Who will save us from technological profiling?

Equalize, the scandal that is filling the newsfeed of these hours re-proposes all the issues posed by similar events that have happened in Italy and abroad, and in particular, highlights three of them: the ‘loyalty’ of the civil servants entrusted with the power to enter the citizen’s lives, the involvement of private entities in the provision of technological services to critical apparatuses of the State, the need to ‘cut angles’ or to practice ‘plausible deniability’ on the part of institutions, companies and subjects in top positions even in private sectors – by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Strategikon – Italian Tech – La Repubblica
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Webscraping and AI Datasets: if the purpose is in the public interest there is no copyright infringement

“The creation of a dataset … which can form the basis for the training of artificial intelligence systems, can certainly be considered scientific research … Although the creation of the dataset as such may not be immediately associated with an increase in knowledge, it constitutes an essential step for the goal of using it to subsequently acquire the knowledge in question ’ – by Andrea Monti – originally published in Strategikon – Italian Tech-La Repubblica
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Allegations against Pavel Durov call into question Big Tech’s stay in Europe

The publication of a press release by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office on the arrest of Pavel Durov allowsus to delve a little more (but not too much) into the context of the affair because it contains the list of charges brought against the founder of Telegram.
To summarise, the legal bases for Pavel Durov’s arrest are the offences set out in the LOI n° 2023-22 du 24 janvier 2023 d’orientation et de programmation du ministère de l’intérieur, which inserts Article 323- 3-2 and an additional paragraph (the twelfth) to Article 706-73-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and by the Loi n° 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004 pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique that subjects the use of cryptography for uses other than authentication and integrity checks to ministerial authorisation (in practice if it serves to prove one’s identity in an e-commerce service, encryption is freely usable, if it serves to encrypt information it must be authorised by the government) by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by Strategikon – Italian Tech La Repubblica Continue reading “Allegations against Pavel Durov call into question Big Tech’s stay in Europe”

What Pavel Durov’s arrest means for social media and smart device manufacturers

A Reuters press release informs of the arrest in France of Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, with dual Russian and French citizenship. According to TF1, the reason for the arrest is the lack of content moderation, the failure to cooperate with law enforcement and the type of ‘tools’ -such as cryptocurrencies and disposable phone numbers- freely available on the platform. The French investigators considered that in doing so, Durov did not merely ‘fail to control’ but was a real accomplice in the commission of the crimes. Since we do not have access to the case file of this affair, and therefore do not know whether there are indications of Durov’s involvement in specific acts, it is not possible to say more on the merits. However, this case does allow for some more general reflections on the subject of Big Tech’s liability for the way it designs devices and services that control our existence. by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by Strategikon – Italian Tech La Repubblica

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