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...
surveillance
49 articles on surveillance.
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
'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....
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...
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...
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...
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 Warrant Loophole: How the FBI Tracks You Without Breaking the Law
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed under oath what privacy advocates feared: the FBI is buying your location data without a warrant. Here's the legal l...
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...
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...
500,000 Stalkerware Users Just Got Exposed: When Spying on Others Backfires Spectacularly
A hacktivist just scraped payment records from half a million stalkerware customers. The hunters have become the hunted—and the privacy implications c...
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...