If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Florida wants every social media user in the state to prove how old they are. The method is up to the platforms and the options include government ID uploads, biometric face scans, payment credentials, and behavioral profiling. Now the state is suing TikTok for not doing it fast enough. Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a 66-page complaint Monday in St. Lucie County Circuit Court, accusing TikTok of letting children under 14 create accounts, skipping parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and lying to parents about what their kids actually see on the app. The lawsuit names TikTok Inc., its parent company ByteDance and several related entities. It’s the first enforcement action under House Bill 3, Florida’s Online Protections for Minors Act, which took effect January 1, 2025 after spending two years tangled in court challenges. We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.  HB 3 bans social media platforms with addictive design features from contracting with children 13 and younger and requires parental consent before 14- and 15-year-olds can open accounts. Violations carry fines of $50,000 each. But to block minors, platforms first have to figure out who is and isn’t a minor, which means age-checking every user, adults included. Florida is building an identity verification regime for the internet under the banner of protecting kids and the surveillance costs of that project land on millions of people who have done nothing wrong. What the Complaint Says TikTok Did The state’s filing is an indictment of TikTok’s entire business model. According to the complaint, the platform’s own executives have admitted internally that “[t]he product in itself has baked into it compulsive use” and that the algorithm can disrupt young users’ ability to sleep, eat, and interact with people in person. The complaint also cites a description of “[t]eenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience,” drawn from New York Times reporting in 2016. Florida alleges TikTok uses what its own documents call “coercive design tactics” to manipulate young users into spending more time on the app. The platform harvests personal data from children and teenagers to identify psychological vulnerabilities, then exploits those vulnerabilities to serve targeted advertising. Internal records cited in the complaint acknowledge that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety” and that it “interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.” TikTok knew and kept going. The complaint also targets how TikTok represents itself in Apple’s App Store. The platform currently carries a 13+ rating and tells parents that sexual content, profanity, drug references, and self-harm themes are “infrequent” and “mild.” Florida says that’s false and that investigators found this content “frequently and easily accessible” through accounts registered as belonging to 13-year-olds. The state argues TikTok deliberately lowballed its App Store rating to dodge parental controls. If the platform had been honest, according to the filing, it would have received a 17+ rating under the old system or 16+ to 18+ under Apple’s new one, triggering automatic blocks on phones with parental restrictions enabled. “TikTok’s success hinges on its ability to addict children and teenagers to the platform,” Uthmeier said. “TikTok knowingly deceives parents and allows children to be exposed to harmful and inappropriate content in direct violation of Florida law. We have zero tolerance for companies that prioritize profit over children’s safety. TikTok should expect to be held accountable.” Beyond HB 3, the lawsuit invokes the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and asks the court to declare TikTok a public nuisance. Florida is seeking civil penalties, punitive damages, disgorgement of profits, permanent injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees. TikTok’s Response TikTok said it has already been working with the attorney general’s office and has started notifying users under 14 in Florida that their accounts will be suspended. “TikTok is built with safety at its core, with more than 50 preset safety and privacy settings for teens and easy-to-use tools for parents,” a spokesperson said. “We’re continuing to update our platform in Florida in response to state law. We are evaluating the state’s complaint and are prepared to defend our strong record on minor safety.” The company claims 50-plus preset safety settings. What it doesn’t explain is how those settings square with internal documents showing executives knew the platform was harming children and chose to keep operating the same way. Fifty safety toggles mean nothing if the algorithm underneath them is designed to override user autonomy through compulsive engagement. Florida’s case against TikTok is built on a law that creates a problem of its own. HB 3 requires platforms to verify ages but doesn’t specify what counts as “reasonable” verification. That leaves companies to decide how much personal data to extract from every user in the state, and none of the available methods come with meaningful limits on how long the data gets stored or who gets access to it. The law protects children by demanding that adults prove they aren’t children, a trade that turns anonymous internet use into identity-verified internet use for millions of people who have every legal right to browse without showing ID. Meta already capitulated in April, agreeing to start purging accounts belonging to under-14s and implementing age checks ahead of an enforcement deadline. Uthmeier has been pressuring Snapchat, Roblox, and Discord to follow. Discord’s earlier experiment with government ID-based age checks resulted in a breach that exposed over 70,000 government-issued IDs. That’s a preview of what mandatory identity harvesting across every major platform could produce at scale. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Florida Sues TikTok Over Age Verification Failures as Digital ID Mandate Takes Effect appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. SUBSCRIBE Already a supporter? Sign In. (If you’re already logged in but still seeing this, refresh this page to show the post.) The post How to Fly Without Feeding the Surveillance Machine appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. India’s government has blocked a messaging platform used by more than 150 million people because it couldn’t keep a single exam paper from leaking. The ban on Telegram, ordered under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act and in effect until June 22, targets cheating tied to the NEET-UG medical entrance exam. A second order forces Telegram to disable its message-editing feature across India until June 30. The National Testing Agency said the block was “in response to the organised use of the platform by cheating rackets to defraud candidates appearing for the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled on 21 June 2026.” The re-exam follows the cancellation of the May 3 test, which 2.28 million candidates sat before allegations of a paper leak forced the NTA to scrap results. The CBI arrested more than a dozen people. In 2024, the NEET exam faced a similar scandal involving leaks and irregularities. Two years running, the exam’s security has failed inside the system that prints and administers the test. The leak originated among insiders, not on Telegram. Blocking the app where screenshots circulate does nothing about the people doing the leaking. The NTA’s own press release confirms targeted enforcement was already working, acknowledging that India’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre had taken down “a substantial number of Telegram channels, groups and bots whose names and content openly advertised their fraudulent and misleading purpose.” The agency confirmed “there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain.” The scam channels were selling access to something that doesn’t exist, and law enforcement was already shutting them down. Telegram founder Pavel Durov called the ban a punishment aimed at the wrong people. “This punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India,” he wrote, “not the insiders who leaked the exam materials.” The Internet Freedom Foundation called the ban a “band aid solution” and a “disproportionate answer to exam fraud,” arguing that Section 69A permits blocking specific information, not shutting down an entire platform. “The block of Telegram is reactive and ineffective and will punish ordinary users instead of addressing the systemic source of exam leaks,” IFF said, adding that “thousands of students depend on Telegram for study groups, doubt-clearing, and shared resources” in the final days before the test. IFF also noted the MeitY order authorizing the block has not been published, violating the Supreme Court’s Anuradha Bhasin ruling that such orders must be made public. App-level blocks in India run through ISP-level DNS filtering, which anyone with a VPN can route around in minutes. Fraud operators sophisticated enough to run scam channels demanding lakhs of rupees will not be inconvenienced by a DNS block. The students who lost their study groups five days before the exam will be. The NTA said it regretted “the inconvenience,” an admission buried in bureaucratic language that the government knows most of the people it cut off from Telegram have done nothing wrong. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post India Shut Down Telegram for 150 Million Users Over One Exam Leak appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Google is removing the last technical workaround that kept effective ad blockers alive in Chrome. When Chrome 150 ships on June 30, the browser will delete a hidden setting called the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, a switch that power users had been toggling to keep old-style extensions running after Google officially discontinued them. Without it, uBlock Origin and every other extension built on the old Manifest V2 framework, the set of rules that governed how browser extensions worked for years, will stop functioning permanently. Chrome 151, expected in July, will strip the remaining MV2 flags entirely. No policy override and no hidden setting will bring them back. The company that sells more advertising than any other on Earth now controls whether you can block those ads. And it just decided you can’t, at least not effectively. What Google took away and why it took it The technical change is the replacement of Chrome’s webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API. Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen. Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list. uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported. It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design. Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.” Cronin’s sign-off, that “other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire,” suggests the removal as a Chrome-specific choice. It isn’t. Google controls 65% of the desktop browser market and the MV2 code being stripped from Chromium, the open-source project that Chrome and many other browsers are built on top of, affects every browser that shares that foundation. Google justifies the migration on security grounds and there’s some substance to the argument. The old webRequest API gives extensions deep access to every network request a browser makes, from images and page loads to login credentials, and the extension sees the data before Chrome acts on it. A compromised or malicious extension with that access can read your passwords as you type them, redirect you to fake websites, or slip harmful code into pages you trust. The declarativeNetRequest API is designed to prevent exactly this kind of attack by restricting extensions to predefined rule sets. Instead of giving an extension free rein over your browser traffic, Chrome only lets it submit a list of instructions in advance and handles the blocking itself. That narrows the ways a bad actor can exploit an extension because the extension never gets to touch your data directly. But Google generated roughly $239.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, and content blockers directly reduce the number of ads users see. The MV3 restrictions don’t ban ad blocking entirely. They cap how many rules an extension can use and eliminate dynamic blocking, the ability to recognize and stop new ad formats and trackers as they appear in real time. Ad companies constantly change how they deliver ads, rotating domains and disguising tracking scripts, and the old extensions could keep up with that. The new ones can only block what’s already on a list that was written before the ad loaded. The result is ad blockers that work against yesterday’s ads but struggle against the ones that adapt daily. The same company that built Chrome and sells the ads it displays also wrote the rules governing what ad blockers can do inside it. Whether those incentives shaped MV3’s design is the most obvious question in the room, and Google has never given a convincing answer. Microsoft Edge and Opera, both built on Google’s Chromium engine, are expected to follow suit because the MV2 code being removed is shared across all Chromium-based browsers. Maintaining it independently would require significant engineering resources that most of those browsers are unlikely to commit. Brave, also Chromium-based, supports MV2 but also sidesteps the problem by building its own ad-blocking engine directly into the browser, bypassing the extension framework entirely. Firefox, which runs on its own engine, continues to support Manifest V2 and uBlock Origin without restriction. Mozilla implemented its own version of Manifest V3 but kept the old webRequest API working alongside it, so extensions that need real-time traffic access can still use it. That proves security improvements and effective content blocking can coexist. Google chose not to make them coexist. What you can do For Chrome users who want effective content blocking, the options are leaving Chrome or accepting reduced protection. Firefox supports uBlock Origin in full and shows no signs of changing that. Brave blocks ads natively. Both are free and work well, and switching takes about ten minutes. You can also install uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and accept that it blocks less, adapts more slowly to new threats and can’t match the original. Or you can do nothing, and Chrome 150 will disable the extension through a routine update and show you a notification that it’s no longer supported. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google Removes the Final Workaround for Full Ad Blocking in Chrome appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Poland’s Council of Ministers voted this month to approve a bundle of internet laws that, if enacted, would require adult websites to verify the identity of every visitor, speed up the government’s ability to block online content it classifies as “illegal,” and ban mobile phones in primary schools starting in September. Prime Minister Donald Tusk framed the entire package around protecting children. The age-verification bill does away with the self-declaration checkbox. Under the proposed rules, sites would have to confirm a visitor’s age through banks, mobile carriers, credit cards, or a government digital ID wallet. Poland’s mObywatel app, which already stores identity data for around 12 million people, is the most likely tool. Providers who don’t comply face fines ranging from 10,000 to 1 million zloty (roughly $2,700 to $270,000). The government can also order their sites blocked entirely. That blocking power is where the bill stops being about children and starts being about control. It works against sites hosted outside Poland, bypasses Polish courts, and requires no foreign cooperation. Domestic networks get the order and the connection dies. Digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski told reporters the companion legislation would let “paedophile material, child grooming attempts, fraud and identity theft” be blocked faster “and under full judicial oversight.” Nobody is going to argue with blocking child abuse material. But the bill doesn’t stop at child abuse material. It aligns Polish law with the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the DSA defines “illegal content” to include “illegal hate speech.” The government writes the definition of what qualifies. That gap between the stated purpose and the actual reach of the law is the whole problem. Poland’s own data protection authority, the PUODO, flagged this a year ago. The International Bar Association reported that the PUODO objected because the drafters never defined what “harmful content” means anywhere in the statute. The method for age verification was left to non-binding recommendations that sit outside the legal hierarchy entirely. Rights and obligations can’t be derived from recommendations. When the rule that gets your content deleted was never spelled out in binding law you have no grounds to challenge it. This all follows news that the Polish Sejm voted 419 to 19 on June 11 to criminalize the online publication of content that depicts crime, animal cruelty, or “degrading treatment” of another person. Anyone convicted faces up to three years in prison, rising to five when the content involves a minor. The bill now heads to the Senate, which can delay but not kill it, and then to President Karol Nawrocki’s desk. The law targets patostreaming, a Polish portmanteau of “pathological” and “streaming” that describes broadcasts where hosts do awful things on camera for paying audiences. The English equivalent is “trashstreaming.” The hosts are easy villains, and they gave lawmakers an excuse to pass something much broader than what’s needed to stop them. Two provisions in the bill reach far beyond shock-value livestreamers. The first concerns consent. The ban on distributing content showing “degrading treatment” applies even when the person being filmed agreed to appear. Two adults who consent to record something that a prosecutor later decides was degrading are both criminally exposed. The participants’ own judgment about what their conduct meant is overridden by the state’s judgment. A government prosecutor, not the people actually involved, gets the last word. The second concerns fiction. The same penalties apply to anyone who simulates or stages one of the prohibited acts without actually committing it. That means a performance depicting a crime that nobody carried out can still send its creator to prison. The offense lives in the depiction, not the act. Documentary footage of police violence depicts a crime. Protest video can be called degrading to someone. Satire can be staged. Once you’ve criminalized depictions and tied the trigger to “personal benefit,” which covers ad revenue, donations, or follower growth, you’ve written a law that can reach almost any online video a prosecutor wants to target. The vote itself was remarkable. Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition and the opposition Law and Justice party, bitter enemies on nearly everything, lined up together. The only opposition came from the right-wing Confederation and Confederation of the Polish Crown. PiS MP Michal Wojcik celebrated the result by tweeting, “This is a major success for Polish democracy.” When a tool to silence people is described as a success for democracy by a party that spent eight years in power dismantling judicial independence, that ought to tell you how useful the tool will be to whoever holds it next. Digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski told Polsat News he expects no presidential veto. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Broad New Powers Hiding Inside Poland’s Child Safety Bills appeared first on Reclaim The Net.