Discussions around data sovereignty have taken centre stage in the EU in recent years.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is launching its ‘Sovereign Secure Cloud’ offering in Europe, as the region tries to tighten its reigns on data and privacy.

TCS’ new launch is designed specifically for governments, public sector enterprises and regulated industries, the company said. It combines sovereign cloud architecture with AI capabilities to enable sovereignty across data, operations and digital infrastructure.

The new offerings are expected to help European organisations be digitally autonomous and enhance security. Sovereign Secure Cloud is launching in Europe today (26 May), following successful rollouts in India in 2025, as well as Kenya, East Africa and the Philippines.

According to the company, which operates a global delivery centre in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, the new offering comprises of national sovereign cloud layers, that enable country-specific localisation while bringing operations under a unified control plane.

“European organisations are looking to strike a balance between addressing supply chain and sovereignty risks while ensuring leverage of frontier technologies to be globally competitive,” said Sapthagiri Chapalapalli, TCS’ head of Europe.

Data sovereignty has taken centre stage in the EU in recent years after growing geopolitical tensions stemming from the US, as well as Big Tech corporations, who are increasingly found to be non-compliant with the bloc’s laws.

Last year, France and Germany announced a joint taskforce on digital sovereignty, aiming for a more competitive and sovereign Europe.

TCS, meanwhile, is also introducing the a new framework in the EU to help organisations become a “minimum viable sovereign enterprise” by helping find a balance between control and flexibility.

TCS generated more than $30bn in revenue during its 2025 fiscal year. The company operates 58 offices across Europe. Last year, it announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs over the course of the year.

Earlier this year, the company took on OpenAI as its first customer in its data centre business Hypervault, with an initial commitment of 100MW of AI capacity.

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Off-prem

Britain’s ‘free’ internet economy is powered by invisible data extraction that feeds advertisers, AI firms, and digital platforms

Brits are apparently giving away the equivalent of a retirement fund every time they mindlessly hammer “Accept All Cookies” just to read a recipe online.

A new white paper [PDF] from the Web3 Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit pushing blockchain-based alternatives to today’s platform-dominated internet, claims that the average person in the UK and across Europe generates $1,604 a year in commercial value for the data-hungry machinery of the modern internet, rising to an inflation-adjusted value of $189,405 over a 60-year “digital lifetime.”

In other words, your browsing history may now be outperforming your pension.

The paper argues that internet users continue to treat digital services as “free” despite effectively paying with a constant stream of behavioral data, prompts, preferences, location history, clicks, searches, messages, purchases, and whatever cursed thing they typed into ChatGPT at 2am.

“The implicit bargain of Web2 was simple: free services in exchange for invisible extraction,” the report states. “This paper argues that the bargain was never free.”

According to the report, the modern data economy now extends well beyond Silicon Valley social networks to include banking, insurance, healthcare, AI systems, enterprise software, and data brokerage markets. Put another way, your Tesco Clubcard is probably building a more detailed profile of you than your GP.

The report’s main benchmark, called Personal Data Annual Value (PDAV), is meant to estimate the commercial value that firms squeeze out of individual users each year across advertising systems, AI platforms, APIs, enterprise software, hardware ecosystems, and inferred behavioral profiling.

Unlike earlier advertising-focused studies, the paper argues AI has fundamentally changed the economics because human-generated data is no longer just fueling targeted ads – it’s now training models, improving recommendations, building predictive systems, and helping create new forms of machine intelligence.

The paper also takes aim at the internet’s increasingly fictional idea of “informed consent.” According to the report, nine in ten users accept privacy policies in under ten seconds, while only between 1 and 3 percent read them in full. Facebook’s privacy policy reportedly ballooned from 1,137 words in 2005 to more than 7,000 words by 2025 – long enough that the average reader would need nearly an hour to get through it all.

“The result is an opaque market in which users supply a core input while others capture most of the economic return,” the report says. 

The Web3 Foundation stops short of claiming users are literally owed a six-figure payout from Meta or Google, noting the figures are intended as a benchmark rather than a direct cash entitlement. Still, it argues the current internet economy represents “a vast transfer of value from individuals to companies” carried out with little visibility or bargaining power for the people generating the data in the first place.

So while Britain keeps pushing digital ID and AI adoption, Silicon Valley appears to be monetizing the population one cookie pop-up at a time. ®

The strangest moments in my travels never began on the plane or even at passport control, but immediately after leaving the airport. It’s like you’re already in a new country, there’s a different language, a different air, a vacation or a work trip ahead, but instead of calmly going to the city, you’re standing in the middle of the terminal and looking for internet access.

I once spent almost forty minutes searching for a SIM card after a night flight. In one place, they only sold tourist plans at extremely high prices, in another, the terminal wouldn’t accept my card, and in a third, they tried to explain the fare conditions to me in the local language.

I’ve tried roaming too. It seems convenient until the notification from the bank arrives. A few trips taught me to quickly turn off mobile data and start hunting for free Wi-Fi.

Before the next trip, I decided that there had to be an easier way. Without plastic SIM cards, mobile phone shops, and endless searches for Wi-Fi after boarding. That’s how I decided to try eSIM Plus for the first time.

What is eSIM and How Does it Work?

To be honest, I used to imagine eSIM as something from the category of features that only tech bloggers use. It seemed like it would take a long time to figure out the settings, connectivity, and compatibility. But at some point, it became clear: this has long been common for travel.

It turned out that eSIM is a digital SIM card built directly into the phone. That is, no physical SIM card that you can lose at the airport or accidentally leave in your jacket pocket after changing your SIM. Instead, you just buy a data plan online, get a QR code, and add it as a new line in your smartphone settings.

I was surprised by how quickly everything connected. In just a few minutes, the Internet is ready to work. Moreover, the main SIM card stays active in the phone. This was especially convenient for me: bank notifications, Telegram, and work accounts continued to work as usual.

What is eSIM Plus?

With eSIM Plus, everything turned out to be pretty straightforward — without the extra steps and confusion I’m used to with travel SIM cards. On the platform, you can select either a specific country or a regional package. This is convenient if the route is not limited to one point: today you’re in one country, in a couple of days you are in another, and you do not need to solve the issue with the Internet every time.

The whole process is completely online. Payment, plan selection, and a QR code for activation appears immediately. You just add it to your phone’s settings, and the new line is ready to work. No visits to stores, no queues, and no attempts to explain to the seller that you need the Internet “without difficult conditions.”

There are also global plans, which are especially helpful on longer trips when the route is not pre-scheduled by day. You can connect the package once and not return to this issue in each new country.

How to Install and Activate eSIM Plus

In the case of eSIM Plus, the installation process is quite simple:

Step 1: Choose a plan

First, you need to log in to eSIM Plus and select the appropriate package. This can be done by country or by region at once, for example, if you plan several transfers or a trip to different cities. Each tariff has a data volume and expiration date, and it is important to estimate in advance how much Internet you will really need. After the selection, everything is standard — online payment, without additional steps.

Step 2: Install eSIM

Immediately after the purchase, a QR code for activation appears in your personal account. You don’t need to forward it somewhere or wait for it separately — it’s available immediately. Next, everything is done in the phone settings: Mobile settings → Add eSIM → Scan the QR code from eSIM Plus.

Step 3: Activate and start mobile data

After the eSIM is added, it must be enabled as a line. In the settings, eSIM Plus is selected as the source of mobile data. You also need to enable data roaming — without this, the Internet in another country will not work. Usually, the network connects automatically within a minute or two after landing, and the phone immediately starts working through a local partner operator.

As a result, the whole process boils down to three steps: buy a tariff → scan a QR code → turn on the line.

My Experience of Using eSIM Plus While Traveling

I tested eSIM Plus during a trip to Turkey — the route was simple: a few days in Istanbul, then Antalya and a couple of short trips along the coast.

In Istanbul, it all started at Sabiha Airport. This time, the phone already had internet access. Without making any unnecessary attempts to connect to the airport Wi-Fi, I immediately ordered a car and went to the exit, while people were still picking up the signal at the walls.

Everything worked smoothly in the city. Maps were opened immediately, Telegram didn’t lag, and routes were built without delay. I made a couple of video calls — on the Galata Bridge, the second time in a cafe. The connection was fine, although uploading photos was sometimes slightly slower, especially in busy areas.

During the trip to Antalya, the speed difference became more noticeable, but it was quite expected. The Internet was stable in the city center, and in tourist areas, it sometimes dropped to regular LTE.

Once I worked from a small cafe in Antalya: I connected my laptop via hotspot, sent files, and calmly joined a conference call. Everything went smoothly.

The Result of the Trip with eSIM Plus

After the entire trip around Turkey, from arriving in Istanbul to moving around Antalya, it became clear that eSIM Plus primarily removes unnecessary hassle with mobile internet.

At the airport, the connection appeared immediately, without searching for Wi-Fi and buying a local SIM. During the trip, the internet simply worked: navigation, instant messengers, calls, and work through a hotspot did not require any additional settings. In some places, the speed dropped to LTE or the network could disappear for a short time, but it looked like the usual behavior of mobile communications, without major issues.

The main result of the test is that the Internet stopped being a separate task during travel. Once everything is set up in advance, you can just use it along the route.

If you have ever scrolled through a YouTube Music playlist wishing you could just sort it alphabetically, we have some good news! YouTube Music is rolling out new sorting options for playlists, and yes, it has only taken about a decade.

As first spotted by PiunikaWeb, users are now seeing three new sorting options: Title, Artist, and Album, in addition to the four existing options: Manual, Top Voted, Newest First, and Oldest First.

New sorting options for YouTube Music are still rolling out

The new options were first spotted by a Reddit user running YouTube Music version 9.20.52 on Android. However, this appears to be a server-side rollout, meaning the update is not tied to a specific app version.

You could be on the exact same version and still not see the new options yet. So if you don’t see the new sorting option yet, it is not just you. A wider rollout is expected over the coming weeks.

A feature this basic should not have taken this long to arrive

This might sound like a small update, but YouTube Music users have been asking for this for years. Spotify and Apple Music users have had alphabetical sorting for over a decade, making YouTube Music’s absence of this feature genuinely baffling.

The reactions to the new options have been positive, though plenty of users also pointed out that this should have been available from day one. Either way, if you have a sprawling playlist that has been driving you mad, keep an eye on your app updates.

YouTube Music has been adding features lately while also raising its prices. The platform now lets Premium subscribers generate AI playlists just by describing a mood or genre. The catch is that the individual plan went up to $12 a month earlier this year, so you will be paying more to access it.

AI is changing how tenders are written but not how they’re evaluated in Ireland. That gap is becoming a problem says BidReview founder Tony Corrigan.

Until very recently, the biggest challenge in public procurement was getting SMEs to compete at all. The submission process was torturous, the success rate was low, and most business owners took one look at the process and decided their time was better spent elsewhere. I spent decades trying to streamline the workflow, but it didn’t really change anything.

Then AI arrived, and everything changed.

Through 2024 and 2025, companies that had never tendered before started feeding sales collateral into ChatGPT and passing the results into submissions. Today, a bidder can choose from dozens of AI-powered proposal platforms that will generate a full response from the barest scrap of input.

I evaluate tenders for a living, and from the buying side of the table, the volume has exploded. Competitions that attracted three or four bids in 2023 are now attracting twelve or fifteen. In one recent evaluation I took part in, roughly 30pc of the submissions were entirely AI-generated, another 40pc were largely AI-generated, and only the last 30pc had been meaningfully written by a human.

Buyer concerns

Buyers have started to notice. Two things worry them.

The first is what happens to their RFP documents once a supplier feeds them into a multi-tenant AI model they don’t control. Clauses restricting the use of AI in proposal preparation are now appearing in more RFPs. In theory, suppliers aren’t penalised for declaring it. In practice, AI-generated copy has a fingerprint, and I wouldn’t bet against some evaluators being more sceptical about claims in a submission that has been obviously ChatGPT’d end to end so that they don’t even have to get into evaluating the proposal.

The second and more serious concern is what the AI puts in that was never true. The polite term is hallucination. In a procurement context, that word is far too soft. What’s actually happening is that a supplier with real gaps in experience, capability or resource has those gaps plastered over by a model trained to produce a plausible-sounding response. The bid reads well. The business behind it may not be able to deliver. In the best case, the buyer wastes time evaluating a proposal that was never at the races. In the worst case, they award a contract to a supplier who can’t fulfil it.

The supply side of the market has been transformed. The evaluation side has not moved. Every tender I have evaluated this year has been read, scored and debated by human beings, sitting in a room or on a call, working line by line. There are no widely adopted AI evaluation tools, and I don’t expect them anytime soon. If a buyer outsourced their judgement to a model and a losing supplier found out, the fallout would be severe. AI’s well-known tendency to produce agreeable answers is a feature when you’re drafting sales copy and a catastrophic bug when you’re deciding who gets a €250,000 contract.

So, we now have a market in which it takes no time at all to produce a credible-looking bid, and exactly as long as it ever did to evaluate one properly. The volume has quadrupled. Indeed, there’s a tendency among evaluators to disqualify bids on the basis of qualification criteria and precedent contracts. And the buyer’s best defence against a flood of generic, plausible, interchangeable submissions is the one thing that has been a feature of public procurement for as long as I’ve worked in it: retreating to the suppliers they already know.

Past delivery wins

Fewer than 3,000 businesses have recorded a public sector contract win on this island in the past two years. That is a fraction of the companies that are perfectly capable of delivering. Evaluation panels score on evidence of past delivery, and past delivery almost always means past delivery for someone else. The consequence, over time, is supply chain concentration: buyers end up dependent on a narrow pool of established suppliers, pricing power shifts, flexibility reduces, and when disruption hits, there are no well-developed alternative relationships to fall back on.

The arrival of AI has not broken this pattern. It has reinforced it. When an evaluator is faced with fifteen submissions, several of which are visibly template-generated and indistinguishable from each other, the rational response is to weight known suppliers even more heavily.

None of which is an argument against AI in tendering. The first draft of a modern proposal should almost certainly be written with AI help; anyone competing without it is now at a real disadvantage. But the quality gap between “the AI wrote a comprehensive answer” and “this is a bid that will actually win” is the whole game, and nothing in the current toolkit is closing it.

In a market worth €22bn on this island, where one in four competitions still attracts only one bid or none, the problem isn’t that we need more proposals. We need a way to tell which of the ones we have are any good. Until the evaluation side catches up with the drafting side, the asymmetry will keep widening, and the companies that already had the advantage will keep extending it.

Tony Corrigan is the founder of BidReview.ai, an AI-powered platform that independently scores tender submissions against evaluators’ own criteria. He previously founded TenderScout, having started his career at IBM.

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Shopping for contact lenses online can be convenient and cost-effective, but it’s important to do some research before you order contacts online. Unlike buying in a store, you won’t have immediate access to an optometrist for guidance, so taking a few key factors into account can help ensure you get the right lenses for your needs.

Prescription and brand compatibility: Before you purchase your contacts online, be sure to have a valid contact lens prescription from your eye doctor. Additionally, it’s best to stick to the brand and specification suggested by your doctor, as different materials, water content and oxygen permeability levels can affect comfort and eye health.

Pricing and discounts: While online retailers often lower prices than brick-and-mortar stores, it’s worth comparing costs across multiple sites. Look for discounts on bulk orders, subscription savings or rebates from manufacturers. However, be cautious of deals that seem too good to be true, as some unauthorized sellers may offer counterfeit or expired lenses.

Shipping and return policies: If you wear contacts daily, factor in shipping times to avoid running out unexpectedly. Some retailers offer expedited shipping or auto-replenishment services for added convenience. Also, be sure to check the return policy in case you receive the wrong prescription, a damaged box or uncomfortable contacts. You’ll want a hassle-free way to change or return your order.

Customer reviews: Not all contact lens retailers are reputable. Choose sites that require a prescription verification process, have clear customer service policies and are approved by regulatory agencies like the FDA. Reading customer reviews can also give insight into the retailer’s reliability, shipping times and overall service quality.

Insurance and HSA/FSA eligibility: If you have vision insurance or a health savings account or flexible spending account, check whether the retailer you choose accepts them. Some sites allow you to apply your benefits directly at checkout, while others may require reimbursement. Taking advantage of these options can help you save on out-of-pockets costs.

Read more: No Prescription Needed: The 8 Best Places to Buy Reading Glasses Online