If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A 6-3 decision says geofence warrants, the tool that lets law enforcement vacuum up everyone near a crime scene, trigger the Fourth Amendment. US Police can no longer demand a digital dragnet of everyone’s phone location near a crime scene without answering to the Fourth Amendment. The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that the geofence warrants law enforcement has relied on for years count as a search of the people they catch, even when those people did nothing but carry a phone through the wrong place at the wrong time. We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here. A geofence warrant treats location itself as the suspect. Police draw a virtual fence around a spot and a stretch of time, then force a company like Google to turn over data on every phone that passed through. The method does not begin with a specific person and a trace their movements. It begins with everyone’s movements and goes looking for a person, which is why it gathers bystanders by the thousands. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, held that the records pulled into these warrants carry a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” even for someone out in public. “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information – even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote. The majority refused to treat the everyday act of using a phone as permission to hand your life to the government. A cell-phone user, Kagan wrote, “is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties – which then can be freely passed on to the government – just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do.” The opinion ran through the apps that pull location all day, the maps app that wants to route you home, the rideshare app that keeps tracking after you’ve climbed out, and a dozen others doing it in the background. The government’s fallback was that two hours of someone’s movements is too thin a slice to deserve protection. The Court rejected the notion that privacy only switches on once the tracking runs long enough. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s movements can yield “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations,” and she listed the stops most people consider nobody’s business, trips to “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the Aids treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, (or) the by-the hour motel.” The government also argued that anyone running Location History chose to, that the feature is optional, and so the data it produces is fair game. It leaned on its own figure that “only about one-third of active Google account holders actually opted into the location history service.” The majority called that argument “meritless” and spelled out why in terms anyone who has set up a phone will recognize. “That argument ignores how and why Google users turn on location history: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not “work correctly” otherwise, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users’ location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government,” the judges wrote. The case behind the ruling, Chatrie v US, grew out of an armed robbery at a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, where the robber left with $195,000. Investigators ran out of leads and turned to a geofence warrant aimed at Google. Their eventual suspect, Okello Chatrie, had switched on Google’s optional location history, which logged his position every couple of minutes and placed him near the credit union around the time of the robbery. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years. Chatrie’s lawyers had argued the search was far too broad and breached his Fourth Amendment shield against “unreasonable search and seizure.” The Court agreed that a search happened. It left the harder question, whether this particular search was reasonable, to the lower court, which now has to decide whether the “search was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause.” Officers never have to name a target. They just define a place and a window of time, and Google produces everyone who was inside it. That one-third of accountholders still came to more than 500 million people, by the count Chatrie’s lawyers gave the court. Google itself admitted that geofence searches “often run a high risk of sweeping in innocent users–sometimes thousands of them,” reaching into private homes, apartment buildings, government buildings, hotels, places of worship, and busy roads that police had no cause to search. This is the first time the Supreme Court has taken up the scope of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age since 2018, when a 5-4 majority in Carpenter v United States held that the government generally needs a warrant to obtain a person’s cellphone location history. Monday’s decision carries that logic from a single tracked suspect to the whole crowd a geofence pulls in. The ruling lands on a procedure that no longer exists. Google changed how location history works in July 2025. It now stores that data on users’ own devices instead of its own servers and says it can no longer answer geofence warrants for it. The exact procedure the Court just ruled on is one Google has already abandoned but the principle the justices set down outlasts it, though, and it reaches whatever location database law enforcement turns to next. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Supreme Court Rules 6-3 That Geofence Warrants Trigger Fourth Amendment Protections appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back. The titles all come from StudioCanal, the distributor behind Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo: First Blood, The Deer Hunter, Bridget Jones’s Diary, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Cliffhanger. Anyone who hit “buy” on one of them will open their library that morning and find a hole where it used to be. PlayStation’s notice states it without apology: “You will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” The justification Sony offers runs to six words, “due to our content licensing agreements.” A licensing deal between Sony and StudioCanal expired or shifted, and the people who paid are the ones losing their films over it. None of them signed that contract and none gets a vote in it. X user somatyk surfaced the news on June 25, posting the notification they’d received. The message signed off with, “Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.” Sony has since reproduced the same warning, and the full roster of 551 titles, on the PlayStation website. Nobody rented these movies. The store put a “buy” button next to them, charged the purchase price, and dropped them into a library it called yours. Sony can empty that library the moment a contract somewhere upstream changes, and the terms of service you scrolled past on first boot already say you agreed to this. If the movie case feels abstract, the games industry just made the same point with its biggest release in over a decade. GTA 6 arrives November 19, and the boxed copy you can buy at Walmart or GameStop contains no disc. Take-Two confirmed it in a press release: “The physical version of Grand Theft Auto VI, containing a download code inside the box, will be available starting November 12, 2026 to support pre-loading.” You pay $80 for a cardboard sleeve wrapped around a download code that locks the game to your account. You cannot lend it, resell it, or install it offline. Do you want an actual disc that lives on your shelf and answers to no server? There isn’t one, and if a real physical edition ever ships, you’ll buy the game a second time to get it. Asked earlier whether Rockstar might hold physical copies back to stop leaks, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick had said, “That’s not the plan.” The plan, it turns out, was to keep the box and throw away the disc. Killing the disc also ends the secondhand market and lending, and it hands the publisher control over access that a physical object never gave them. Ownership is being pulled back to the center, into accounts and servers a handful of companies control, and the words on the storefront haven’t caught up. The word “buy” might still sit on the button, but the definition of what that means keeps getting thinner. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Sony Deletes 551 StudioCanal Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Australia has spent six months running the world’s first big experiment in keeping teenagers off social media. The results are now in and the results are that teenagers are still on social media. Pretty much all of them. So naturally, the government has looked at this comprehensive, undeniable, slightly embarrassing failure and decided that the correct response is to do exactly the same thing again, except angrier and with bigger fines. A study in the British Medical Journal followed 408 teenagers and found that 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still merrily logging on three months after the ban supposedly cut them off from the world. The New York Times took a look and concluded that “six months in, most indications are that the law has largely failed at keeping young teens off the platforms.” One parent, asked how the great crackdown was going in their household, offered the immortal line “I don’t know a single person who’s lost an account.” The methods teenagers use to defeat this multimillion-dollar age-verification apparatus are the fun part. Some of them draw mustaches on their faces. A nation’s flagship child-protection technology, the thing other governments are flying in to study, can be undone by a child with a marker. The rest just borrow an account from mom, or an older brother, or anyone in the house who has technically aged past the algorithm’s wild guessing. The whole edifice has the structural integrity of a wet paper bag and the teenagers worked that out in roughly a day. You would think a government confronted with this would feel a flicker of doubt. You would be wrong. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped up on Saturday and announced that the maximum fine for tech firms would double from A$49.5 million to A$99 million (around 68 million USD) because clearly the problem with an impossible law is that the threats attached to it weren’t scary enough. “It’s clear Big Tech are not doing enough to comply with the law – there are still too many children on social media,” he said, with the wounded confidence of a man who has never once considered that the law itself might be the issue. “These changes reflect the seriousness with which we take any failure by social media companies to comply.” Here sits a real expansion of state power and the mustache jokes have done a fine job of keeping anyone from looking at it. The government wants to strengthen the information-gathering reach of its internet regulator, the eSafety Commissioner. Communications Minister Anika Wells delivered the obligatory villain messaging, declaring that “Based on the regular updates I receive from the eSafety Commissioner, it is clear to me that social media platforms are adopting tricks straight out of the big tech playbook and doing the bare minimum to get by.” That’s a tidy story that conveniently skips over who’s building the surveillance plumbing. Because that is what these new powers are. The regulator would be able to compel platforms to hand over documentation proving what they’ve done to keep under-16s out, and the reach stretches past the platforms themselves to third parties, the digital ID companies and the app stores. A law sold to the public as a simple rule about teenagers opening accounts is a government machine that can demand records from every business that so much as glances at the verification process. The five platforms currently under investigation, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Snap’s Snapchat, and TikTok, are being squeezed to deploy ever more aggressive age-checking, which means scanning more faces and binding more real identities to more usernames, all to fail at stopping a 13-year-old with a borrowed login. The face-scanning deserves a special prize for pointlessness. The BMJ researchers found two-thirds of underage users sailed through by either declaring themselves over 16 or posting a selfie that the platform cheerfully accepted as over 16. The system doesn’t work. What it does, reliably, every single time, is normalize the idea that you should hand your face to an automated identity scanner before you’re allowed to speak to your friends. Kids beat it by pulling stupid expressions. Adults beat it by simply existing for more than 16 years. And in both cases, the camera still got its data. The verification fails at its job and succeeds wildly at the thing it was never advertised to do, which is harvesting biometric and identity information from the entire population on the way past. The genuinely maddening thing is that a less invasive road existed, and Australia bulldozed straight past it. A government that actually cared about minimizing data collection could have accepted that no system catches every teenager, leaned on lighter measures, and declined to build a face-scanning, identity-linking, document-demanding regime to chase a problem it was never going to solve. Instead, it has done the opposite with real enthusiasm. The fines climb, the regulator’s tentacles extend and the pressure on platforms to gather more personal information rises with every press conference. The government brags that it has already deactivated or restricted more than five million accounts, which it presents as a triumph, and which is really five million identity judgments made by systems no user can see, question, or appeal. Other countries are watching this circus and taking notes, not as a warning but as inspiration. Britain announced this month that it wants restrictions to go even further, dragging gaming and live-streaming platforms into the same net. The thing they’re all so keen to copy does not keep children off social media. The children are demonstrably still there, drawing facial hair and giggling. What it builds with frightening efficiency is permanent infrastructure for identity checks, biometric scans, and behavioral profiling at the front door of every platform you use. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Failed. The Government’s Fix Is to Double the Fines appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Council of the European Union has decided that from July, online creators can attend EU summits and ministerial meetings to make videos for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Fine. But the guidance to member states includes one odd instruction: don’t pick anyone who has “published views against EU values.” What are EU values? Nobody will say. That’s the useful thing about a vague rule. You can point it wherever you like and never have to justify it. Posted something awkward about migration? Wondered whether the euro was a good idea? Suggested the Commission gets things wrong? Possibly against EU values, possibly not, depending on who’s reading your back catalog that morning. There’s no list of banned opinions or a review. An official just looks through your old posts and makes a call. Now imagine them trying this on actual journalists. Guidance that said: nominate reporters to cover the summit, but exclude any who’ve expressed views against EU values. The newspapers would lose their minds, and Brussels knows it, which is exactly why it would never write that sentence down for the press corps. Journalists come with a long tradition of being a nuisance to power, and a fair number of lawyers to back it up. Creators don’t have that armor. There’s no press freedom group ready to defend some bloke with 200,000 followers who makes explainer videos about the Council. So the EU runs an opinion test, files it under “eligibility criteria,” and assumes nobody will notice it’s the same thing it would never ask of a reporter. They’re doing the same job, though. A creator explaining a Brussels decision to teenagers who’ll never buy a newspaper is doing journalism, whether or not anyone hands him a badge. Plenty of them reach more people than the wire reporters in the room. The only real difference is that one group has institutional defenders and the other has a phone. Which leaves the EU with an awkward question. Is a free press one of these “values” or not? If it is, the rule contradicts itself, because the whole point of a free press is being able to publish views against you. You can’t vet your reporters for loyalty and call it press freedom in the same breath. And if a free press isn’t on the list, then they’ve told you what’s actually on it by what they left off. An institution that believed in free expression wouldn’t reach for an opinion test at all. The clever part needs no rejection to work. The moment this guidance exists, anyone who wants a press pass starts editing himself. Skip the criticism about the latest policy. Drop the joke about von der Leyen. Keep it balanced, just in case. The Council doesn’t need to silence anyone when it can make people nervous enough to do it themselves. There’s also no paper trail, because nobody was ever formally told no. The scheme arrives wrapped in good intentions, naturally. Brussels calls it widening engagement and bringing the institutions closer to the public. The other rules are reasonable enough: you need a real audience at home, a track record on politics and European affairs, no big sponsorship deals, no political office. Then the values clause does the job it was put there to do, sorting the approved from the unapproved. What you get isn’t a press pool so much as a fan club with lanyards. The politicians who said anything were the ones already out of favor. Belgium’s Gerolf Annemans, a Vlaams Belang MEP, went for sarcasm: “I would go even further: nothing should be allowed to be questioned.” Lucas Hartong, formerly a Dutch MEP for the PVV, was drier, noting that “the EU and genuine democracy don’t exactly go hand in hand.” The Sweden Democrats said the whole thing showed “the EU elite is becoming increasingly desperate.” Take the word “values” off the front and look at what’s underneath. The EU writes the definition, hands it to national governments, and uses it to decide which independent voices get to film its leaders. An institution that trusted its own legitimacy would open the doors and let the unflattering footage happen. Screening the cameras for loyalty first tells you how confident it really feels. And the creators most likely to pass? The ones who were never going to ask anything difficult anyway. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU’s New Creator Press Passes Come With a Loyalty Test appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. 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. Google has lined up the promises you would expect. The company says the footage is deleted once verification finishes, no audio is recorded, and the video is never tied to your identity. Its documentation adds that nothing goes to third parties and the data serves security alone, then points to the Google Privacy Policy for how everything is used and stored, a policy elastic enough to cover almost anything. For now the feature seems optional. People who cannot perform the gestures still get the older puzzles, with Google saying reCAPTCHA “continues to provide visual and audio challenges” while it develops alternatives. However, we all know that optional today is rarely optional forever and the older challenges survive partly because the gesture check is still being tested. The reassurances rest on trust and Google has spent years giving people reasons to hold it back. This is a company whose business runs on gathering and monetizing personal data, now asking to switch on your camera and read your hand. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google’s New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.