If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The British government found a rare setting on its own control panel labeled “leave it alone,” and for once it pressed the button. “Online Safety” Minister Kanishka Narayan went on BBC Breakfast on Wednesday and said the words that privacy people had spent a year begging to hear. “We decided not to limit VPNs.” That means no age gate on virtual private networks, no ban, and no demand that you hand over a passport before routing your traffic through an encrypted tunnel. The tools that let you step around Britain’s expanding age-check regime stay legal and unrestricted. It counts as a real win, even if the people delivering it would rather you call it something blander. The plan they walked away from was uglier. As the Online Safety Act’s age-verification machinery switched on and adults across the UK started reaching for VPNs to get out from under it, ministers floated going after the exits too. If everyone drives around the checkpoint, close the roads. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall promised in June to “come back in July with a further statement.” That statement has landed, and it blinks. Her written note to Parliament was just as flat. The government will not age-gate or ban the software because “VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses.” Narayan supplied the human detail. “Whistleblowers told us that VPNs are important for them,” he said. “Minority groups told us that the ability to use VPNs is a really important way in which they can call out for help when they need it.” Break the tool to inconvenience a fourteen-year-old sneaking onto TikTok and you break it for everyone who needs it. The government’s own figures gut the case for a crackdown. A DSIT survey found 26% of 11-to-17-year-olds use a VPN, and they mostly do it for privacy. Somewhere between 7 and 10 percent reach for one to dodge age checks. The favorite teenage workaround is far dumber and far more common. Typing a fake birthday, which 45% cheerfully admitted to. You could outlaw every VPN in Britain tomorrow and the age gates would still leak like a colander, because the real hole is a lie about a date, not a piece of encryption software. The fine print is where the concession gets slippery. Narayan called it “the primary conclusion for now,” then added that “it is something we’ll continue to review.” The “for now” is the tell. This is a pause, not a peace treaty. Kendall wants platforms “to take robust steps to detect and prevent attempts by underage users to circumvent age assurance measures.” Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office have until October to report on how apps can spot and block VPN traffic. So the state won’t touch your VPN but it will lean on every service you use to notice when you’ve switched one on. The checkpoint survives, the border guards get outsourced. The Online Safety Act was sold as a universal rulebook for the entire web. It is turning into a row of speed bumps that anyone with a cheap monthly subscription can steer around. Saying so out loud would hand a club to campaigners like Baroness Kidron, the online-safety crusader the government least wants to provoke. Easier to dress the surrender up as a masterplan. Hold the champagne for one more reason, though. British politics is mid-earthquake, and Andy Burnham has the numbers to shove Keir Starmer aside and stroll into Number 10. Nobody knows yet what a Burnham government makes of any of this. A concession granted “for now” by one administration is worth precisely what the next one says it is. VPNs are how free-thinking people will choose to opt out of Britain’s censored internet. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Rules Out VPN Limits — “For Now” 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. A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from wielding visas as a weapon against foreign researchers who pushed for online censorship. Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia froze the State Department policy on July 14, ruling that it likely tramples the First Amendment by punishing one viewpoint and rewarding its opposite. The policy let officials deny entry, pull visas, or deport noncitizens the government labeled complicit in “censoring Americans.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced it in May 2025, warning that he would not tolerate foreign officials who “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States.” Boasberg read the policy as a thumb on the scale. It “presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify,” he wrote. The government “has set itself against those whose work favors more moderation rather than less.” A noncitizen who argued for less moderation, he noted, had nothing to fear. That is textbook viewpoint discrimination, the government line-drawing the First Amendment exists to forbid. Boasberg granted a stay under federal law, finding the plaintiff likely to win the case. The plaintiff is the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a nonprofit whose members include some of the most aggressive architects of online censorship. The State Department sanctioned five Europeans under the policy in December 2025. Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner, helped write the Digital Services Act, which forces American companies to delete content that Europeans find objectionable. Imran Ahmed runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has campaigned to strip accounts from platforms. Clare Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index, which built advertiser blacklists to choke revenue to news outlets it judged guilty of “disinformation.” Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg co-founded HateAid, a German group that pursues legal action against speech it calls “digital violence.” Rubio accused the coalition of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose,” and called the five “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex.” According to the ruling, the government does not get to punish speech it dislikes, even the speech of people who would gladly punish yours. Carrie DeCell, an attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University who represents the coalition, said the ruling “recognized the serious constitutional harms” the policy is causing. “This policy punishes researchers for work the public needs, and the First Amendment protects,” she said. In court she called the policy “expansive and incredibly vague, and the chilling effects are correspondingly enormous.” The coalition says the fear is already reshaping behavior. Researchers “have dropped out of conferences and opted out of travel to meet with colleagues, shifted research topics entirely to avoid negative attention, and in some cases, even stepped back from affiliating with the coalition out of fear for their safety,” the group said in a May statement. Boasberg traced how the policy grew past its original terms. “What began as a visa-restriction policy later expanded,” he wrote, “into a broader campaign against noncitizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.” The State Department is standing firm. “The Trump administration believes that aliens who are or were involved or complicit in censoring American citizens must face appropriate consequences,” a spokesperson said back in May. “An American visa is a privilege, not a right.” Boasberg has not issued a final judgment, and the government can appeal. For now, the policy is frozen. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Judge Halts Visa Ban on Global Censorship Figures 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. For years, getting a rival app store onto an Android phone meant wrestling with sideloading, a process Google wrapped in warnings and friction. That barrier falls on July 22, when Google Play begins hosting competing app stores directly, letting users install them with the same tap that installs any ordinary app. The change comes from a courtroom retreat. Epic Games and Google jointly withdrew their motion to modify the permanent injunction that governs the Play Store, according to a filing submitted July 14 to Judge James Donato. “The Parties respectfully withdraw their Renewed Joint Motion to Modify Permanent Injunction,” the notice reads. Google told the court it “continues to comply with the Court’s Permanent Injunction, and that it is prepared to launch the remedies reflected in paragraphs 11-12 of the Permanent Injunction on July 22, 2026.” Walk back the timeline and the size of the concession comes into focus. A US District Court ordered these changes in October 2024. The Ninth Circuit upheld them on September 12, 2025. Google kept fighting anyway, and late last year it looked like the company had found an exit, striking a settlement with Epic that carried an $800 million partnership and let Google avoid carrying rival stores inside Play. Pulling that settlement puts the original order back in charge, and the original order tells Google to open the gates. Google framed the surrender as strategy. “We’ve agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US Court’s injunction rather than prolonging this process which creates uncertainty for the ecosystem,” spokesperson Dan Jackson said. He added that the move lets Google “focus on executing our recently announced global business model evolution to deliver greater app store choice, lower prices, and more opportunities for developers and users,” and said the company remains “committed to maintaining Android’s industry-leading security and fostering a competitive ecosystem where every app store and developer has the freedom to compete.” US developers will find their listings, icons, descriptions, screenshots and all, automatically offered to third-party stores starting July 22 unless they opt out. “Google Play’s service fee will continue to apply to apps downloaded in this manner,” the company notes, which tells you where the tollbooth still stands. The freedom comes fenced. Google is charging third-party stores $5,000 a year for what it calls “security and policy reviews.” The arrangement covers the US only, so shoppers elsewhere stay inside the walled garden for now. Stores that want in have to be US-based registered organizations, keep “clear, non-discriminatory” trust and safety rules, stay open to every eligible developer, avoid distributing apps outside the country, and hold malware below 1 percent of “install attempts.” Google keeps its hand on the catalog, the fees, and the rulebook even as it lets competitors through the door. A store-within-a-store model Google resisted for years now sits a week away, and that direction favors anyone who believes one company should not decide what software you can install. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Google Opens the Play Store to Its Rivals 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. A federal judge has handed Apple a victory that anyone wary of surveillance should welcome, and attached a request that should worry them. Apple cannot be sued for refusing to scan everyone’s iCloud for child sexual abuse material, U.S. District Judge Noel Wise ruled on July 13, dismissing a proposed class action with prejudice. She then asked lawmakers to compel the very scanning Apple abandoned. We obtained a copy of the order for you here.  The women behind the suit, using the pseudonyms Amy and Jessica, were photographed and filmed as young children while being abused. They filed in 2024 on behalf of roughly 2,680 people with similar histories, seeking up to $32.8 billion and a court order requiring Apple to change how iCloud works. Their case rested on a single theory: that Apple’s refusal to monitor everyone’s content and deploy detection tools was a design defect. As their complaint framed it, “Apple’s failure to implement any known CSAM detection is a design defect.” Apple’s rivals took a different route. Microsoft and Google run a Microsoft-built tool called PhotoDNA across their services to flag known abuse images and report them to authorities. Apple went its own way, announcing a proprietary system called NeuralHash in August 2021 and promising it would guard privacy better than the competition. That promise collapsed fast. Within a month, after it became clear that NeuralHash was “significantly less precise than PhotoDNA,” Apple delayed the rollout. By December 2022 the company had scrapped on-device CSAM scanning entirely and switched on end-to-end encryption for iCloud instead, making it far harder for anyone, Apple included, to inspect what users store. Judge Wise never had to weigh whether that was the right call. She ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields Apple no matter what, because deciding whether to run a scanning tool “is a choice related to content moderation,” and content moderation decisions are immune. A significant part of her order is a plain statement of where the law sits. She wrote that “nothing in the law prevents any company, including Apple, from utilizing available technology or creating new technology to identify and report child pornography stored and distributed on their traditional servers or through their cloud services.” Then she added, “Conversely, there is no law that obligates companies to proactively do so.” What followed reaches well past Apple. Wise wrote that “lawmakers can fix this problem that is contributing to the exploitation of children,” and, “This Court cannot.” She was candid about the price of such a fix, conceding that legislation of this kind “would come at a cost of at least some loss of privacy for millions of people.” Her order goes further, granting that as the law stands, it “prioritizes privacy.” The scanning she invited Congress to require is the same scanning security researchers keep finding to be broken. Apple’s own explanation for walking away is like a brief against the mandate. Erik Neuenschwander, the company’s director of user privacy and child safety, told a child-safety group that after consulting widely, Apple “concluded it was not practically possible to implement without ultimately imperiling the security and privacy of our users.” Scanning private iCloud content, he warned, “opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.” The alarm was there from the start. When Apple unveiled NeuralHash in 2021, Edward Snowden warned that “if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow.” Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green cautioned that the hashing behind such tools is “imprecise” “on purpose,” and that harmless images could be doctored to “match” flagged ones and get innocent people reported. The technical case against mandated scanning has only hardened since. A study published in March 2026 by researchers at KU Leuven and Ghent University reverse-engineered PhotoDNA, the tool the plaintiffs held up as the industry standard, and reached a one-word verdict. The software is “unreliable.” The researchers showed that criminals can hide illegal images from the scanner with changes as small as adding a border, while ordinary photos can be manipulated to trip false alarms and route innocent users to the police. Europe already ran this experiment. The European Union spent years pushing “Chat Control,” a plan to scan private messages and photos across the bloc. The European Parliament rejected the mass-scanning version by a single vote in March 2026, after the EU’s own evaluation found no measurable link between the surveillance and actual convictions, and after German police reported that 48% of flagged chats were criminally irrelevant. Patrick Breyer, the former MEP who fought the plan for years, compared it to “desperately trying to mop up the floor while leaving the faucet running.” The proposal has not died. Negotiations over a permanent version continue, and a push for mandatory age verification is close behind. That is the future the judge’s request would usher in. Congress could answer by ordering Apple and everyone else to install scanning systems that researchers call unreliable, that Europe’s police found buries them in false leads, and that Apple’s own engineers said could not be built without endangering the people they claim to protect. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post A Judge Just Recommended Congress Force Apple to Build iCloud Photo Scanning appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

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. The post Microsoft Stamped a Secret Number in Your Windows PC. A VPN Can’t Hide It. appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.