The Tech Brief

The European Commission adopted the delegated act regulating the auditing of algorithms under the DSA last month. We discussed the challenges in this field and possible implications in terms of technical standards and interlinks with the AI Act with Catalina Goanta, an associate professor at Utrecht University, and Jurriaan Parie, director at Algorithm Audit.

The re-explosion of the Middle East's conflict has brought a flood of illegal and harmful content across the web. We discussed how this crisis is, for the first time, testing the Digital Services Act, the EU's content moderation rulebook, with Rose Jackson, Director of the Democracy and Tech Initiative of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

After several months of controversial delays, Luca Tagliaretti was recently appointed the new Executive Director at EU Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC). We discuss with him the prospect of this EU body, its role in Europe’s security posture and the overall state of cybersecurity in the Union.

The negotiations on the AI Act are at a critical stage, with important chapters such as foundation models, governance, and law enforcement still on the table. We caught up with Brando Benifei, one of the lawmakers spearheading the file, to discuss the current state of the negotiations and possible landing zones. 

EU policymakers are hashing out their approach to open source software in the Cyber Resilience Act. We discussed how this regulation would affect the open source software community with Bert Hubert, an IT developer and tech entrepreneur.

EU policymakers' understanding of this area's metaverse and regulatory needs has been developing in several initiatives. We took stock of the EU institutions' thinking and current market trends with Anselm Kuesters, head of division at the Centre for European Policy, and Patrick Grady, tech lead at Fourtold.

This week, Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer and activist who launched the not-for-profit organisation NYOB, standing for None-of-Your-Business, joins Euractiv Tech brief podcast to talk about the European Union - United States Data Privacy Framework, the new transatlantic agreement allowing EU data to be transferred to the US.

Schrems has been known for filing multiple lawsuits which bear his name. The cases Schrems I and Schrems II are well known for anyone working in the sphere of data privacy or in the implementation of the EU General Protection of Data Regulation (GDPR) because they put an end to previous transatlantic data deals: the Safe Harbord in 2015 and the Privacy Schield in 2020.

This week, Schrems talks with us about the new complaint the activist decided to file in front of the Court of Justice of the EU regarding the Data Privacy Framework: from his motivations that led to the initiative, to his views on the Commission and his point of view regarding the need to "internationalise data protection".

The second episode of the two-part podcast series aims to shed light on the dynamics between the European and the American approach. In a discussion with Heike Hagemeier, an expert at the German Federal Office for Information Security, BSI, and Andrea Garcia Rodriguez, Lead Digital Policy Analyst for the EU Digital Agenda at the European Policy Centre (EPC), we talk about policy recommendations and the possibility of sandboxes.

Slovaks voted last Saturday on 30 September, but criticism abounded over the extensive abuse of political disinformation across online platforms – just as the Digital Services Act (DSA), the legislation tackling illegal content online, entered into force across the EU bloc.

With this in mind, David Wheeldon, Head of Public Policy in Europe for YouTube and Katarína Klingová, Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Democracy & Resilience at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute are joining us to discuss their take on political disinformation in the Slovakian context and whether this is something we should fear at a broader EU level during next domestic and EU elections.

At the end of September, a report from the TrustLab, the organisation spearheading work with the European Commission on the topic of disinformation, stated that "Slovakia appeared to be more vulnerable to large-scale disinformation campaigns compared to other nations in Central Europe" and that "Facebook and YouTube were top platforms for messaging and social media in Slovakia.

The first episode of the two-part podcast series focusses on the EU’s preparedness for post-quantum encryption. With Heike Hagemeier, an expert at the German Federal Office for Information Security, BSI, and Andrea Garcia Rodriguez, Lead Digital Policy Analyst for the EU Digital Agenda at the European Policy Centre (EPC), we look at the state of affairs at EU and German level.