Privacy
Xbox UK Age Verification Launch Locks Out Thousands of Players
The UK’s age verification mandate arrived as promised, and Xbox delivered it by ejecting players mid-session, stripping away chat, and treating 18-year account holders like suspicious strangers.
Colorado Senate Bill Would Require Apple and Google to Embed ID Checks in Operating Systems
Colorado’s OS-level age verification bill sidesteps the failures that killed its predecessors by making Apple and Google do the heavy lifting and outsourcing the problem to a more powerful set of defendants.
Newsom Backs Teen Social Media Ban After Daughter’s Birthday Party Phone Moment
The governor who couldn’t bring himself to say “put the phones down” at his own daughter’s party is now asking the state to say it for every family in California.
Zuckerberg’s “Fix” for Child Safety Could End Anonymous Internet Access for Everyone
Zuckerberg spent five hours defending Instagram’s design choices, and walked out having handed legislators and regulators their preferred blueprint for a national digital ID system.
EU Defends Censorship Law While Commission Staff Shift to Auto-Deleting Signal Messages
Brussels is pursuing Chat Control to surveil private communications while its own enforcers retreat deeper into encrypted, self-destructing ones.
Friedrich Merz’s Push to End Online Anonymity Has a Troubling Subtext
Germany already has laws that let politicians prosecute citizens for insulting them online and Merz just wants to remove the last step between a critical post and a knock on the door.
MembersThe Billion Dollar Business Of Breaking Into Your Pocket
A leaked dashboard screenshot reveals how commercial spyware silently installs via zero-click exploits to read encrypted messages and activate microphones.
Senators Talk Digital Freedom for Iran While Expanding Surveillance at Home
Their voting records read like blueprints for the same surveillance state they’re asking taxpayers to help Iranians escape.
Spanish Court Orders NordVPN and Proton VPN to Block Piracy Streams
The same blocking system that once took down Amazon, GitHub, and Cloudflare is now targeting the tools Spaniards used to get back online.
Macron Calls Online Free Speech Argument “Pure Bullshit”
The pro-censorship French president is now the most eloquent voice in the West for the idea that free speech, unregulated, is a problem to be solved.
UK Government Plans to Use Delegated Powers to Undermine Encryption and Expand Online Surveillance
Delegated powers mean the specific rules (what gets scanned, what gets flagged) get written by a minister, not Parliament.
Arizona Bill Would Require ID Checks to Use a Weather App
The bill would require parental permission or ID checks to open the calculator app that came with your phone.