Osaka Castle. It’s the first time after 5 years I am back in Japan. It’s - as always - beautiful, fascinating and strange.
NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song for the Week)
This week’s song is from the newest release of Antilopen Gang - together with much admired Sophie Hunger (again, see Weekly 26/2024).
YouTube:
Comments below the song video are disabled (understandably) on YouTube, the song triggered lots of discussion and polemics, suche as in Jacobin (“Musikalisch ist der Song so schlecht, dass man schlichtweg nicht über ihn reden müsste.”), TAZ (“In seinen musikalischen Mitteln ist das Lied eher schlicht – ein schleppender Rhythmus, dunkle, getragene Streicher –, doch entscheidend sind die glaubhaft vorgetragenen Ich-Botschaften, die der Text sendet.”), FAZ (Paywall), Jüdische Allgemeine or Die Presse.
I like the band’s member Danger Dan, though, in particular for
and - perhaps even more - for
Retrospect
I participated at the “13. Dreiländerforum Strafverteidigung 2024 in Wien”.
The venue was the former headquarter of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce that has been turned into a hotel now. It’s a nicely renovated 50-ies building. I am not really into criminal defence lawyering but everyone I know from the field was here, the room was packed with (prominent) people.
I was, in particular, impressed by Sophie Matjaz (what a brilliant young lawyer!) speaking, inter alia, about PimEyes (“we are committed to protecting privacy of our users”) and similar obscure services (place of business: Belize) being used or not used by Swiss (?) police (“Bei der Polizei arbeiten Menschen, die sich Gesichter gut merken können.”). Rumors are there that it wouldn’t be Swiss police only not using the service.
Jonas Divjak’s important contribution lead to an eye opening debate among senior criminal lawyers on personal data collections (“Schattenakten”) not being part of the official case file.
My gig gave me the opportunity to look a little deeper into the Austrian Constitutional Court’s decision on seizure of mobile phones (and their data).
Manz Symposion Data Protection Law
I was one of the speakers at this seminar and spoke about AI act and GDPR (in short: it’s complicated).
Two takeaways:
Mathias Schmidl, head of Austria’a data protection authority, informed in some detail that there is a second data protection authority in Austria now, due to a CJEU-ruling (Case C-33/22): the parliamentary data protection control committee (“Parlamentarisches Datenschutzkomitee”). The law installing this is published, job offers were made available as well (the deadline was already due, though) - actually, it’s not really a job offer as it’s not really a fully paid position.
Most likely, this will not ease the finding of stable opinions on (politically) difficult data protection matters in Austria.
Second, the panel and the audience speculated about who would become the competent AI authority in Austria. If I understood the nuances correctly, most of the present (deeply involved) stakeholders neither expect the KommAustria/RTR to become comptent authority (different from Germany; I learned from a Linkedin blogpost [!] from the ministry that Bundesnetzagentur had wone the race) nor the creation of a new authority from scratch. A new exclusive role for the DPA looked unlikely too.
The most likely outcome is therefore a typical Austrian coordination melange between existing stakeholders asked to find compromises. In any case, the polital decision making will need to wait until a new government is operative, so sometime in spring 2025 at the earliest. We will - most likely - run late again.
#arsboni
Finally, the rescheduled conversation on data seizure with Shirin Ghazanfaari took place. It was worth the wait. The legal situation is very chaotic, though, with several very unpleasant options.
Privacy Ring
This nice and traditional event - somehow a joint venture of University of Vienna and Leibniz Universität Hannover - was in Vienna.
We recorded the presentations and the panel debate and made it available.
Timeline: 00:00:00 Mag. Judith Leschanz und Iris Phan (Begrüßung) 00:05:30: Prof. Ursula Sury (Transparenz und unternehmerische Verantwortung) 00:21:45: Bettina Blawert (Transparency Unlocked: DSGVO und KI-VO im Rechtsvergleich - Juristische Insights und Umsetzungstipps) 00:47:39: Dr. Winfried Veil (50 Shades of Open. Open Data, Informationsfreiheit und Datenschutz: Unauflösliche Widersprüche) 01:15:37: Dr. Matthias Schmidl (Informationsfreiheit und Datenschutz – wie kann das Spannungsverhältnis gelöst werden?) 01:37:10: Podiumsdiskussion
#Japan
I am currently in Japan. The moment I am writing this I am commuting back from Kyushu University to Osaka. We held a joint workshop with Steven van Uytsel who is head of the international programme there. Topics oscillated around privacy law, data protection, energy law, Web3, the metaverse and, of course, lots of AI. Florian Seitz and Iana Kazeeva were the department’s representatives and gave excellent presentations remotely.
The mics on the picture wer formerly used for faculty meetings. As faculty meetings continue to be held remotely also five years after after the pandemic and hybrid teaching sessions seem to be rare, the mics are - at least for the moment - no longer needed.
I also learned, in particular, a lot from Stella Anne Ming Hui Teoh who taught me that the Japanese word for privacy (プライバシー Puraibashī) is an English leanword phonetically imitating “privacy” - perhaps an indicator of the concept’s (missing?) cultural importance and tradition. Stella Anne also gave figures of the unbelievable amount of Japanese plastic waste exported to Malaysia (190 Million Kilograms per year! Another 160 Million Kilograms go to Vietnam. Every year. Just plastic.). This puts the Japanese obsession of waste separation and cleanlinss into a rather different perspective - as neither Malaysia nor Vietnam are famous for their waste management.
Steven mentioned, in reply to Florian, that, roughly, 30 % of today’s Japanese energy production stems from nuclear and the remaining 70 % more or less from fossil fuels. A Russian participant added that Japan is heavily dependent on Russian oil and LNG imports that have not been replaced since the beginning of the war. (Some figures on this here and here).
No Green Deal here, therefore.
Friedrich Baumgaertel - a young German scholar who wrote his PHD at Kyushu - spoke about the ‘WHO Pandemic Accord as a New Form of Response to Increasing Global Risks?’ This treaty is (to me) a very goood example of a possibly failing approach to solve legally and ethically extremely complex challenges (Genetic modification. Pandemic. IP. Public health) with “traditional” WHO-instruments of public international law. After the impressive presentation I found it even more astonishing than before that this matter - requesting very thorough legal analysis and judgement - was put as one of only 20 questions into “wahlkabine.at” to help people deciding on whom to vote into the Austrian Parliament on Sunday.
I doubt that anybody answering the question (including lawyers) has fully understood the question.
Prospect
Japan
We will have a similar workshop at Kyoto University next week. Kyoto University is a strategic partner of University of Vienna and the local organisor, Tatsuhiko Inatani, is a good friend and an excellent colleague. I am very much looking forward to this, therefore.
Parliamentary Elections
National elections will be held on Sunday. I believe that everyone allowed to vote should do so. I did so before leaving to Japan.
Look and Feel
Amanda Knox
I listened to “Judging Amanda Knox” during my runs.
This is a funny example of a True Crime Podcast opening a meta level of discussing true crime podcasts. I am not entirely sure whether this works out convincingly - but I am not in the target group either. One of the facts I learned here is that 93 % of the true crime audience is female.
Japan
It’s so good to be back after 5 years. Many impressions to digest, such as: Commuting is still as it was: - Do never ever make any noise, listen to music or watch a video and make yourself as unvisible as possible.
Food is just as marvelous as ever and I do make progress in somehow mastering the vending machines. The Shinkansen trains are still as impressive as the were and, in general, people everywhere are as friendly as ever, while, at all means, also keeping quite some social distance.
However, I also feel some tiny changes. I believe to feel, in particular, that some consequences of the difficult economic situation have become (more) visible. There’s more poverty on the streets, more people collecting trash cans, stressed/running/pushing people and more waste (altough it’s still unbelievably clean here). Also some general global trends might have become more apparent - such as more visible tattoos, more cashless payment (with the metro card used as a leading means of payment, funnily), more spoken English and (perhaps) more conformistically nonconformistic fashion. And subway train entries for women only.
I made new friends too in Fukuoka.
These robots can, inter alia, be used for the monitoring of elderly patients affected by dementia in order to assess their ability to live at home alone, プライバシー puraibashī being not so critical then, perhaps.
The manufacturer has a very interesting website explaining some of the features.
The robot was introduced to me by Professor Yueh-Hsuan Weng who, inter alia, runs a very interesting website on Robolaw.
More on this, perhaps, next week.
Daisy
went swimming at a dog swimming event closing this year’s summer season in a public outdoor pool.
She liked it a lot, although she didn’t find any fish or duck.
© Anna Forgó
Have a wonderful week!
Kind regards
Nikolaus (Forgó)