Recent weeks have brought significant developments across Europe's digital rights landscape, from regulatory action against tech giants to emerging concerns about infrastructure costs and media narratives around artificial intelligence.
Audio and podcasts
Privacy Salon and Gimic's Avatar.FM programme, presented during this year's CPDP event, featured discussions and performances exploring pressing digital rights topics. The series examined potential European social media bans, the Fediverse, spyware misuse, chatbots and synthetic image-based abuse, with experts and activists discussing data and AI concerns alongside musical interludes.
The Data Skeptic podcast, hosted by Kyle Polich, has launched a season dedicated to recommender systems. The interviews examine how these algorithms shape video consumption, travel decisions, social media experiences and numerous other aspects of daily life, exploring their technical workings and broader societal impact.
Reading and resources
The Electronic Frontier Foundation continues its LGBT Q&A series, addressing urgent digital rights questions facing LGBTQ+ communities. The guidance tackles the dual threats facing queer individuals both online and offline, emphasising the importance of protection against surveillance and discriminatory systems.
EFF has also highlighted deceptive patterns—features embedded in applications, websites and AI systems that manipulate users into unintended actions or harmful choices. Also termed "dark patterns," these design elements undermine user agency and decision-making.
As platforms face criticism for algorithmic control, EFF points to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as a decades-old alternative for managing information feeds. The tool offers users greater autonomy in curating their digital content consumption.
Data centres and infrastructure costs
A joint report from Friends of the Earth Ireland and Beyond Fossil Fuels reveals the hidden costs of data centre expansion. Irish households paid an estimated €715 million more in electricity bills between 2015 and 2023 as data centres proliferated across the country. This analysis emerges as the European Commission plans to triple data centre capacity over the next five to seven years, a market currently dominated by American technology corporations.
The Balanced Economy Project argues that the global AI data centre rush reflects concentrated financial power rather than organic consumer demand. The paper documents how dominant technology firms and major financial institutions have aligned to drive AI infrastructure expansion, effectively transferring risks and costs to broader society while capturing government attention.
AI governance and media coverage
EDRi member Hermes Centre has analysed how artificial intelligence appears in four leading Italian newspapers. The research identifies limited coverage of the EU AI Act, a predominance of technology-optimistic and corporate-focused narratives, and minimal representation of civil society voices and affected populations. The full report is available in Italian, with an English executive summary.
Source: EDRi (European Digital Rights)
