If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Meta is rolling out a badge on Facebook that requires users to record a video of their own face. The feature, massively accelerating the normalization of face scanning and biometric data collection, is called Facebook Verified, and asks a user to record a short video selfie, which the company checks against the photos already on their profile to confirm a match. The process is free and takes a few minutes. The company, which has been aggressively lobbying for “age verification” digital ID laws, presents the badge as a way to confirm a real person is behind an account. “As AI makes it easier to generate content, profiles, and messages,” it said, it wants users “to know there is a real person on the other side of a profile.” The badge is open to Facebook users who are 18 or older and in good standing with Meta’s Community Standards on fraud, scams, and deceptive practices, and who show “no evidence of inauthentic behavior.” It is not available for Pages or ProMode accounts, which limits it to personal profiles. Once a user completes the one-time check, the badge appears on Marketplace, Dating, Groups, and Profile. Meta said it plans to extend it to Feed posts over time. Facebook Verified is separate from Meta Verified, the company’s paid subscription, which bundles a badge with impersonation protection and account support. Facebook Verified charges no fee. Meta has not said how long it keeps the selfie video, where it stores it, or when it deletes it. The launch materials describe the match and say nothing about the video afterward. The scan arrives the same month Google added a selfie-video sign-in that records a user’s face to recover a locked account. Age-check laws in several US states and in Britain already require a face or an ID scan to open some accounts. Meta is now asking hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a face scan too. Facebook Verified is rolling out in phases, starting in select markets, and Meta plans to expand it worldwide. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Facebook Verified: Meta Now Wants a Video Selfie of Your Face 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 European Commission has told TikTok it broke the European Union’s Digital Services Act by failing to protect the accounts of minors. The Commission’s preliminary findings, issued on July 24, say TikTok lets minors set their accounts to public, so anyone, including people without a TikTok account, can see their content. The default also lets the platform recommend posts from users aged 16 and 17 to any other user through the For You feed. The Commission said the settings expose children to cyberbullying, unwanted contact, and predatory behavior. It said TikTok should make minors’ accounts visible by default only to users the minor has accepted, and should never push an older minor’s content to a global audience. TikTok can respond before the Commission issues a final decision. A non-compliance ruling carries a fine of up to 6 percent of the company’s annual worldwide revenue. The finding rests on a line between a minor’s account and an adult’s. To apply one rule to minors and another to adults, a platform has to know which of its users are minors. The same Commission has already said how it wants that done. On July 14, 2025, it published guidelines on protecting minors under its censorship law, the Digital Services Act. The guidelines rank the ways a platform can check a user’s age. Self-declaration, entering a birth date, is “unreliable.” Age estimation uses “facial analysis or behaviour patterns.” Age verification checks “official IDs or trusted digital credentials, such as the upcoming EU Digital Identity Wallet.” On the same day, the Commission released an app for age ID checks that it called a “gold standard in age assurance.” It is being piloted across member states, and the Digital Identity Wallet is due in 2026. All three methods collect data TikTok does not hold now. To sort minors from adults, age estimation reads the face or the behavior of every TikTok user. Age verification runs every user’s ID or EU wallet credential through the check. The adults who were never the subject of the Commission’s finding get scanned or checked alongside the children. A platform that has to confirm each user’s age cannot keep offering anonymous accounts. To use TikTok as an adult, a user first has to prove to TikTok that they are one. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU DSA Ruling on TikTok Points to ID Checks 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’s newest account-recovery option asks for something no password ever required: a moving image of the account holder’s face, kept on the company’s servers. Selfie video sign-in, launched July 23, records a short clip of the user turning their head on cue. When someone is locked out, Google matches a fresh clip against the stored one to decide whether to let them in. The head movements are the security pitch. They let Google’s systems tell a live face from a photograph or a prerecorded loop, the same trick it uses to turn away deepfakes. Those checks all serve the accuracy of the match. They say nothing about how much of the face Google stores, or for how long. The company’s assurance covers only the storage. In its words, the video is “encrypted at rest, meaning it’s securely stored even when it’s not being used.” Encryption at rest is a claim about how the file is stored. It says nothing about who can open it. Its systems have to read the enrolled video to check any new face against it, so Google can decrypt the footage on demand. Encryption that only the account holder could open would rule that out, and Google has not claimed it. Passkeys, hardware keys, and authenticator apps already restore a locked account with no biometric anywhere in the process. Google added the face scan on top of them. By default, the company says the clip stays with verification and recovery. A separate setting asks the user to release the same data toward developing Google’s products. The feature is opt-in and reversible. Eligible accounts around the world can switch it on, and account holders can delete the stored clip at any time. The company has not said how long it keeps that clip while the feature runs, or where the footage is handled. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google’s New Recovery Option Stores a Clip of Your Face 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 Indian government answered a week of youth protests in the capital by ordering the mobile networks around them switched off. Telecom operators cut mobile data across much of central Delhi on Thursday at the government’s instruction. Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone-Idea, the carriers that run India’s networks, complied. The blackout took digital payments down with it. Vendors, shopkeepers, and restaurants were left unable to take money. It was the widest mobile blackout in the capital since the farmers’ protests of 2021. The demonstrators want Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan gone. They protest under the banner of the Cockroach movement, a name lifted from a chief justice who reportedly likened young Indians to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Their grievance is the leak of the NEET-UG medical entrance exam, which forced roughly two million students to take it again. The leaks have been linked to several student suicides. “We will not leave this place until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns,” Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka said. Police met a march to Parliament on Monday with tear gas and batons, and protesters answered with stones. At least 178 people, including security personnel, were injured. The same exam scandal has now produced two communications shutdowns. The government banned Telegram across India in June, cutting off more than 150 million users, after claiming cheating rings used the app during the leak. It reached for Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, the power it holds to block platforms. The leak came from inside the exam system. India’s own testing agency said “there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain,” and the channels blamed for it were selling access to material that did not exist. The insiders who produced the leak are the subject of a police investigation. Pradhan has not resigned, and the networks in central Delhi stayed dark. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post India Cuts Mobile Internet in Delhi Amid Cockroach Protests 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. India’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre last night ordered GitHub to disable access to BitChat, the peer-to-peer messaging app backed by Jack Dorsey. The order, Notice No. 11072601011432, went out at 11:16 pm under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021. It named three repositories, including the Android application and its release files, and gave GitHub three hours to take them down. It warned that failure would cost the platform its safe harbor and open it to criminal prosecution. The government did not publish the order. The public learned of it from a post by Jack Dorsey, whose team develops BitChat, who wrote that “the government of India does not like technologies like BitChat and wants it taken down.” An excerpt from the document the Indian government sent to Bitchat. BitChat is open source and uncensorable, and is one of Reclaim The Net’s recommended messaging apps for situations where the internet may be cut off. It carries messages from phone to phone over Bluetooth, hopping between nearby devices, with “no internet, servers, phone numbers, or accounts.” It keeps working when the mobile network does not. Around this protest, the government, getting increasingly brazen with its blocking orders, has switched the mobile network off. Since July 17 the Ministry of Home Affairs has suspended mobile internet around Jantar Mantar in New Delhi about five times. The most recent suspension ran from 4 pm to midnight on July 23, inside a 1.5-kilometer radius that takes in Janpath and part of Connaught Place. People at the site reported signal jammers, and walking two kilometers before a phone found a signal. Inside that radius, a student separated from her group during a detention sweep could not send a message to say where she was. The protesters are students. Tens of thousands have camped at Jantar Mantar since June, demanding accountability for the leak of the NEET medical entrance exam and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Their march to Parliament was refused. Metro stations near the site were closed. When the shutdowns cut the network, protesters turned to BitChat and other Bluetooth mesh apps to reach each other inside the dead zone. The order did not name a single message sent on BitChat. It just objected to what the app can do. In the agency’s words, BitChat “significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation,” and could be used during “public disorder, riots, terrorism, organized crime, or internet shutdowns.” The order lists internet shutdowns among the dangers. The government has imposed one at Jantar Mantar. BitChat kept working inside it. The order used Section 79(3)(b) to demand the block. In 2015, in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, the Supreme Court held that Section 79(3)(b) lets the government require a takedown only through a court order, or a notice confined to the grounds in Article 19(2) of the Constitution. India has a separate law for blocking an app, Section 69A, which requires a hearing and reasons set down in writing. The order against GitHub used neither. It went out through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal, the channel Indian High Courts are now hearing constitutional challenges against. The order says the repositories hold information prohibited under law. It names none. It points instead to what the app is “capable of” enabling. It reaches into criminal law as well. Alongside Section 43 of the IT Act, a civil compensation provision, it invokes conspiracy and abetment under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023, against a platform that hosts code. The order set a three-hour deadline, close to midnight. In 2020, ruling on the Kashmir internet shutdown in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, the Supreme Court required that orders like this be proportionate and open to review. This one went out at 11:16 pm with a three-hour clock. The Internet Freedom Foundation, which is litigating the Sahyog regime, today called the takedown “unconstitutional and authoritarian.” Deleting a repository removes nothing from the phones that already run the app, and a mesh that needs no server keeps passing messages whatever GitHub hosts. Within hours of the order, the BitChat code was mirrored to another site. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post India Orders GitHub to Block BitChat appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.