European Union: EDPB publishes statement on Digital Services Package and Data Strategy

On 18 November 2021, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published a statement on the EU's recent legislative proposals relating to digital and data governance, including the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, Data Governance Act, the Regulation for a European Approach for Artificial Intelligence, and a soon-to-be-published 'Data Act'. In relation to these proposals, the EDPB calls for increased protection of individual rights in relation to: AI categorisation of individuals according to prohibited grounds of categorisation (ethnicity, gender, political and sexual orientation, etc.); the use of biometric identification; and targeted advertising. Further, the EDPB warns of ambiguous or overlapping supervisory structures and spheres of application between the proposed frameworks and existing ones, such as the GDPR.