Valerie O'Neill

After 8 years of inaction, the DPC now claims that RTB adtech does not provide location data to dodgy firms.
Wrong.
Meet "Patternz" for example:
An Israeli surveillance tool built on RTB data that provides a targeted individual's coordinates and "driving path" www.iccl.ie/wp-content/u...

Unusually for the time of year about 15 red kites and a pair of buzzards are circled for food here today. Bad weather on its way
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California Assembly Bill AB-566, passed in the State's Assembly and Senate 2 weeks ago has been given to Governor Newsom for signing, and, unless he caves to lobbying from the behavioral advertising industry and big tech, could soon become law.

Irish ‘House of Guinness’ becomes first Netflix title to feature Irish subtitles The drama series about the famous brewing family is on the streaming service from Thursday evening

Hey, neat
www.irishnews.com/news/norther...

3) legislate to stop the bombardment of users with consent-entreating pop-ups. See for example the description of the "frictionless" response to an opt-out in California's CCPA regulations.

2) legislate for a duty on software providers (browsers et al) to enforce users' privacy e.g. by blocking high-entropy persistent cookies/storage unless the consent signal exists. This was partly the approach in the now abandoned ePrivacy Regulation, and:

A better approach now would be to:
1) standardise on a consent signal, which could be a request header (like DNT:0) or simply a low-entropy short duration cookie with a well-known name, together with legislation forbidding its creation without informed consent, and:

While browser signaling standardisation & compliance-enforcement would help, the ad & wider big tech industry would try to dominate the process as they did before, causing its abandonment when they did not get their way -trying to turn it into "implied consent" with opt-out made rare by friction.

As we said many times over 15 years, the ePrivacy Directive didn't call for incessant "consent popups", only that people mustn't be tracked UNLESS they give informed consent. An unobtrusive button in a footer linking to a clear description & an agree/decline option suffices
bsky.app/profile/poli...

Lina Khan on media, mergers, & muzzling dissent When FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC over a controversial monologue by comedian Jimmy Kimmel, his show was suspended hours later by the network. Former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan w...

Lina Khan points out especial risks when monopolies start to control mainstream media. www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/w... h/t @douglasfarrar.bsky.social

We cooperated with RTE PrimeTime over the last year on this very significant story about RTB data exposing the movements of Irish people, including military and political personnel.

Link to this morning's preview piece is here --> www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

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Forever young :)

Annotated extract from ICO AdTech consultation

Invoking "economic growth" & the vaguest of claims about #AdTech the UK Information Commissioner plans to explicitly “enable” non-complaint business models. Even partial Responses (by 7 Sept 25) pushing back on this erosion of rights & democratic processes encouraged. ico.org.uk/about-the-ic...

The UK Parliament had a full opportunity to recalibrate #dataprotection & #ePrivacy compliance for #AdTech in Data (Use and Access) Act & did so. In immediately eroding these rights, the ICO’s stance would seriously undermine both the rule of law and democratic processes. 3/3

It is against the ICO’s Growth Duty, the Statutory Guidance being that “[n]on-complaint activity…harms the interests of legitimate businesses that are working to comply with regulatory requirements, disrupting competition and acting as a disincentive to invest in compliance” 2/3

Lina Khan: “You can only undo so much in three and a half years” The former chair of the Federal Trade Commission on the war against corporate power.

"I think there are a lot of cautionary tales about what happens when you try to hitch national sovereign goals to a private tech company, and what they do with that power.” www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

Will Y Coyote realising the ground has disappeared

The current state of the AI ecosystem

How the N.Y.P.D.’s Facial Recognition Tool Landed the Wrong Man in Jail

How the N.Y.P.D.’s Facial Recognition Tool Landed the Wrong Man in Jail www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/n...

Drowning in a sea of racism People granted asylum here are Brits: Farage wants to deport 600,000 of them

Drowning in a sea of racism
open.substack.com/pub/htsf/p/d...

It's the trend now. They get filthy rich doing dirty jobs, publish a book 'exposing' how evil the evil job they've evil-y done was, and then get free media publicity to sell their book about how brave and/or sorry they are.

The EU must use the anti coercion instrument now, or be humiliated. Europe must be free to enforce its own law on its own soil.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/1...

The maximum penalty that can now be enforced under the UK's PEC regulations (including the requirement for valid user consent for cookies and other storage) is now £17,500,000 or 4% of turnover whichever is the higher. See para 1181 of the Explanatory Notes

screenshot of scan of site just fined by the Spanish DPA

baycloud.com/detailedscan...

No this is not the latest view of 3I/ATLAS!
In fact its just an animation showing the scale of unconsented tracking cookies on the site just fined by the Spanish DPA.