BECOMING A PRODUCT: THE HOLLOWING OUT OF DIGITAL RIGHTS

By the EESC Workers’ Group

The outlook for digital rights in the European Union had, until a few years ago, given reasons to breed optimism. Moving away from the wild west of data harvesting, the Digital Services and Digital Market Acts, along with further regulation on AI and data protection, set world-leading standards for a ‘human-centred’ approach to technological development, despite all their shortcomings, particularly in enforcement.

However, regulation soon became the source of all the Union’s woes, real or imagined. A defective and biased reading of the Letta and Draghi reports on the one hand, and a generous dose of magical thinking on the other, framed Europe’s productivity gap and its lack of an adequate number of unicorn start-ups as the result of overregulation. Never mind the fact that in related fields, such as AI, the relevant regulation was not even in force at the time.

Now, in the hope that this will somehow magically spark a world-leading, energy-consuming and water-gutting word-salad generator with some statistical accuracy (namely, large AI models leaving an enormous environmental footprint and using vast amounts of water to cool data centres), the Commission has put forward two omnibus proposals that undermine the foundations of personal data protection ─ GDPR and ePrivacy ─ by enabling broader data use for AI training and dismantling protections and safeguards in the AI Act.

Given the fact that the emergence of tech unicorns appears, at the very least, uncorrelated with relevant regulation, and setting aside strong ideological assumptions about the supposed evils of consumer protection, civil society must reflect on the dangers of the ‘Digital fitness check’ before we become a data farm for US companies. Copilot, which invasively suggests summaries of this text, seems to agree.