Op 25 juni gaf de auteur de openingstoespraak van de Surf Privacy en Security Conferentie, waarin hij opriep tot concrete actie op het gebied van digitale autonomie. Ondanks meer dan 50 eerdere presentaties over dit onderwerp, werd nu voor het eerst een volledig transcript gemaakt.
Background
- Bert Hubert is a well-known Dutch technologist, creator of PowerDNS, and an influential voice on digital sovereignty in Europe.
- SURF is the Dutch national research and education network (NREN), providing IT infrastructure to universities and research institutes—similar to Internet2 in the US or Jisc in the UK.
- "Digital autonomy" (digitale autonomie) refers to Europe's push to reduce reliance on a handful of large non-European tech companies for core digital infrastructure (cloud, data, identity, networking). The conversation has intensified since the Snowden revelations and with recent EU regulations like the GDPR and Digital Markets Act.
- This post is a transcript of Hubert's keynote at the 2025 SURF Privacy & Security Conference, where he argues that after years of talk, the time for concrete action on digital autonomy has finally arrived.
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In this weekly update recorded from a riad in Marrakech, Troy Hunt discusses the futility of trying to delete personal data from the internet, comparing it to removing urine from a swimming pool, while covering recent data breaches.