EU data protection
fromWIRED
9 hours agoEurope Gets Serious About Age Verification Online
Five EU countries are testing a digital wallet for age verification, but progress varies significantly among them.
The man in his early twenties from a Paris suburb had been charged with 'terrorist criminal conspiracy' and remanded in custody. French counter-terrorism prosecutors suspect he asked teenagers to place an explosive device outside the US financial institution near the famed Champs-Elysees avenue.
The new checks, part of the EU's new Entry/Exit System (EES), collect digital personal records of third country nationals travelling to the Schengen area and replace the manual stamping of passports.
Companies across sectors such as banking, industry, and technology report that their digital infrastructure is closely intertwined with American software and cloud platforms. Many organizations rely on services from large American suppliers for office software, cloud storage, and AI applications. According to them, this dependence cannot be reduced quickly without operational disruptions.
For the first time, one or more French investigating judges will examine the conditions of the possible criminal liability of Fabrice Leggeri in the carnage that has resulted in thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean, particularly children and women.
Gaining citizenship through family or through marriage is possible, but if you don't have any useful relatives or an EU spouse you'll be looking at getting citizenship through residency. From residency requirements to rules on dual nationality, every country in Europe has its own way of tackling naturalisation.
At first, it sounds almost too simple like someone claiming they've solved European immigration with nothing more than a calendar and a backpack. But this little pattern, when used intentionally and legally, becomes one of the most elegant travel strategies in the world. It lets you stay in Europe far longer than any tourist visa seems to allow, all without breaking rules, overstaying, or navigating complicated immigration systems.
In late December 2025, Elon Musk's AI company xAI updated its Grok chatbot, integrated into the social media platform X, with a new image-editing feature. Within days, users were exploiting it to generate realistic sexualised images of real women and girls without their consent, including content that regulators said depicted minors in a manner that constituted child sexual abuse material.
Yesterday (Jan. 20), the Commission unveiled its revised Cybersecurity Act proposal after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations that reportedly caused substantial friction between officials and member states. This sweeping update introduces measures to identify and potentially exclude "high-risk" third countries and companies from Europe's critical digital infrastructure across 18 essential sectors, including energy systems. As cybersecurity threats continue rising since the original Act took effect seven years ago, the EU is essentially drawing new battle lines in the global tech landscape.
The groups complain about "the increasing concentration of power and lack of alternatives in digital markets, the push for deregulation, and the urgent need to enforce digital laws to protect our fundamental rights and create a level playing field for competition and innovation."
The European Parliament has taken a rare and telling step: it has disabled built-in artificial intelligence features on work devices used by lawmakers and staff, citing unresolved concerns about data security, privacy, and the opaque nature of cloud-based AI processing. The decision, communicated to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in an internal memo this week, reflects a deepening unease at the heart of European institutions about how AI systems handle sensitive data.
GDPR fines pushed past the £1 billion (€1.2 billion) mark in 2025 as Europe's regulators were deluged with more than 400 data breach notifications a day, according to a new survey that suggests the post-plateau era of enforcement has well and truly arrived. The figures come from the latest GDPR Fines and Data Breach Survey published by DLA Piper, which puts total fines issued across Europe last year at roughly £1 billion (€1.2 billion), up from £996 million in 2024. While that year-on-year increase is modest, regulators have now handed down €7.1 billion (£6.2 billion) in penalties since GDPR came into force in May 2018.