EU Digital Services Act: Industry and government interests prevail over citizens' digital rights

After 16 hours of discussion, negotiators from the European Parliament
and EU governments have made a deal on a new EU Digital Services Act.
Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table as
Rapporteur for the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) and summarises:

"We were able to prevent removal obligations for search engines. We
could also prevent the indiscriminate collection of the cell phone
numbers of all uploaders to adult platforms, which would have endangered
their privacy and the safety of sex workers due to foreseeable data
hacks and leaks."

"Minors will be protected from surveillance advertising on online
platforms. However, the ban on using sensitive personality traits (e.g.
a person's political opinion, diseases or sexual preferences) for
targeted manipulation and targeting was heavily watered down." The new
rules on personalised targeting will apply to all online platforms for
sharing user content such as Facebook, Instagram or eBay, but not to
sites hosting self-generated content, such as news websites.

"The new set of rules as a whole does not deserve the name 'Digital
Constitution'. The disappointing outcome fails in multiple respects to
protect our fundamental rights online. Our online privacy will not be
protected by a right to use digital services anonymously, nor by a right
to encryption, a ban on data retention, or a right to generally opt-out
of surveillance advertising in your browser (do not track). Freedom of
expression on the Internet is not protected from error-prone censorship
machines (upload filters), nor from arbitrary platform censorship.
Cross-border removal orders issued by illiberal member states without a
court order can take down media reports and information that is
perfectly legal in the country of publication. The monopoly power of
consumer-hostile social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter will
not be tackled by interoperability obligations. Users will have no
alternative to the toxic engagement-based corporate algorithms that
spread hate, violence and misinformation in the interest of commercial
profits. Industry and government interests have unfortunately prevailed
over digital civil liberties."

Marcel Kolaja, a Czech Pirate, Member and Quaestor of the European
Parliament, explains: "Today, the Parliament wasted a great opportunity
to make the Internet fairer and more user-friendly for European
citizens. Internet users will not be given a chance to generally refuse
tracking in their browsers and apps as the Pirates proposed. The "do not
track" option would have put a stop to annoying consent banners and dark
patterns that companies abuse to collect data. But for users, it should
as easy to refuse consent as it is to give it and that is exactly what
we were fighting for during the negotiations. Unfortunately, the
national governments favoured the voices of digital giants over the
support for the fundamental rights of European citizens. And by that, I
am truly disappointed. As I have been pointing out from the very
beginning, Internet rules need to be human-centred in the first place.
And that is certainly not the case of today's result,” Kolaja says.

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