The Home Office insists the transition to a digital-only system of immigration status is going smoothly. For @politico.eu I ask: if the department is so confident, why won't it publish evidence to back that up?
www.politico.eu/article/home...

NEW: Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who led a bipartisan "free speech" delegation to Brussels, London, and Dublin this week, says he's returning to Washington unconvinced that Europe's new online safety laws won't violate Americans' free speech.
www.politico.eu/article/trum...

Petition to repeal the OSA now racking up signatures after months of zero traction. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/72...
Organiser Alex Baynham told me it had 92 signatures 1 July but had seen "exponential growth" since, with another spike over the weekend after Children's Codes came into force.

More in today's MTUK: pro.politico.eu/news/200873

SCOOP: Campaigners are threatening to refer Meta to the ICO if it doesn't state a formal intention to allow users to opt-out of targeted ads after allegedly "stalling" on more than 10,000 requests. This morning they're doorstepping Meta's London office bearing these...

A good old-fashioned fact check in today's @politico.eu MTUK, and apologies where apologies are due

SCOOP for @politico.eu: GP leaders are drafting a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner alleging that NHS England broke the law by training generative AI model Foresight on patient records.

www.politico.eu/article/doct...

From @mizyjudah.bsky.social: the methodology the UK gov used to calculate how much civil service work can be done by AI assumes that 62% of the work done by the most junior civil servants is "routine" (i.e. AI can do it) www.politico.eu/article/uk-g...

SCOOP for @politico.eu this morn: The gov's claim (still doing the rounds) that digital overhaul of the public sector could yield £45bn in productivity savings assumes that the least senior civil servants spend 62% of their time on routine, and thus automatable, tasks

Thanks to @mizyjudah.bsky.social and @politico.eu for writing up my thoughts on the governments recent immigration announcements and the effects they will have on our world leading university sector and the tech ecosystem more generally.

EXCLUSIVE: Technologists, digital rights activists, legal experts & founders sound the alarm over Britain's "unchecked dependence" on US Big Tech in a letter to Starmer shared with @politico.eu this morn:

On age verification, ORG is concerned about a race to the bottom as third-party vendors offer cheap services at the expense of robust security and accuracy, and the framing of privacy-enhancing technologies as "circumvention" tools.

Report also argues that ambiguity over what precisely constitutes acceptable content encourages platforms to "err on the side of disproportionate caution" by preemptively over-moderating perfectly legal expression, with no clear means of redress for those affected (the so-called "bypass strategy")

NEW: @openrightsgroup.bsky.social intervenes in Online Safety Act debate with report out this morning, for @politico.eu

eg

+ risks to users (like skills fade),
+ unsafe use (eg under-trust of AI outputs, something that can be seen in the evaluation),
+ & new failure modes (hey, could Scottish govt end up relying on AI tools built by UK govt to do policy work? can't see how that could go wrong...)

Transparency could also be a double-edged sword here: @gavinfreeguard.bsky.social says openness needs to be balanced against risk of opportunistic stakeholders figuring out ways to game the system.

The subjunctive is doing some heavy lifting there (that much-queried £45bn in public sector productivity savings stat is still doing the rounds) and DSIT didn't use a control group, looking instead at past data on how long it took officials to thematically sort consultation responses.

By me for today's @politico.eu U.K Morning Tech: DSIT reveals its Consult AI tool was used to parse a live public consultation for the first time. Claims Consult could save civil servants some 75,000 days of analysis every year.

📢 Today is my last day at @semafor.com after a year of learning from some of the best in the biz.
I’ll be joining @politico.eu as a tech reporter from May 12. Inbox is open so if you’re in/into tech politics (both big and small “p”) and policy, please say hello - always up for coffee.

latest on @semafor.com
Boston Consulting Group analysis finds minimizing damage from climate change requires investments in mitigation and adaptation equivalent to around 1-2% of cumulative global GDP, paling in comparison to costs of inaction.
www.semafor.com/article/03/1...

Hi Tony, I'm a (trans) reporter at Semafor looking into this. Wondering if you're willing to chat.

Heya, am a (trans) reporter at Semafor looking into this. Wondered if you might be willing to chat.