Latest from Natasha Lomas
If X continues to violate Europe’s data protection rules, the company is on the hook for fines of up to €4,000 per day.
The platform formerly known as Twitter has earned the dubious honor of being the first very large online platform (VLOP) to face a preliminary finding of breaching the European Union’s…
The full and final text of the EU AI Act, the European Union’s landmark risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence, has been published in the bloc’s Official Journal. In…
EU ends Apple Pay antitrust probe with binding commitments to open up contactless payments
The European Union has accepted commitments from Apple over how it operates Apple Pay to settle a long-running competition investigation. Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager, who heads up the EU’s competition…
XNXX joins handful of adult sites subject to EU’s strictest content moderation rules
The European Union has designated adult content website XNXX as subject to the strictest level of content regulation under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) after it notified the bloc…
Solo founder Cat Jones took the plunge on setting up a travel business right around the time the pandemic was hitting Europe in March 2020. Fast-forward to summer 2024 and…
An adtech business owned by Microsoft is the target of a complaint backed by European privacy advocacy group, noyb — a nonprofit that punches far above its weight when it…
Berlin-based food delivery giant Delivery Hero has warned investors it may “ultimately” face an antitrust fine of up to €400 million. The development, reported earlier by Reuters, follows unannounced raids…
In its latest step targeting a major marketplace, the European Commission sent Amazon another request for information (RFI) Friday in relation to its compliance under the bloc’s rulebook for digital…
In a major update, Proton adds privacy-safe document collaboration to Drive, its freemium E2EE cloud storage service
Collaborative document features are being made available inside Proton Drive, further extending the company’s trademark pitch of robust security.
The EC has found that Meta’s “pay or consent” offer to Facebook and Instagram users in Europe does not comply with the bloc’s DMA.
Following raft of consumer complaints, Shein and Temu face early EU scrutiny of DSA compliance
Ultra-low-cost e-commerce giants Shein and Temu have only recently been confirmed as subject to centralized enforcement of the strictest layer of the European Union’s digital services regulation, the Digital Services…
Amazon hit with fresh class action-style suit in UK — $3.4B in competition damages sought for 200,000+ sellers
Amazon is facing another competition lawsuit in the U.K. The latest claim, which was filed Thursday, is seeking more than £2.7 billion in damages — or around $3.4 billion at…
What is AI good for? Automating repetitive tasks for the very busy people running small businesses, reckons Berlin-based startup Synthflow, which is announcing a $7.4 million seed round for its…
Unbabel among the first AI startups to win millions of GPU training hours on EU supercomputers
Four startups will share €1 million in prize money and 8 million GPU hours to train their models on a couple of the bloc’s HPC supercomputers over the next 12…
The European Union accused Microsoft of breaching competition rules Tuesday. In a formal statement of objections, the bloc said it suspects the software giant of abusing antitrust rules by bundling…
The EU Digital Identity Wallet: Everything you need to know about the EU’s plans for a universal digital identity system
If all goes to plan, Europeans will be able to download and use a free EU Digital Identity Wallet to access a wide range of public and private services.
Opponents also contend the EU plan will fail at its claimed aim of protecting children, suggesting law enforcement will instead be swamped by millions of false positives.
Kenya closes its probe of Worldcoin, opening the door to a relaunch of its orbs after a year-long suspension
Worldcoin — the crypto “proof of personhood” startup co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman — has been given the green light to resume iris-scanning and other operations in Kenya after a…
A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan the private messages of citizens in a bid to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a risk to the future of…
The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…
Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…
Early attempts at making dedicated hardware to house artificial intelligence smarts have been criticized as, well, a bit rubbish. But here’s an AI gadget-in-the-making that’s all about rubbish, literally: Finnish…
Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…
The European Union has taken the wraps off the structure of the new AI Office, the ecosystem-building and oversight body that’s being established under the bloc’s AI Act. The risk-based…
A data protection taskforce that’s spent over a year considering how the European Union’s data protection rulebook applies to OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT, reported preliminary conclusions Friday. The top-line takeaway…
The U.K. will shortly get its own rulebook for Big Tech, after peers in the House of Lords agreed Thursday afternoon to pass the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer bill…
The best known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, a meat substitute that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday. But Finnish biotech startup Enifer is cooking up something even older: Its proprietary single-cell…
The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has closed an almost year-long investigation of Snap’s AI chatbot, My AI — saying it’s satisfied the social media firm has addressed concerns about risks…
It’s a wrap: European Union lawmakers have given the final approval to set up the bloc’s flagship, risk-based regulations for artificial intelligence.