I guess Daddy Trump gets his wish afterall. Spineless cowards ...
Well shit, do we EU citizens have any say in this ?
Contact your local MEP. Ask your local MP or Deputy or whatever you call them to push the relevant minister to oppose it. It's not great, but you do have a say.
I believe the EU Parliament has to approve this so they can block it, and that's elected by Proportional Vote and we all have MEPs there who, unlike national parliamentarians in countries without Proportional Vote (which are most of them) have to worry more about the public opinion in their nation turning against them.
So if this shit ever makes its way to the EU Parliament (were the EU Commission will try to make it pass quietly), contact your country's MEPs and show you're well aware of it.
Have we ever?
Yes. It worked with Chat Control (even though it wouldnt have passed anyway. Didnt even go to voting.)
It didn't go to voting because it wouldn't have passed, and it wouldn't have passed because of public backlash causing important countries for the vote to back out.
Your comment makes it sound as if it wouldn't have passed without public backlash
lol sure
Looks like somebody has been promised by one or more large Tech firms a very highly paid non-executive board membership, millionaire speech circuit engagement or gold plated "consulting" gig when their time in the Commission is over...
Mind you, by now that kind of exchange of "favours" is tradition for the members of the EU Commission.
Humanity really can't progress anywhere with capitalism running so rampant. Every corpo needs to go, or it will be like trying to sail against the wind.
True.
That is however a pretty hard and time consuming change, so to me it makes sense that in the meanwhile we take steps to reduce the harm caused by the system still in place, not least by cracking down hard on Corruption and Conflicts Of Interest and closing the legal loopholes that allow certain politicians to stay within the Law whilst purposefully using today the power they have been delegated to do favors for others who have promised them monetary payback for it tomorrow.
If you're drowning now you don't put all your hopes on the ship that might be coming but isn't even visible yet.
The commission pitched the Digital Omnibus as simplifying and streamlining digital regulations to relieve the regulatory burden for digital services and AI systems, with a specific focus on helping small-to medium-sized businesses in Europe; however, the draft proposal goes further than expected.
won’t somebody think of the poor “AI” companies? 😢
Helping small to medium-sized businesses in Europe
Yyeeaa as if these small companies are the ones that yelled in favor of this. The lady at my local grocery shop always told me how it would be easier for her to do her job if this change in GDPR made it through...
My grandpappy started this here AI company with a handful of GPUs he whittled himself, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna let big gobmint regulations cost us the family business!
Make those motherfuckers' phone lines burn!
Omfg, is there anything that we can do?
Vote wisely.
…
No no just kidding whatever your vote is it doesn’t matter in the end
This message brought to you by anti-democracy coalition. "Anti-democracy coalition - whatever you do just please don't participate in democracy"
Whilst I do not agree with the spirit of the message of the previous poster, I must point out that specifically the EU Comission - from were this came - is not elected but nominated, and the nomination is one big horse trading shit show several levels removed from voters, were everybody but the head of it is chosen by the Council Of Ministers (which only represents EU National Governments , not National Parliaments) so the whole thing is maybe slightly more "democratic" than nominations for the Chinese Politburo.
(If there is one thing that needs changing in the EU political structures, it's the crooked, rotten shit show that's the EU Commission).
That said, the EU Parliament which can stop most of this shit, is elected and it's even via Proportional Vote so there is no mathematical rigging at all to make some votes count more than others (unlike in First Past The Post Power Duopoly countries like the US or Britain) and hence voting in the EU Election does matter.
As much as all of us may hate it - it's true. The only scenario in which democracy functions is one where all, or at the very least the majority of voters make their own decisions, based on objective information. This is not the case.
While it's always great to contribute, no matter how little, we cannot deny reality here. Your vote is welcome and appreciated, but the truth is it won't change anything. Voting only gets you so far when the vast majority of people are brainwashed and just pick whatever their media outlet of 'choice' tells them to pick.
Doesn't seem terribly surprising to me, the existing rules make it very hard to make use of data for AI training in the EU. Other parts of the world have looser restrictions and they're developing AI like gangbusters as a result. The EU needed to either loosen up too or accept this entire sector of information tech being foreign-controlled, which would have its own major privacy and security problems.
As if the GDPR was a barrier to IP theft
Did you read the article? It says that making AI training easier is a key purpose of these changes.
Why should any of us approve of making things easier for technofascists?
Did I say you should approve of it? I'm just explaining why it comes as no surprise to me.
And my point was they’re already doing this in the face of regulation.
"Massive trillion dollar corporations are behaving absolutely fucking atrociously, so we need to do the same" is such an awful take that it makes me doubt the legitimacy of this user account.
There is nothing stopping the EU from going the DeepSeek route and just stealing the finished LLM's from American companies. But the truth is that the EU shouldn't want to have all these data centers training generative models. The us is already dedicating 4% of our electricity production to them, with people in states along the Great Lakes and Eastern seaboard seeing massive increases in their electric bills to pay for them (~30% for me in Ohio, ~75% for my brother in Virginia). I can understand if you are a technocratic neoliberal in the EU parliament that is taking bribes from tech firms why you would want this, but for anyone paying attention, rhe promises tech companies are making to burn hundreds billions of euros while gutting privacy, 🔏IP, and consumer protections at the top of the bubble makes no sense.
The guy explained the rational he didn't say it was his personal view that it should be done.
And even if was his view we shouldn't be down voting things based on whether you agree or not. We should do it on whether it adds to the discussion.
The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.
Explaining something no one asked to be explained without providing an opinion on the subject itself reads like tacit approval. On a subject such as this - "reduce your privacy for the benefit of AI companies that are some number of:
If I stopped my comment there I'd get voted on based on my explanation of what just happened assuming I was pro-this process because that's human nature (or maybe it's a byproduct of modern media discourse where they ask questions but don't answer them and expect you to fill in the blanks (look at most of conservative media when it's dog whistling or talking about data around crime or what have you)).
I don't think someone should be voted into the ground for explaining something, but I also think every online comment should do it's best to make a stand on the core subject they're discussing. We are in dire times and being a bystander let's evil people win.
So practicing what I'm preaching: Privacy laws should absolutely not be reduced for the benefit of AI companies. We should create regulations and safety rails around AI companies so they practice ethically and safely, which won't happen in the US.
Copyright is the bigger problem. The lack of a sensible Fair Use equivalent makes a lot of "tech" impossible. GDPR is a problem, too, but for AI it is the smaller problem. The media sees itself as benefitting from the broken copyright laws, while GDPR cuts into their profits. So that's why the public discussion is completely skewed.
It's a given that the EU's reliance on foreign IT companies will increase. Europe is deeply committed to this copyright ideology, that demands limiting and controlling the sharing of information. It's not just a legal but a cultural commitment, as can be seen in these discussions on Lemmy. Look for reforms to the Data Act. That's the latest expansion of this anti-enlightenment nonsense and it really has the potential to turbocharge the damage to the existing industry.
I want to know who is behind these changes being proposed. This smells of corruption.
Compliance does need to be considered. The company I work for is trying extremely hard to comply, but because of complexities and ambiguities in the law, it is difficult to find out how to comply. I don't know all the details, but I know legal, compliance, and the data engineering teams spend a lot of time figuring out how to be compliant and there aren't always clear answers.
That said, the solution is not to roll back protections but to be very explicit about how to comply.
Such a shame. 😕
This is what happens when you act for no reason like you’re better than the US.
oh yeah i've heard about it.
basically, people got pissed with cookie banners so much that they complained to the EU government about it.
the EU government said "well, if people don't like the choice to allow or deny cookies, i guess we'll un-do these regulations".
I think this is a very good example how people are always complaining, no matter what the government does.
If the government makes a law, a group of people complain. If the government later removes that same law that people kept whining about, another group of people complains. What to do?
Btw, another nice example is worldwide free trade. When it was introduced starting in the 1970s, people were very loud about the fact that they didn't like it because they feared competition from foreign markets, companies moving abroad (offshoring), and jobs at home being lost. That is largely exactly what happened (though free trade also had many positive sides like exchange of technology and culture). 50 years later, world governments (especially in the west) want to un-do free trade, and people complain again about it, citing a loss of free exchange of ideas as a reason. What to do.
It's different groups of people with different interests.
Also doesn't help that the cookie banners were a kind of malicious compliance. They were made deliberately difficult to navigate around when you didn't immediate hit "accept everything unequivocally".
That the response to this malicious compliance is a retreat rather than a doubling down suggests the EU regulators are compromised by the industry and this isn't a popular reform in any meaningful sense.
Yeah; the response should be that a "reject all" button must be displayed next to the accept all button with equal prominence, and define prominence to mean the same size, with similar contrast to the accept all button and clearly labelled.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
