The following is an extract from an editorial in CICED’s newsletter, CICED NYT, published on 7 April.
With the arrival of total insanity in the White House, IT experts in Denmark and the rest of Europe have sharpened their warnings against dependence on the big US-based tech companies.
Most recently, Jacob Herbst, chairperson of the Danish government’s cybersecurity committee, has warned and urged the state and society to take into account that Donald Trump may decide to expand the trade war to the digital field. The probability is small, the interview emphasises, but it is there.
Then there is the whole issue of ‘the European regulation of the US tech giants with GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and most recently the Artificial Intelligence Act’, as emphasised by Jacob Herbst.
CICED has decided to follow the calls, and a first step is to move the publishing of CICED NYT to a GDPR-secure platform with a server located in Europe.
CICED has also moved its document storage to a secure cloud in Europe. We are gradually starting to use the European Mastodon instead of/alongside Facebook. When we write ‘together with‛, we recognise that virtually all our partners around the world and most of the people we want to communicate with are on Facebook. At the same time, Mastodon is not as user-friendly as its US-based counterpart.
We make regular use of LinkedIn, but only to refer to news on our website. And we will continue to do so for the time being.
We are aware that the Irish Data Protection Authority fined the Microsoft-owned platform €310 million in October 2024 for illegal targeting of advertising without consent. As far as we can tell, LinkedIn has changed its practices to comply with GDPR.
We will also try other European social networks such as Pixelfed and Loops. We have never been active on X/Twitter, but we have created an account on the alternative BlueSky. More on this later when there is activity on these networks.
