#18 You win, you celebrate
Losing is just a question of time
I’m a big fan of the message Jorge Campanillas pins on all his social networks:
And that’s exactly where we are, because last Tuesday Darío — the 50% of Zero Party Data — received his second AEPD research award (the "Tesseract" for friends).
We were at Jorge Juan with the President, former President (or last Director, whichever you prefer), Deputy, colleagues from the field, with friends and with more interesting people doing things.
Today we celebrate with you.
You’re reading ZERO PARTY DATA. The newsletter about the crazy crazy world news from a data protection perspective by Jorge García Herrero and Darío López Rincón.
In the spare time this newsletter leaves us, we like to solve complicated issues in personal data protection. If you’ve got one of those, give us a little wave. Or contact us by email at jgh(at)jorgegarciaherrero.com
🗞️News from Data World 🌍
.- NOYB is taking the Swedish Tax Authority to court to, wait for it, stop selling its taxpayers' data. I'm speechless.
.- Today the AEPD is presenting its Strategic Plan for the upcoming five-year period, and most importantly, opening a public consultation period to hear what the various stakeholders have to say, propose, and point out as areas for improvement.
I'll go first: the resolution and report search engine is the worst.
.- Bias identification and correction: a curious and educational example of LLM applied for good. LLYC has published The Purple Check: a tool that detects and corrects ubiquitous biases in headlines about gender-based violence. More of this, please.
.- The Irish Council of Civil Liberties (the NGO led by John Ryan) calls out the European Parliament for the poor job done when hiring Anthropic for a project related to a historical archive.
.- On the agenda of Tuesday’s EDPB plenary session, there was an item: “state of the EU-US data protection framework under the new U.S. administration.” Will we see louder voices on the non-Dorito side of the table? As of this newsletter’s preparation, no news had surfaced on the outcome.
The Dorito moment
💀Death by Meme🤣
📄Data-heavy documents for coffee-lovers☕️
.- Crema Games (known for the successful Spanish Pokémon-style game: Temtem) has received a €5,000 fine for improperly handling a data access request from the Netherlands (remember, Holland is not the correct term). The case is complicated by translation/vocabulary issues (see "chorradones") and Crema’s explanation, which the AEPD refutes using EDPB access rights guidelines: requesting an identity document without being able to verify it is considered an undue restriction of the right of access. And the key point of having access to the authentication mechanism that the AEPD mentions (screenshot). Two comments on the matter: the more neutral one from Alejandro Prieto Carbajo, and the one with “boomer” movie references from Jorge. .- The Hong Kong supervisory authority has published a guide on the use of generative AIs for employees that’s actually pretty good.
.- I wouldn’t read this massive Study exploring the context, challenges, opportunities, and trends in algorithmic management published by the European Commission, but I’ll make sure some Rumpelstiltskin summarizes it for me.
.- Same goes for this other tome from IBM’s Ethics Board on AI Agents.
.- This book, fully available for download by Adrian Todolí et altra, also looks promising: “The legal scholar and AI: a challenge for Law Schools, Bar Associations, Law Firms, and professionals” (full book for download).
.- Do you have a whistleblowing system in your company? Do you reveal the whistleblower’s identity to the accused at the end of the process? Answer the second question first…
.- Lastly, in the whole mess about OpenAI, Ghibli, intellectual property, and decency… I thought it was interesting to realize that Miyazaki’s statements (“AI is an insult to life itself”) were taken out of context. It’s worth watching the full video, and especially the actual piece of crap the elderly craftsman was commenting on. Here. Even the AEPD published a post, although it’s not as specific and grounded as one might expect (AEPD’s more technical posts usually hit harder).
🤖 Robots.txt or the AI thing
.- Guillermo Lazcoz shares that he has written interesting stuff on human oversight in high-risk AI, in a Wolters/Aranzadi book available in both English and Spanish. And with references to both versions.
.- It’s not only about AI, but we came across an interesting infographic on LinkedIn about some EU regulations that may overlap in certain cases. These are fun times where one cannot possibly know everything about the so-called “Digital Law.”
Paper of the week
The next one is quite nice: Data Sharing in the Internet of Medical Things: Between the Data Act and the EHDS.
And if you were interested in Tuesday’s topic (“Innovation or Regulation”), Mikel Recuero sent us a classic paper: The Privacy–Innovation Conundrum.
"Innovation or regulation?" and other fishy false dilemmas
Every time—let me repeat, every single time—that someone (usually a politician, or some other kind of salesperson) reduces a complex issue to a choice between “A” or “B,” they’re trying to pick your pocket.
🧷 Useful tools 🔧
.- Are you interested in using (in my case: poking around) an LLM that runs locally and is trained to anonymize clinical documents? If the answer is YES, you have it here, and here is the paper. Via Maria Isabel Iñigo Petralanda.
.- If you’re feeling adventurous and are fed up with Google, Apple, or whoever training their AI models using your cloud photo backups, here’s Ente, a free software that, together with a free app, lets you use those unused gigabytes from your Wordpress hosting or wherever the hell you want, to self-host your photos in an encrypted cloud. That’s my Holy Thursday plan.
Our two cents
.- On Tuesday we were at the AEPD. Darío receiving the price and the bald one as invited guest.
A thousand things could be told, but a few images are worth thousands of words. Content available in various formats: AEPD’s social networks, the video of the event already on their YouTube channel, mini-interviews on social platforms, and tons of photos from everyone on socials.
And for anyone with plenty of time, here’s a link to the award-winning study: Video game cheating prevention.
🙄 Da-Ta-dum bass
Si crees que esta newsletter puede gustar e incluso ser útil a alguien, reenvíasela.
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