The European Union has kicked off the first stage of a consultation process involving gig platforms and workers. Regional lawmakers have said they want to improve working conditions for people who provide labor via platforms which EU digital policy chief, Margrethe Vestager, accepted in a speech today can be “poor” and “precarious”. Yet she also ...

Facebook has been fined again by Italy’s competition authority — this time the penalty is €7 million (~$8.4M) — for failing to comply with an earlier order related to how it informs users about the commercial uses it makes of their data. The AGCM began investigating certain commercial practices by Facebook back in 2018, including ...

Epic Games has taken its fight against Apple’s App Store rules to the European Union where it’s lodged a complaint with the bloc’s antitrust regulators. In a blog post today the maker of the popular online game Fortnite said it’s extending its battle for what it dubbed “fairer digital platform practices for developers and consumers” ...

Uber is shooting its shot at EU lawmakers as they dial up scrutiny of working conditions on gig platforms to decide whether new rules are needed to improve the lot of gig workers. The ride-hailing and on-demand food delivery giant has published a white paper today in which it lobbies European policymakers for what it ...

TikTok has until Friday to respond to an order by Italy’s data protection agency to block users whose age it cannot verify, TechCrunch has learned. The GPDP made an ‘immediate’ order Friday in response to the death of a 10-year-old girl from Palermo who died of asphyxiation after participating in a ‘blackout challenge’ on the ...

The European Union is preparing the ground for vaccine passports. A common approach for mutual recognition of vaccination documentation is of the “utmost importance”, the Commission said today, adding that it wants “an appropriate trust framework” to be agreed upon by the end of January — “to allow Member States’ certificates to be rapidly useable ...

EU lawmakers have just unveiled a wide-ranging counter terrorism agenda as they set out plans to beef up regional security. The plan touches on some key tech topics — the most keenly watched of which is encryption. Here, concerns have been mounting that the bloc could be moving toward legislating against end-to-end encryption — in ...

European Union lawmakers are considering whether current rules aimed at limiting the practice of geoblocking across the bloc should be extended to cover access to streaming audio-visual content. Access to services like Netflix tends to be gated to individual EU Member States, meaning Europeans can be barred from accessing libraries of content offered elsewhere in ...

European Union lawmakers have laid out a major legislative proposal today to encourage the reuse of industrial data across the Single Market by creating a standardized framework of trusted tools and techniques to ensure what they describe as “secure and privacy-compliant conditions” for sharing data. Enabling a network of trusted and neutral data intermediaries, and ...

A coalition of 135 startups and tech companies with services in verticals including travel, accommodation and jobs have written to the European Commission to urge antitrust action against Google — warning that swift enforcement is needed or some of their businesses may not survive. They also argue the Commission needs to act now or it ...