On the occasion of Safer Internet Day, UNICEF called for renewed urgency and cooperation among governments, civil society, UN agencies and, the private sector, to put children at the centre of digital policy, and to protect them from sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and the misuse of their private information. Every half a second, every day, a [...]

Krzysztof Izdebski reports that the European Court of Human Rights ruled that user rights to anonymously share photos of ballot cards should be allowed as a manifestation of the freedom of expression. Complaints to the National Election Commission of Hungary alleged that this sharing violated the secrecy of the vote. The court based its decision on [...]

The Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement (7amleh) published a report on the Internet Freedoms in Palestine: Mapping of Digital Rights Violations and Threats, focusing on the challenges to the telecommunications infrastructure and the violations to digital rights by state and non-state actors in Palestine. The report argues that digital rights are curbed by the political and geographical [...]

The European Commission has appointed 39 experts to the High-Level Group on fake news and online disinformation. The experts come from a variety of backgrounds, including civil society, social media companies, news media organisations, and academia. The experts will advise the Commission on 'scoping the phenomenon of fake news, defining the roles and responsibilities of relevant [...]

Microsoft has published as updated version of its A Cloud for Global Good policy roadmap, originally released in October 2016. The 2018 edition reflects recent developments in areas such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, and contains several policy recommendations for 'governments, industry and civil society to consider as they realise the [...]

Although still ongoing, a group of civil society technologists' analysis of IETF RFC 7725 at the IETF 99 Hackathon already demonstrates 'how implementation and data on human rights can inform protocol design.' The draft implementation report provides extensive comments, including potential negative or positive impacts, in particular considering the significance and use of IETF Status Code 451, so-named in [...]

The European Commission is setting up a High-Level Expert Group on fake news and online disinformation, with representatives of academia, the tech industry, news media and civil society and has opened a call for applications to participate in the group. In addition, it launched a public consultation to feed into an EU-strategy on how to tackle [...]

A letter signed by more than 300 civil society organisations calling on the WTO to refrain from adopting a negotiating agenda for e-commerce was made public. The document argues that new rules would benefit large global companies at the expense of the public interest and that digital policy issues should be discussed in other forums.

The joint press statement by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, Vera Jourová, on the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Review has been published. The first annual review of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework took place in Washington, DC. It states that since the program’s inception, more than 2.400 organizations [...]

As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to make a final decision with regard to the US net neutrality rules by the end of the year, a coalition of activists and civil society organisations is planning a new action in support of net neutrality, for late September. The Battle for the Net initiative, which [...]