Paige Collings and Jillian C. York write: This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027. The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response...

Zack Whittaker reports: Anthropic may ask Claude users to verify their age and identity by uploading their government-issued documents, according to a new version of the company’s privacy policy. The AI giant says the move was to allow users to appeal having their account flagged for potentially fraudulent activity rather than outright banning them, but...

David E. Rattray reports: A few minutes before 7 in the evening on May 9, 2025, a deputy in the Johnson County, Tex., sheriff’s office sat at a computer seeking information about a missing resident’s car. In the spot where officers were required to give a purpose for their requests, the deputy typed, “had an...

Lauren Rankin writes: New York had the chance to make history in more arenas than basketball this June. Earlier this month, the New York Senate passed the Maternal Health, Dignity and Consent Act, becoming the first legislative chamber in the country to pass legislation that would require informed consent for drug testing of pregnant people. But despite that...

On June 12, Jon Brodkin reported: Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is set to expire at midnight tonight after Congress failed to pass an extension of the controversial spying law. But that doesn’t mean the government’s spying powers will disappear. Surveillance under Section 702 of FISA “operates under yearlong certifications approved...

Daryna Antoniuk reports: Russia has spent decades building one of the world’s most sophisticated digital surveillance systems. Now, the Kremlin is taking steps to make it faster, more automated and better integrated across the country’s internet infrastructure. Known as SORM, the platform gives Russia’s security and intelligence agencies access to telephone calls, internet traffic and...

Greg Bensinger reports: Amazon was sued on Monday by a Virginia resident over what he said were privacy violations after the company’s Ring doorbell cameras at friends and ​family members’ homes collected and stored images of his face using facial recognition ‌software. The plaintiff, Charles Sigwalt, who is seeking class-action status, sued Amazon in federal...

Dutch News reports: Around two-thirds of Dutch parents use an app or device to track where their children are, according to a survey by broadcaster RTL Nieuws – a habit that child development experts warn can give a false sense of security. In the survey of RTL’s viewer panel, 65% of parents with children aged...

Naomi Diaz reports: The American Hospital Association and Illinois Health and Hospital Association are urging the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a lower court ruling in a website-tracking lawsuit against Evanston, Ill.-based Endeavor Health, formerly known as Edward-Elmhurst Health. In a May 27 amicus brief, the hospital groups said they support Endeavor Health and...

Zack Whittaker reports: The Dutch government has blocked American IT giant Kyndryl from acquiring Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider that hosts the Netherlands’ online identity platform. The government in The Hague said the deal poses a possible “risk to the public interest.” Dutch minister for the digital economy Willemijn Aerdts said in a machine-translated letter published Monday...

Amaar Chowdhury reports: London’s Metropolitan Police – the UK’s largest police force – asked tech companies to give officers access to private communications data over 700,000 times in 2025 alone, according to figures obtained by The Register under the Freedom of Information Act. These statistics expose the monitoring of everyday platforms like takeaway delivery services, and also...

Jared Perlo reports: The long-running fight to rein in the government’s power to search Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages without a warrant has gained new urgency on Capitol Hill over concerns that AI will supercharge state surveillance. Lawmakers are currently jockeying over reforms to a key law that enables warrantless monitoring of Americans’...

Stetson Miller reports: The Supreme Court is set to hear a case on Monday that could determine if law enforcement’s use of geofence warrants violates the Fourth Amendment. The case was filed by a man named Okello Chatrie, who was convicted in a 2019 Virginia bank robbery after law enforcement obtained his digital location information...

Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, and Mia McCarthy report: Hill Republican leaders are finding themselves in a never-ending crisis over the fate of a government spy law that has unleashed a bitter, intraparty battle within the House while also threatening to derail a host of other GOP priorities. Republicans now have scant legislative days to...

Suzanne Smiley reports: The governor of Virginia on Monday signed a law banning the sale of citizens’ precise geolocation data, a sign of growing momentum for such laws at the state level. The legislation bars the sale of geolocation within a 1,750 foot radius, a buffer large enough to keep data brokers from pinpointing where...

Joseph Cox reports: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. The case involved a...

Ernesto Van der Sar writes: HBO has obtained a DMCA subpoena, ordering X Corp. to identify the person behind a Euphoria fan account that allegedly posted spoilers from unaired episodes of Season 3. The action comes just days before the show’s long-awaited premiere this weekend, but it remains unclear what the company plans to do...

Jude Joffe-Block reports: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using spyware tools that can intercept encrypted messages as part of the agency’s efforts to disrupt fentanyl traffickers, according to a letter sent last week by the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons. Lyons’ letter, which was reviewed  by NPR, said ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is using...

by Amanda Seitz and Maia Rosenfeld April 8, 2026 The Trump administration is quietly seeking unprecedented access to medical records for millions of federal workers and retirees, and their families. A brief notice from the Office of Personnel Management could dramatically change which personally identifiable medical information the agency obtains, giving it the power to...

Colin Woods reports: The Massachusetts Department of Public Health last month settled a class-action lawsuit by a handful of Android users who claimed that the state had worked with Google to automatically install a COVID-19 contact-tracing app on their phones, and the phones of more than one million others, tracking their locations and transmitting their...