When I pointed out issues with the DMA-GDPR Guidelines & resulting risks for *all* controllers (not just gatekeepers), the EDPB’s Gwendal Le Grand said something to the effect of “Don’t just post about it, submit a response”. So here we go, a copy of the response submitted yesterday to the public consultation by the Commission […]
The ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) of yesterday, 4 September 2025, in the EDPS v SRB case is significant – never mind the naysayers. It is the first time that the CJUE has clearly, explicitly said that if a dataset initially contains personal data but is pseudonymised, and that […]
In law, the choice of words matters, and a given interpretation can mean the difference between a behaviour being permitted or prohibited. When some recently claimed that the Cologne Higher Regional Court might have misinterpreted one of the European Union’s newer data-related acts, the Digital Markets Act (DMA for short), the challenge to the judges’ […]
Does training of AI systems involve the processing of personal data, and is it permitted under the GDPR? These were the two fundamental questions that I have already looked into in two previous articles: On the date of that second article, the Cologne Higher Regional Court (the Oberlandesgericht Köln – the Cologne HRC) delivered a […]
This is an article that I wrote in the context of a Chatham House rules roundtable on questions to be tackled more extensively in the future regarding the interaction between AI systems & data protection. This particular one relates to AI agents and the notion of authority, notably as regards (i) the user’s perspective (subordination?), […]
The Irish Data Protection Commission’s statement of 21 May 2025 “on Meta AI” (just like the judgment coming today in a German court case) provides a great excuse to talk briefly about GDPR legal grounds & AI model training, while I continue to work on the next part of my Better Regulation series (that next […]
The European Commission’s announcement that it will consider simplifying regulatory regimes, notably in relation to data and technology, seems to open Pandora’s box. Is it a chance to draw lessons from what works well and what works less well? In this series on “Better Regulation” in relation to the digital economy, I will be exploring […]
The European Commission’s announcement that it will consider simplifying regulatory regimes, notably in relation to data and technology, seems to open Pandora’s box. Is it a chance to draw lessons from what works well and what works less well? In this series on “Better Regulation” in relation to the digital economy, I will be exploring […]
Time to talk about what can be done to improve the “cookie” rule! In Part I of this series on the opportunities and difficulties of today’s ePrivacy regime, I discussed the underappreciated and seemingly-easy-but-really-complex world of the anti-spam rule, Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive (or ePD). This Part II is about a provision that […]
Now that the Commission has withdrawn its proposal for an ePrivacy Regulation, where does that leave the ePrivacy Directive and the issues organisations face? Over the past 7-8 years, a lot has been said about the proposed ePrivacy Regulation. Intended as both a modernisation of the ePrivacy Directive and a manner of getting to (more) […]
