“We don’t have to manipulate our customers or exploit their vulnerabilities to scale up” – European entrepreneurs and social organizations appeal to the MEPs to put an end to invasive and privacy-hostile practices related to surveillance-based advertising and thus open the market to ethical and innovative online ads, which respect users’ rights and their choices. On the opposite bench – the Big Tech lobby fights for the status quo to remain – despite the well-documented social and individual harms caused by the current ads ecosystem.

Following a number of complaints filed in 2018 and 2019, including by Panoptykon and Bits of Freedom, and coordinated by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, the Belgian Data Protection Authority has found that the consent system developed and managed by the adtech industry body IAB Europe, and used by many websites in the EU, is illegal under the GDPR.

Winter 2022/2023 seems to be a spectacular time in the history of Artificial Intelligence. It is so even though the current hype is an effect of mass popularization rather than a real scientific revolution, which in this field began quite a while ago. With the rapid growth of new users of products based on generative AI (or GP AI), its potential to wreak havoc raises an increasing number of serious concerns.