If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. We have long covered how Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has been issuing global takedown orders to American social media companies since at least 2020, demanding they delete accounts and posts worldwide, including for users in the United States. But now, a new House Judiciary Committee report, built on nonpublic documents, maps the full scope of this operation and has given some more insight. We obtained a copy of the report for you here. The orders target political dissent. Moraes’s first documented global order, from July 2020, told Meta to delete 16 Facebook profiles everywhere to stop “continued dissemination of fraudulent news (fake news), slanderous accusations, threats and offenses imbued with animus . . . that affect the honor and safety of the FEDERAL SUPREME COURT.” The speech he wanted erased was criticism of his own court. The targets include Americans. Bruno Aiub, a Florida-based podcaster known as “Monark,” saw roughly 40 accounts ordered deleted across 24 platforms in June 2024, with daily fines of about $18,500. Moraes also issued secret orders to Spotify between 2023 and 2024 demanding the removal of Aiub’s podcast. Brazilian journalist Allan Dos Santos, also US-based, triggered a harsher response. When X refused to block his account, Moraes froze the platform’s assets, cut off payment processing, and ordered X to cease operating in Brazil. Rumble was shut down for the same reason. Brazil’s censorship agency, the CIEDDE, even flagged posts about US presidents for deletion. One April 2025 post was targeted because it said Trump was “going to expose that bandit dressed as a judge [Justice Moraes] here in Brazil, as well as the interference/fraud in the 2022 elections.” Others accused Biden and USAID of involvement in Brazilian election fraud. X refused to comply. Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center hosted a September 2025 roundtable that brought together censorship officials from Brazil, Australia, the EU, and the UK. The event, revealed by a whistleblower, was framed as discussing “compliance and enforcement of existing regulations related to online trust and safety.” The attendees included officials who have directly targeted American speech. Brazil’s Supreme Court also stripped platforms’ liability protections in June 2025. Justice Gilmar Mendes called the ruling a potential “paradigm for the world” for “how to deal with social media.” If a foreign judge can order worldwide deletion of posts that criticize him, and platforms comply to keep market access, every government with a large consumer base holds a veto over speech in the United States. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brazil’s Justice Moraes Ordered Global Takedowns of American Users’ Speech, House Report Reveals appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Nearly three million people uploaded photos to OkCupid expecting those images would stay on a dating app. Instead, the photos ended up training facial recognition software, handed over by the company’s own founders to an AI firm they’d personally invested in. Match Group settled a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit last week over the transfer, which the agency says violated OkCupid’s privacy policy and was actively covered up for years. The consent decree permanently bars Match Group and OkCupid from misrepresenting their data practices and puts them under compliance reporting for a decade. The settlement carries no financial penalty. Three million users’ photos, demographic profiles, and location data were funneled to a facial recognition company with zero restrictions on use, and the regulatory consequence is a promise not to lie about it again. The data transfer happened in September 2014. Clarifai, an AI company building image recognition systems, asked OkCupid for a large dataset of user photos. Clarifai The request wasn’t routed through a business development team or vetted by legal. OkCupid’s founders were financially invested in Clarifai, and the ask came on that basis, one investor helping out another. OkCupid’s president and chief technology officer were directly involved in the data transfer, and one of the founders allegedly sent the photos from his personal email account, bypassing any corporate oversight or audit trail. No contract governed the handoff. No restrictions were placed on what Clarifai could do with the data. Clarifai never provided any business services to OkCupid. OkCupid’s privacy policy at the time told users the company wouldn’t share personal information with third parties except as described in the policy, or when users were given a chance to opt out. Neither applied here. The photos, the location data, and the demographic details went to a facial recognition startup because insiders wanted them to, and nobody asked the people in those photos whether that was acceptable. Clarifai’s CEO and founder later said his company used the OkCupid images to build a service that could identify the age, sex, and race of detected faces. Dating profile pictures, uploaded by people looking for romantic connections, became raw material for technology that could be sold to police departments, government agencies, and military operations. When The New York Times reported on the arrangement in 2019, OkCupid’s response was carefully evasive. The company told the paper that Clarifai had contacted OkCupid about a possible collaboration and that no commercial agreement had been entered into. That framing was technically true and functionally misleading. There was no commercial agreement because the data was given away for free, a favor between a company and its founders’ investment. The FTC alleged that OkCupid did not address whether Clarifai had gained access to photos without consent, and described the response as part of a broader pattern of concealment. The agency said it ultimately had to enforce its Civil Investigative Demand in federal court after OkCupid obstructed the investigation. Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said, “The FTC enforces the privacy promises that companies make.” He added, “We will investigate, and where appropriate, take action against companies that promise to safeguard your data but fail to follow through.” “The alleged conduct at issue does not reflect how OkCupid operates today,” OkCupid spokesperson Michael Kaye. “Over the years, we have further strengthened our privacy practices and data governance to ensure we meet the expectations of our users.” Match and Clarifai did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The settlement, filed March 30, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, permanently prohibits misrepresenting data collection, use, and disclosure practices. Match Group did not admit wrongdoing. The Commission vote was 2-0. What the settlement doesn’t do is more revealing than what it does. There’s no fine. There’s no requirement to delete the data Clarifai received. There’s no penalty for the twelve years of alleged concealment. There’s no action against Clarifai itself. The settlement creates a compliance framework that only produces consequences if Match Group violates the order going forward, meaning the first violation is effectively free. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post OkCupid Gave 3M Users’ Photos to AI Firm, FTC Says 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 Your Weather App Became a Surveillance Machine — and How to Escape It appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Washington wants to run European fingerprints through American databases, and the EU is considering it. The Department of Homeland Security and the European Union are in formal negotiations over an arrangement that would give DHS direct query access to biometric records held by EU member states, a level of access that Brussels has never granted to a non-EU country for border security purposes. The deal sits inside DHS’s Enhanced Border Security Partnership program, which effectively tells Visa Waiver Program countries to open their biometric databases or risk losing visa-free travel privileges. Washington has set a December 31, 2026, deadline for EBSP agreements to be operational. After that, DHS reviews each country’s compliance. Countries that fail to meet expectations risk suspension from the VWP, which would reimpose visa requirements on their citizens. When DHS encounters a traveler, asylum seeker, visa applicant, or anyone flagged during immigration processing, it would query a participating country’s database using that person’s biometrics. A match returns fingerprints and related identity data to DHS. If there’s no match, there’s no data transfer. That sounds targeted until you consider the volume. Twenty-four of the EU’s twenty-seven member states participate in the VWP. DHS wants query access to all of them. What makes this negotiation unusual is its layered structure. The EU Council authorized negotiation of an EU-level framework agreement in December 2025, setting the legal conditions for data transfers. Individual member states would then sign their own implementing arrangements with DHS, identifying which databases are involved and setting operational terms. The framework creates the legal permission. The bilateral deals create the pipeline. The scope of data under discussion extends well beyond fingerprints and passport photos. Draft documents show that European countries may be compelled to transfer “special categories” of personal data to US border authorities, including political opinions, trade union memberships, and information on sex life. The draft allows this if transfers are “strictly necessary and proportionate,” and the DHS gets to argue what qualifies. The European Data Protection Supervisor described it as the first EU agreement involving large-scale sharing of personal data, including biometrics, with a third country. European negotiators are pushing for limits on bulk data harvesting, meaningful human oversight when automated decisions produce adverse outcomes, tight controls on what happens to data after DHS receives it (particularly transfers onward to third countries), and some form of legal remedy for Europeans whose data gets misused. The EU also wants reciprocity, meaning European authorities would get to query American databases rather than just supplying data in one direction. That last demand tells you something about the power dynamics here. The current proposal asks Europe to feed information into a system it can’t search itself. Reconciling those European demands with what DHS actually wants may prove functionally impossible. The tensions run through every major detail. How long can DHS retain transferred biometric data? Does the agreement cover targeted border checks, or does it enable something closer to systematic screening of entire populations? And what legal redress can a German or French citizen realistically obtain under US law when their data is mishandled? According to draft documents, EU states would have to resolve disputes through national and international courts, rather than through a joint oversight committee. For a European whose fingerprints end up in a US enforcement database by mistake, the path to correction runs through American courts, a system with no equivalent of data subject rights. The DHS is simultaneously expanding its domestic biometric surveillance capabilities. CBP signed a $225,000 contract with Clearview AI for facial recognition technology and access to a database of over 60 billion publicly available images scraped from the internet. And biometrics aren’t the only data DHS is reaching for. CBP proposed in December 2025 to require DNA from the 42 Visa Waiver Program countries and to provide five years of social media history as a mandatory condition of entry, along with all email addresses from the past decade and phone numbers used over the past five years. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US & EU Negotiate Biometric Data-Sharing Deal appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple deleted Bitchat from the China App Store, acting on a direct order from the Cyberspace Administration of China. Jack Dorsey, who created the app, posted a screenshot of Apple’s removal notice to X with a short caption: “bitchat pulled from the china app store.” The notice Apple sent to Dorsey is almost a copy-paste of the one it sent to Damus three years earlier. The language is identical. The accusation is identical. The CAC determined that Bitchat violates Articles 3 of the Provisions on the Security Assessment of Internet-based Information Services with Attribute of Public Opinions or Capable of Social Mobilization. That regulation, enacted in 2018, requires any online service capable of influencing public opinion or organizing collective action to undergo a government security assessment before going live. If a service hasn’t submitted to that assessment, the CAC can order it pulled. It targets the capacity for “public opinions” and “social mobilization.” The Chinese government has decided that the ability to communicate outside state-approved channels is itself a security threat, and Apple consistently treats that determination as sufficient grounds for deletion. Bitchat is a peer-to-peer messaging app that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks. It requires no internet connection, no phone number, no email address, and no user account. Messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored only on the devices involved. There are no central servers to subpoena, no user databases to hand over, and no content moderation pipeline for the CAC to plug into. Dorsey built the initial version over a single weekend in July 2025, coding it with Goose, Block’s open-source AI assistant. He published a white paper on GitHub and opened a TestFlight beta that hit its 10,000-user cap within hours. That design is precisely the problem from Beijing’s perspective. China’s internet censorship apparatus depends on having a chokepoint. WeChat, the country’s dominant messaging platform, has censorship tools baked into its architecture. The government can monitor conversations, flag keywords, and delete content before users even see it. Bitchat offers none of those control surfaces. The app makes censorship structurally impossible on a technical level because there is nothing between sender and receiver for the state to intercept, filter, or read. The app had already proved its usefulness in exactly the scenarios that make governments nervous. Protesters in Madagascar downloaded it 70,000 times in a single week during September 2025. Nepalese users pulled down nearly 50,000 copies on September 8 alone, after their government shut down social networks during anti-corruption demonstrations. Downloads spiked in Uganda and Iran during internet blackouts in January 2026. Dorsey noted publicly that Russia was at one point the app’s largest user base by country, as citizens looked for alternatives to state-surveilled messaging platforms. Apple’s compliance with the removal order was, as usual, immediate and without public comment beyond the boilerplate notification to the developer. The notice told Dorsey that his app “includes content that is illegal in China, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.” Apple cited Section 5 (Legal) of those guidelines, which requires apps to comply with local laws. Apple has refined this process into a routine. When the CAC ordered WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram removed from the China App Store in April 2024, Apple complied and issued a statement saying, “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.” The company has removed VPN apps, news apps, a Quran app, and tens of thousands of games from its China storefront over the past several years, all at government request. Apple positions itself publicly as a defender of privacy and an advocate for human rights. The company’s own human rights commitment states that it believes in “the critical importance of an open society in which information flows freely.” And yet Apple functions as the enforcement arm of the CAC’s censorship decisions whenever those decisions concern the Chinese market. The company doesn’t challenge the orders. It doesn’t delay. Apple controls the only door into every iPhone on the planet. Unlike Android, which allows users to install software from the web or third-party stores, iOS locks app distribution to the App Store. Apple decides what gets listed, what stays, and what disappears. That makes every removal order from a government functionally absolute for anyone using an iPhone in that country. When the CAC told Apple to pull Bitchat, it wasn’t asking Apple to remove one option among many. It was asking Apple to cut off access entirely, and Apple had the architectural power to do exactly that. No sideloading, no alternative storefront, no workaround short of jailbreaking the device or having already installed the app before the order came through. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple Removes Bitchat from China App Store at Cyberspace Administration Order appeared first on Reclaim The Net.