Really? this is being considered? I guess that means we go back to getting visa’s for the US. Or at least, I hope it does. With the EU leaderships current total disregard for privacy, they might not care. The EU has until December 31st, 2026, to agree to giving American authorities wide access to Europeans’…

Before you send your next Instagram DM, be warned: Whatever you share with that friend, influencer, or business could potentially be seen by anyone—including but not limited to hackers, law enforcement, or even Meta itself. As of today, May 8, 2026, Instagram DMs are no longer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). Your messages are vulnerable, whether you’re…

They don’t realise that VPNs are actually also security and privacy tools. Once the UK blocked a lot of content under ID control, people didn’t necessarily want the government to know about their LGBT habits, suicidal thoughts and other mental (and physical) health problems and used VPNs to be able to find the information they…

The District Court of The Hague has dismissed the claims of three citizens seeking to prevent the Dutch government from renewing its contract with Solvinity. But there’s still a sliver of hope for opponents. The plaintiffs tried to prevent the government from renewing its agreement with Solvinity, the hosting company for DigiD, the Netherlands’ national…

Source: To The Surprise Of No One, Cops Are Using ALPR Cameras To Stalk Their Exes | Techdirt

The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) imposes a fine of no less than 100 million euros on MLU B.V. for the transfer of personal data to Russia. MLU is the company behind the European version of taxi app Yango and is based in the Netherlands. With Yango, people in Norway and Finland book a taxi…

Great. So now an American company sees how often you are accessing Pornhub. More people in the UK will now be able to access Pornhub again, as long as users can verify their age on an iPhone. The website’s parent company, Aylo, has announced that it’s welcoming back “age-confirmed” iOS users after Apple launched a…

[…] A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There’s the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems,…

So it’s pretty bizarre that this is seen as a Good Thing – where the whole identity control / age verification is a terrible idea that doesn’t work, endangers children and is a target for hackers. Colorado’s “age-attestation” bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized…

Let’s stop calling it age-verification and call it what it is: identity checking. Ausweiss bitte! Proton’s boss has waded into the age verification fight with a warning that sounds less like child safety and more like an identity checkpoint for the entire internet. In a blog post on Thursday, Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, argues…

Not only is age verification unworkable and actively harmful to people, framing this kind of intrusion as though parents have anything to do with it is downright wrong.The parents are more than capable of parenting and don’t need this level of intrusion into their or their childrens’ lives. So maybe it’s time to stop punishing…

And the rest of the OS’s should stay away from this massive new privacy invasion technique as well. I don’t think people will like not being able to use their hardware. Source: GrapheneOS refuses to comply with new age verification laws for operating systems — group says it will never require personal information | Tom’s…

An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s browser even if they opted…

Age verification is a huge mess. How about regulating big tech instead and solving the cause of problem, not the symptoms? Many countries are pursuing social media bans for anyone under 16, but a recent poll is putting the effectiveness of such laws into question. The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity organization that focuses on…

Someone with sense. Age verification is a horrible mess. Of course right wingers and police forces tend to like being able to trample on privacy with impunity. Age verification is another way to destroy that privacy and control people, not a way to save children. The European Union should focus on regulating large social media…

A new class action lawsuit alleges WhatsApp messages are not private. Plaintiffs Brian Y. Shirazi and Nida Samson claim WhatsApp, Meta Platforms Inc., Accenture PLC and Accenture LLP wrongfully intercepted and shared private WhatsApp messages with third parties. Shirazi and Samson argue the companies marketed WhatsApp as a secure platform where users could send private…

As soon as they start mentioning child safety, start looking for how your security and privacy are being eroded. Warrantless scanning does not improve child safety – scanning with a legal basis (targeted suspicion) does. The big tech guys are not scanning your stuff for “child safety”. They are scanning it for information – you…

: As reported by 404 Media, the FBI recently extracted incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone. The user had even deleted the app off their device, which only added another hurdle into the investigators’ goals. You would think by deleting the app itself, your encrypted messages would be protected. As it turns out, however,…

Microsoft has introduced flex routing, which allows large language model (LLM) inferencing – producing outputs to users’ prompts – to occur outside the EU Data Boundary during periods of peak demand to “maintain a consistent Copilot experience.” The EU Data Boundary is a geographical boundary within which Microsoft stores and processes customer data and personal…

Age verification is the new control and monitor – everyone is rolling it out everywhere. 11 days ago Apple launched device-level age restrictions in the U.K. There were some glitches, reports the blog 9to5Mac. For me, the experience was an entirely painless one, taking less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was tap…

An investigation by Fairlinked e.V., a group representing commercial LinkedIn users, reveals that the popular business-focused social platform has been secretly collecting sensitive user data, potentially affecting 405 million people. According to the report, LinkedIn deploys code on its website that scans users’ browsers for installed software, including browser extensions. The code checks for thousands…