If you are annoyed by websites that tell you that they and their many hundreds of partners totally respect your privacy, just remember that the reason they have to give you that exact number is the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive. So another #ThanksEU ;)

Seems my spam reports are upsetting a spammer who tries to subscribe me to weird mailing lists and swinger groups. LOL. Good thing is that EU regulations require a double opt-in so I just ignore the "please confirm" mails.

#SysAdminLife #MailAdmin #ThanksEU

@jwildeboer Please don't, you're on the right side.

Small anecdote: my 20-year old daughter is currently traveling in Asia. Some days back out of nowhere she said: "Europe is actually pretty cool: potable tap water and rule of law." (She had an accident and had to deal with local police.)
#thanksEU

Repost from https://todon.eu/@marcohackney/115992340469511552 with ALT text added. Unified chargers, free roaming, travel, study and work everywhere in the EU, simple bank transfers with SEPA and Wero. EU makes life better. It' definitely not GoodEnough™ in all parts.Work remains to be done. And that's worth doing!

Originally from a Facebook post by the EU Commission, ALT text added by me.

#ThanksEU

After the trade agreement with MERCOSUR, which took 25 years, now a trade agreement with India after 20 years of negotiations. The EU stoically pushes onward. When chaos surrounds you, build bridges and stability. #ThanksEU

https://www.politico.eu/article/india-slashes-tariffs-on-eu-cars-and-wine-in-exchange-for-steel-climate-concessions/

"The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-eu-made-apple-adopt-new-wi-fi-standards-and-now-android-can-support-airdrop/

#ThanksEU #DMA

#Increase, a transnational project to share seeds, increase biodiversity as citizen science. You get seeds, grow produce, share observations and share the next generation of seeds with more people. Financed also by the EU Horizon programme.

https://www.pulsesincrease.eu/de/about

#ThanksEU

The data your connected devices collect is yours.

"This Regulation ensures that users of a connected product or related service in the Union can access, in a timely manner, the data generated by the use of that connected product or related service and that those users can use the data, including by sharing them with third parties of their choice"

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:L_202302854&qid=1757595472752

More context: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-act

#ThanksEU #EUDataAct

€2.95B fine from the @EUCommission against Google. While their spindoctors tried to push the message that Europe will bow before Trump with regard to Big Tech in the past few days (and many news outlets happily ran that biased story).

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_25_2034

#ThanksEU

Did you know? If you have data that you want to share as a citable source, you need a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). One provider of DOIs is https://zenodo.org/ a project funded by CERN, OpenAIRE and the European Union. Register, add your data and get a DOI! It has Github integration, so you can just point it to a Github repo and whenever you add a release on Github, you get a DOI :) I will try to get the same functionality in codeberg/Forgejo.

Example: https://zenodo.org/records/16903106

#ThanksEU

You know how you often hear that the EU is hurting US tech companies a lot and in unfair ways?

Well.

Dutch company Booking.com BV is facing a kind of class action suit at the Amsterdam Court from 10.000 hotels after the European Court of Justice decided in September 2024 that the parity clauses (Best price) used by Booking.com are in violation of European competition law. #ThanksEU

https://www.mybookingclaim.com/en/

And when Facebook/Meta say the #TTPA [1] "is yet another threat to the principles of personalized advertising, ignoring the benefits to advertisers and the people they want to reach." they say exactly what it is all about and why the TTPA is such a DamnGoodThing™ to make radicalisation through very narrowly targeted ads less attractive. So. Yes. #ThanksEU

[1] TTPA explained https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=legissum:4741696

#ThanksEU :) #TTPA

"Social media giant Meta [Facebook, instagram, whatsapp] announced today that it will stop running political, electoral or social issue advertising in the EU from October, instead of complying with the bloc's transparency rules for political advertising."

https://www.euractiv.com/section/tech/news/meta-to-stop-running-political-ads-on-facebook-and-instagram/

Original press release from Meta: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral-and-social-issue-advertising-in-the-eu/

#ThanksEU

"Solar became the EU’s largest source of electricity for the first time in June 2025. National records for solar and wind rolled in across EU countries in May and June, pushing coal to an all-time low."

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-biggest-power-source-for-the-first-time-ever/

@tadcan Yep. And to protect your local installation, 800W is the maximum for that setup. That 800W limit is EU wide, not just Germany. These balcony units are legal to be used that way all across the EU :) #ThanksEU

A lot of the most vile and far-right content from "conservative" US news outlets is still not available here, almost 10 years after introduction of the #GDPR, as these outlets block traffic from the EU with "This content is not available in the EU, we are working on sorting this out" disclaimers.

I say #ThanksEU — this is actually a good thing :)

Thanks to real time SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area), buying a car for my daughter just took a few minutes. Transferred the money in real time with a few clicks and she will be driving back home in her first ever car now. #ThanksEU

Today was a good day for the #Europe I want to see more of.

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home

More than 1 million EU citizens supported the ECI (European Citizens Initiative) to ban conversion therapy.

#ThanksEU for creating this tool of direct democratic influence. Thank you https://act.lgbt for doing the hard work of setting this up. Thank you to all who signed.

We can become a better #EU this way. There are a lot of problems to solve. So let's go!

Also, also. Losing such a big chunk of the European grid in a matter of minutes did NOT lead to ripple effects east of France, it seems. Which shows how resilient the grid actually is. This failed in 2006 (see the link in comment #4 of this thread), so it seems lessons have been learned. Which is A Damn Good Thing. At least here in Germany we saw no outages at all, AFAICS. #ThanksEU!

9/n

But to sweeten the deal:

Apple: "the Commission has also closed the investigation on Apple's user choice obligations"

Meta: "the Commission also found that Meta's online intermediation service Facebook Marketplace should no longer be designated under the DMA."

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1085

And yes, Alphabet/Google could very well be next: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_811

In sum and IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): #ThanksEU :)

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