Source: Amnesty International –
By Joshua Franco is a Senior Research Advisor at Amnesty Tech
For years, the EU has taken a leading role in creating standards that protect our rights online. But the winds have now shifted, and under the guise of “simplification” a corporate-backed wave of weakening digital rules is underway that threatens all of our rights – on and offline.
Digital and human rights advocates including Amnesty International have been documenting some of the human impacts caused by new technologies, and it’s clear from these, that what’s needed more than ever is stronger rights protections. Despite this, this simplification agenda aims to roll these very protections back.
It is becoming increasingly clear that this process is inevitably leading towards the weakening of provisions of the AI Act and data protection, and perhaps much more. The Commission have also proposed a “Digital Fitness Check.” While we haven’t been told what this will mean in practice, it is most likely going to be an exercise to identify further laws to be “simplified”. All of this is being undertaken under expedited procedures without prior impact assessments to ask how individuals and communities experience or are harmed by high-risk and emerging technologies, on the preposterous basis that laws that protect our rights can be pared back without impacting our rights.