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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The UAE Cabinet has approved a resolution barring children under 15 from holding a social media account, state news agency Wam reported on Thursday, and enforcing it will mean verifying every user in the country, adult or child. Anyone below 15 will be barred from creating, using or operating a personal account once the resolution is ratified and locked out of publishing, commenting, sharing and joining public groups or open channels. The Cabinet, led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, gave companies up to 12 months to comply. The rules cover any platform reaching users in the country, free or paid, that ranks or recommends content through algorithms, which is to say nearly all of them. The resolution states plainly that a user simply saying how old they are will no longer count. With self-declaration off the table, companies have to verify age some other way, and every available option, from identity documents to facial analysis to behavioral profiling, means each adult hands over more of themselves to prove they are not a child. The resolution does carry privacy language and the wording reveals the tension at its center. Verification must “achieve a high level of accuracy…while adhering to the highest standards of child privacy and personal data protection.” Platforms are told to minimize data collection and avoid keeping it longer than strictly necessary. Those constraints sit on top of a system whose whole purpose is to extract verified identity from people who previously surrendered none, and the second goal undercuts the first no matter how carefully the first is phrased. The Cabinet framed the resolution as an effort to “establish an advanced model for child protection in the digital space, reinforcing the national digital safety framework in line with the rapid evolution of technology use, and striking a balance between enabling responsible use of modern technologies and ensuring the highest standards of child protection.” Teenagers aged 15 and 16 may stay on, with what the resolution calls enhanced protective measures including “age-appropriate content classification and restriction, disabling high-risk features such as interaction with unknown users, regulation of usage time and duration, and the provision of parental control tools.” The UAE is not acting alone and that is the development with the longest reach. French President Emmanuel Macron thanked the country for “joining the movement,” a global agenda that already spans Australia, the UK, and his own push in France. Each government cites child protection and each builds the same thing underneath, a verified link between a real person and an online account. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post To Keep Kids Off Social Media, the UAE Will ID Every User appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple did not open up the iPhone in Brazil out of goodwill. A regulator forced it to, ending a fight that started in 2022, and the company has spent the months since designing terms that give developers almost no reason to take the exit it was ordered to build. The changes went live June 18 for anyone on iOS 26.5 or newer. Developers in Brazil can now sell through marketplaces other than the App Store and process payments without Apple’s billing. The case behind this began when MercadoLibre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce company, brought a complaint about Apple’s App Store rules to the competition watchdog CADE four years ago. CADE found a problem. Apple settled late last year, and the concession it made is genuine. What it did next undercuts that concession. The pricing is where you see it. A developer who stays in the App Store but uses a third-party payment processor still owes Apple a 21% commission. Route users to a website to pay, and Apple takes 15% of whatever they spend within seven days of the tap. A US Court already found this to be illegal. Pull the app out and ship it through a rival store and Apple still collects 5% on sales through what it calls the Core Technology Commission. A reduced 10% tier covers small developers and year-old subscriptions, lowering the bill without loosening the grip. Tallied up, leaving the App Store costs about what staying costs, so staying becomes the obvious choice. Apple set the prices to land exactly there. The reporting rule drops the pretense. Apple makes developers track and report all transactions made through an outside link or a rival store, even the ones a customer abandons before paying, and hand those records to the very company they routed around. Epic Games, years into its own war with the App Store, named the play. “Intentionally designed to thwart competition,” it wrote, describing terms built to “undermine alternative stores and payments in Brazil.” The same setup is already running in Japan, where Apple rolled out near-identical rules in December, so Brazil reads less as a one-off than as a template Apple plans to reuse wherever a regulator pries it open. Apple’s reply is the one it reaches for every time, which is safety. It says Brazil’s rules protect children and privacy more tightly than Europe’s Digital Markets Act, that age ratings follow apps out of the store, and that buying outside its system means losing refunds, subscription management, and Apple support. Some of that holds. It also happens to be the argument of the party collecting rent on the wall, which is reason enough to weigh the claim against who profits from it. What genuinely opened is narrow. On iOS 26.5, Brazilians can set a rival marketplace as their default in Settings, and notarized apps can reach a phone without passing Apple’s full review. That helps, up to a point. With the fees tuned to keep the App Store the cheapest path, a default you pay extra to choose is a default in name only. Epic, for its part, is not retreating. “We’ll keep working with policymakers in Brazil to open up the mobile app ecosystem,” it said, and added that it is “full speed ahead to bring the Epic Games Store to iPhones in the next few months.” So Apple lost the case and held onto the leverage. It now sets the price of the exit it was forced to open, and logs who walks through it. That is the kind of loss a company writes for itself. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post How Apple Lost in Brazil and Won Anyway appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Britain’s communications regulator is pressing Telegram to find ways of seeing what its users say to one another in private. Ofcom has begun questioning the messaging app about how it detects and prevents illegal incitement, following the conviction of a Ukrainian man for arson attacks on a car and properties connected to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Roman Lavrynovych, 22, was reportedly drawn in through a public Telegram channel that advertised money to post and print leaflets, and that channel broke no laws. It offered legal work and told anyone interested to “contact in private messages.” The real offers, first for the poster work and later for the arson, reportedly moved into one-to-one chats away from public view. A spokesperson for Ofcom said it had contacted the app “to seek further clarification” because the arsonist had been directed on Telegram by a handler linked to Russia. The regulator frames this as a preliminary stage ahead of any formal investigation, though the questions point in one direction. If nothing illegal appeared in the open channel, the only place left to look is inside the private conversations between individual users. That request carries a cost the regulator has not spelled out. Telegram cannot scan private messages for signs of incitement without reading private messages, all of them, belonging to everyone, not the handful that turn out to involve a crime. The arson plot stayed hidden in personal chats precisely because that is where people expect to speak without an audience. Asking Telegram to surface that content means asking it to treat ordinary private conversation as something to be inspected by default. It is not even settled what “private messages” covers here and the ambiguity raises the stakes. Telegram’s standard chats sit on its servers. Its secret chats use end-to-end encryption that the company itself cannot read, but only when turned on, and the feature is not turned on by default. Court reporting has not made clear which kind carried the arson offers. Should Ofcom expect detection inside encrypted chats, it is effectively asking Telegram to build a route around its own encryption, most likely by scanning messages on the user’s device before they are sealed. That hollows out the protection for the people who relied on it. A message read before it is encrypted was never really encrypted. A single conviction has become the occasion to ask a platform how it inspects private speech in general and the answer Ofcom seems to want is closer inspection. The push runs in one direction across the Online Safety Act, through age checks, hash-matching against databases of banned images, automated tools to flag grooming and self-harm content, and now questions about catching incitement inside private chats. Detection keeps moving inward, from public posts toward the conversations people assumed only their recipient would see. Real harms justify the steps one at a time and the cumulative effect normalizes a new baseline, where a messaging app is expected to read along and act as an extension of the regulator’s reach. The Act backs that expectation with fines of up to £18 million ($24M) or a tenth of global revenue, which is leverage enough to make most companies listen. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Speech Regulator’s Telegram Questions Point Toward Private Chats appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Searching Google for the address of a political party headquarters was enough to land hundreds of people inside a federal investigation. Newly unsealed court records show the Justice Department demanded that Google identify 311 users who looked up the Republican and Democratic party offices in Washington during the first five days of January 2021, the same week someone placed pipe bombs outside both buildings on the eve of the Capitol riot. Google fought the demand behind sealed doors and lost. The company had already turned over user data three times in the same investigation but it drew the line at this warrant, telling the court the request was “grossly overbroad” and warning that it would catch innocent party members, volunteers, and ordinary people who had done nothing more than type a committee’s name into a search box. The records came out on Thursday. We obtained a copy of the order for you here. People in Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wyoming, plus users overseas in Spain and the Philippines, had typed things such as the street address of the Democratic National Committee or a request for the Republican committee’s email address. Yet, none of it pointed to a crime. The government wanted their names anyway, together with their email addresses, backup emails, payment information, and the devices tied to their accounts. The demand reached anyone Google could tie to them through shared technical traces, a login from the same coffee shop Wi-Fi, an airport network, a library terminal, a common credit card, or recovery email. Google warned that a single search by one person could expose the names of thousands of strangers whose only connection was passing through the same public network at some point. The company described associations that ran from family members and roommates to people who had never met the searcher, all caught in the same net by accident. This was the fourth time the government had turned Google into a search tool aimed at its own users. Two geofence warrants in early 2021 mapped everyone whose phone passed near the buildings, the second one widening the zone tenfold to cover homes, two hotels, and part of the Library of Congress. A keyword warrant came next, pulling anonymized data on roughly 1,341 people. By the time this latest warrant arrived, the government had already unmasked more than 370 users across the investigation and charged none of them. Google’s lawyers leaned on the First and Fourth Amendments, arguing that letting the government comb through political searches would chill the kind of activity the Constitution exists to protect. They called the warrant a “general search” of the sort the country’s founders wrote the Fourth Amendment to forbid, and they argued the government was attempting something the law does not permit, “seizing the haystack to find the needle.” The court never decided whether the warrant was too broad. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh ruled in November 2024 that Google had no right to make the argument at all, at least not at that stage. Citing a 2006 Supreme Court decision, he found that a warrant cannot be challenged on Fourth Amendment grounds before it is carried out, only afterward, through a motion to suppress or a lawsuit. “Google’s challenges largely fail,” he wrote. The people who could have objected after the fact were the users themselves and they had no idea any of it had happened. Faced with the challenge, the government dropped the most extreme part of its request and withdrew the demand for technically connected users. The judge struck that language from the warrant. The rest stood and Google produced the identities the Justice Department wanted. The unsealed file leaves behind a working template for the next investigation. The government asked a search engine to turn its own index against the people using it, kept the request hidden under a nondisclosure order, and won on a question of timing rather than on the merits. The hundreds of people whose names and accounts were handed over were never told. Most of them, going by the record, had done nothing but look up an address. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Unsealed January 6 Records Show Google Losing a DOJ Keyword Warrant Battle appeared first on Reclaim The Net.