Michael Veale

mikarv@someone.elses.computer

Professor of Technology Law and Policy at University College London (#UCL), Faculty of Laws. Not resigned to today's technological power structures (yet). Researching at the intersection of emerging technologies, law and policy; data protection; machine learning; PETs and cryptographic infrastructures; platform and infrastructural regulation. 🏳️‍🌈administrating a small exoplanet in the fediverse :loading:.

Posts

Post #4433780
Cloudflare (>20% of all domains) has started automatically implementing DSM Dir art 4 rights reservation (ie copyright/TDM objection to scraping) for all sites that do not have a robots.txt file. They also adding purpose fields (new content-signal field with search, AI train, AI use) to robots.txt unilaterally and are enforcing it through monitoring and analysis. https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurations/managed-robots-txt/
Post #4415803
on protest and bluetooth mesh networking apps - india attempts to restrict source code to stop people circumventing internet shutdowns https://restofworld.org/2026/india-github-geoblock-jack-dorsey-bitchat/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds
Post #4355798
RE: https://someone.elses.computer/@mikarv/117009744087358555 You can now access many more digital laws, not just the GDPR, at the UCL Massively Crossreferenced Digital Laws page: EU: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, UCPD, NIS2 UK: OSA, DPA18, ...+ Each article/para/recital, links to what-cites-it in int'l cases/statutes/guidance https://homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/laws/index.html
Post #4269411
Parts of the GDPR are cited and interpreted by thousands of pieces of case law and guidance, but there's no easy and free way to find out what. We've made a tool which makes it super easy, for 13,000 citing documents, all in one place. More regulations to come! https://homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/laws/gdpr.html
Post #3700124
after Brexit, any of the pan-European PLC type company, the ‘Societas Europaea’, were converted into ‘UK Societas’. This is now a highly endangered species of legal person, with only seven active, and no way to form new ones.
Post #3700123
UK: social media ban CJEU: hold my beer
Post #3700122
Information Compliance team at the House of Commons managed to send an incorrect email to 120,000 recipients (me included), ironically intended as an internal puff piece about how good their information compliance is https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/incorrect_email_recipients_may_2#incoming-3456681
Post #3700121
genuine q: if ai coding is massively increasing engineers’ productivity why does software either feel the same or worse? where is this productivity actually going?
Post #3700120
in the legislative proposal to expand the supreme court, could you please also tell them to publish HTML versions of their judgments? (you can still paginate them precisely, technology is amazing!). section 508 of the rehabilitation act called and it wants the judicial branch in scope.
Post #3082263
Firefox raises the alarm about Google’s attempt to build ‘Prompt API’ into Chrome-like browsers — de facto standardisation towards local Gemini models, required agreements to terms of use despite being local — a Chrome infrastructure play all over again? https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/30/mozilla_pushes_back_against_googles/
Post #3082262
more backlash to scraping, this time to Common Crawl — a notoriously intransparent org for what they moderate (if they moderate, or eg remove csam) or what they include https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-30/news-organizations-push-back-against-web-archive-used-for-ai
Post #3082261
It seem that archive.today has been blocked at some technical level by an order by the Roskomnadzor — seemingly from laws cited not for piracy (these sites, and their .is and .ph domains, avoid paywalls) but under disinformation law — they are often used to document/subvert Russian media censorship.
Post #3082260
A good start to a proposal for reviews, requiring authors of submitted papers to expend tokens to submit and earn them back through reviewing. Needs to be more radical though in light of AI slop: cap on total submissions, earn further at steep rate through reviewing. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3770921
Post #3082259
really useful primer on data, ai and trade law from @streinz https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-world-trade-law/conceptualising-data-and-artificial-intelligence-in-world-trade-law/1D280F68D70CFBA9E0171B8C15939BCF especially good if the issue comes up in teaching
Post #3082258
Musk’s xAI rapidly appoints an EU representative for the DSA following Grok investigation, choosing an entity with an address in Estonia but no registered presence in the country. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/elon-musk-ai-company-basement-address @fantafanta
Post #3082257
Amazon employees race to automate non-essential tasks to expend tokens to impress managers on internal AI usage leaderboards. Great outcome, all. https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/4965c8a3-169e-4815-bd1b-16f5e9a22e70
Post #3082256
Canvas pays presumably enormous ransom to end extortion of universities and schools — receives questionable promise that data has been deleted. Moodle less of a monoculture but unis must harden it, possibly rebuild from the ground up in something other than PHP… https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/12/double-canvas-intrusion-confirmed-as-shinyhunters-resets-leak-deadline/5238361
Post #3082255
more Hugging Face content moderation challenges — the model marketplace finds itself hosting infostealers disguised as legitimate models https://www.heise.de/en/news/Infostealer-on-AI-platform-Hugging-Face-disguised-as-OpenAI-repository-11290946.html
Post #3082254
“It has not been a productivity booster at all, it feels like a speedrun towards severe mental exhaustion” https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/
Post #3082253
In Memoriam: Prof William Twining https://currentlegalproblems.org/article/in-memoriam-prof-william-twining/ (Philip Schofield, David Sugarman, Jane Holder)
Post #3082252
on vibe coding as an ADHD multiplier — a strong, short blog on the author’s personal experience of building repeated things they don’t need as a form of pseudo productivity https://thoughts.hmmz.org/2026-05-31.html
Post #3082251
wow, save energy by not saying please or thank you to your AI. the individualistic ‘turn off the lights’ moment for LLMs. models use tools and hidden thinking that expend thousands of tokens in seconds. two or three tokens of nicety isn’t going to move the needle. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529017-ditch-the-niceties-in-ai-prompts-to-save-energy-use-say-researchers/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&amp;utm_source=NSNS&amp;utm_medium=RSS&amp;utm_content=technology
Post #2963507
Meta's latest attempt to stop the progress of my 2018 GDPR access complaint and its draft fine of €360-€430 million dramatically failed in the Irish High Court last week https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/05/21/meta-loses-challenge-to-possible-430m-fine-over-personal-data-processing-complaint/ The case is long and contains excerpts from relevant documents which I cannot myself post as Ireland changed primary law (Data Protection Act 2018 s 26A) during my complaint to make it a crimina...
Post #2532802
Still waiting for the AI Act advisory forum (Art 67), meanwhile the all important, de facto compulsory, privatised harmonised standards, made without democratic process (yet part of EU law), charge ahead. EC opines on their suitability without civil society input or views. https://edri.org/our-work/the-eu-ai-office-must-prioritise-setting-up-the-advisory-forum/
Post #2451509
Real time bidding and the tracking infrastructure is so toxic &amp; illegal that the firms whose apps embed this code have to pretend to be shocked when resulting data appears in a huge leak from an actor many steps away, with a history of selling to law enforcement https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/
Post #2381866
Great work from Foxglove — UK government sheepishly forced to increase estimated carbon emissions from data centre usage by... 100 times https://www.ft.com/content/0c8bc0a9-63e5-4739-a91e-f07189b45f20?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Post #2293681
2 year research postdoc at UCL Laws on data and democracy, public law focus — could focus on surveillance and/or AI issues https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/search-ucl-jobs/details?jobId=43885&amp;jobTitle=Research+Fellow+%28Data+and+Democracy%29
Post #2273673
‘Going to the cloud’: renting servers, or integration of deeply proprietary services? “both options go by the same name, and organizations often slide from the first into the second without realizing the fundamental difference, until it’s too late” - @C__CS https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2645879#d1e228
Post #2172098
Trump lets down the Rust belt already.
Post #2041819
Palantir sells AI tool to the Met Police to discover bent coppers, trawls over presumably IT &amp; telemetry data that few look at, starts hundreds of investigations for non compliance, WFH, roster fraud, and dozens related to… undeclared membership of the Freemasons? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/25/met-police-investigates-hundreds-officers-palantir-ai-tool