Cross posted from https://sh.itjust.works/post/62848445

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/61790

In February, a Swedish newspaper reported that contractors in Kenya were reviewing Meta glasses footage without the wearer’s knowledge. The workers were made to watch uncensored videos of people going to the bathroom, getting undressed, and having s*x. Lots of the footage seemed to be taken without the wearer knowing they were recording. Then at the beginning of June, WIRED uncovered that Meta was quietly adding facial recognition technology for its smart glasses to every single iPhone. The feature, called “NameTag,” would identify people captured by the glasses and share information about them.

From More Perfect Union via This RSS Feed.

Posting some recent good or funny news to say happy 4th to my fellow Americans. And happy Canada Day to our friends to the north. Not sure about Flocks exactly, but I heard of ALPR use in Ontario, maybe other provs too.

Gizmodo: Flock Cameras Have a People-Love-Smashing-Them Problem. People just aren't being very nice to these mass surveillance devices. A sticker with the note, “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling f***s” was applied to one of the poles below the spot where it was cut.

Several ppl doing it have been caught, often due to other Flock camneras who follow their movements across their city.

Also 100's of stories out there about municipalities across dozens of states not renewing Flock contracts due to mounting public pressure. It's not univerally good, some are looking toward other vendors. But many are stopping ALPR completely too!

Jalopnik: Unsure With How To Cancel Service, City Officials Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags Until They Can Be Removed. Dayton, Ohio's utility poles are sporting new accessories this week in the form of a black trash bag. Police and local authorities are working to cover the controversial Flock cameras installed throughout the city as they try to figure out how to severe ties with the company.

Citizen engagement does help. We need to keep the momentum going. Pls get involved locally if you can! A hundred ppl showing up at a city council meeting to speak out against ALPRs carries more political weight than 10 thousand emails.

EXCLUSIVE: EU could announce social media ban for kids in September

Von der Leyen is expected to use her annual State of the Union speech to unveil plans for EU-wide age restrictions on social media

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8915892

(original article in Swedish that reported this)

Posting this because I hadn't heard about it before and I'm probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.

I'm not Swedish, but going off NATOpedia, it seems like the party is basically reinventing fascism from first principles:

The party claims to stand for a "class-conscious populism" which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the "productive" classes of society against the "Transferiat", with the "Transferiat" being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work "made-up services"[...]

The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that "live off transfers", as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.

Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)

Even if you're comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.

I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it's not great

I love how Signal pretends we're using it for book clubs and not for fighting facism. I'm sure they know and this is just tongue-in-cheek.

I am a foreigner in the EU. One of the unwashed masses. I don't like the chat control or age verification legislation. Do I have any recourse to fight for my privacy here via politics or am I at the whims of my fellow countrymen?

Most sites I see encourage you to message your representatives but the sites make it seem like it's only open to EU citizens. What about permanent residents? People who have a residence permit?

I was searching for a WhatsApp alternative and stumbled upon nospeak. I haven't seen it mentioned before. Has anyone used it? Is it safe(like is it encryption solid, etc)? What are its pros and cons?

Reddit has begun rolling out mandatory age verification for any NSFW content, as well as for some social media functions, if the AI determines you might be under a certain age.

Another good day to be on Lemmy... until the surveillance capitalist tech overlords lobby enough to get their great firewall of the West, anyway.

Further reading:

• https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA
• https://cybernews.com/security/eu-age-verification-app-hack/
• https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/19/persona-age-verification-surveillance-allegations/
• https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23595536875796-Digital-Services-Act-DSA-Information-for-EU-users

🚨 UK Online Safety Act in the EU - starting now? 🚨

It appears I had suspected right and big platforms will think the UK Online Safety Act equivalent for the EU has already been decided by the EU commission in July 2025, with a deadline of July 2026 (a few days). At least Reddit acts like it: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA

I talked about all of this here on lemmy, with more detailed explanations: https://leminal.space/post/31858818/21120139

How all of this went for the UK previously: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/09/uk-online-safety-act-internet-censorship-world-following-suit https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/6/britain-calls-it-safety-it-is-censorship

I'm worried this might be the beginning of the end of anonymous public discourse in the EU...

For anybody reading in the EU, consider emailing one of your representatives and demand they undo this age verification surveillance stuff: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates (Site is unrelated, it just happens to have a list of representatives.)

For anybody in the US, find your representatives here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Since the US has similar plans: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online

Gonna vaguepost so I don't self dox too much. Had to replace a dead appliance this week. Got a lightly used replacement, no choice about which. It had a wifi spot build in. It would talk to any phone with the mfg app. No auth other than having the app installed! WTF.

You couldn't disable that! Well not thru the panel controls. Web says you can do it with the phone app. IF you make an account with the mfg for your appliance first. Rofl!

Maybe this approach will help others. What I did was, searched the schematics online. Most appliances, you can find it. Searching model number + schematic often works. There are sites that catalog them.

Using the schematic, I found a connector that powered the wifi. Unplugged that. Re-powered appliance. Confirmed wifi was gone.

My neighbors are not gonna hijack my appliance over wifi, so I wasn't worried about that. I guess it could find an open WAP and phone home. TBH it was mostly the principle of the thing tho! I don't want ANY n/w on my appliances, thank you. Ya know?

It's a tiny skirmish in the war against IOT. Editing here to quote Aragorn, who famously said about IOT, "There may come a day when my appliances connect to the internet. But it is not THIS day!"

Source code and details: https://git.anarchists.space/NanoChat/Server

Features

• Small codebase
• Messages expire after 30 days
• Panic button to delete all messages in a room
• WebSocket for communication
• Docker support

Technical details

• AES-256-GCM for client-side encryption
• Key is not sent to server

People don't even want you to play a video game in private now.

"Gibbons cut in: "They're illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers."

Arguably more security than privacy, but this made me think. I havent considered the use of ambiguous fonts in phishing before. Worth reading.

https://archive.ph/a6Tmo

What VPN have you switched to after the Mullvad situation. I have looked at nym and ivpn. But don't know if they are any good.

Negative thoughts flooded my mind. The EU is constantly trying to push Chat Control. They're blocking bootloaders on phones, introducing ID and face scanning everywhere, in the US they're trying to push system-level verification, corporations are spitting in our faces and don't even hide it. I know we have to fight. My personal rebellion was joining Fediverse and Lemmy and quitting Reddit. But seriously, boss—I'm tired. Are our attempts to preserve internet freedom futile? Can we win against corporations and politicians who we pay but don't listen to us?

We don't get a lot of privacy wins. Ya know? I'll take whatever we can get.

I linked the wiki page for this court case. As of me typing now, page hasn't been updated with the court decision. Prob will be soon. If you want the rawdog court document, it's here.

TLDR. SCOTUS just decided that geofence warrants require 4th amendment protection. For the non-USA peeps, 4A is protection against gov searches without a warrant granted with probable cause. The court decided that since everyone now carries a smartphone everywhere, and loc data is highly personal, police geofence requests require a judicial warrant. In the same way one is required for the police to search your home.

Before anybody goes off about how "this doesn't matter"... This does not restrict commercial data collection. Even so, it does matter. It is a step in a good direction, and will have real world impacts. It might even change the landscape around Flocks. Another positive step happened a while ago, in Carpenter vs the United States, about historical cell site location data.

Archived version

A month or so ago, the Netherlands reportedly blocked a US company from buying the cloud provider that runs Dutch digital identity (there is a post about it in this community here).

The more recent news is that the Chief Privacy Officer of the Dutch government, who was behind this initiative, is about to lose his job.

...

For more than four months, Pieter van Oordt warned internally about the risks of the takeover. When these warnings were ignored, he brought the issue to the media, the Dutch Parliament, and the Cabinet. He showed that Parliament had received incomplete and misleading information and revealed that vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure had been shared with a U.S. company. His actions forced the Ministry of Economic Affairs to block the takeover.

Instead of protection, Van Oordt faced retaliation. He was excluded from meetings, his salary increase was blocked, and his request for protection under the European Whistleblower Directive was rejected, despite an expert report confirming that he should have been protected. He has been suspended, and his dismissal is mentioned in a written notice from the Attorney General on 22 May 2026.

The dismissal has not yet been implemented.

...

Someone started a petition (not me), I post this here as you may want to sign it (and maybe spread the word).

The petition calls on the European Parliament and the European Commission to act:

• Protect Pieter van Oordt from an unlawful dismissal.
• Ensure he can continue his work safely within the public sector.
• Place digital sovereignty of vital infrastructure high on the European agenda.
• Hold the Dutch government and the responsible ministries accountable.

[To read the English version of the linked text, you need to scroll down. It's below the Dutch version.]

Qoute:

A shocking backroom deal is underway to revive Chat Control 1.0 this Friday — and on Monday 29 June, the final trilogue for permanent mass scanning takes place. We face a double-attack on private communication. Take two minutes now: e-mail your MEPs and Permanent Representation to stop this!

Discord has quietly begun testing Incode as a new age verification provider, replacing its previous vendor for some users. The company says face scans are processed on-device where possible, IDs and selfies are deleted after age confirmation, and Discord only receives an age result, not your identity. But the move still raises important privacy questions around biometric verification, third-party trust, and the growing trend of mandatory age checks online, especially after the massive Persona breach linked to Discord user data back in 2025

If this isn't a reason to switch to Linux, I don't know what is! I should have posted this sooner, just in case if it helps. This should piss you off as much as it does me. More shady ass ways data is being sent back to Microsoft. You have to switch off all kinds of shit! I assume you might know this already. But, just in case you are still on Windows and don't know. Next, you also can go to the recovery tab and select take no action, just in case Windows tries to re enable it after a Windows update. Also, turn off the telemetry setting in settings shown in photos. There might be more that I don't even know about.

It also stores your search history!

Who knows what required data they are sending!

More garbage.