Feedback on GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, AI Act lawmaking submitted to European Commission's Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology on 14 Oct 2025
link to consultation |
download document
Cite as: Harshvardhan J. Pandit, "AIAL's Comments to the European Commission's Digital Omnibus (Digital Package on Simplification) Consultation" AI Accountability Lab (AIAL). https://aial.ie/research/policy/consultation-2025-EU-Digital-Omnibus-Simplification DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17352929
This document represents the answers prepared by the team at AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) for the European Commission’s Simplification – Digital Package and Omnibus Consultation, conducted by the European Commission as part of the lawmaking process. The consultation was open for 6 weeks from 16th September until 14th October 2025, during which the AIAL team submitted its response.
Regarding the scope and method of the omnibus proposal, AIAL has concerns regarding the justification of removing ‘red tape’ without a corresponding assessment of impacts to fundamental rights and freedoms. While the need for competitiveness is well understood, this lapse in typical rule making procedure is a severe risk to citizens as we increasingly see rights, especially those regarding digital services, healthcare, workers, and environment, are under threat owing to rapid technological proliferation. In this, the Commission’s recent measures to increase the adoption of AI also risks creating new forms of surveillance, control, and violations at scale. This is the very reason the Commission initially proposed and has been able to successfully adopt the AI Act, which has placed a specific emphasis on AI systems considered as high-risk and established the world’s first legal framework to address their harms to fundamental rights and freedoms. To now ignore these risks and their rapidly realising harms in the name of simplification would be a mistake and a step back for democratic processes that ensure citizen’s interests.
Further, the Commission also has proposed removal of key documentation from regulatory measures regarding GDPR, as a means to simplify the regulatory burden. We show with empirical evidence how this creates a severe risk to the organisations’ ability to address rights of the individual and also greatly lessens the degree of accountability present in the EU. This is highly likely to become an opportunity to further reduce the legal protections and to justify further dilution under the name of economic competitiveness. We therefore urge the Commission to avoid any reopening or dilution of the GDPR, and to instead focus on improved enforcement and simplification of compliance measures for organisations without changes to the GDPR.
In continuation of this, we also urge the Commission to not revoke fundamental protections regarding privacy afforded by the ePrivacy Directive. We welcome the resolve to address online consent popups and issues regarding cookies, but are concerned that the Commission is not addressing the underlying surveillance infrastructure that violates the privacy of citizens routinely and at massive scale. We therefore ask that the Commission directly address this core issue at source instead of tackling the symptoms (cookie banners). For this, we provide specific recommendations for how the Commission can utilise its proposed adoption of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in a way that works to uplift rights and freedoms of the individual without creating new risks and mechanisms for privacy violations.
In conclusion, we advocate for a cautious and pragmatic approach regarding any simplification as these directly affect fundamental rights and freedoms. While competitiveness is necessary, the Commission must support organisations in a way that advances rather than ignores fundamental rights from the onset. For this, we request the Commission to investigate other measures that reduce the effort of enforcement by supporting organisations with their compliance instead of focusing on reduction or dilution of regulations. Indeed, we feel that the EU can and should utilise its highly valued rights and freedoms as the very measures for measuring competitiveness and innovation, rather than focusing only on the artificially amalgamated metrics regarding its economy. We reiterate that a healthy and competitive EU is one where the competition comes from a high degree of assurance and accountability, and not where such measures can be easily sidelined for economic reasons.