The Digital Regulation Expertise Center (PEReN) and the European Commission are launching a hackathon aimed at dissecting the Tech giants (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, TikTok and others) with a view to the European regulation on digital services (DSA).
While the entry into force of the very restrictive Digital Services Act (DSA) is scheduled for February 17, 2024, PEReN is launching a fairly innovative hackathon, in collaboration with the European Commission, mobilizing the community of developers and researchers with the aim of develop tools to monitor the functioning of large digital platforms, and to uncover bad practices and violations of the new regulations. The initiative kicked off on January 3. Let’s talk about the details.
A revolutionary hackathon to scrutinize digital giants
Until February 3, 2024, PEReN is organizing a cyber competition aimed at developing new tools that will help understand how Tech giants operate. The hackathon takes place in two parts.
First, participants engage in a collaborative online sprint, which aims to “ co-build a suite of open source tools to collect, centralize and structure documentation for access to transparency data » online services. Collection modules, standardization tool, HTML and JSON are notably on the program.
On February 2, the “DSA RAG Race” will take place in physics in Brussels, where the selected participants will this time develop an AI allowing researchers to carry out more effective surveillance of the platforms covered by the European text. Among the giants targeted are Amazon Store, AppStore, Booking, Facebook, Google Maps, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Wikipedia and YouTube.
The DSA, a text that could ultimately change the digital landscape
The Digital Services Act continues the mission of making the European digital space more secure. It imposes on online platforms, among the largest among them in terms of their number of users and their turnover, obligations in terms of moderation of illicit content (for minors but not only), transparency of algorithms and citizen protection.
The hackathon aims precisely to prepare researchers for these new obligations and to help them conduct in-depth studies on the potential systemic risks of major digital players. The winners will share prizes with a total value of 7,000 euros.
Source : PEReN Hackathon
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