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EU abandons ePrivacy, AI liability reforms as bloc shifts focus to AI competitiveness
A long stalled bid to beef up European Union rules around online tracking technologies -- and put penalties on a similar footing to the bloc's data
A long stalled bid to beef up European Union rules around online tracking technologies — and put penalties on a similar footing to the bloc’s data protection framework, GDPR, which allows for fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for breaches — has been withdrawn by the Commission after co-legislators failed to reach agreement over the plan. The dominance of behavioral advertising business models that rely on tracking and profiling web users to monetize people’s attention raised the commercial stakes for any reform of EU ePrivacy rules — especially a proposal to underscore the need for entities to obtain affirmative consent from consumers to snoop on them. As well as being the target of intense industry lobbying, Olejnik believes the proposal’s chances of reaching a compromise between legislators in the European Parliament and the Council was scuppered by bad timing — in the wake of the bloc passing its flagship update to data protection rules, the GDPR, he suggests there was a surge in scaremongering about expanding privacy rule-making.
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