If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Ireland has switched on the first working pieces of its state digital ID. The version citizens can now download is the opening move in something larger than a convenience app. Built on top of the existing MyGovID login, the Government Digital Wallet begins the slow removal of anonymous dealings with the Irish state, with anonymous access to large parts of the internet not far behind. The pressure comes from Brussels, where eIDAS 2, formally EU Regulation 2024/1183, requires member states to make at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet available to citizens, residents and businesses by the end of 2026. Ireland’s Department of Public Expenditure has described its own scheme as designed around meeting “Ireland’s legal obligations under the EU’s eIDAS 2 Regulation,” a phrasing that gives the game away. The wallet exists because the law requires it, not because Irish people asked for a government app that holds their identity. Sold as convenience, the wallet holds digital versions of a driving licence, birth certificate, European Health Insurance Card and other official documents, ready to be shown from a phone. Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers says it will “make it simpler for people to verify their identity, apply for supports and access entitlements,” and his framing leans hard on user control. “The wallet is designed so that all personal data is fully protected, and the user stays in control of what information they put in the wallet and choose to share. Only the details needed for a service will be shared, and nothing more,” Chambers says. What those assurances cover is how the wallet shares data, not the larger change sitting under them. A single government-issued credential now stands between a person and the services they need, and when the wallet proves who you are, it also records that the proof happened, tied to a verified legal identity instead of a throwaway username. Convenience and traceability ship in the same download. Beyond storing documents, the wallet reaches into how people get online. Ireland has wired age verification into the system, and Minister of State Frank Feighan says it will “be able to facilitate secure age verification capability as set out in Digital Ireland and the implementation of the Online Safety Code,” the regime pushing online platforms to check how old their users are. By the end of 2027, the largest platforms operating in the country are expected to accept the wallet, which sketches a near future where signing in to a mainstream social network runs through a state ID. A system that confirms you are over 18 also confirms who you are, where the government has you on file, and which service you passed through to get there. Age assurance and identity assurance are the same transaction with different labels, and the identity half is the costly one for anyone who would rather not be catalogued. The strongest card the government holds is adoption. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office puts digital ID use, through services like MyGovID, at roughly eight in ten people, so much of the population has been walked toward this point over several years. Wide use is a poor proxy for consent to what the wallet becomes once private companies and platforms plug into it. Brussels sells the whole project as a privacy upgrade. The European Commission says “threats to digital privacy have become apparent, with people increasingly worried about profiling and surveillance,” and it promises a wallet built with “privacy and security at the heart of the project.” The design does lean on data minimization, with a service seeing only the field it asks for. Concentrating verification in the hands of the state is the other half of the picture, and it turns the government into the fixed point that more and more of daily life has to authenticate against. None of this lands in a country with a clean record on holding sensitive data. The 2021 ransomware attack on the Health Service Executive tore through roughly 80 percent of the health service’s IT systems and exposed patient information, the kind of history that makes a central store of verified identities look less like a vault and more like a target. Today, the wallet is opt-in, a testing phase rather than a mandate. The end-2026 deadline is written into EU law, public bodies will have to accept the wallet, and the private-sector obligations arrive a year after that. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ireland’s New Digital Wallet Turns MyGovID Into a National ID appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. On June 29, 2026, the House passed H.R. 7757, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, by a vote of 267 to 117. It was fast-tracked under “suspension of the rules,” which limits debate and requires a two-thirds majority. The package bundles more than a dozen separate bills, including a House version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and it now heads to the Senate. If you have concerns about online age verification, anonymous speech, and being asked to hand your ID to a third-party company just to use the internet, the Senate is where this gets decided. A House vote alone does not make a law. The Senate still has to act, and senators answer to constituents who call and write. You can use our guide to find and reach your representatives: → https://reclaimthenet.org/usa-defend-digital-rights-contact-congress-state-reps What the KIDS Act actually does The centerpiece is age verification, sometimes softened to “age assurance.” To sort minors from adults, platforms would collect government IDs, run facial scans, or track how you behave online to estimate your age. To find the kids, in other words, they check everyone. The package also overrides state laws that fall below its federal standard. Supporters call this a floor, not a ceiling; critics counter that the preemption language can wipe out stronger protections some states already passed and make platforms harder to sue. More: The Age Verification Con The House version also cut KOSA’s “duty of care” clause, which would have required platforms to take reasonable steps against design-driven “harms.” Riding alongside these are some useful pieces: tighter data and privacy rules, chatbot disclosures, and new requirements on data brokers. The trouble is what comes with them. The main objection is that you can’t build a system to verify everyone’s age without building the infrastructure to identify everyone. Once that checkpoint exists, the only question is what it gets used to guard next. Age verification started with adult content and has already crept toward social media, app stores, messaging apps, and AI tools. Why age verification is the heart of it Every time you upload an ID or submit a face scan to a verification company, you create a permanent record: your name, your ID number, your biometrics, and a log of the site you were trying to reach. That record is a target. Breaches are not hypothetical. Verification vendors and the platforms behind them have already leaked government IDs, selfies, home addresses, and billing details. Unlike a password, you can’t reset your face or your ID number after it leaks. There’s a second cost that’s harder to see. Tie your real name to everything you read and post, and people start to self-censor, not because anyone forced them, but because they know a record exists. Anonymous speech has always been the refuge of whistleblowers, abuse survivors, journalists, and people researching something they’d rather not attach their name to. Lose it and you don’t get it back easily. If you want the fuller argument, including responses to the usual talking points (“it’s just like showing ID at a bar,” “if you have nothing to hide,” “the courts have upheld this”), our campaign page lays it out: → https://reclaimthenet.org/age-verification Where it stands in the Senate The Senate looks like a harder fight than the House. Key senators have said the bill has little chance in its current form, and there’s active negotiation over whether the kids’-safety language gets bolted onto a broader effort to preempt state AI laws, which would raise the stakes a lot. None of it is settled, which is the whole reason constituent pressure right now can change what the Senate takes up. What you can do today Call and write your two US senators. It’s the most direct thing you can do. Keep it short, say you’re a constituent, and tell them to oppose online age-verification mandates and the preemption of stronger state protections. A few sentences in your own words beat a form letter. You can use our guide to find and reach your representatives: → https://reclaimthenet.org/usa-defend-digital-rights-contact-congress-state-reps Contact your state legislators too. The bill’s preemption language reaches into state law, so your representatives in the statehouse have a stake in it as well. Share this Most people have never heard of the KIDS Act, and most don’t know that a “protect the children” bill can reset the rules for every adult online. That’s why bills like this tend to move fast, with little debate and little press. Send this to friends and family, post the two links, and say in your own words why handing your ID to a third party just to log on is a bad deal. The Senate is listening now, and the more people who speak up, the harder this is to move without scrutiny. Two links worth passing along: Say No to Online Age Verification: https://reclaimthenet.org/age-verification Defend Your Digital Rights, Contact Congress and State Reps: https://reclaimthenet.org/usa-defend-digital-rights-contact-congress-state-reps If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The KIDS Act’s Next Stop Is the Senate. Make Your Voice Count. 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 will stop making physical discs for new PlayStation games in January 2028, routing every fresh release through its digital store and nothing else. Titles already sold on disc keep working. Everything after that date exists only as a download, tied to an account Sony controls and parked on servers Sony owns. The disc, the one copy a player could hold, lend, resell, or shelve for a decade, goes away. The company calls this a response to what buyers already want. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony wrote on the PlayStation Blog. The numbers give it cover, since nearly four in five full-game purchases on PS4 and PS5 last year arrived as downloads. What Sony leaves out is what the buyer hands over on the way to convenience. A download is a license rather than a possession. You pay for permission to reach a game, and that permission runs through Sony’s store, Sony’s account system, and Sony’s servers. Cut off any one of them and the game is gone, with no disc in a drawer to fall back on. A ban on your account can wall off an entire library at once. Sony has already shown what that power looks like when it points at movies. This month, Sony told PlayStation users across the UK and Europe that 551 films they had purchased would be “removed from your video library” on September 1. The cause was a lapsed licensing deal with Studio Canal, and no refund came with the notice. The list includes Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Total Recall, and Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut. People who clicked “buy” years ago lose those films on a date Sony chose, and the same logic governs any game sold without a disc. The deletion follows a pattern. Sony moved to wipe purchased Discovery shows from accounts in 2023 before backing down under pressure, and buyers in Germany and Austria lost their Studio Canal films back in 2022. Sony’s own network terms lay out the arrangement, admitting that clicking “buy” transfers no ownership and that the content sits with you on a revocable basis. The button says purchase but the contract says rental. A disc breaks that loop, which is why its retirement carries weight beyond nostalgia. A disc plays when a license expires, when a store shuts, and when an account gets banned. Sony is closing the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita in 2027, stranding the digital libraries built there, and the 2028 disc cutoff points straight at the next console. None of this stands alone. Sony stopped producing blank Blu-ray, MiniDisc, and MiniDV media in early 2025, then pulled its Blu-ray recorders from shelves worldwide in February 2026. One format at a time, the company is removing the tools that let people keep their own copies of things. California wrote a law against the confusion in 2024, barring sellers from stamping words like “buy” on digital goods that can disappear, a sign lawmakers already see the gap between the button and the reality behind it. So the disc goes, and a PlayStation game becomes something you are allowed to use until you are not. Come 2028, buying a new PlayStation game will mean renting it from a company that has already proven, 551 films at a time, that it collects when the lease runs out. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Sony Kills the PlayStation Disc 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. Reddit is closing one of the last doors that let people read the site without an account. Users will soon have to log in before they can reach old.reddit.com, the pared-back version of the platform that stayed usable for logged-out visitors long after the redesign pushed everyone else toward accounts. The company has also signaled that this older interface might not survive indefinitely. Reddit points at automated abuse to explain the change, calling the logged-out experience on Old Reddit a “significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic” and casting the login requirement as a way to slow the bots that harvest its conversations to feed AI models and resale pipelines. The change rolls out over the coming month, and Reddit has warned that Old Reddit may not exist “forever.” To be fair, Reddit does have a point. The open web is now a mass of scrappers, AI bots, and more, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to fend off. But Reddit is a big player and whether that reasoning holds up depends on who the login wall actually catches. Serious scrapers register accounts, rotate them, and automate their logins, so a sign-in requirement does little to stop a determined data operation. The person who loses access is the one who wanted to read a thread without handing Reddit a name, an email, and a session tied to everything they click. Reddit is giving up anonymous reading to inconvenience bots that will mostly route around the obstacle. Requiring a login also changes how much Reddit can attach to a real person. A logged-out visit leaves the company with very little. Sign in, and your reading turns into an authenticated session. The pages you open and the time you spend get logged against an identity Reddit stores, feeds into ad targeting, and can be handed to authorities under subpoena or lose in a breach. Browsing that used to leave barely a trace becomes a record. This follows a direction Reddit set years ago. It ended most third-party apps in 2023 when it started charging for API access, closing off Apollo and the clients many people used to read the site on their own terms. More recently it shut down the unauthenticated data endpoints that independent tools relied on, and it is suing companies it accuses of scraping its content. Requiring accounts on Old Reddit pulls one more slice of the site behind a name, onto routes Reddit can watch, rate-limit, and charge for. Many privacy-conscious readers prefer Old Reddit because it loads without the heavier tracking and scripting of the redesign and still works on older hardware and stripped-down browsers. Folding it into the account-only site removes a lighter, less-surveilled way in. Reddit frames the goal as protecting the platform from abuse. What it actually does is put a price on reading a public forum, and the price is the anonymity you used to keep by default. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Reddit to Require Login for Old Reddit, Curbing Anonymous Browsing appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.