When the Escape Hatch Becomes the Target: Europe Declares War on the VPN
Age-verification laws drove millions of Europeans to download VPNs. Now Brussels has noticed — and the European Parliament's research arm is calling t...
privacy
91 articles on privacy.
Curfews, Kill-Switches and the Under-16 Ban: What Starmer's Social Media Crackdown Actually Does
Keir Starmer has announced that Britain will bar under-16s from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and the rest — complete with overnight curfews, anti-doomsc...
When the Blueprint Becomes the Battleground: Washington, New York, and the Fight Over 3D-Gun Files
Washington and New York have moved to regulate not just 3D-printed guns but the digital files used to make them. Banning a physical weapon is one thin...
When the Best Model in the World Vanishes in Three Days: The Case for Local AI
Anthropic's Fable 5 launched on June 9 and was pulled days later after a Commerce Department directive. Whatever you think of the policy, the lesson i...
The Domino Effect, 2026 Update: Five More Countries Mandate Age Checks for Social Media
Australia's under-16 ban came into force in December 2025. Six months later, Brazil, Greece, Turkey, and Malaysia have followed with their own age-che...
Spotify's Spam Flood: 57,000 AI Podcasts and the Collapse of Platform Trust
Spotify removed 57,000 AI-generated podcast episodes pushing illegal pharmacies and crypto scams — and the accounts it actioned jumped from 87 in 2024...
Brussels Pries Open WhatsApp: Meta Has Days to Let Rival AI Back In
Meta quietly evicted every AI assistant but its own from WhatsApp. On June 10, the European Commission gave it roughly a working week to reverse cours...
Scanning Before the Lock Clicks: The UK's Plan to Search Your Phone Before Encryption
The UK keeps circling back to the same idea: have your phone inspect your messages before encryption ever protects them. Client-side scanning is sold ...
The Same Day: A UK Cop Accused of Faking Evidence With AI, and a £140m Bet on Police AI
A Derbyshire officer is under criminal investigation for allegedly using AI to fabricate evidence across multiple cases. Days earlier, the UK announce...
Build the Database and It Will Be Abused: Cops Are Using Flock Cameras to Stalk Their Exes
An Institute for Justice study found at least 18 police officers caught using automated license-plate-reader networks to stalk romantic interests. One...
London Blocks a £50m Palantir Police Deal — But a Block Is Not a Ban
In May 2026 the Mayor of London's policing office blocked the Met's £50m plan to buy AI software from Palantir. It was a procurement decision, not a p...
Bill C-34 and the 'Missing Piece' Theory: What Canada's Digital Bills Actually Say
A viral theory holds that four Liberal bills — C-8, C-9, C-22, and C-34 — are snapping together into a Canadian digital-ID surveillance grid, with C-3...
When Transparency Becomes an Attack Surface: Maine's Breach Portal Goes Dark
Maine pulled its public data-breach database offline this month after someone planted fake disclosures naming VRChat and Discord. The episode exposes ...
Google Sues the Factory Behind Your Fake Toll Texts
Google has taken a Chinese-language phishing-as-a-service operation called Lighthouse to court, blaming it for the flood of fake USPS, E-ZPass, and to...
New York's FAIR News Act: When 'Made With AI' Becomes the Law
New York's FAIR News Act would force news organizations to label content substantially made with generative AI — covering weather, sports, and enterta...
Sovereignty Is a Login Screen: France's Linux Migration and the Day Microsoft Cut Off a Prosecutor
France is moving 2.5 million government computers off Windows and onto Linux, and the timing is not an accident. The push gathered force after US sanc...
Two Minutes to Break a Child-Safety Promise: The EU's Age-Verification App Meets Reality
Brussels unveiled a privacy-preserving app to keep children safe online and prove age without exposing identity. Within roughly two minutes, a securit...
The $130 Billion Question: Who Decides Where America's AI Gets Built?
The federal AI buildout promises 75-plus data centers worth $130 billion-plus, fast-tracked onto American soil. But the same number turns up in a stra...
To Protect Kids Online, Congress Wants to ID Everyone. That's the Trade Nobody Voted For.
A House subcommittee just took up 19 federal digital-media bills, including a revised Kids Online Safety Act and an App Store Accountability Act that ...
Connecticut Just Quietly Passed One of the Strongest State Privacy Updates of 2026
Connecticut's Governor signed SB 4 and SB 5 into law, significantly amending the state's consumer data privacy act and creating a new data broker law....
Five Eyes Warns China Is Recruiting Insiders Through LinkedIn. Your Job Profile Is Intelligence Data.
The Five Eyes intelligence agencies issued a rare joint bulletin warning that Chinese military intelligence is using LinkedIn, Indeed, and Upwork to i...
Amazon's Ring Is Scanning the Faces of People Who Never Bought a Ring. Now It's a Class Action.
A new class action over Ring's 'Familiar Faces' feature gets at the core problem with neighborhood facial recognition: the people being scanned never ...
Trump's New AI Executive Order Makes Frontier Model Security Review Voluntary. That's the Problem.
The June 2 executive order 'Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security' creates a voluntary pre-release cybersecurity review f...
The 'Your Phone Is Listening' Ad Tool Was a Scam — and the FTC Just Proved It
Cox Media Group marketed 'Active Listening' — an AI service it claimed could target ads based on conversations overheard by smart devices. The FTC fou...
A Whistleblower Says DOGE Copied Every American's Social Security Record to an Uncontrolled Cloud
Chuck Borges, the former chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, alleges that DOGE copied the government's master Social Security da...
China Breached the FBI's Wiretap System. The Targets' Phone Numbers Were Inside.
The FBI has told Congress that a Chinese intrusion into one of its internal surveillance systems is a 'major cyber incident.' The system — part of the...
California Just Fined GM $12.75M for Collecting Too Much Data — Not for Leaking It
California's $12.75 million settlement with General Motors is the largest CCPA penalty in state history — and the first built on the data-minimization...
Amnesty International: Generative AI Is 'Unlawful by Design' — Built on Mass Privacy Violations
Amnesty International's May 28 report 'Unlawful by Design' concludes that OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek built generative AI through systematic, u...
Palantir Built ICE a Deportation Map Using Your Medicaid Records. Here's How It Works.
ICE's ELITE tool — built by Palantir — populates a real-time map of deportation targets using data including Medicaid records from 80 million patients...
The Digital Euro Is Coming. Here's What a €3,000 Holding Cap and a Centralised Ledger Actually Mean for Your Privacy.
The European Central Bank's digital euro is scheduled for a 2029 debut with a €3,000 individual holding cap and a centralised ledger that grants autho...
FarSight: The Drone Surveillance System That Identifies You by Your Walk, Not Just Your Face
Researchers have built a drone surveillance system called FarSight that identifies individuals at long range by fusing facial recognition, gait analys...
The EU's Digital ID Wallet Deadline Is December 2026. Most Member States Aren't Close.
Every EU member state must offer a functional European Digital Identity Wallet by end of 2026. As of April, only four had reached public sandbox stage...
70+ Civil Liberties Groups Want Meta to Stop Its Facial Recognition Smart Glasses. An Internal Memo Explains Why They're Worried.
A coalition of 70+ organisations including the ACLU and EFF is demanding Meta halt its 'Name Tag' facial recognition feature for Ray-Ban and Oakley sm...
The EFF Says the SECURE Data Act Is Privacy Theater — Are They Right?
We covered the SECURE Data Act when it passed committee, calling it a meaningful step toward federal privacy law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation j...
The FTC Just Banned a Data Broker From Selling Sensitive Location Data. Here's Why That Matters.
The FTC secured a settlement banning Kochava's subsidiary from selling sensitive location data linked to millions of mobile devices — including data r...
Canada Found OpenAI Broke Privacy Law Training GPT-4. The Fix Doesn't Apply to the Models That Broke It.
A joint investigation by Canadian privacy commissioners found that OpenAI's collection of personal data to train GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was 'overbroad and ...
GDPR Breach Notifications Hit 443 Per Day — What Eight Years of Data Tells Us
European data protection authorities are now receiving 443 personal data breach notifications every single day — a 22% increase over last year and the...
Your Scattered Public Data Can Be Assembled Into a Digital Twin of You — Researchers Just Proved It
Researchers used LLMs, GANs, and cross-platform image matching to reconstruct detailed personal profiles from fragmented public social media data — ac...
GM Sold Your Location to Data Brokers While Claiming It Didn't. California Just Fined Them $12.75 Million.
General Motors earned $20 million selling OnStar driver location and behaviour data to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis while its privacy policy told c...
Vietnam Just Enacted Its First National Data Protection Law — Southeast Asia's Privacy Landscape Is Changing Fast
Vietnam has enacted its first comprehensive national data protection law, joining a wave of privacy legislation sweeping Southeast Asia. The law intro...
New York Is Coming for Your Face and Your AI Training Data — Two Bills Just Passed
New York's Senate passed the Biometric Identifier Privacy Act, requiring opt-in consent before companies can collect your facial geometry, fingerprint...
Colorado Just Scrapped Its AI Law and Started Over — Here's What Changed and Why It Matters
Colorado was supposed to be the state that gave America its GDPR-equivalent for artificial intelligence. Instead, the governor just signed a bill repe...
Cox Media Group Sold 'Active Listening' AI Ads — It Was a Lie, and the FTC Just Fined Them $930K
Cox Media Group pitched advertisers on an AI service that supposedly listened to consumers through their smart devices and used those overheard conver...
Georgia Just Made Chatbots Tell You They're AI — And It's More Significant Than It Sounds
Governor Brian Kemp signed SB 540 into law, making Georgia the latest state to require chatbots to disclose they're artificial intelligence. It sounds...
20 States, One Mess: What Every American Needs to Know About the Privacy Laws Now in Effect
Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island joined the club on January 1, 2026 — bringing the total to 20 states with comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Ark...
The Warrant-Free Surveillance Loophole That AI Just Made Catastrophically Worse
The government doesn't need a warrant to buy your location data, browsing history, or financial transactions — because it buys them from commercial da...
The AI Police State Is Already Here: How Axon, Flock Safety, and Motorola Are Watching You
Facial recognition. Behavioral analytics. Vehicle scanning 20 billion times a month. Predictive policing algorithms that flag you before any crime occ...
The SECURE Data Act Could Rewrite American Privacy Law — Here's What It Actually Says
House Republicans dropped the SECURE Data Act on April 22 — the most serious federal privacy legislation in years. It would give every American the ri...
Your Kid's School Uses Canvas. Here's What to Actually Do This Week.
About 8,809 institutions worldwide were named in the May 2026 Canvas breach — roughly 7,400 U.S. schools across all 50 states. If your child's school ...
The Take It Down Act Is Law — Now the FTC Is Telling Big Tech to Actually Comply
The Take It Down Act requires platforms to remove non-consensual deepfake intimate imagery within 48 hours of a victim's request. A year after Preside...
Google Is Paying $135 Million Over Android Data It Collected Without Your Permission — Here's How to Claim Your Share
A class action lawsuit alleges Google's Android OS secretly transferred user data to Google's servers in the background — even when phones were idle —...
'Netflix Watches You': Texas Just Sued the Streaming Giant for Spying on Users and Children
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against Netflix this week, alleging the company runs a secret surveillance program — collecting 5 petabyt...
Your Cannabis Dispensary Was Watching You — and Selling What It Saw
Stiiizy, California's largest cannabis retailer, secretly embedded tracking tools across its websites to monitor customer behavior, then sold that dat...
AI Is About to Make Warrantless Government Surveillance Exponentially Worse
Congress has temporarily extended FISA's Section 702 surveillance program twice this spring without the reforms privacy advocates have demanded for ye...
Anthropic Told the Pentagon No — Then the Government Tried to Destroy the Company
When Anthropic refused to let the Department of Defense use its AI for mass surveillance of Americans, the Pentagon labeled it a national security thr...
The FTC Finally Stopped a Data Broker From Selling Your Location Data — Here's What Kochava Was Doing
For nearly four years, the FTC fought data broker Kochava in court over its sale of precise location data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices....
275 Million Students, 3.65 Terabytes, One Extortion Deadline: The Canvas Breach Is Higher Ed's Worst Nightmare
ShinyHunters claims it stole 3.65 terabytes of data from Instructure's Canvas platform — 275 million users, 8,800 schools, and billions of private mes...
Pennsylvania Sues Character.AI After Chatbot Faked a Medical License — and This Is Just the Beginning
A Character.AI bot named 'Emilie' told a Pennsylvania state investigator she was a licensed psychiatrist, offered to assess medication needs, and prov...
ICE's $28.7 Billion AI Surveillance Machine: Palantir, Clearview, and the End of Anonymous Public Life
ICE's FY2026 budget is ten times its total surveillance spending over the previous 13 years combined. Palantir's ImmigrationOS tracks self-deportation...
Your Hardware Run Is Now a Police Record: Home Depot's Secret License Plate Surveillance Network
Home Depot installed Flock Safety license-plate readers at all 233 of its California stores without telling customers — then shared that data with law...
The 2026 Digital Therapy Wrap-Up: A Year of Breaches, Subpoenas, Suicide Lawsuits, and the Bots That Replaced Your Therapist
Talkspace transcripts in court. Hims & Hers breached. Character.AI and Google paying out on teen suicide cases. OpenAI fighting seven wrongful death l...
The World's Strongest Privacy Law Is Being Quietly Dismantled: How Big Tech Rewrote the EU's Digital Omnibus
The EU invented GDPR. It set the global standard for data protection, inspired privacy laws on six continents, and put real fines on companies like Me...
Mexico's Third Attempt at Mandatory Biometric Phone Registration — And Why This Time It Might Actually Stick
Mexico passed legislation on January 9, 2026 requiring all 130 million phone lines to be linked to a biometric version of the national ID — facial rec...
Britain Built a Surveillance System and Called It Child Safety: The Online Safety Act's Age Verification Problem
On March 25, 2026, the UK's ICO and Ofcom published a joint statement formalizing age verification requirements under the Online Safety Act. Platforms...
When Police Cast a Net Instead of Catching a Suspect: The Supreme Court, Geofence Warrants, and the End of the Fourth Amendment as We Knew It
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Chatrie v. United States on April 27, 2026 — the first major Fourth Amendment case the justices have taken up sin...
A Billion Identities in Your Pocket: Google Wallet Just Became India's Biometric ID Distribution Network
On April 28, 2026, Google announced that India's Aadhaar biometric credentials can now be stored in Google Wallet — making a US tech giant the distrib...
Your Therapist Now Has a Subpoena: How Talkspace Turned 8 Billion Words of Mental Health Confessions Into Court Evidence and AI Training Data
Every word Jennifer Kamrass typed to her Talkspace therapist ended up in court — produced by the employer she was suing. Talkspace says it has 'one of...
Your Developer Tools Are the Attack Surface: The Vercel Breach and the AI Supply Chain Problem
Vercel — the platform hosting millions of web applications — was breached through a chain that started with an infostealer on an employee of an AI com...
Congress Punted on FISA 702 — Your Emails and Texts Are Still Being Swept Up Without a Warrant
Congress failed to pass a 5-year or 18-month renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the warrantless surveillance progra...
$375 Million and Counting: Juries Are Starting to Hold Social Media Platforms Accountable for Teen Harm
Two landmark verdicts in April 2026 have cracked open a decade of platform immunity: a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million over child exp...
A Security Researcher Walked Through a Conference and Identified Every Stranger He Saw Using Meta's Glasses
At RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, ESET's Jake Moore paired Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses with commercial facial recognition software and identified people i...
New York Wants to Put a Surveillance Agent Inside Every 3D Printer
New York's 2026-2027 budget bill would require all 3D printers sold in the state to include mandatory censorware that scans every print job for forbid...
BrowserGate: LinkedIn Is Allegedly Scanning Your Browser Extensions — and Sharing What It Finds
A privacy investigation by German group Fairlinked alleges LinkedIn secretly injects JavaScript to scan over 6,000 browser extensions on visitors' com...
770%: The Staggering Rise of Government Requests for Your Social Media Data
New research from Proton reveals that US government requests for social media and tech company user data have surged 770% in the past decade — with 3....
God-Level Access: How DOGE Copied 300 Million Americans' Social Security Records to an Unauthorized Server
A whistleblower says a DOGE staffer copied every living American's Social Security record — names, SSNs, birth dates, addresses, citizenship status — ...
Incognito Mode Won't Save You from AI: Inside the Perplexity Privacy Lawsuit
A class-action lawsuit filed today alleges Perplexity was secretly routing your search queries to Meta and Google — even when you were browsing in pri...
The EU Just Put Snapchat on Trial: What the DSA Investigation Means for Your Kids
Half of all 10-year-olds in Denmark use Snapchat. The European Commission just opened a formal investigation. Here's what predators exploit, what the ...
The Algorithm Is on Trial — and It Just Lost
A jury just ruled that Meta and YouTube's recommendation algorithms are defective products that caused real harm to a real person. The punitive damage...
You Told BetterHelp Your Darkest Secrets. They Sold Them to Facebook.
2 million people chose BetterHelp for privacy. BetterHelp sold their mental health data to Facebook, Snapchat, and Criteo. The FTC fined them $7.8M. T...
Russia Phished Thousands of Signal Accounts — The App Was Fine, the Users Weren't
Russian intelligence successfully compromised thousands of Signal accounts through sophisticated phishing — not by breaking encryption, but by exploit...
DOGE Employee Allegedly Stole 500 Million Americans' Social Security Data on a Thumb Drive
A former DOGE software engineer allegedly walked out of the Social Security Administration with two massive databases — potentially covering 500 milli...
You Were Never the Player: How Pokémon Go Built a $3.5 Billion Surveillance Map
30 billion photos. 8 years of gameplay. Pokémon Go players unknowingly built the most detailed spatial map ever created — now powering delivery robots...
The Great Encryption Retreat: Meta Kills Instagram E2EE While TikTok Refuses to Build It
In the span of two weeks, Meta announced it will remove end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs and TikTok confirmed it won't add it. The privacy imp...
Your Face For Rent: How AI Model Recruitment Is Fueling the Next Generation of Deepfake Scams
A WIRED investigation reveals Telegram channels recruiting 'AI face models' for pig-butchering scams in Cambodia — and the massive privacy implication...
The Payment Giant That Wants to Be Your Digital ID
Payment processors aren't just moving your money anymore — they're building identity verification empires. From Stripe Identity's biometric scans to P...
Texas Sues the Biggest TV Makers in the World — Your Smart TV Has Been Spying on You Every 500 Milliseconds
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Samsung, Sony, LG, Hisense, and TCL for turning millions of living rooms into surveillance systems. Courts have...
When Your AI Assistant Goes to War: Claude's Role in the Iran Strikes
The same AI that helps you write emails and debug code helped the US military strike over 1,000 targets in Iran within 24 hours. What does this mean f...
Meta's Stunning Legal Argument: BitTorrent Piracy Is Fair Use If You're Training AI
Meta argues in court that downloading pirated books via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use—as long as you're using them to train AI. The implications fo...
7 Million Surveillance Nodes on People's Faces: How Meta's Smart Glasses Became the Biggest Bystander Privacy Disaster in History
Meta sold 7 million Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025. A Swedish investigation just revealed that contractors in Kenya are reviewing the intimate, unblurr...
Inside the DHS Contractor Leak: 6,681 ICE Vendors Exposed — Including a Company Building a Microwave Vehicle Stopper
A hacktivist group claiming to have breached DHS released contractor records tied to ICE enforcement. Buried in the data is a funded contract for a mi...
Viral Military Alert About Uber and Snapchat Tracking Was Fake — But the Privacy Threat Is Real
A viral message claiming U.S. Cyber Command warned soldiers to disable Uber and Snapchat location services was debunked — but the underlying privacy r...