Facebook has deleted all European facial recognition data, the Irish data protection commissioner and a German data protection regulator confirmed independently Thursday after reviewing parts of the social network's source code.
A pair of European cyber security initiatives are helping to make the region safer to surf, according to Microsoft.
The company said in its Security Intelligence Report on the security landscape that countries who participate in the Council of Europe and London Action Plan security initiatives are more likely to perform at or above expectations in comparison with other countries.
The European Commission has confirmed that the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) is to open on Friday 11 January to help protect member states from cyber threats.
At a press conference, announcing EC3’s opening, Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the centre will allow the EU to fight cybercrime on multiple fronts.
Governments have been urged by an EU agency to use “honeypots” to lure in hackers to gain a better understanding of what nefarious activity they’re involved in and how to better secure their data.
Honeypots are traps, consisting of fake resources, such as an application or some seemingly important data. By tagging those resources, companies can track attackers to see what part of the network they are exploiting and what malware they are pushing out. This shows up weaknesses that can then be patched.
Two laptops used by European Commission officials were pinched last week in Azerbaijan's capital Baku during the Internet Governance Forum, Digital Agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has revealed.
In a blog post at the weekend, Kroes explained that she was in two minds about attending the summit, held this year in the gas and oil-rich country, because the Azerbaijani government has “a very troubling attitude to freedom and democracy”. She added the following:
The European Commission has approved the creation of a new secure-element company backed by ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient, just as long as ARM promises to keep its hardware open.
The new company will develop and sell products running software from G&D and Gemalto on the TrustZone element embedded in ARM chips, complete with management software, but the EU required promises from ARM that it wouldn't unfairly lock out competitive offerings.
European Union regulators want Google to make changes to its new privacy policy to protect the rights of its users, the EU's national data protection regulators said in a letter to the US internet company, which was seen by Reuters.
The letter, which stopped short of declaring Google's approach to collecting user data illegal, follows an investigation led by France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique (CNIL) that began in February.
A European watchdog has opposed moved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers (ICANN) to force domain name registrars to improve accuracy of the WHOIS database.
Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the European Union's working party on data protection, told ICANN's chairman and interim CEO in a letter that the proposed changes to the organisation's registrar accreditation agreements would likely run contrary to European citizens' right to privacy.
India says it will only agree to a free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union if the latter decides to accord the Asian economic giant data-secure destination status.
In a report by the Economic Times on Monday, the country has linked the FTA negotiations with achieving data-secure status as it understands the boost the recognition will give to its business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.
Twenty-two U.S. privacy and consumer groups have voiced support for a tough online privacy proposal being considered by the European Union, even though some U.S. businesses and government officials have described the proposal as too regulatory.
