Apple chairman Tim Cook is backing the EU KIDS Act, which would bring app stores and operating systems into scope for age verification. Age verification means identity verification. Under the KIDS Act, that check would happen at the device level, before anyone downloads an app. Cook discussed the proposal with Ursula von der Leyen in New York. This week he told Roberta Metsola and MEPs that Apple was “very encouraged” by it. He also reportedly called Australia’s age verification rules “world-leading.” The EU’s own age verification app was hacked in under two minutes in April, with scanned ID documents stored unencrypted.

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Tim Cook Welcomes EU KIDS Act Age Verification for App Stores

Von der Leyen posted about privacy, safety, and security for children. The law behind the post needs everyone’s age checked.

Aaron Sorkin directed his own Facebook movie so it would come out just before the midterms. Its hero is Frances Haugen, who campaigned for higher social media age limits and praised the UK's online censorship law. The film arrives as age verification digital ID checks spread everywhere. Meta has agreed to ID check or face scan every Facebook and Instagram user in 51 states and territories. Florida wants every user in the state age-checked within 30 days. The EU wants a state-certified credential before anyone can open a social media account. Hollywood is selling the story while governments write the laws. Sorkin has made a two-hour advert for speech control and the ID checks it thinks you should need to access social media...

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The Social Reckoning Wants the Speech Referees Back

Facebook spent years censoring plenty. The movie says the problem was that it didn’t censor enough.

Florida’s attorney general is asking a court to make Meta verify the age of every Facebook and Instagram user in the state. Accounts of under-14s that fail to verify within 30 days get marked for deletion. The motion goes further. It wants teen accounts to be subjected to a state-enforced lock-in to quiet mode from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. year-round, and during school hours on weekdays. It wants like counts hidden, autoplay and infinite scroll switched off, and a cap of 60 hours a month. Last week it also asked a court to order OpenAI to build age verification for ChatGPT. You cannot check teenagers without checking everyone. Every adult in Florida would have to hand over ID or a face scan to keep using these platforms and have access to speech.

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Florida Seeks Meta ID Checks For All Users

Florida is asking the court to make privacy the price of admission for Meta’s platforms.

A French mayor wants to cut minors off from social media whenever the streets get tense. France’s highest administrative court already ruled that blocking TikTok in New Caledonia was illegal. The Constitutional Council struck down the under-15 ban in August as disproportionate. Every time France has trouble (which is often) someone reaches for the off switch.

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France Riots: Mayor Wants Teen Social Media Access Cut

The proposed fix treats an entire generation as collateral damage in a fight over unrest.

Google is challenging a Las Vegas police warrant that demands the identity of everyone who searched a set of keywords. The case involves the July killing of a homeless woman. The keywords, the number of people affected, and most other details are sealed. Google calls it an illegal general warrant and says it is facially invalid under federal and state constitutional provisions. The filing also revealed that Las Vegas and Henderson police have served Google with numerous reverse search warrants before. A gag order barred Google from telling the public for months. Nevada has no law on reverse search warrants. No federal appellate court has ruled on whether keyword searches count as a search at all. The first hearing is set for late October.

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Google Challenges Las Vegas Keyword Search Warrant

The warrant wants a crowd, not a suspect, and Google is asking whether that is constitutional.

A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a sheriff's deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching license plate reader databases without a warrant. The deputy was parked by the highway when a Mazda SUV with California plates drove past. Judge Sara Hill said he followed it "for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate." Before he pulled the driver over, he ran the plate through Flock and VehicleManager. That search gave him more than 50 records of her movements across the country over a single month. He then used them to help justify searching her car, which turned up about 91 pounds of methamphetamine. Hill suppressed all of it. She called the technology "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance" and a "dragnet type law enforcement practice." She also wrote that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public road, but that plate readers become "constitutionally problematic" when police can "indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time." Other courts disagree. The Fifth Circuit ruled in March that periodic sightings of a car were not a search. A California federal court ruled that looking at eight photos of a car was not a search either.

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Federal Judge Calls License Plate Readers a Form of Mass Surveillance

The ruling found access to a month of license plate location data violated the Fourth Amendment.

A French court may fine Quad9 €580,000 for refusing to block pirate sites, and the Swiss privacy DNS resolver is now weighing a full exit from France. beIN Sports wants €10,000 per day per domain across 58 domains. Quad9 says it has no legally useful way to tell who is a French user, so it can't block just them. Blocking for everyone would hand French courts jurisdiction over the whole internet. OpenDNS already left France in 2024 over a similar order. Jurisdiction-specific blocking orders could push smaller and non-profit resolvers out of the market.

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Quad9 Considers Leaving France Over Website Blocking Order

French court asks Quad9 to block 58 domains or face a €580,000 fine.

A New Mexico jury found Meta liable for 43.9 million violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act. The state wants $35 to $40 billion. About a quarter of those violations are for not removing "hate speech" and "misinformation" fast enough. The state did not have to show anyone saw the statements or was harmed. It only had to show harm was likely. Then it multiplied the violations by the number of people in New Mexico. Meta says it has a First Amendment right to manage its platforms as it sees fit. Fining a company for slow takedowns of lawful speech is pressure to take down more of it. Remove faster, remove more, or pay by the head...

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New Mexico Found a Way to Fine Platforms for Speech It Didn't Delete

Lying about user data is one thing. Leaving up speech a state doesn't like is supposed to be protected.

Speech Police UK: Four West Midlands officers turned up at the home of a 15-year-old, arrested him, and took his phone and laptop. His offense was a set of Facebook posts about Conservative councillor Simon Bennett. One complained about shorts and sneakers at a scrutiny committee. Another had rabbit ears Photoshopped onto the councillor's photo. The boy was questioned, bailed, and banned from attending council meetings in Wolverhampton. Police have not explained why it took four officers or why any turned up at all. The Free Speech Union says there was plainly no offense and plans to sue for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment. The councillor says the police thought it merited an arrest. Police then wonder why public trust keeps falling.

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UK Police Arrest 15-Year-Old Over Posts Mocking Politician

In modern Britain, four officers, one teenager, and a rabbit-eared Photoshop job that somehow became a police matter.

Minnesota passed a law that bans AI from making fake nudes of real people. Many support the law. But look at how the law is written. It exempts any tool that requires "technical skill." So if you paint the image by hand, you are fine. If you ask an AI to make the same image, you owe up to $500,000 per violation. The law also covers shirtless men and swimmers. It has no exception for art, satire, journalism, or politics. It applies even when the person in the image said yes to it being made. Now the Eighth Circuit has blocked it for xAI while the appeal plays out.

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Minnesota’s "Nudification" Law Finally Runs Into the First Amendment

Minnesota wanted a bright line between consent and exploitation, but wrote one that reaches much farther.

The UK government wants a passport, a driving license or a face scan before you can open a new social media account. This is the same country that arrests people over tweets. Britain has jailed people for what they posted online and now the state wants to know exactly who is behind every account before the first post goes up. The ban covers Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X, and it is expected to start in spring 2027. Discord already leaked government IDs after it introduced age checks. There is no reliable, privacy-preserving way to verify the age of every internet user. A pile of faces and passports linked to social media accounts is a gift to a government that prosecutes speech.

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UK Plans Passport And Facial Age Checks For Social Media

Britain is building a surveillance tollbooth for the web.

British Transport Police scanned the faces of 537,697 people at London railway stations over six months. The trial produced one alert, and that alert was false. It cost £320,786 ($424,000) The police responded by extending the trial by four months and expanding the area. Since then, 926,912 people have been scanned in total. The system has made only three correct identifications, and every one of them ended with no action. The arrest column still reads zero. The watchlist, meanwhile, has grown from 381 names to 862. Transport for London welcomed the expansion and said it would tackle violence against women and girls. More than half of the police forces in England and Wales now scan faces in public, and every failed trial is treated as a reason to scan more of them.

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British Transport Police Facial Recognition Trial Scanned 926,912 People With Zero Arrests

Half a million faces scanned, one false alert, and still the experiment got an encore.

The music industry has asked the EU to add yt-dlp, an open source video downloader, to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. IFPI's submission even names the volunteer developers who maintain it. It also wants Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Verisign on the list, because apparently the company running .com is now a piracy concern. LaLiga has gone after NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark over affiliate blogs it never names or links to. A Spanish court already threw out its last attempt to fine NordVPN. The Commission insists the list makes no findings of legal violations. It just tells the world which lawful tools the entertainment industry would like to see gone...

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EU Piracy Watch List Targets YouTube Downloader and VPNs

An open source project maintained by volunteers has found itself under scrutiny from the global music business.

Emmanuel Macron says American free speech is "the opposite of free speech." In his view, freedom only exists inside a "common framework" set by the state. He compared posting an insult online to hitting someone in the street. Those are different things, because one is speech and the other is violence. He wants people punished for posting "nonsense," with state-backed fact-checkers deciding what qualifies. He wants a verified identity behind every social media account. He has written to Ursula von der Leyen demanding the DSA be enforced "much faster, much more forcefully."

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Macron Attacks Free Speech and Urges the EU to Censor Online Posts Faster

Macron’s theory of liberty begins where the government’s permissions end.

Emmanuel Macron says American free speech is "the opposite of free speech." In his view, freedom only exists inside a "common framework" set by the state. He compared posting an insult online to hitting someone in the street. Those are different things, because one is speech and the other is violence. He wants people punished for posting "nonsense," with state-backed fact-checkers deciding what qualifies. He wants a verified identity behind every social media account. He has written to Ursula von der Leyen demanding the DSA be enforced "much faster, much more forcefully."

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Macron Attacks Free Speech and Urges the EU to Censor Online Posts Faster

Macron’s theory of liberty begins where the government’s permissions end.

Google's Android developer ID requirement is now live. Apps from unregistered developers are blocked on certified Android devices in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The rule goes global in 2027. To register, developers hand Google a government ID, their legal name, address, email, and phone number. They also pay $25. This applies even if the app never touches Google Play. Google says sideloading isn't going anywhere. F-Droid called that claim "clear, concise, and false." Users who want an unverified app now face ten steps, developer mode, several warning screens, and a 24 hour wait. Google is clearly putting the squeeze on Android's openness.

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Google Android ID Rules Take Effect In Four Countries

Google’s identity checkpoint has arrived, and sideloading now comes with paperwork, warnings, and a waiting period.

A body linked to the UK Home Office has been keeping files on people who criticize government programs online. Between March 2024 and February 2025, the Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit logged 77 "observations" of critics. Most came from X, and some came from Reddit. Posts from or about groups like Hope Not Hate and Open Rights Group were also included. The entries were filed as "open-source complaints" and stored internally. The unit also tried to independently verify the claims made in them. The Home Office refused to release any of this. Rights & Security International won an appeal to the Information Commissioner's Office, and only then did the documents come out. Nobody knows whether automated tools found the posts. Nobody knows who the data gets shared with. You should be able to criticize government policy without ending up in a file.

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UK Government Body Kept Files on People Criticizing Prevent Program

The Home Office tried to keep the paperwork private until an appeal brought it into the light.

India has now pulled BitChat from its App Store through Apple. BitChat works over Bluetooth with no internet, no phone number and no account. That is exactly why Delhi wants it gone. In July the government shut down the network around Jantar Mantar, and protesters used BitChat to keep talking. The government has now gone after the network, then the code on GitHub, and now the app store. Each step has been aimed at the same target, which is leaving people with no way to communicate when the internet is cut off. Apple's notice says the app "includes content that is illegal in India" and never names any content. Apple simply complied.

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Apple Removes BitChat From India App Store At Government's Request

The BitChat removal follows India’s Telegram block and internet shutdowns during protests in New Delhi.

Reddit says it is ending RSS because scrapers abuse it. Reddit also licenses that same data for money. Reddit is killing RSS on November 13, the public API in March 2027, and old Reddit now needs a login. Its non-ad revenue grew 24 percent to $43 million. Money is not the problem. The open web is just harder to sell than a licensing deal. Reddit is not protecting the open web from scrapers. It is selling the open web to them, and everyone with a feed reader gets locked out of the sale.

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Reddit Is Ending RSS Support, Citing Scraping And Abuse

Reddit says abuse forced its hand, but the economics of an open web tell a sharper story.

Wyoming Committee Advances Bill Against Foreign Censorship Enforcement

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Wyoming Committee Advances Bill Against Foreign Censorship Enforcement

A state level answer to the increasingly global business of policing expression.