Welcome to our highlights of net political news from Germany, week 47.

Who wins the contracts?

The computer scientist Martin Tschirsich has examined ten products from various manufacturers of communal information systems. The software is used for the administration, manages citizens data and other information the city or municipality processes. They often play a part in managing cash flows through calls for tenders and manage confidential documents. We take a closer look at which security gaps exist, and how the human factor plays a part.

Politics fails civil rights

Everything that we know so far about the negotiations and their results indicates that a black-yellow-green coalition would not have brought about a hoped-for restart in net policy. The IT lobby was heavily involved. There were bright spots on the subject of data retention. But with the end of negotiations,  hope for an end to data retention practices needs be postponed. 

In Lower Saxony, on the other hand, the Social Democrats and Christian Democratic Union have agreed on a grand coalition headed by the SPD. Apart from broadband expansion and an economy-centered network policy, the coalition appears appears hostile to progress on fundamental rights and freedoms promising more surveillance with less oversight. We examine the core netpolitical tenets of the coalition agreement.

In Hesse, the dispute over the planned introduction of computer Trojans goes into the next round. The Green Party base voted against the use of Trojans by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz). This puts the green members of parliament in Hesse, who have adopted some of the rhetoric of Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, in a quandary: will you vote against the will of the party base? Or do you oppose the Hessian Trojan and thus your coalition partner, the CDU?

Big online platforms avoid responsibility

The Performance Artists of the Centre for Political Beauty opened a branch of the (Berlin) Holocaust Memorial in Thuringia – within sight of Björn Höcke’s, provincial leader of the far right Alternative for Germany, house. Höcke is a political revisionist known for citing Adolph Hitler. A video of the action on YouTube was subsequently blocked and the artist collectives account deactivated. After a public outcry, YouTube reopened the CPB’s account and unlocked the video.

Facebook moves more slowly in ‚the case of disappearing Followers’: Kerem Schamberger was still unable to download his Facebook data. The company admits to having deleted thousands of accounts from Schamberger’s followership because of unspecified violations.

Google News wants international media owned by the Russian state to be downgraded by its algorithms. This raises questions about transparency, not least if Google News hasn’t been doing this in secret already? How can we know?.

More surveillance techniques

The Federal Department for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is increasingly focusing on technical solutions. So-called „assistance systems“ are supposed to facilitate decisions on asylum status. Among other things, private mobile phones of refugees are copied – a measure deemed legitimate by the BAMF in the context of „refugee management“.  The faith the BAMF places in automated natural language dialect analysis is particularly impressive given the paucity of evidence for its effectiveness.

In a one-month field test, the consumer protection center North Rhine-Westphalia has tested fitness apps and trackers. Companies must, by law, provide information on the use of the collected data, but do so insufficiently if at all in response to consumer protection requests. Now the Consumer Protection Center is admonishing companies to comply with the law.

Welcome to our highlights of net political news from Germany, week 46.

EU to strengthen consumer protections while introducing contested blocking measures.

The European parliament has passed a bill to protect European consumers with last-minute additions of contested net block censorship measures. Meanwhile, privacy activist Maximilian Schrems’ class action suit against Facebook, to shore up consumer rights, is declared ineligible by the European Attorney General.  Still, the Attorney General negated Facebook’s assertion that Schrem is not acting as a consumer.

In the mysterious case of disappearing followers on the Facebook profile of Turkey critical academic Kerem Schamberger problems with Facebook remain. He has been unable to download his data using the platforms own tools. Our crowd research shows that other profiles with even higher numbers of friends and followers are all available in a reasonable time.

Aimed at social-networking giants like Twitter and Facebook, the far-reaching Network Enforcement Bill (NetzDG), also called the hate speech law will be fundamentally revised according to information from federal coalition negotiations (since failed). Restrictions of freedom of speech inherent in the NetzDG may finally be addressed.

Freedom on the Net in decline globally

The current Freedom House Freedom on the net report discerns that disinformation and manipulation are on the increase globally just as mobile use of the Internet is more and more restricted.

Perhaps this comes as no surprise in view of self-censorship such as practised by scientific publisher ‚Springer Nature’ which rejected papers critical of China or concerned with topics like the Tiananmen Massacre.

Scientists in Germany fill some gaps in the literature with a survey clients of ISPs after the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) determines only one in eight users get the advertised bandwidth.

EU to regulate sale of dual-use spy software

In an op-ed,Daniel Moßbrucker reports on ‚dual-use’ software being sold by European companies to governments that use it to spy on opposition parties. An initiative by the Eu Commission to increase control in the trade is encountering resistance from industrial associations and some member states, including Germany.

Apropos weapons, another current subject of international negotiations, autonomous killer bots!. A UN commission of experts is consulting over a ban. Rules of international law are required for effective enforcement of a ban on autonomous weapon systems. It is a great challenge for a commission to accomplish in the face of the veto powers.

While we watch developments in international cyber warfare, the city of Kassel, home to the Documenta Art Exhibition, plans to extend surveillance in the inner city without citing any plausible grounds. Crime is at a long time low.

Algorithms as tools for manipulation

We report in German on the TED-Talk „We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads“ . The potential for misuse stemming from network surveillance techniques developed to create more effective advertising is staggering. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci addresses the things which need to change.

Konrad Lischka also discusses an ethics of algorithms in in an interview netzpolitik.org conducted at our 13th „This is Netpolitics“ conference.