Newsletter: The Pope, the cloud, and your data after you die

Good morning!

On Monday, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, addressing human dignity and the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. It’s a remarkable document—and one that I recommend reading in full.

Tech Policy Press contributors saw much to admire in it, but were also left with questions. We had four pieces that took up the encyclical this week:

• Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum helped reshape labor rights after the industrial revolution. Daniel Dobrygowski, an author, attorney and educator, makes the case that Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas could do the same for AI governance—and arrives at exactly the moment people are ready to push back on techno-optimism.
• Indeed, when tech execs tell college graduates to seize 'agency' in an AI future they call 'inevitable,' students hear the contradiction, writes Mark MacCarthy, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in the Graduate School’s Communication, Culture, & Technology Program and in the Philosophy Department. So does Pope Leo XIV, whose new encyclical warned of AI risks becoming “an accelerator of injustice” without protections for workers.
• Pope Leo XIV's encyclical calls for AI that protects human dignity. But who's responsible for delivering it—users or designers? José Marichal, a professor of political science at California Lutheran University, warns against piling responsibility on individuals while systems are built to undermine their judgment. “We are in the early stages of understanding the affordances of AI tools. We are far from understanding which types of AI affordances enable human dignity,” he writes.
• What happens when AI starts reshaping spiritual life itself? Pope Leo XIV's encyclical named the material harms—labor, truth and warfare. Danielle A. Davis Canty, the director of technology policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, argues the AI debate is still missing an important dimension.

European tech policy debates heat up

Next week should be a big week in Europe, as the European Commission's tech sovereignty package is scheduled to be released on June 3. (The release has been postponed three times since March.) We had a wealth of pieces this week on European tech policy matters:

• Tech Policy Press senior editor Ramsha Jahangir and I used the podcast to report back from CPDP in Brussels, Europe's big privacy and data protection conference. The theme: "Competing Visions, Shared Futures." From the Digital Omnibus to tech sovereignty, there was much to discuss. Along the way, we feature voices from across the conference, including Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott, AlgorithmWatch's Oliver Marsh, the Knight-Georgetown Institute's Peter Chapman, the Center for Democracy and Technology's Marie Seck, Project SENTIMENT's Joel Baumann, Mozilla's Svea Windwehr, and conference director Barbara Lazarotto. The episode's centerpieces are two interviews: a conversation with European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski on whether the GDPR needs reform amid the simplification push, and a wide-ranging reflection from CPDP founder Paul De Hert on how the conference and the field of data protection have evolved over nearly two decades, the value of reasoned disagreement, and why Europe should be more self-critical.
• Ramsha hosted another episode this week, as well. The EU wants to triple data center capacity in five years. But how much energy and water do these facilities actually use? Nobody can say. We dug into the secrecy with Investigate Europe's Nico Schmidt and Leitmotiv's Christiaan van Veen.
• The EU has fined Chinese e-commerce giant Temu €200 million for failing to prevent the sale of dangerous and illegal products — the largest penalty yet under the Digital Services Act, and the first aimed at physical consumer harm, Ramsha reports. “If the Commission acts on the addictive design strand—Temu's gamification mechanics, countdown timers, and spin-the-wheel reward systems—it would be the first DSA enforcement action targeting dark patterns in an e-commerce context,” she says.
• The EU-US Data Privacy Framework underpins much of the annual trade between two of the world’s largest economies, writes Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott. But tension is mounting over questions about eroding US privacy standards under the Trump administration.
• When it comes to AI, the EU simply has to stop buying into self-interested corporate narratives around the AI Race—whether they come from the US or the EU—as synonymous with the public interest, writes Margarida Silva, a senior tech researcher at SOMO.

You are invited!

Independent researchers play a critical role in helping the public understand how digital platforms shape politics, public discourse, and democratic life. Yet access to platform data has become increasingly restricted, while legal, technical, and political pressures on researchers continue to grow.

This webinar, Access Denied: Barriers to Data Access and Threats to Tech Researchers, brings together leading experts to examine the state of platform-to-researcher data access and accountability. Panelists include Mark Scott(Atlantic Council and Tech Policy Press contributing editor), Courtney Radsch(Open Markets Institute and Tech Policy Press board member), and Brandi Geurkink (Coalition for Independent Technology Research).

This event is part of the Digital Governance for Democratic Renewal webinar series, hosted by Tech Policy Press, Columbia World Projects, and the Centre for Digital Governance at the Hertie School. The series brings together leading voices in technology, policy, and academia to explore how we can redesign digital infrastructures to serve democracy rather than erode it.

Register now.

Technoauthoritarianism in the UK

• As questions grow over its NHS data deal, Palantir’s recent contract losses in the UK highlight concerns about procurement rules, escalating prices and overstated benefits, writes Martha Dark, co-executive director at Foxglove.
• In the UK, facial recognition is everywhere—but no statute authorizes it. Police rely on their own internal policies, and a recent High Court ruling refused to look beyond them. Tech Policy Press fellow James Ballconsiders the legal vacuum enabling Britain's surveillance boom.

Latin America

• Everyone wants AI sovereignty, yet few agree on what it actually means. Maia Levy Daniel, a research affiliate at the Center of Technology and Society (CETyS) at Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina, examines how the term gets stretched across Latin America—and why treating sovereignty as binary obscures the harder strategic choices the region actually faces. “Clearly defining what AI sovereignty means in the region is essential, alongside a strategic articulation of the specific goals an initiative is trying to achieve,” she writes.
• Brazil’s new framework for regulating addictive design bans features such as infinite scroll and autoplay for minors, but its long-term impact will depend on how regulators define its scope and enforce the rules, argues Victor Oliveira Fernandes, Brazil's National Secretary for Digital Rights.

The digital divide

• The digital divide isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s about trust, skills, and the human support systems that help people stay connected, write Kyla Williams Tate, director of digital equity for Cook County Government in the Office of the President, and Colin Rhinesmith, director of the Digital Equity Action Research (DEAR) Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They urge policymakers to restore the Digital Equity Act to sustain the ecosystems that digital equity requires.

Your data after your die

• Your digital life doesn't end when you do—it keeps working for tech platforms. Indiana University’s Mike Bennett and Nicole Bennett make the case that digital afterlives are a civic infrastructure problem, not a personal planning one, and regulation is long overdue. “If our data continues to circulate, generating engagement and revenue long after we are gone, we must ask who is truly being remembered, and who is profiting from the act of remembrance,” they write.

AI governance

• A growing assumption in AI safety is that frontier systems will fail unpredictably rather than through coherent misalignment. But as Jennifer Kinne, a member of Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences for 20+ years in research operations, risk, safety and compliance, argues, governance may be missing a more dangerous failure mode: models that appear reliable while gradually drifting away from reality.

A huge thanks to Ben–and we’re hiring

After three years playing an integral role in building Tech Policy Press, Managing Editor Ben Lennett will leave his role at the end of June. Ben was the first person to join me full time at Tech Policy Press in 2023. At the time, he was working on a project that was similar in intent. We combined the best of what he was working on with the early iteration of Tech Policy Press, and that is the point at which the site as you know it today was born.

Since Ben joined, together we’ve built a team, a set of processes, a bunch of tools and necessary resources, and a host of relationships that have sustained us through three years of growth on every metric. Along with everyone on the team, I’m grateful to him for his commitment to Tech Policy Press and to the field—he’s edited the work of hundreds of people all over the world, and himself produced ~80 bylines on the site.

We’re hiring for the role—please share this announcement with anyone you know that may be qualified and interested.

What we're watching

In addition to the expected release of the tech sovereignty package, we’ll be digging into another document out of Europe. Last week, the European Commission published draft guidelines on trusted flaggers under the Digital Services Act, inviting stakeholder feedback by June 26 ahead of planned adoption later this year. The draft guidelines address the criteria for awarding that status, technical requirements for processing notices, and safeguards against misuse.

And via Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we note that there will be a hearing in the US House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection next week on issues at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.

We welcome contributor perspectives on these matters and more!

I wish you the best for the week ahead.

-Justin