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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The EU’s digital identity wallet is voluntary. That’s the official position, repeated often enough that the European Commission felt the need to label the opposite claim a “myth.” Under the eIDAS 2.0 regulation, use of the wallet is voluntary and free of charge for citizens. Nobody will be forced to download the app. Nobody will be compelled to link their government ID to a smartphone. The EU has been very clear about this. Germany is now showing everyone what “voluntary” actually means. The country’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has proposed making the EUDI Wallet the tool for accessing social media platforms, tying the proposal to an impulse paper circulated ahead of a CDU federal conference in Stuttgart. The plan creates a three-tier system. Children under 14 would face a complete ban, with platforms required to “technically prevent access.” Users aged 14 to 15 would get youth-only platform versions with restricted algorithmic features, and everyone 16 and older would need mandatory EUDI Wallet verification. That last category includes every adult in Germany. The wallet that nobody is forced to use becomes the only way to access Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook. SPD leader and Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil framed this as an evolution in his own thinking. “A few years ago, we all emphasized the freedom of the internet and said that there should be no restrictions whatsoever,” Klingbeil said. “But now we see in the debates that something is happening in society, that young people are coming to me and saying we need clear rules on how to deal with social networks. We need restrictions… and we need to make decisions about that now.” SPD Secretary General Tim Klüssendorf confirmed the party is pushing the proposal forward, and he’s already in talks with coalition partner CDU, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, which called for an end to online anonymity the previous week. Both governing parties now want the same thing. Klüssendorf called it a matter of child protection. “We are currently not meeting the state’s obligation to protect. I believe children and young people are particularly at risk there. That has been proven,” he said after an SPD leadership meeting in Berlin. The platforms, he added, are currently “operating a business model that is simply not compatible with our democratic principles.” The privacy architecture of the EUDI Wallet is designed, at least on paper, to share less than traditional ID checks. The system uses a selective-disclosure mechanism that lets a user confirm they meet a specific age threshold without revealing their name, address, or full date of birth. A cryptographic proof goes to the platform. The platform gets a yes or no. Your legal identity stays on your device. That’s the theory. The SPD’s proposal starts dismantling it almost immediately. Users between 14 and 16 would only be able to access social media through a parent or guardian’s EUDI Wallet app, tying account access to the identity credentials of an adult. For everyone 16 and older, algorithmic content recommendations would be switched off by default, and opting back in would require active consent. Every login, every account creation, every new platform signup passes through a government-issued digital identity. The wallet confirms your age, sure. But the act of verification itself creates a record that you accessed a specific service, at a specific time, from a specific device. Klüssendorf insisted the SPD wants “a very data-minimising solution that is also in the hands of state regulation” rather than handing platforms more user data. Instead of Meta profiling your behavior to guess your age, the German state would verify your identity before you’re allowed to participate at all. The surveillance doesn’t disappear. It moves from the private sector to the government. The proposal gets more aggressive when it comes to enforcement. Klüssendorf said the goal must also be that workarounds “such as via a VPN tunnel” would not work. There’s no clean technical mechanism for that. Blocking VPN circumvention at scale requires either forcing VPN providers to verify users themselves, deep packet inspection of internet traffic at the network level, or both. These are the same tools that authoritarian governments deploy to control what their citizens can see online. Germany would be reaching for them because teenagers use TikTok. The broader EU framework around the wallet tells its own story about where “voluntary” is heading. Under the eIDAS 2.0 regulation, all Very Large Online Platforms and companies required by law to use strong customer authentication must accept the EUDI Wallet by late 2027. The EU’s own Digital Decade target aims for 80% of citizens to use a digital ID solution by 2030, with the EUDI Wallet as the primary instrument for reaching that goal. You don’t set an 80% adoption target for something you genuinely intend to keep optional. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Says EUDI Wallet Is Voluntary; Germany’s SPD Plan Says Otherwise appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Reno police treated a casino’s facial recognition system as a reliable witness for years, arresting people on algorithmic say-so with no corroborating evidence, no follow-up investigation, and no department policy telling them to do otherwise. A federal lawsuit now alleges this wasn’t one officer’s mistake. It was standard practice, applied to thousands of people. The amended complaint, filed April 2, 2026, in US District Court, names Officer Richard Jager and the city of Reno as defendants after Federal Judge Miranda Du allowed the city to be added. We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. Attorney Terri Keyser-Cooper, representing plaintiff Jason Killinger, stated that “Jager’s conduct was not a sporadic incident involving the wrongful actions of a rogue employee, but the result of a widespread custom and practice involving hundreds of municipal employees making thousands of arrests in the same manner over a period of years.” Killinger’s story shows exactly how this played out. He walked into the Peppermill Casino in Reno in September 2023, and the casino’s surveillance system flagged him as a “100 percent match” for a person who’d been banned from the property. More: Angela Lipps Spent 108 Days in Jail Because a Facial Recognition Algorithm Was Wrong The match was wrong. Killinger carried three forms of identification, including a Real ID, and offered to get more from his vehicle. Jager’s arrest report mentioned none of that. The lawsuit alleges the report falsely claimed Killinger presented conflicting identification, a characterization that doesn’t survive comparison with the bodycam footage and documents now in the court record Killinger spent 11 hours in custody. A fingerprint check at Washoe County jail confirmed what his driver’s license, pay stub, and vehicle registration had already shown: he was not the man the Peppermill had banned. Jager admitted under oath in January 2026 that the arrest “never should have happened.” He testified that the Reno Police Department’s custom and policy was to trust facial recognition software and to arrest people based on it without any other corroborating evidence. What happened after the fingerprints cleared, Killinger is almost as troubling as the arrest itself. City prosecutors filed a criminal complaint under the name “John Doe,” and a municipal judge found probable cause for trespass, even though the jail’s own biometric data had already proven Killinger’s identity. City attorney Jill Drake kept the case open after dismissal and referred it to an RPD fraud detective. That detective sided with Killinger, finding no identity theft and confirming the Peppermill had made an error. A Reno sergeant later told Jager there was probable cause for an identity theft charge against Killinger, despite the fraud detective’s findings. Jager declined to proceed. The Reno Police Department operated for years without a policy stating that a facial recognition match alone can’t establish probable cause. That gap isn’t a technicality. The US Department of Justice published a policy template back in 2017 through its Bureau of Justice Assistance, characterizing facial recognition results as “advisory in nature” that “do not establish probable cause.” The template explicitly states that results are not to be treated as positive identification without further investigation. RPD either ignored this guidance or never bothered to read it. Seven states now prohibit police from using facial recognition as the sole basis for an arrest, and four states require a warrant or probable cause before officers can even run a facial recognition search. Nevada has enacted no comparable restrictions, leaving departments like RPD to write their own rules, or, in this case, to write none at all. The case fits a pattern that has become depressingly familiar. Detroit’s Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested at his home in 2020, in front of his wife and two children, after the department relied on an incorrect facial recognition match. That case produced a landmark settlement requiring Detroit police to stop arresting people based solely on facial recognition results. The surveillance question here extends beyond police practices. Casinos like the Peppermill run facial recognition systems that scan every person who walks through the door, building biometric profiles of gamblers, tourists, and anyone else who happens to enter. The trouble with treating facial recognition as gospel is that it inverts how policing is supposed to work. Probable cause requires evidence that a specific person committed a specific act. A facial recognition match provides neither. It provides a statistical guess that two faces look similar, generated by an algorithm whose methodology, training data, and error rates are typically proprietary and unavailable for scrutiny. When police departments treat that guess as equivalent to an eyewitness identification or a fingerprint match, they’re building arrests on a foundation that no officer can explain and no defendant can meaningfully challenge. The city attorney’s office maintains Jager followed correct protocol, a claim that becomes harder to square with Jager’s own deposition testimony and the department’s lack of any written protocol governing facial recognition arrests. The complaint seeks punitive damages, compensation for injuries Killinger sustained while handcuffed, and attorney’s fees. A jury trial has been requested. No date has been set. The city did not respond to a request for comment. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Reno Police Sued After Wrongful Arrest Based on Facial Recognition Errors appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A record player from 1972 still plays records. A paperback from 1985 still opens. A Kindle from 2011, the one that works perfectly, the one with no cracked screen or dead battery, will stop functioning as an e-reader on May 20, 2026, because Amazon decided it should. Amazon sent emails this week to owners of Kindle devices manufactured in 2012 or earlier, informing them that support for their hardware would end in six weeks. After May 20, those devices will no longer be able to buy, borrow, or download books. The only content available will be whatever is already sitting on the device. And if you factory reset your Kindle, or deregister it from your Amazon account for any reason, you will not be able to re-register it. At that point, the device becomes a plastic rectangle. The affected models include the original Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle 5, Kindle Touch, and the first-generation Kindle Paperwhite. Some of these devices have been in continuous use for 14 years. They work. The screens display text. The batteries hold a charge. The page-turn buttons click. None of that matters. Amazon spokesperson Jesse Carr said that, “These models have been supported for at least 14 years — some as long as 18 years — but technology has come a long way in that time, and these devices will no longer be supported moving forward.” He added that Amazon is “notifying those still actively using them and offering promotions to help with the transition to newer devices.” The promotion is a 20 percent discount on a new Kindle and a $20 eBook credit. Amazon is offering customers a coupon to buy something they didn’t want to buy, to replace something that already works. The offer expires June 20, 2026, which gives affected users exactly one month to decide whether to spend money solving a problem Amazon created for them. The deregistration clause is where this gets ugly. The email Amazon sent includes a specific warning: if you deregister or factory reset your device after May 20, you cannot re-register it. The device becomes permanently unusable as a Kindle. Here’s what that means.. Your Kindle glitches. You need to reboot it. The reboot requires a factory reset. Your Kindle is now a brick. You bought it, you paid for it, you’ve used it for over a decade, and now it’s garbage because a software handshake with Amazon’s servers failed, and there’s no way to reconnect. A Reddit user in r/mildlyinfuriating put it plainly: “I’ve had my Kindle for years, but it still works perfectly and continues to serve me well. How wasteful is it to make a product practically unusable in order to force people to buy a newer model.” Amazon controls 72 percent of the global e-reader market. In the United States, the company handles 67 percent of all digital book sales, rising to 83 percent when Kindle Unlimited is included. When Amazon decides your reading device is obsolete, you don’t have a lot of alternatives within the ecosystem you’ve been buying into for years. Your library, your purchases, your reading history, all of it lives on Amazon’s servers. You can access your books through the Kindle app on your phone or through Kindle for Web, Amazon says, but the device you bought to read books on can no longer read new books. The hardware is fine but the software permission has been revoked. This keeps happening, and the pattern is always the same. In April 2025, Google announced it would end support for its first and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats. Starting October 25, 2025, those devices lost the ability to connect to the Google Home app, receive remote commands, or get software updates. A thermostat that was sold as a smart device became a dumb one overnight. The hardware worked. Google just stopped talking to it. Google offered affected US customers a 50 percent discount on the fourth-generation Nest thermostat, which costs $280 at retail. Same formula as Amazon. We broke your thing, here’s a coupon for a new thing. A class action lawsuit was filed, alleging Google had deprived consumers of features they’d already paid for. The lawsuit contends that customers would not have purchased the thermostat, or would have paid less, if they’d known Google could strip away core functionality on a corporate whim. The thermostats still work as basic temperature controllers. You can still walk up to the wall and press buttons. But nobody paid $250 for a device that lets you walk up to a wall and press buttons. They paid for the app, the scheduling, the remote control, the energy savings from smart algorithms. All of that disappeared on a date Google chose. In 2019, Sonos launched a trade-up program that required customers to put their older speakers into something called Recycle Mode. Once activated, a 21-day countdown began, after which the speaker was permanently bricked. Sonos offered a 30 percent discount on newer speakers in exchange for customers voluntarily destroying working hardware. After public backlash, the company reversed course in March 2020 and stopped requiring the bricking. But speakers that had already been put into Recycle Mode stayed bricked. Those devices were gone. In 2022, Insteon, a smart home company, abruptly shut down its cloud servers without warning. Thousands of users woke up to find their smart home hubs offline. Lights, thermostats, door locks, all controlled through Insteon’s servers, all suddenly unresponsive. The hardware was fine. The company just stopped existing in the way that mattered. Lowe’s did the same thing in 2019 when it shut down its Iris smart home platform. CNET described the resulting hardware as “expensive bricks.” Reading is not a complicated activity. A book is a self-contained object. You buy it, you own it, you read it whenever you want, and nobody can remotely disable it. The same is true of a record player, a CD player, and a cassette deck. These are devices that perform their function without asking permission from a server. The Kindle changed that relationship. The Kindle is a reading device that requires ongoing permission from Amazon to perform its basic function. The permission can be revoked. And while Amazon frames this as a natural consequence of technological progress, there’s nothing natural about it. The decision was made in a meeting. It was a business choice. The broader lesson here extends well beyond e-readers. Every internet-connected device in your home carries the same risk. The smart fridge that connects to an app for grocery lists. The smart washing machine that lets you start a cycle from your phone, the smart oven, the smart doorbell, the smart light bulbs; all of them depend on servers maintained by companies that may decide, at any point, that your model is no longer worth supporting. When that happens, you have an appliance that was broken for you. The motor in the washing machine still turns and the thermostat still measures temperature. But the software layer that was sold as the reason to buy these products gets switched off, and the company offers you 20 percent off their new model. A non-smart washing machine from 2005 still washes clothes. A non-smart thermostat from the 1970s still controls temperature. A paperback from any year still opens to the page you left off on. These objects do what they were made to do because their function is contained within them, not outsourced to a server farm that someone else controls. The Kindle was supposed to make reading more convenient. For millions of people, it did, and still does. But the trade-off was always there, buried in the terms of service: you are reading with permission, and the permission can be revoked with six weeks’ notice and a coupon. Amazon reported roughly $28 billion in annual book sales worldwide. The company’s Kindle ecosystem is valued at approximately $18 billion. This is not a company that cannot afford to maintain server compatibility for older devices. This is a company that chose not to. The 20 percent discount makes the motive clear enough. Amazon wants these customers to buy new Kindles. The support cutoff is the mechanism that makes it happen. The oldest affected Kindle was released in 2007. If you bought one of those, you’ve been an Amazon customer for 19 years. Amazon’s reward for that loyalty is an email telling you to buy a new one, with a discount that expires in a month. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Your Old Kindle Still Works Perfectly. Amazon Is Killing It Anyway appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A Freedom of Information response has confirmed what the UK’s speech regulator would probably have preferred to keep quiet. Ofcom fired off 197 information demands to American tech companies under the Online Safety Act, and not a single one went through the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, the formal diplomatic process that exists for exactly this kind of cross-border legal enforcement. Every one of those 197 notices was sent directly, by email or post, to companies operating entirely on American soil. The number comes from a FOI request filed by Daniel Lü, who asked Ofcom a series of pointed questions about how it enforces the Online Safety Act against non-UK targets. Ofcom confirmed that as of February 26, 2026, it had issued 197 Section 100 notices to US businesses. Zero through MLAT. The treaty between the US and UK that governs how one country’s legal process gets enforced in the other’s jurisdiction was treated as optional. Ofcom decided it didn’t apply. That admission drew an immediate response from Preston Byrne, the American lawyer who represents 4chan and other US companies targeted by Ofcom. Byrne called the 197 notices a “breathtaking” “attack on the First Amendment” and pointed out the uncomfortable math. Only two US companies, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, have publicly refused to comply with Ofcom’s demands. If Byrne’s assessment is right, that leaves Ofcom enjoying “a 98% compliance rate with foreign censorship orders that violate the First Amendment.” A British regulator sent nearly 200 demands to American companies, bypassed every established legal channel, and almost all of them appear to have simply done what they were told. The chilling effect is already here. Ofcom Uses Free Speech to Hide Its Censorship Methods Lü did more than ask for the number of notices. He asked for policy documents about how Ofcom selects its foreign enforcement targets, what guidance it gives its teams about the legality of emailing criminal penalty warnings to US corporations, and whether Ofcom has any internal guidance on protected speech. Ofcom admitted it holds much of that information. Then it refused to hand it over. The reason, cited directly from the FOI Act, was that disclosure “would, or would be likely to, inhibit the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation; and/or would otherwise prejudice, or would be likely otherwise to prejudice, the effective conduct of public affairs.” A speech regulator is claiming that transparency about its censorship operations would damage free and frank deliberation. Ofcom is borrowing the language of free expression to shield itself from accountability over how it suppresses expression. The irony is so complete it feels deliberate. On the question of whether Ofcom holds any guidance on protected speech, the answer was even more revealing. Ofcom said it doesn’t have any. No internal documents addressing what speech is protected when it exercises its enforcement powers against foreign companies. It pointed instead to its general obligations under the Online Safety Act, the Communications Act 2003, and the European Convention on Human Rights, along with links to already-public guidance documents. That’s the speech protection regime for companies being censored by the UK from American soil: a few hyperlinks to existing publications. The MLAT Problem Isn’t New. It’s Getting Worse. The treaty issue is central. MLAT exists so that when one country wants to enforce its laws against people or companies in another country, there’s a formal process involving both governments. For the US side, that means routing through the Department of Justice. A judge gets involved. There’s oversight. There are procedural protections. Ofcom has previously argued it doesn’t need to use MLAT because its Section 100 notices are administrative, not criminal. That distinction might satisfy Ofcom’s lawyers in London, but it doesn’t satisfy anyone else. Byrne and his clients have argued in federal court that Ofcom’s demands have no legal force precisely because they skipped the treaty process. 4chan and Kiwi Farms received their enforcement demands by email, sent to addresses that in some cases weren’t even authorized to accept legal service. The Lü FOI also asked whether Ofcom holds any correspondence with the US Department of Justice or the FBI about its enforcement activity. Ofcom’s response: it holds no information related to this question. The regulator didn’t talk to anyone in the US government before firing off 197 demands to US companies. It just hit send. What the FOI Actually Revealed, and What Ofcom Hid Lü’s request covered six questions. The pattern in Ofcom’s responses tells its own story. On the questions where Ofcom could respond by linking to documents that are already public, it was happy to share. On everything else, it cited exemptions, claimed it didn’t hold the information, or both. When asked for policy documents about enforcing the OSA against non-UK providers, including any records discussing MLAT, Ofcom said it holds some information but won’t release it. It also claimed it holds no records of MLAT discussions or legal guidance about whether emailing criminal penalty warnings to American corporations is valid. Either Ofcom never considered whether its enforcement method was legal under international law, or it did consider it and doesn’t want anyone to see that analysis. When asked how it selects non-UK enforcement targets, Ofcom cited exemptions under the Communications Act 2003 and linked to its public enforcement guidance, plus its own decisions against 4chan and other US entities. The internal criteria, the actual decision-making process for choosing which American companies to go after, stayed hidden. When asked about its approach to “qualifying worldwide revenue,” the basis for calculating fines that can reach £18 million or 10% of global revenue, Ofcom linked to its public guidance explaining that companies are expected to self-report their revenue to Ofcom. Companies that Ofcom is threatening with fines are supposed to voluntarily tell Ofcom how much money they make, so that Ofcom can calculate a bigger fine. The compliance incentives here are about as perverse as they get. Byrne Goes to Congress Byrne said he forwarded Ofcom’s admission directly to the US government. He tagged US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, Senator Eric Schmitt, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and called on Congress to act. This is consistent with Byrne’s approach throughout the Ofcom fight. He has previously said he copies the US government on Ofcom correspondence that crosses his desk. The legal strategy from the US side has been to deny Ofcom any clean precedent. The four companies that received formal enforcement action, 4chan, Kiwi Farms, a mental health forum called SaSu, and the social network Gab, all refused to comply. 4chan responded to one of Ofcom’s fines with a picture of a hamster. The point was to make Ofcom’s orders publicly and visibly unenforceable on American soil, turning each attempted punishment into a political liability for the regulator rather than a deterrent for the rest of the American internet. But the 197 number changes the scale of the problem. Those four companies were the public-facing enforcement targets, the ones Ofcom wanted to make examples of. Behind them, 193 other US companies apparently received quieter demands and, if Byrne’s analysis is correct, most of them complied without a fight. Without lawyers, without publicity, without anyone in Congress knowing it happened. Byrne has pushed the GRANITE Act, a proposed law that would allow US entities to sue foreign governments for censorship attempts and void foreign censorship orders in US courts. Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has appeared on GB News in London suggesting Congress is considering a federal version of the law. The Trump administration has made public statements objecting to the Online Safety Act. The US State Department sent diplomats to London in 2025 to challenge Ofcom directly. Whether all of that translates into legislation remains an open question. Ofcom, for its part, has already moved on to bigger targets. After spending a year trying to fine platforms like 4chan and getting nowhere, the regulator recently opened new investigations into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Roblox, and X. The small companies held the line. The question now is whether the large ones will too, or whether they’ll decide that complying with a foreign regulator’s censorship demands is easier than asserting their constitutional rights. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post How UK Regulator Ofcom Quietly Bypassed International Law to Police American Speech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.