Based in Germany, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. (GFF) promotes democracy and civil society, protects individuals from disproportionate surveillance, and advocates for equal rights and social participation for all. Its strategic litigation efforts concern the use of automated-decision making (ADM) systems by state and private actors (for example, in immigration processes or online content moderation).
GFF will continue and expand the work of its Center for User Rights to cover AI transparency and Big Tech companies accountability under European regulations such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the AI Act. The Center supports the wider civil society ecosystem in effectively using legal tools to translate research findings into concrete action and to respond to incidents such as the deplatforming of organisations.
This Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte's project aimed to shape jurisprudence in Germany and the EU, with relevance beyond platform regulation to areas like public administration, workplace software, and generative AI. The networks they built also allowed us to monitor the German government's testing of Aleph Alpha's potentially discriminatory AI model and to explore litigation we expected to have impact well beyond Germany.
GFF promoted a fundamental rights-based approach to automated decision-making systems and laid the groundwork for future litigation against restrictions on platform users' rights.
When the EU Council proposed "Chat Control", which would require messaging services to scan for child sexual abuse material, GFF helped shape Germany's position. It argued that error-prone AI filters would invade the privacy of millions of users and risk wrongly accusing them of serious crimes.
