This week's net.wars, "Parting glances", bids farewell to Keir Starmer, the former human rights lawyer who presided over the Online Safety Act, age verification, restrictions on protest, and increased surveillance: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/06/26/parting-glances/, #NetWars #UKPolitics #privacy
⚖️ Looking for an exciting path into litigation, #IT #law and digital rights? We’ve got you covered! We are seeking bright new people to support our work for #privacy and #GDPR enforcement from November 2026 onwards. 📆
❗ You are interested and hold a law degree from an EEA university? 🇪🇺 Apply now! https://noyb.eu/en/traineeship
What happened to the fight for the internet? https://lobste.rs/s/rfkmw3 #privacy
https://dustycloud.org/blog/what-happened-to-the-fight-for-the-internet/
Stop Killing the Internet https://lobste.rs/s/pdkrax #privacy
https://www.stopkillingtheinternet.com/
🚨 New post alert 📝
A deep dive into #WSocial with some fascinating findings: candid statements about their motives, a Greta Thunberg connection, potential AI plans (!!!)
Why write about it again? I still had so many questions after publishing my first article.
I spent 3 weeks watching every interview I could find and connecting the dots.
I hope you'll enjoy this piece:
Scanning tech would turn every phone into a surveillance device ⚠️
UK Ministers may claim this is to stop children sharing intimate images.
But it means forcing every adult through a digital ID checkpoint and scanning all private images by default.
Once the infrastructure exists, it will be expanded.
It would award every future government and every tyranny across the globe a mechanism to pre-censor everything anyone does with their phone.
Expanding Private Cloud Compute - Apple Security Research https://lobste.rs/s/4xbzbk #ai #privacy #security
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/
The announcements at #wwdc26 confirm the shift: the tech industry is moving from simple cloud storage to total cloud dependency.
Break the dependency cycle. #lucentOS keeps offline as the absolute default workflow. Your files stay on your local storage unless you choose otherwise.
Roadmap to launch: https://github.com/dixon-team-tech/lucentOS
👋 Hello! We are the team behind lucentOS and fijiOS.
We believe your operating system should be a private digital vault, not a corporate surveillance terminal. No telemetry and no forced cloud lock-in. Just clean, premium desktop environments built on a hardened Fedora foundation with absolute user autonomy.
💻 Our codebase is completely open and auditable.
🚀 Launching November 2026.
Check out ourrepository:
https://github.com/dixon-team-tech/lucentOS
PRIVACY ALERT!
Please boost for reach! 🚨👇
The Canadian government is planning
to introduce a bill on Wednesday, June 10th, to mandate identity surveillance of every adult using social media in Canada! 👁️🗨️
https://globalnews.ca/news/11894610/canada-social-media-ban-teens-online-harms-bill/
A ban on social media for children
does nothing to reduce the harm caused by commercial social media. Instead, it means mandatory ID scans for every adult using social media.
We must stop this authoritarian proposal,
and demand our government focuses instead on reducing the harm for everyone using social media.
It has been explained by experts over and over that bans of social media are shortsighted lazy measures that do not help in the end, but in fact harm everyone, including the children.
Stop ID surveillance in Canada! ✊⛔️
Contact your MP and our Prime Minister TODAY to voice your opposition. Here's where to find their contact information: https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/search
If you aren't aware of this issue yet, here's more information on age verification: https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
#AgeVerification #Privacy #Canada #HumanRights #CanPoli #StopIDChecks #StopIDSurveillance
What's wrong with EU age verification? (Nothing) https://lobste.rs/s/29laqs #privacy
https://blog.vrypan.net/2026/06/29/260629-whats-wrong-with-eu-age-verification/
The FCC wants to make it impossible to buy "burner" phones, such as pre-paid phones not linked to your identity. They plan to do this by forcing all companies to store a ton of data about ALL phone users, including Copy of ID, and Verified address and a ton more info for both new & existing phone users, regardless of company or phone.
Can iCloud remotely enable Protect Mail Activity on your Mac? https://lobste.rs/s/3remgt #privacy
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/6/6.html
Google is apparently testing a new reCAPTCHA method that prompts you to turn on your device's camera to prove you are human by scanning your hands.
I assume this will eventually be mandatory, just like the current reCAPTCHA.
https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand
“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.
That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.
Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”
https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand
New reCaptcha requires approved phones to pass https://lobste.rs/s/p07gv1 #android #privacy
https://cybernews.com/privacy/google-qr-code-recaptcha-requires-approved-phone/
Happy Friday, folks. My new YouTube video is up!
It's about Kristen Volpe, a schoolteacher in Illinois who was arrested after a private DM she sent to friends was forwarded to the FBI by Snapchat's AI alerts.
It's an interesting story and a cautionary tale.
If you watch and enjoy the video, please hit the like button to help me out a little. Thanks!
#YouTube #Privacy #Tech #Technology #AI #DigitalPrivacy #KristenVolpe
A thread to Stop ID Surveillance from coming to Canada ⛔️🧵
Yesterday, I sent a long letter to the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Culture Minister Marc Miller, and the leaders of all other major federal parties in Canada.
I sent this letter to voice my concerns about the upcoming bill that is planned to be introduced today at 5 p.m. ET, to propose a ban of social media for children, therefore requiring all social media platforms to identify every adults accessing it.
This is a long thread of what I wrote (mute me for one hour if you don't want to see it).
Feel free to copy any parts you want to share in your own letter of opposition sent to your representatives this week.
Here's how to find their contact information: https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/search
(1/9)
#StopIDSurveillance #Privacy #HumanRights #AgeVerification #CanPoli #Canada
Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology to promote privacy in age assurance https://lobste.rs/s/uswzil #privacy
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/opening-up-zero-knowledge-proof-technology-to-promote-privacy-in-age-assurance/
Connecting The Meta Privacy Dots
As dangerous as it is, I find it somewhat humorous to watch the reactions to some of the actions Meta is taking to gather up and reprocess what we see and hear. Especially from the always hungry for some new cool tech crowd. On the one hand you can’t blame someone from wanting the next new thing to play with. On the other you also can’t blame tech companies for taking advantage of hobbyists’ hunger.
Every where you turn on the Internet, everyone is posting about Meta changing its Instagram policy so that unless Instagram users opted out, any of their content on that platform was now free for the grabbing by anyone using Meta’s AI tools to create and distribute. You can imagine the possible nasty outcomes of what that would be like. Certainly if you’ve been paying even a smidgen of attention to the goings on with Grok.
It’s also been interesting to watch the small avalanche of users on other social media announcing that they are taking their Instagram accounts private, opting out by flipping the designated switches, or just bailing on Instagram altogether.
Almost parallel to this policy change happening word spread from Joanna Stern, among others, about a trend (and apparent underground business opportunity) of users of Meta’s smart glasses who were disabling the mechanism that displayed the warning light when the camera was recording. Talk about a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Meta quickly moved to put the kibosh on that with a software update that disabled the cameras if the warning light was tampered with. (I wonder if it works if you just taped over the camera?)
Privacy focused tech geeks were all over that, praising Meta for moving so swiftly to counter the hack.
But hold on a minute. These stories don’t end there. According to a report from The Financial Times, Meta is testing ‘super sensing’ AI glasses that can record video and audio continuously.
Here’s a quote:
The $1.5tn social media platform has been advancing a new hardware line of smart glasses that would continuously record audio while taking photos every few seconds, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. A user could then use AI to help query what they saw or heard, or recall their day.
And the worm continues to turn:
With Meta’s current AI smart glasses, an LED in the corner of the frame lights up to signal to others when a wearer is taking photographs or filming.
However, executives are currently planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That would make it harder for bystanders to know when they were being recorded, potentially intensifying the privacy concerns surrounding the technology. Those plans could still change, however, several people said.
It’s pretty easy to connect the dots between these two stories. Mark Zuckerberg wants anything and everything he can on you, and he doesn’t care how it’s used once he has his paws on it and his data centers crunching it. The privacy implications are certainly real, even if you don’t use a Meta product but fall within camera or microphone range of someone who does.
We’ve heard all of this before in different contexts. Microsoft caught all kinds of hell for Windows Recall, a feature that continually monitored and recorded what was on your screen. I’m old enough to remember the hue and cry about Google Glasses back in the day.
It’s a bit eerie how those at the time very visceral reactions seem to have softened in this new era of folks rushing to turn over their data to the AI crunchers in order to better plan a party. Should be quite interesting to watch party videos if this prototype Meta is testing ever comes to reality and becomes accepted.
I predict we’re going to keep hearing about this kind of thing again and again as the tech companies keep thirsting after any morsel of data about you, what you do, and where you do it. For their purposes that thirst will never be quenched.
It used to be “their purposes” was simply defined as selling or brokering your data for advertising purposes, because despite all of the grand promises of how this can help users, it’s always been about making a buck hustling your data for advertisting. Add AI into the mix, and it’s also about continuing to feed and train that beast to help them with that same ultimate goal.
Apple is rumored to be working on a version of AirPods Pro that contains cameras, apparently for AI purposes. All the talk you hear about Apple and others creating pendants, pins, other wearables, and counter top robots all follow the track to the same end point regardless of how the user benefits are packaged and hyped. Even if some follow Apple’s announced approach of keeping your data on whatever device is recording your every moment, those that don’t, like Meta, will spoil any potential benefit. Heck, in the long run, that’s type of spoilage is probably going to be a good thing in this era of overreaching.
It’s a damn shame really. Because there are certainly legitimate accessibilty uses for this kind of technology. But I have to say, it sure feels like that’s going to be just another hyped up smokescreen to try and mask the real purposes behind all of this.
Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.
#ai #airpods #Apple #ArtificialIntelligence #cameras #Internet #Meta #privacy #security #Smartglasses #SocialMedia #technology
On June 12, developers across Europe woke up to a 403 error. Not a bug. A geopolitical decision. ⚠️
The U.S. government banned Anthropic's most advanced AI models for European users overnight. No warning. No appeal. Just a kill switch.
If the infrastructure is American, someone else holds the keys.
🐘 https://pixelunion.eu/blog/2026/06/antphoic-mythos-export-controls/
mlisp alpha is out: packages for Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD.
A mailing list manager where the Maildir is the database. No separate
state to drift out of sync, the archive is the audit trail. CAN-SPAM,
GDPR, and CASL compliance are test-covered code paths, not a checklist
bolted on after the fact.
The Mailman/smartlist/Mailchimp replacement that doesn't put your list
in someone else's TOS.
#foss #selfhosted #infrastructure #privacy
git.sr.ht/~denzuko/mlisp
Banning noise will be a disaster for statistical data products https://lobste.rs/s/jcpzqt #math #privacy
https://desfontain.es/blog/banning-noise.html
