News

Late 2004, as part of the Google Books Project, Google announced that it had entered into agreements with five of the biggest research libraries in the US to digitize books from these libraries’ collections. The goal of the project was to create a digital library and expand access to library content. Google’s plan meant that… Read more

Some users are moving away from centralized platforms, such as Instagram or X, to federated social media platforms, sometimes collectively called the Fediverse. The Fediverse refers to a collection of interconnected, decentralized social media platforms bringing power back to users by letting them create their own server. The EU has meanwhile adopted the Digital Services… Read more

The European right to repair refers to a set of policies and regulations aimed at ensuring thatconsumers have the ability to repair and maintain the products they purchase. These policies aredesigned to counteract a trend toward products becoming more difficult to repair, due to e.g.,design choices, software locks, and a lack of access to spare… Read more

Facebook’s ad platform often shows job ads based on historical gender stereotypes, NGO Global Witness found when they placed genderneutral ads on the platform and reviewed the data. Ads for pilots and mechanics were shown mostly to men; ads for preschool teachers mostly to women. Global Witness together with female rights’ organisation Clara Wichmann filed… Read more

Libraries play an important role in our society. For a vast majority of people who rely on libraries and their collections, libraries function as gatekeepers to the public’s access to information and knowledge. Libraries also have an important role in facilitating this access in the online environment, a role which has been made clearer during… Read more

Algorithms have a lot of impact on our lives. But we often know little about they way they work. The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security engaged the ILP Lab to perform a study on transparency with regard to automated decision making. Student researchers used a case study on dating apps to review to what… Read more

The ILP Lab today published a report on privacy issues surrounding app tracking for the European privacy organisation noyb. When developers create apps, they often use building blocks made by other companies. Many of these building blocks, called software development kits (SDKs), contain tracking technologies which gather privacy-sensitive data. The ILP Lab investigated the privacy… Read more

On behalf of the Dutch Consumer Organisation (Consumentenbond), the ILP Lab drafted a report regarding the data protection of children on social media platforms. Under the GDPR, platforms must offer ‘specific protection’ to children with regard to the processing of their personal data (recital 38 GDPR). The GDPR provides little guidance on the interpretation of… Read more

The ILP Lab drafted a report for European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) on mandatory data retention in Europe. Although the Data Retention Directive was invalidated thanks to legal action brought forward by EDRi member Digital Rights Ireland, many of the national implementations of the defunct Directive remain in place with no prospective of invalidation. Data… Read more

End-to-end encryption is applied in various communication services. It provides secure communications and affords its users privacy. However, encryption also makes it difficult for law enforcement to detect and investigate the distribution of images of child sexual abuse via these services. In this report, the ILP Lab investigates whether states have a positive obligation to… Read more