Focus

Dark patterns are interfaces designed to push users taking unaware or unwanted actions, potentially dangerous for individual privacy. The European Commission works on tackling and regulating these “deceptive design patters”; in fact, European Data Protection Board published guidelines to recognize and deal with dark patterns, especially highlighting the relevance of GDPR’s Articles 5 and 25, where the first regards the principles of fair treatment, transparency, purpose limitation and data minimization, and the second establishes essential data protection design requirements to build an interface and avoid deceptive patterns.

AI tools are applications developed on specific algorithms to perform tasks, respond to user inputs and solve problems by guaranteeing quality, effectiveness, decisive support into processes and constant improvement. The most used must-try AI tools play a game-changing role in the unfolding of daily activities, both for personal and business purposes. People use AI tools for several reasons and benefits, especially when technical and complex tasks have to get done, including fields like accessibility, automation, creativity, innovation, research, personalization, data analysis and predictive analytics.

Companies need strategic data management approaches to guarantee data integrity, reliability and accessibility supporting decision-making processes. Data Fabric is the solution, an approach aiming to create centralized and secure data sources and facilitate cloud-based end-to-end data integration. Data Fabric overcomes traditional data management’s obstacles and offers advantages like high scalability, fast, easy and mobile-friendly access to real-time data and information and team collaboration improvement, especially for remote working environments, thus making a big step further to accelerate digital transformation.

In June 2023 the most important European bodies welcomed a political agreement for a new legal framework on EU Digital Identity Wallet. This agreement reformulates the eIDAS Regulation by introducing innovation through a secure and convenient digital ID mobile app, allowing trustworthy access to public and private online services for EU citizens, residents and companies. The work for the EU Digital Identity Wallet is already unfolding thanks to the Europe’s Digital Decade programme, with the development of four large-scale pilot projects and a wide digitilisation plan to make the whole Europe move big steps further in the digital transformation.

AI is playing as a game-changer in the world of work requiring workers to learn and train useful soft skills to best deal with technological change. They are cross-skills essential to leverage AI, characterizing a person’s mindset in terms of communication, creativity, ways of thinking, decision-making reasoning and forms of intelligence. The AI era will continuously ask workers and companies to pursue soft skills education and training as a relevant goal to lead innovation.

AI plays a key role in digital transformation era, which needs stronger and smarter Artificial Intelligence systems to achieve profitability benefits that simple automation can’t afford, such as complex data processing, predictive analytics and automated cyber security. AI ethics is fundamental too, concerning considerations about the overall development, deployment and use of AI applications. Leveraging AI being attentive to ethical values will surely be a crucial lever for organisations willing to drive innovation, create and retain a competitive advantage.

Hybrid cloud computing is a flexible, versatile and efficient mixed computing model based on a combination of public and private cloud services and on-premise infrastructures. Hybrid cloud computing supports and accelerates business digital transformation, providing companies with solid guarantees in terms of security and control over sensitive data while increasing cost optimization, resources management, data recovery and availability of in cloud services and applications.

The European Commission welcomes provisional political deal on EU Digital Identity Wallet. This represents an important step towards the introduction of Europe’s first trusted, secure and convenient digital identity mobile app. It will allow all citizens, residents and businesses to have trustworthy access to public and private cross-border online services all over Europe, marking a key goal for Europe’s Digital Decade programme.

Nowadays data represent the most precious resource for companies. In this context Data Lineage comes into play: it’s a data science discipline that traces the whole data life cycle to correctly use them and exploit their business value. Companies use DL tools to understand data through a comprehensive data visualisation, improving decision-making processes. The adoption of solid Data Lineage strategies within companies basically leads to better performances for key data-related and data-driven operations.

GDPR’s Art. 39 designates the Data Protection Officer as the person in charge to manage, process and safeguard third parties’ private data, in compliance with data protection laws. Organisations dealing with large scale personal data processing must hire a Data Protection Officer considering the skills required to best fulfill the main responsibilities of this professional. Some example of large scale data processing concern hospitals patients data or banks customer data. The main Data Protection Officer’s tasks are the training of the personnel on data processing, the conduction of compliance audits and the interaction with data subjects and GDPR supervisory authorities for informational and organisational reasons.