New research by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and LobbyControl shows that Big Tech lobbying is pushing the EU towards sweeping deregulation of data protection rules.
The new publication finds signs of an intensive lobbying campaign between Big Tech and Germany and Ireland which are helping to gut fundamental European data protection safeguards.
“The Big Tech campaign to kill data protection in Europe” documents how MEPs are meeting with Big Tech lobbyists under the guise of boosting AI tech innovation.
The report documents extensive contacts between Big Tech companies and European policymakers over the EU Commission’s proposed Digital Omnibus.
The aim is to change and influence how personal data are used to develop and operate AI systems, warns CEO.
“It is a really drastic change,” Bram Vraken researcher and campaigner at CEO told EUobserver.
Introduced by the commission last November, the Digital Omnibus forms part of the EU executive’s wider drive to simplify regulation and strengthen European competitiveness.
The commission has presented the proposal as a way to make Europe “simpler and faster” and to “adapt” its regulatory framework to a “more volatile world”.
The Digital Omnibus “provides a simple, innovation-friendly environment for our European AI ecosystem to grow,” said commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen.
But the proposed changes potentially create broad exemptions from existing data protection rules for AI companies.
“What we see is a creation [of] this huge backdoor, which in many cases will make the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) meaningless,” Vraken said.
If adopted by the European Parliament, the changes would allow companies to collect people’s personal data to train and operate AI systems without consent.
Google and Meta
Under the parliament’s rules, all MEPs and their assistants must publicly declare scheduled meetings with lobbyists and third-country representatives and access to these information is public.
From November 2025, CEO and LobbyControl identified 655 meetings with lobbyists in the parliament, the report says. This comes as Big Tech lobby budgets hit record levels.
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