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.

Reclaim The Net

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.

Reclaim The Net

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.

Reclaim The Net

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.

Reclaim The Net

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.

A Colorado bill would force your phone's operating system to collect your date of birth and share your age bracket with every app you open. Chamber of Progress, bankrolled by Apple, Google, and Meta, is lobbying Gov. Polis to sign it. For now, kids can just type in a fake birthday. But what it does build is the infrastructure for mandatory ID verification later...

Reclaim The Net

Big Tech Backs Colorado OS-Level Age Data Bill

Apple and Google would become the state-appointed gatekeepers of every Coloradan's age data and their lobbyists are pushing hard for the privi...

Canada's military ordered soldiers to create fake social media accounts and spy on opposition political parties during COVID. Soldiers who warned it could be illegal were reprimanded. Six years later, no law prevents it from happening again.

Reclaim The Net

Canada's Military Punished Whistleblowers Who Flagged Illegal COVID Speech Monitoring

Six years later, the legal vacuum that made domestic surveillance possible hasn't moved an inch.

Britain Decides Viral Protest Clips Need Prosecutors

Reclaim The Net

Britain Decides Viral Protest Clips Need Prosecutors

Your chant at a march is now judged not by the crowd around you but by how a stranger might feel watching a clip of it online.

Ten states sued Roblox over child safety. Every single one demanded the same fix: more ID scanning, more biometric collection, more face scans. The pattern is always the same. A crisis, then surveillance.

Reclaim The Net

Oklahoma Sues Roblox, but the “Fix” Is Biometric Checks

The lawsuit designed to protect children from surveillance essentially mandates a biometric surveillance system for 150 million users.

A German man jokingly called former Chancellor Olaf Scholz a bastard on Twitter because his Fortnite download was crawling at 173KB/s. The tweet had 503 views. Authorities investigated him for committing a criminal offense (insulting a politician) and he was forced to delete it. Imagine what would happen if they get their way, ban end-to-end encryption, and monitor all of your private messages.

TikTok deleted a Reform UK campaign video because someone filed a report under the Online Safety Act. There's no penalty for bad-faith reports. The OSA was sold as child protection but the actual incentive structure is this: platforms face billions in fines for under-enforcement, so they delete first and never look back. Starmer's government says platforms should "uphold freedom of expression" while threatening them with penalties that guarantee the opposite...

Reclaim The Net

TikTok Removes Reform UK Campaign Video Using Online Safety Act Hate Censorship Rules

The law Parliament sold as a shield for children just became a sword against a political campaign.

Canada's Public Safety Minister says Apple, Meta, and Signal are "misinterpreting" his surveillance bill. Apple says the bill would force encryption backdoors. Signal says they'd leave Canada entirely. Meta says it would turn companies into arms of government surveillance. The minister thinks they just can't read.

Reclaim The Net

Canada Says Critics Don't Understand Its Surveillance Bill.

They do. That's the problem.

A nonprofit is suing on behalf of people Rubio sanctioned for pressuring platforms to delete speech. These are the folks who built advertiser blacklists, ran deplatforming campaigns, and helped write the EU's law forcing American companies to censor legal content. Now they want a federal judge to protect them. The people who spent years arguing deplatforming isn't censorship are upset about being on a blacklist themselves...

Reclaim The Net

Rubio Is Sued Over Visa Bans on Foreign Censorship Supporters

The people who spent years building blacklists to silence others are now shocked to find themselves on one.

Ofcom and the Fantasy of Global Speech Control

Reclaim The Net

Ofcom and the Fantasy of Global Speech Control

The British speech regulator proved it doesn't understand the internet.

The police in London are deploying facial recognition at a political protest tomorrow. That's every face scanned against a police watchlist for attending a lawful rally. No parliamentary vote authorized this. No legislation regulates it. Not only is it a privacy invasion, some people will stay home knowing their biometrics are being captured, chilling speech.

Reclaim The Net

London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time

Britain's civil liberties are eroding one deployment at a time.

Clinton, von der Leyen, and the guy who helped Biden's White House pressure platforms to suppress speech all walk into a Danish palace to decide what AI is allowed to say. They're calling it "youth safety." Every speaker has a track record of expanding censorship...

Reclaim The Net

AI Safety Institute Debuts with Big-Name Backers and a Censorship Agenda

Every major speaker at the Copenhagen summit has a resume built on telling platforms what to take down.

Every lawsuit against OpenAI after a shooting or suicide makes the same demand: scan every user's private conversations, build psychological profiles, flag people to police. They're using real grief to build a surveillance system that treats every ChatGPT user as a potential suspect.

Reclaim The Net

The FSU Shooting Lawsuit That Could Turn ChatGPT Into a Surveillance Tool

Every AI company's nightmare scenario just became a plaintiff's attorney's blueprint for court-ordered mass surveillance.

Reddit is testing a full-screen popup on mobile that blocks the entire site unless you install the app. No close button, no way to keep reading. They say it offers a "more personalized experience," which means they can track your device ID, location, and every subreddit you browse. Mobile browsers let you fight back with ad blockers and tracking protection. The app takes that away...

Reclaim The Net

Reddit Tests Blocking Mobile Web to Force App Downloads

Reddit's message to its most loyal lurkers is this: your anonymity is the one thing we can't monetize.

Sweden wants to strap GPS bracelets on children based on pre-crime predictions. A social worker decides you're "at risk" of committing a crime and the state tracks your location in real time. They say they'll design it to look like a watch so it's less "stigmatizing." The device does exactly what an ankle monitor for convicts does...

Reclaim The Net

Sweden Wants to Strap Tracking Devices on Children as Young as 13

The country that once exported its parenting model to the world now wants to put ankle monitors on 13-year-olds who haven't been charged with ...

Europol built secret databases holding passport photos, phone records, and location data on people never suspected of anything. Two petabytes, 99% of it outside any legal framework, with no logs of who accessed it. They hid parts of it from their own privacy regulator. Now the EU wants to double Europol's budget and expand its powers.

Reclaim The Net

Europol Ran Secret Data Platforms on Millions of Innocents

The agency tasked with protecting Europe's data built a secret two-petabyte surveillance machine that its own privacy officer couldn't ac...

A resigning British minister used her goodbye letter to complain the government hadn't moved fast enough on installing image-scanning software on every phone in the country. The EU already killed the same proposal (for now) after 700+ experts called it mass surveillance. Once that software is on your device, a policy update decides what it looks for...

Reclaim The Net

Jess Phillips Resigns, Pushes Phone Scanning Law in UK

A departing UK minister used her resignation letter to demand device-level photo scanning on every phone in the country.