California’s New Age-Verification Bill Frees Linux But Expands Age Tracking to the Open Web

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California Wants an Age Tracker for the Whole 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.

Texas Sues Discord, Seeks Mandatory Age Verification

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Texas Sues Discord, Seeks Mandatory Age Verification

Texas is using a child safety lawsuit to try to end anonymous access to Discord entirely.

UK gov “consulted” the public on banning social media for under-16s, then announced they’d do it anyway before it even closed. Former Health Secretary Wes Streeting says it’s like Big Tobacco. Nonsense. It’s all about a push for mandatory digital ID checks for every adult to post online.

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Westminster Recycles Tobacco-Style Panic Campaign For Internet Crackdown

Somewhere in Westminster a whiteboard has "free speech = tobacco" written on it with three exclamation marks.

Big Tech just voluntarily handed UK speech regulator Ofcom preview access to new features before they launch. Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snap & YouTube all agreed. TikTok refused. Meta is now rolling out AI to scan Instagram DMs under the premise of detecting “sexualized conversations," right after quietly killing E2EE. This is how free speech and privacy die: companies willingly building the surveillance state for the regulator. All for “safety.”

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5 Tech Giants Let UK Speech Regulator Preview New Features

Five tech giants just agreed to show a government regulator their homework before turning it in, even though the law never said they had to.

South Carolina just passed a law requiring platforms to estimate your age every 100 hours of use, or any time they run their algorithms on you. 80% confidence minimum, $10k fine per wrong guess. The incentive is to collect more data about everyone, including kids.

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South Carolina's New Social Media Law Puts Every User Under Age Surveillance

A bill sold as child protection builds the legal framework for surveilling every user in the state.

Angela Merkel used her first major speech since leaving office to tell the EU to keep regulating speech online and not worry about getting it wrong. "We learn through mistakes," she said. The mistakes she means: satirists censored, opposition leaders silenced, a law her own government built to crush dissent.

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Merkel Urges EU to Keep Regulating Social Media Speech

The architect of Germany's original internet censorship law now wants the whole continent to stop worrying and learn to love the delete button.

A new lawsuit says Disney scans 75,000 faces a day at Disneyland without meaningful consent. The opt-out is a small icon at select gates, no verbal notice, no app alert. The suit argues guests should have to opt in, not find their way out of a biometric dragnet.

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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.

Canada's government posted "use a VPN to protect your data" the same week VPN companies threatened to leave the country over Bill C-22, which would force them to log that data. Windscribe called it a clown show. They're not wrong.

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Use A VPN, Says Canadian Government That Wants VPN Logs

The government posted "use a VPN" the same week two VPN companies threatened to leave rather than comply with a new surveillance bill.

Massie and Boebert's new bill effectively kills the third-party doctrine. No more warrantless access to your bank records, your browsing history, your location data just because it sits on a corporate server. The terms of service can't consent to surveillance on your behalf. Worth reading in full.

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The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data

The silent handoff from your bank, your carrier, and your ISP to the federal government would finally stop happening behind your back.

California wants mandatory age verification for every chatbot user. ...Every Californian, ID'd by the state before they can talk to an AI. The bill even defines what tone of voice is legal for someone who has not proven themselves to be an adult. One of the authors calls it child protection. It's a digital ID speech regime.

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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.

A federal judge blocked Arkansas Act 900, a law that would have forced platforms to ID visitors, build parental surveillance dashboards, and kill notifications overnight. The state called it child safety. The judge called it unconstitutional and blocked it a day before it took effect.

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Federal Judge Blocks Arkansas Social Media Law on First Amendment Grounds

The same judge blocked the same state's second attempt to regulate online speech in as many years.

DOJ Blocks France’s X Probe, Citing First Amendment

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DOJ Blocks France's X Probe, Citing First Amendment

The refusal puts American mutual-assistance treaties off the table for European speech prosecutions, and Paris is the first to find out.

The Parents Decide Act makes Apple and Google verify every user's age at device setup. The bill doesn't say how. It hands that to the FTC, so a federal agency gets to decide whether your face scan, ID, or credit card is the price of turning on a phone. It's called the Parents Decide Act but parents don't decide anything. The FTC decides what counts as age verification, Apple and Google decide how to collect it, and every American hands over ID to turn on a phone. Parents lose power. The state gains it.

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US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

Buried in the definitions is a mandate that reaches every laptop, console, smart TV, and car infotainment system in the country.

"Harvest now, decrypt later." Intelligence agencies are already hoarding encrypted files, betting quantum computers will crack them in ten years. Your medical records, legal docs, everything in Google Drive. Tuta Drive just launched to fix this.

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Tuta Announces Quantum-Resistant Encrypted Cloud Storage, Tuta Drive

Ten million users already trust Tuta with their email, and now the same quantum-resistant math covers everything they store.

Three of the world's biggest ad agencies just settled with the FTC over colluding to defund publishers they didn't like. Dentsu, GroupM, Publicis. $81 billion in ad-buying power agreeing on which outlets get starved. They called it "brand safety." It was a blacklist.

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FTC Settlement: Ad Agencies Agree to Stop "Brand Safety" Collusion to Defund Media Outlets

The agencies literally quoted Fight Club rules to keep their $81 billion blacklist quiet.

Turkey is about to tie every social media account to a national ID number. Miss the three-month window and the account gets shut down. Justice Minister Gürlek says social media is "definitely not a space for freedom." The system he's building proves it.

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Turkey To Require National ID for Social Media Accounts

Turkey's government just found a way to put a national ID card on every tweet, post, and comment its citizens make online.

A San Francisco judge just locked a man out of ChatGPT without ever hearing from him, and the First Amendment question went unasked.

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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.

Von der Leyen says the EU's new age verification app will "shield children." What it actually does: routes every adult through a government ID check to use the internet. She compared it to the COVID pass. That's not reassuring.

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EU Launches Age Verification App

The Commission built the app on the same architecture as its planned continental digital identity wallet. That's not a coincidence.

Britain has developed a very specific institutional reflex. When its agencies fail catastrophically, the state responds by expanding surveillance of the general population. When the public expresses anger about those failures, the state responds by censoring the expression of that anger. UK Southport Inquiry Pushes Mass Surveillance and VPN Restrictions

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UK Southport Inquiry Pushes Mass Surveillance and VPN Restrictions

Every agency involved had the information to stop the Southport attacker, and the inquiry's answer is to track what the entire country browses...

Massachusetts House Passes Social Media Age Verification Digital ID Bill

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Massachusetts Social Media Age Verification Bill

Every adult in Massachusetts would have to hand their ID to a tech company just to keep scrolling.