California
California Assembly Passes Under-16 Social Media Ban
Buried past the 76-to-0 vote is a clause letting the Attorney General widen who counts as a “covered platform’ without the Legislature voting again.
MembersStop Renting Access to Your Own Movie Collection
Running it yourself means a price you set, a door only you hold the key to, and infrastructure that answers to no one but you.
California’s New Age-Verification Bill Frees Linux But Expands Age Tracking to the Open Web
California fixed the most obvious problem with its age-tracking law but replaced it with a version that follows you across the entire internet.
MembersThe Strange Truth Behind The New WhatsApp Privacy Lawsuits
End-to-end encrypted, with asterisks nobody reads.
Disney Faces $5M Lawsuit Over Disneyland Facial Recognition
The lawsuit lands as facial recognition quietly becomes the price of admission at stadiums, airports, and more.
Tumbler Ridge Lawsuits Seek to Force OpenAI Into ID Verification, Police Referrals for ChatGPT Users
The remedies sought would end pseudonymous AI use and wire every ChatGPT conversation to a permanent law enforcement pipeline.
MembersThe Opt-Out Button Is Decorative: A Guide to Hardening Your Browser
The opt-out button you’ve been clicking is decorative, so here is the browser build that stops asking nicely.
California Lawmakers Advance Bills to Impose AI Chatbot Censorship and Age Verification
California’s new bills would let state lawmakers define, by statute, exactly how agreeable a chatbot is allowed to be.
California’s “Stop Nick Shirley Act” Would Penalize Journalism
The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this; a law that punishes speech before any court decides whether it was harmful.
A Court Banned a Man from ChatGPT. No One Asked If That’s Constitutional.
A California judge just decided who gets to use ChatGPT, and the person banned from it wasn’t even in the courtroom.
MembersHow Your Weather App Became a Surveillance Machine — and How to Escape It
The forecast is free, but you’ve been paying for it with every place you’ve ever visited.
The Verdict Against Meta and Google That Could End the Anonymous Internet
If the design-as-defect argument survives appeal, more than 1,600 similar cases waiting in courts across the country inherit a ready-made blueprint for killing anonymous speech.