🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The EU’s push for equal-speed data access raises privacy risks

• The European Commission wants more than basic data sharing. It proposes that rivals get Google search data as often as Google uses it internally 1.
• That could give competitors search queries and click data more often than periodic historical reports do. Google warned that faster access could raise the chance of re-identifying people 1.
• Search queries can be sensitive because a person’s history may expose private information 2.
• The dispute sits within a formal European Commission investigation into Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The Commission opened it in March 2024 under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), an EU law meant to curb the power of large digital platforms 3.

Data-sharing rules may push companies toward new private training data

• The Digital Markets Act presses Google to share some search data with rivals. At the same time, the race to build AI is moving toward new private data sources that current rules may not cover 4.
• Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has launched a program that records employee activity on selected work apps and websites. It collects mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots to train AI agents that can handle computer tasks 5.
• Meta describes the “Model Capability Initiative” as a program without an opt-out for employees. That could give the company an exclusive training set for future AI models 5.
• If regulators force more sharing of public data such as search logs, companies may chase an edge in internal workplace data. That information may be much harder for regulators to reach or require them to share.