In parallel, the Commission is running a public consultation on its consumer policy strategy for 2025-30, including with respect to digital fairness and consumer law enforcement, which is open until August 31, 2025. These developments are part of a broader European shift toward tougher digital consumer protection, echoed by the UK's newly adopted Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers Act, which introduces similar rules around pricing, subscriptions, and enforcement powers for the UK Competition and Markets Authority.
The documents contained in the FoI dump include correspondence between the tech giant and policing bodies and two data protection impact assessments (DPIAs). The tech giant also refused to disclose its own risk assessments into the transfer of UK policing data to other jurisdictions, including China and others deemed "hostile" in the DPIA documents.
Facebook and Instagram users in the UK will soon be offered paid subscriptions that remove ads. In the coming weeks, those over the age of 18 can pay £3 ($4) per month on the web, or £4 ($5) per month when using Meta's iOS or Android apps. If you're wondering why the mobile version is more expensive, Meta blames that on fees levied by Apple and Google in their respective app stores.
Big tech hasn't been happy with that, of course, and now Apple's come out swinging against the regulation. The company on Wednesday blamed the EU's enforcement of the DMA for delaying the launch of some features in the EU, saying the rules are "leading to a worse experience" for Apple customers in the bloc by exposing them to new risks and reducing choices.
Although the aim was to give power back to the users and let them decide which cookies they were okay with or not, the law has since had unintended consequences, the main one being cookie fatigue. Users are now bombarded with consent pop-ups so often that they rarely read them, choosing to just blindly click to accept the cookies. So the consent pop-ups make you feel like you are secure, but are not actually good at offering real protection.
Starting on November 3, 2025, we'll start to use some data from members in [EEA, Hong Kong, Canada, Switzerland and the U.K.] to train content-generating AI models that enhance your experience and better connect our members to opportunities.
The Church of England is investigating claims it breached the personal data of almost 200 abuse survivors. An official is reported to have failed to conceal the contact details of applicants to a compensation scheme in an email. Unredacted names, email addresses and personal data were therefore visible to other recipients, according to Channel 4 News.
On the basis of a year of legal research by PI as well as documents obtained by other civil society organisations, and evidence provided by legal representatives fighting these automated systems on behalf of their clients, on the 18th August 2025, we issued a formal complaint to the UK Information Commissioner (ICO) regarding the UK Home Office's use of two 'automated recommendation-making tools' (ARMTs), the Identify and Prioritise Immigration Cases tool (IPIC) and the Electronic Monitoring Review Tool (EMRT).
HMRC has revealed that hundreds of staff have accessed the records of taxpayers without permission or breached security in other ways. HMRC dismissed 50 members of staff last year for accessing or risking the exposure of taxpayers' records.
