Business and Technology
EU Court Overturns German Data Privacy Law
A German law requiring telecoms companies to retain customer data is a breach of EU legislation, a European court ruled Tuesday, prompting the justice minister to vow an overhaul of the rules.
Firms Telekom Deutschland and SpaceNet took action in the German courts challenging the law that obliged telecoms firms to retain customers' traffic and location data for several weeks to fight serious crime.
The case headed to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg, which ruled against the German legislation.
"EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data," the court said in a statement, confirming its previous judgements on the issue.
The Federal Administrative Court, one of Germany's top courts, had argued there was a limited possibility of conclusions being drawn about people's private lives from the data, and sufficient safeguards were in place.
But the ECJ said the German legislation -- which required traffic data to be retained for 10 weeks, and location for four -- applies to a "very broad set" of information.
It "may allow very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data are retained... and, in particular, enable a profile of those persons to be established."
The stated aim of the law was to prosecute serious criminal offences or hinder specific risks to national security, but the court said that such measures were not permitted on a "preventative basis".
However, it said that in cases where an EU state faces a "serious threat to national security" that is "genuine and present", telecoms providers can be ordered to retain data.
Such an instruction must be subject to review and can only be in place for a period deemed necessary.
Following the announcement, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann hailed a "good day for civil rights".
"We will now, swiftly and definitively, remove data retention without cause from the law," the minister wrote on Twitter.
Data privacy is a sensitive issue in Germany, where people faced mass surveillance under the Nazi regime as well as in communist East Germany.
Buschmann is from the liberal FDP party, which has made data protection a key plank of its policies.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser -- from Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party -- said she did not "want to have old debates, but act pragmatically".
Nevertheless, she added the court ruling still gave the government space to implement "what is permissible and urgently necessary".
Faeser noted the ruling still allowed measures such as the storing of IP addresses as part of efforts to fight crime, which she said could help in combating sexual violence against children.
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Meta Closes Monitoring Tool for Disinformation, Fact-Checking
WASHINGTON—A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation.
The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations will largely not have access to.
For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency into the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech on influential Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Killing off the monitoring tool, a move experts say is in line with a tech industry trend of rolling back transparency and security measures, is a major blow as dozens of countries hold elections this year -- a period when bad actors typically spread false narratives more than ever.
"In a year where almost half of the global population is expected to vote in elections, cutting off access to CrowdTangle will severely limit independent oversight of harms," Melanie Smith, director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP.
"It represents a grave step backwards for social media platform transparency."
Meta is set to replace CrowdTangle with a new Content Library, a technology still under development.
It's a tool that some in the tech industry, including former CrowdTangle chief executive Brandon Silverman, said is currently not an effective replacement, especially in elections likely to see a proliferation of AI-enabled falsehoods.
"It's an entire new muscle" that Meta is yet to build to protect the integrity of elections, Silverman told AFP, calling for "openness and transparency."
'Direct threat'
In recent election cycles, researchers say CrowdTangle alerted them to harmful activities including foreign interference, online harassment and incitements to violence.
By its own admission, Meta — which bought CrowdTangle in 2016 — said that in 2019 elections in Louisiana, the tool helped state officials identify misinformation, such as inaccurate poll hours that had been posted online.
In the 2020 presidential vote, the company offered the tool to US election officials across all states to help them "quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression."
The tool also made dashboards available to the public to track what major candidates were posting on their official and campaign pages.
Lamenting the risk of losing these functions forever, global nonprofit Mozilla Foundation demanded in an open letter to Meta that CrowdTangle be retained at least until January 2025.
"Abandoning CrowdTangle while the Content Library lacks so much of CrowdTangle's core functionality undermines the fundamental principle of transparency," said the letter signed by dozens of tech watchdogs and researchers.
The new tool lacks CrowdTangle features including robust search flexibility and decommissioning it would be a "direct threat" to the integrity of elections, it added.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the letter's claims are "just wrong," insisting the Content Library will contain "more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle" and be made available to academics and non-profit election integrity experts.
'Lot of concerns'
Meta, which has been moving away from news across its platforms, will not make the new tool accessible to for-profit media.
Journalists have used CrowdTangle in the past to investigate public health crises as well as human rights abuses and natural disasters.
Meta's decision to cut off journalists comes after many used CrowdTangle to report unflattering stories, including its flailing moderation efforts and how its gaming app was overrun with pirated content.
CrowdTangle has been a crucial source of data that helped "hold Meta accountable for enforcing its policies," Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told AFP.
Organizations that debunk misinformation as part of Meta's third-party fact-checking program, including AFP, will have access to the Content Library.
But other researchers and nonprofits will have to apply for access or look for expensive alternatives. Two researchers told AFP under condition of anonymity that in one-on-one meetings with Meta officials, they demanded firm commitments from company officials.
"While most fact-checkers already working with Meta will have access to the new tool, it's not super clear if many independent researchers — already worried about losing CrowdTangle's functionality — will," Carlos Hernandez-Echevarria, head of the Spanish nonprofit Maldita, told AFP.
"It has generated a lot of concerns."
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