation and Authoritarianism" Great title. edri.org/our-work/pri...

"AI-based behaviour analysis in prisons: A multidisciplinary assessment of an Austrian case study. ... In consequence, less intrusive measures such as mental health care or improving spatial conditions tend to be neglected in favour of technological innovation" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Thread worth reading. The evidence and the enforcement options have been there for years, they've just been ignored.

After an on-site audit, the Berlin GDPR regulator found that Berlin-based location data broker Adsquare has been processing personal data unlawfully at scale, as disclosed in its annual report and confirmed to netzpolitik org: www.datenschutz-berlin.de/jahresberich... netzpolitik.org/2025/nach-un...

After an on-site audit, the Berlin GDPR regulator found that Berlin-based location data broker Adsquare has been processing personal data unlawfully at scale, as disclosed in its annual report and confirmed to netzpolitik org: www.datenschutz-berlin.de/jahresberich... netzpolitik.org/2025/nach-un...

NEW: A data broker owned by major airlines sold domestic US flight data to DHS, telling the dept. not to disclose that, according to records obtained by @404media.co—copublished in partnership with @wired.com. No paywall bc FOIA @josephcox.bsky.social w/ the scoop: www.wired.com/story/airlin...

That kind of anthropomorphization - implying agency ("revolt", "refuse to shut down when instructed", "sabotage the shutdown script") - is completely misguided and only contributes to the AI marketing hype. ...a good example for bad AI propaganda and bad reporting.

www.iccl.ie/digital-data... Today we apply in court to take a class action against the massive data breach at the heart of Microsoft’s advertising system (Real Time Bidding “RTB”)

The Trump administration is building a central online marketplace for the Intelligence Community to buy private information about individuals from unregulated data brokers — coming soon to www.icdata.gov theintercept.com/2025/05/22/i...

The House has passed the GOP's budget bill with the 10-year ban on state AI laws intact. If the provision survives reconciliation in the Senate, the California, Colorado, or any other state that sought to pass laws governing AI would be legally banned from doing so. This is what's behind the bill:

Adage is out with a new piece today about a data broker product targeting people in Saudi Arabia which doesn't make *any* sense to me. I provided pushback but my comments wern't include -- the piece is "How Coke used an AI agent to target ads to 828,000 fast-food fans" adage.com/technology/a... 🧵

"Freiheit für die Wenigen: Anarchokapitalismus, Tech-Faschismus und der Aufstieg des libertären Autoritarismus in Lateinamerika und den USA" …dazu diskutiere ich übermorgen Donerstag 22.5. ab 17h mit Tobias Boos in Wien am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie: www.volkskundemuseum.at/gespraechsre...

In an effort to avoid accusations of cheating, some students are recording their own screens for hours at a time or using keystroke loggers.

Massives Register: Flugdaten-Riese verkauft Milliarden Passagierprofile, verscherbelt sie auch an Trumps Einwanderungsbehörde www.heise.de/news/Big-Bro...

535 continued... Because the data in RTB are totally insecure, there is no way to know what will happen to them. RTB is a free-for-all where data can and do go everywhere. This makes it impossible to tell a person what you are asking them to consent to.

Big news this evening This EU ruling has been 7 years in the making www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a firm owned by 9 airlines from US, Canada, Germany, France that acts as an aviation industry clearinghouse and processes data on 12bn passenger flights per year ("54 percent of all flights taken globally"), is selling to ICE: www.levernews.com/airlines-are...

I came across it in my 'Employees as Risks' study (crackedlabs.org/en/data-work...). Microsoft promotes recording Signal convs via TeleMessage in Purview (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purvie...), which can serve both employee surveillance and public accountability, and yes, also raises security q.

PayPal launches "Offsite Ads, a new way for advertisers to tap into the power of PayPal’s transaction graph and reach millions of consumers across the open web", "powered by actual purchase data across millions of merchants" Via @chesterj1.bsky.social: newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-04-29-P...

I think this is the consensus view among people who understand both AI and social systems.

Im Außendienst organisieren Firmen ihre Beschäftigten mit Apps. Die Software soll Abläufe optimieren, Touren verkürzen und die Produktivität steigern – auf Kosten von Privatsphäre und Betriebsklima. Eine Studie hat die Apps nun untersucht. netzpolitik.org/2025/studie-...

Algorithmisches Management via Smartphone? Software, konkreter Einsatz, Auswirkungen, Handlungsoptionen. Meine neue Studie untersucht digitale Steuerung und Kontrolle von Beschäftigten im Außendienst von technischer Wartung bis mobile Heimpflege, 91 Seiten: wien.arbeiterkammer.at/interessenve...

🦾 Digitale Kontrolle braucht Mitbestimmung – sonst verliert der Mensch 👷‍♀️! 👉 Eine eindrucksvolle Untersuchung automatisierter Arbeitsorganisationspraktiken von @wchr.bsky.social in Kooperation mit der @arbeiterkammer.at und @titusu.bsky.social 📑 #arbeitdigital #digitalerhumanismus

Algorithmisches Management via Smartphone? Software, konkreter Einsatz, Auswirkungen, Handlungsoptionen. Meine neue Studie untersucht digitale Steuerung und Kontrolle von Beschäftigten im Außendienst von technischer Wartung bis mobile Heimpflege, 91 Seiten: wien.arbeiterkammer.at/interessenve...

The top priority of the next functional government has to be reforming the Privacy Act to prevent the use of personal data for reasons other than originally prescribed & to effectively ban database matching all but entirely.

CNN reports that the oligarch is building a "master database to speed-up immigration enforcement and deportations by combining sensitive data from across the federal government" with the help of Palantir, to create "targeting lists". That all sounds very very bad. edition.cnn.com/2025/04/25/p...

"Another mercenary surveillance industry has emerged alongside spyware ... that packages this type of advertising data on potential targets into intelligence products ... This kind of information can be supplied to ... despots, hostile foreign adversaries, or even organized criminal groups"

I somehow miss the good old days when FB graph let anyone run ultra-sensitive targeted searches aka Rasterfahndung for people in a given city who work at a certain company and like competitors or other pages, which we used on each other in privacy trainings for worker reps of Austrian trade unions 🤖

A new bill would allow the Danish domestic intelligence service (PET) to combine health and social security data with data from social media and 'movements around the internet and in the physical world' (autotranslate), and use an analysis platform to identify suspicious patterns in large data sets:

Facebook's "users can vote on TOS changes" 2009-12 reloaded (or, on steroids) #fakedemocracy

How is it possible that a major video call service totally fails to filter out echoes of voice sound that is transmitted over its own service today in this age of 'AI' and why is it Google Meet?

I'd love to know how exactly the digital advertising/data industry managed to get this exception into the AI Act: "common and legitimate commercial practices, for example in the field of advertising ...should not, in themselves, be regarded as constituting harmful manipulative AI-enabled practices"

What's with these random spam vids showing up in YouTube playlists? It feels like almost every 'album' playlist is now contaminated with 'meditation' tracks, affiliate marketing scams etc. Has Google given up on fighting algo/search spam? Do they even incentivize it to push people to paid content?

So, after the Trump/Musk regime repeatedly shut down IT infrastructure to blackmail other countries, German Bundesrat (the second/federal chamber of parliament) voted for a resolution to introduce Palantir as a data analysis platform for German law enforcement #wtf www.heise.de/news/Palanti...

The greatest danger in my everyday research and writing is constantly avoiding opening Pandora's box in terms of scope, and if I do, closing it again as quickly as possible 🙅☠️🙃

Dazu noch ein Tipp 📝 Nächste Woche findet in der @arbeiterkammer.bsky.social eine ziemlich tolle Veranstaltung in Kooperation mit der #RTR satt: #KI in #Personalmanagement und #Beschäftigung Mit dabei uA @titusu.bsky.social und @wchr.bsky.social 🎯 Infos & Anmeldung www.rtr.at/ki_und_perso...

This course on everything from data, classification, automation, algorithms and platforms to power and tech utopianism looks great, by Dan Grossman and Violet Monserate, also a great reading list: courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse4...

Oh great. espysys.com/psychologica...

"we conduct the first systematic analysis of 52 wireless-scanning SDKs, revealing their data collection practices" Interesting paper on third-party software embedded in mobile apps that scans for nearby Bluetooth+WiFi devices, often for profiling and geolocation tracking: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.152...

"we conduct the first systematic analysis of 52 wireless-scanning SDKs, revealing their data collection practices" Interesting paper on third-party software embedded in mobile apps that scans for nearby Bluetooth+WiFi devices, often for profiling and geolocation tracking: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.152...

Downranking posts with links to the web (and journalism) is a crime on so many levels.