Today, 09.03.2020, Homo Digitalis sent a letter to the Minister of Civil Protection, the Minister of Justice and the Permanent Representation of Greece in the EU concerning important safeguards that should be taken into account in the TERREG text.

With this letter we underline various provisions in the suggested text, which might be extremely harmful for privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of information.

The said letter is aligned to the positions expressed by European Digital Rights (EDRi) as well as the pertinent Opinion of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA).

The 4th Law Forum on Data Protection & Privacy took place in Athens on February 26, 2020.

The conference was organized by Palladian Conferences with the support of Homo Digitalis.

Stefanos Vitoratos, vice-president of our organization, represented Homo Digitalis, speaking about the importance of raising awareness of the public in order for data controllers to achieve compliance.

Maria-Alexandra Papoutsi, Vasilis Vasilopoulos and Dimitris Patsos, also members of our organization, participated at the conference, under their professional capacities.

On February 24, Homo Digitalis and “EKPIZO” Consumers’ Union sent a joint letter to the Greek Prime Minister and all leaders of the parliamentary political parties, requesting the immediate reconsideration of Law 4624/2019 on data protection.

The necessity for such a reconsideration stems from the Opinion 1/2020, issued by the Greek Data Protection Authority, which found Law 4264/2019 to be in contravention with the GDPR and Directive 2016/680 on various occasions.

The letter was also communicated to the President of the Greek Data Protection Authority, Mr. Konstantinos Menoudakos.

You may read the letter in Greek here.

On 19 February 2020 the 7th Information Security Conference took place in Evgenidis Foundation in Athens.

The conference was organized by Boussias Communications and with the support of Homo Digitalis.

Mr. Konstantinos Kakavoulis represented our organization, speaking about the importance of information security in our culture. Mr. Kakavoulis underlined that “cybersecure at home means cybersecure at work.”

Three more Homo Digitalis members attended the conference.

On 14 February Homo Digitalis was invited to speak to the teachers of primary and secondary education in Chania, Crete.

In the morning session, Elpida Vamvaka and Konstantinos Kakavoulis spoke to the teachers regarding the digital footprint and its importance for our digital personality.

They explained in a practical way how the teachers can protect themselves, but also how they can educate their students to gain control of their personal data.

In the afternoon session, they spoke to parents and children regarding the right to access and the right to erasure.

Two more Homo digitalis members participated in the seminar, with Anthi Strataki and Dimitris Grammenos, presenting the interactive workshop “GDPR and the 40 thieves”, while Giorgos Perrakis, lawyer and Homo Digitalis member, attended the seminar.

In the context of the Data Protection Day, the Homo Digitalis team distributed cookies to passers-by in the central square of Heraklion, Crete, on 30 January 2020.

The cookies were distributed “for free” in exchange for the personal data of the passers-by. Only 2% of them did not accept to exchange their personal data with cookies!

This action intended to explain in a simple way the operation of cookies online.

The event took place under the auspices of the District of Crete, to which we are grateful.

Local media covered the event and many interviews were given by our members.

You can read the story in Greek at cretalive.gr  and watch videos for Kriti TV and Creta Channel.

Today, Tuesday, 4 February 2020, Homo Digitalis participated in a stakeholders’ meeting in Brussels organized by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). The meeting concerned the draft BEREC guidelines on common approaches to the identification of the network termination point in different network topologies.

Homo Digitalis was invited to contribute to the meeting by BEREC, since it had filed proposals during the public consultation in November 2019.

A representative of the Greek National Telecommunication and Posts Committee (EETT) took also part in the meeting through teleconference.

You may view our proposals here.

On 24 January 2020 Homo Digitalis had the honour to participate in the Computers, Privacy, Data Protection Conference (CPDP) 2020, the most prominent conference in Europe on legal and ethical issues regarding new technologies.

We contributed to a panel, held by European Digital Rights (EDRi), on “AI and Migration Control: New Tools In The Service Of Fortress Borders”.

The video of our presentation is now available here.

You can also watch the video with our slides and sources here.

On January 22, the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) Working Group on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity published its Evaluation of the HLEG Trustworthy AI Assessment List (Pilot Version).

Homo Digitalis contributed significantly on this Evaluation, which aspires to suggest to the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) of the European Commission additions to the said list, with a view to enhancing human rights protection.

The evaluation was presented to Ms. Lucilla Sioli, Director for AI and Digital Industry at European Commission, receiving extremely positive feedback.

Our organization took part in the round table discussion that followed the presentation.

We sincerely thank the co-authors of the evaluation Mr. Lorenzo Pupillo, Mr. Stefano Fantin and Mr. Afonso Ferreira, for this great collaboration!

Homo Digitalis had the great honor to contribute to this Evaluation with the participation of Eleftherios Chelioudakis, and is acknowledged in the Preamble of the study.

You may download the report here.