Palantir’s software is now used by French intelligence, German police, the Dutch defence bodies and the Spanish military. They’ve just opened an office in Brussels – yet their global effective tax rate was just 1.4 percent.
Credit ratings of AI tech giants may be based on “assumptions on future revenue growth and leverage which may not stand the test of time”, creating a risk of “mispricing of credit risk,” the ECB’s financial experts found.
Imagine an EU public-service chatbot gives the eligibility rule in French but drops a condition in Romanian. If both are folded into one aggregate score, the system may appear compliant. For the citizen who receives the incomplete answer, the failure is not cosmetic. It is unequal access to a public service
People desecrating churches and setting others on fire are among the bogus videos that have been circulated on social media platforms such as Elon Musk’s X in the wake of the mass crossing of migrants into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.
Macron’s flagship initiative to ban social media for under-15s before the school year started was just binned by French judges, but amendments are underway, as member states compete with Brussels to lead the way in child protection.
Meta’s Ray-Bans can film you whether you’re aware of it or not. Rights groups have argued this poses a threat of non-consensual sexualisation, and are taking legal action to ensure regulation catches up to tech.
Throught data, defence and AI, Palantir is worth €278bn. They owe the EU €12m in taxes, but member states keep indulge the multi-national’s monopoly of public procurement contracts. That seems to be changing.
The EU’s efforts to crack down on Big Tech have resulted in weeks of fines and debates to tackle child safety online, and Friday’s investigation into TikTok’s teen account settings is the latest piece of a greater policy puzzle to regulate social media giants.
Each new multi-million euro fine on Google, Apple and Meta raises a blunt question for Europeans: are tougher rules on online giants worth the risk of higher US tariffs?
Google has been fined close to €1bn by the EU due to its search engine monopoly, which prioritised Google Flights or Google Store over other results, and for charging business too much on Google Play.
France is leading for the way for the EU to restrict youth access to social media, but its blanket ban poses concern to critics of the Australian model for not addressing the root cause of the problem.
The EU has left the door open to age-estimation by behavioural profiling, and the EU’s own data protection authorities have warned that this can be more intrusive than the verification it replaces, inferring age from a user’s activity at scale, with weaker accuracy for the children it is meant to protect.
As EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen pushes to curb what experts call “addictive” online environments for under-13s, EU capitals are already split over how tough to be — and how to police it.
With the European Parliament’s resistance weakening and the powerful European People’s Party group shifting in favour of tougher controls, this surprise win for message-scanning could clear the way for an even more far‑reaching “Chat Control 2.0” that targets encrypted apps next.
“We do not expect children to design their own seatbelts. We do not expect parents to fit airbags at home. And the very same must be true for Big Tech,” warned Ursula von der Leyen, as momentum is building for an EU-wide social media ban, and the commission is feeling the heat. The EU Commission president hopes to have practical restrictions made into a proposal by autumn.
Data centres are mostly not built to withstand hostile attack, and the Iranian drones that struck Amazon’s sites in the Gulf showed that threat is no longer hypothetical. Cybersecurity incidents are also rising, and they tend to target data centres’ power and cooling systems and their interface with the grid.
The digital euro is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore people’s access to public money and to realise a sovereign payment system in the digital age. Trilogue negotiators should not squander it by designing it in a way that serves the banking sector first and the public second.
To fundamentally understand why it’s strange the EU Commission is throwing its weight behind this new for-profit social platform, you need to understand what lies beneath.
The EU Commission’s decision to appoint the chair of Siemens, Jim Hagemann Snabe, as AI envoy is rife with extraordinary conflicts of interest. Brussels is currently engaged in an unprecedented rollback of digital, social, and environmental rules, which often closely mirror industry lobbying demands. Now it seems that corporate interests don’t just have a seat at the table — they have an office in the Berlaymont.
The EU has denied that foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas will attend Dialog, the secretive society event hosted by German-American billionaire and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, after a leak revealed her name on the list of attendees.