If you're tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.Apple removed Telegram from the App Store worldwide on Monday night, then restored it roughly 40 minutes later."We briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after our review found content that violates our strict guidelines prohibiting child sexual abuse material," Apple said in a statement sent to several outlets. "The app was subsequently restored after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user who posted it."A Telegram spokesperson said that Apple had reported one user sharing the material, and that the user was immediately banned, meaning the trigger was a single user on a platform that Telegram says has more than a billion monthly active users."The app was ​subsequently restored after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user ⁠who posted it,” the spokesperson wrote.Pulling an app from the App Store only blocks new downloads and updates. Anyone who already had Telegram installed kept messaging straight through the episode - which ran, by Reclaim The Net's timings, from about 9:30 to about 10:10 that night, Eastern time.The takedown was patchy while it lasted and it stayed available on the Mac App Store and on Google Play throughout.But the brevity measures how fast Telegram moved, not the limit of what Apple can do. A removal that stood would have blocked new installs first, then reached anyone who reset or replaced a phone, and, once updates stopped coming, eventually everyone was still using the app.Apple's hold over what reaches an iPhone is already in federal court. The Justice Department and 16 state and district attorneys general sued the company in March 2024 for monopolizing smartphone markets. The complaint says that Apple maintains its dominance through restrictions on third-party developers, among them limits on "super apps" and the favoring of its own Messages app over third-party messaging.A federal judge in New Jersey denied Apple's motion to dismiss in June last year, and no trial has been scheduled. Bloomberg reported in July that Apple has made offers and entered early settlement talks with the government, and that there is no guarantee an agreement will be reached.What happens to a developer who takes a week to remove the content, instead of 40 minutes?"I'm sure this stance will be applied equally to all other apps in the store, in the future right? @Apple," Telegram's official X account posted, perhaps hinting that Apple would never remove Instagram or Facebook for a single piece of illegal content.Apple has pulled Telegram this way before. In February 2018, it removed the app over material founder Pavel Durov at the time called "inappropriate content," restoring it after Telegram added extra safeguards.Apple acted on a single reported user, while Ofcom alleges a pattern across the platform, and neither side has said whether Monday's post was an isolated report or part of it.Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, which has been a major challenger to Apple's App Store monopoly and anti-competitive practices, summed up the issue on X."Apple's App Store desperately needs competition worldwide. Apple capriciously removes a vital communication and privacy tool from availability to a billion users, and sadly this is business as usual," Sweeney posted."Apple has stated they removed the app from availability to a billion users because a Telegram user posted something horrible and illegal. They did not elaborate on how, if that is the standard for app removal, any communications app could operate at scale, including iMessage."

If you're tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.Just in time for the global digital ID push, Google will roll out its Play Age Signals API to all Google Play users worldwide by the end of 2026. This gives Android apps an easy way to ask Google how old its users are.Google Play's vice president of product management, Paul Feng, announced the expansion on July 29. Australia and Canada come first by mid-August, followed by "a full global rollout to all users later this year." Apple launched its own version, the Declared Age Range API, worldwide in February.An app calls the API while it's running and Play answers with the band the user falls into, 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, or 18+ by default. Developers can redraw those bands in the Play Console. A developer who sets minimum ages of 13 and 17 gets users sorted into 0-12, 13-16, and 17 and over. The feedback arrives as a lower and an upper bound, and the top band carries no upper bound, so an adult in that setup comes back as ageLower = 17, an age floor with no ceiling. A user who declined to share gets no band at all, only a NOT_SHARED status. Google's rules bar any other use of the answer, "including, but not limited to, advertising, marketing, user profiling or analytics."To parents, Google says the API as "a privacy-preserving tool that puts parents in the driver's seat." A parent enters a child's range once in the Family Link app, 16-17 rather than an exact birth date and every app that has built in the API can read it. Google says sharing is off until a parent opts in and that the setting can be changed or switched off at any time.That default lasts until a law overrides it and Texas already has and you only have to look at the latest senate bill that we just covered to know exactly how this "privacy" preserving plan can end up being anything but. Adults can share their own range when an app asks. "Providing a safe online experience and protecting users from harm is a top priority at Google Play," Feng wrote in his announcement.Apps receive more than a band. Google's developer pages say an app can receive "users' age verification or supervision status, age ranges, and other applicable signals," and the status field can also come back VERIFICATION_REQUIRED. A developer knows when a user declined to share and when an age was verified rather than declared, and Google leaves it to each app to decide what to accept. TechRadar, citing reports, says users who fail to complete verification can be blocked from downloading a wide range of apps, not just those with adult ratings.The API went live in Brazil on March 17, the day the Digital ECA took effect. That law bans the "I am over 18" checkbox and threatens fines of up to 50 million reais, about US$9.44 million, or 10 percent of a company's Brazilian revenue. Texas followed.Play began returning ages and running an age verification flow for Texans who created accounts after May 28, once a federal appeals court stayed the December 2025 injunction that had blocked the state's App Store Accountability Act.Utah and Louisiana have pushed their versions of the law back to 2027. Utah's delay came with amendments "removing its regulatory enforcement mechanism," according to the law firm Alston & Bird, and Alabama's is slated to take effect on January 1, 2027. Google is also bringing all-digital IDs to Google Wallet in the UK and select EU countries in the coming months, GB News reported, and a digital ID is one of the sources Play's documentation counts as verified.Google is on record against these laws. A developer support page says the company has "user privacy and trust concerns with these new verification laws." The same sentence says Google Play "has designed APIs, systems, and tools" to help developers comply. The API already returns ages in Brazil, the verification flow already runs in Texas, and by the end of the year the system reaches every Google Play account. A legislature that wants verification made mandatory only has to require what Google has already shipped.

If you're tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.Australia has finalized its News Bargaining Incentive. It's all a way of forcing tech platforms to prop up notably legacy news brands through a 2.5% charge on the digital advertising revenue of any large platform that fails to sign commercial deals with at least six Australian news publishers. Ministers released the final plan Monday, and legislation is expected to reach parliament within weeks.The charge lands on companies earning at least A$250 million a year in digital advertising revenue from search or social media services in Australia. It is aimed at Meta, Google and TikTok.The way out is deals. A platform escapes the charge by signing tax-deductible agreements with news publishers. The spending counts against its liability at 150 percent for deals with large media companies and 200 percent for deals with smaller ones, up from 170 percent in the April draft. Clearing the charge in full takes at least six deals, together worth about 1.5 percent of revenue. Sign nothing and the platform pays the full 2.5 percent.That April draft set the rate at 2.25 percent and applied it to total Australian revenue. Tech companies argued a charge on total revenue was unfair because parts of their operations have nothing to do with news, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. The government gave them the narrower base. But it raised the rate to keep the take the same. And the number of deals needed to clear the charge fully rises from four to six. The finished scheme faces a review after three years, the Canberra Times reported.LinkedIn had escaped the draft - the platform has claimed it does not carry news, the Herald reported - and now the exemption for professional networking services is gone, bringing Microsoft's platform under the scheme for the first time.This is Australia's second run at the idea. The 2021 News Media Bargaining Code pushed Google and Meta into deals with local publishers - though Meta first blocked news on Facebook in Australia before relenting. Those deals lapsed in 2024, and the platforms chose not to renew them. Meta has said its users no longer want to consume news on its platforms.In Canada, Meta walked instead. Rather than pay under the Online News Act, it stopped allowing news links on Facebook and Instagram, and it has held that line ever since. Canadians lost news on those platforms to a standoff their own government started.Meta called the original proposal a "discriminatory, retroactive tax" that was "grossly unfair." It has accused Australia of breaching the US-Australia free trade agreement and warned that Washington could take trade action, and the White House has described the policy as "foreign extortion."

If you're tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.The long arm of the British state has announced itself in grander ways. This time it was two Sussex Police officers on a doorstep, holding a piece of paper and offering a course in thinking.The doorstep belonged to Anneka Svenska, an animal rights campaigner. The alleged offense was an Instagram reel.The company concerned is MBR Acres, which breeds beagles for laboratory research in Cambridgeshire, and which has had a protest camp outside its gates since June 2021. In the reel, Svenska said that "35 stone of dead beagles were treated as frozen waste and driven to an incinerator in Ipswich to be burned," and then asked her question. "If they're just breeding dogs, why is there so much animal anatomical waste coming from this place?"(Note: In Britain, 35 stone is equal to 490lbs in weight.)Is the reel accurate? Who knows. The courts certainly don't. They never looked.The complaint traveled from the company to one police force, then to a second, then to her door. There is footage, and it rewards close viewing. "We Sussex Police have received a report from a different force," one officer explains, "saying that they've received a complaint from a member of the public from a member of the public or a business." The stumble is in the original. A member of the public or a business. Which, we never learn. The list of suspects is a short one.They had been asked, the officer said, "to just come and have a chat." The chat came with paperwork. Would she accept what is called a community resolution? "All it is, it's a piece of paper here, and it's got some conditions on it essentially," the officer says, and if she agreed, "it would just go on record to say that you've agreed those conditions and moving forward basically." The conditions - the "agreed remedies," in the official phrase - were to complete an online thinking skills course, and to complete "an online impact."An "online impact." Of what, on whom, the officer doesn't say. I shall follow suit."We're the ones that have come to give it to you," the officer finishes. "That's all."In fact, that wasn’t all. According to the Free Speech Union, if she declined the paper, the alternative might have been charges under Section 179 of the Online Safety Act, the false communications offense, in force since January 31, 2024. It is committed by sending a message you know to be false, intending "non-trivial psychological or physical harm" to a "likely audience," without a reasonable excuse. The harm alleged here, per the officer, was that the information "could lead to, you know, have a harmful impact on their business." Psychological harm, physical harm, harm to a company's trade. It’s all the same thing really /s.The maximum penalty is six months in prison. The Act pencils in 51 weeks, one week short of a year, for the day section 281(5) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 comes into force.Svenska declined to admit guilt. She said the reel was based on evidence she believed to be genuine. "It's rather frightening," she said, "that a company can make a complaint about somebody like me and have two police officers turn up on my doorstep like that." In later posts she went further, calling the visit "a blatant intimidation tactic and an attack on my free speech" and warning that "freedom of expression in Britain is under real pressure."Strong words. Then again, she had just been offered re-education at her own front door.So she engaged a lawyer. And the case was dropped.That was the entire war. This time at least. There was no charge and no hearing. The paper, the record, the remedies were gone, the moment somebody with legal training was on the file.Mind you, nobody had to prove anything to get the officers there in the first place. A complaint sufficed. The proving was meant to be done by Svenska, on a doorstep, with a pen.And what does MBR Acres say? The company has a statement on record, preserved on the protest camp's Wikipedia page, that the facility is regulated and frequently inspected by the Home Office, which enforces strict laws around animal welfare in research facilities. It is silent on reels, doorsteps, and courses in thinking. It will have to do.Which leaves the loose ends; a community resolution nobody resolved. An "online impact," still undefined, presumably still online. And waiting on a server in Sussex, a thinking skills course going untaken.It’s  a pity, that last one. Somebody else in this story could have used it.

If you're tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.It looks like Signal is laying the groundwork for server support for accounts without a phone number attached. Recent commits to the public Signal-Server repository on GitHub rework registration security, account locking, and country statistics so that all of it keeps working when an account has no number on file.AboutSignal, a niche site that tracks the messenger, spotted the changes and read them as preparation for an optional way to sign up without a number.The commits reach into plumbing that assumes a number exists. One is titled "Don't allow or set registration lock on accounts with no phone number." A registration lock is the PIN Signal checks when a phone number is registered again, and the commit makes the server refuse to set one on an account that has no number. The refusal remains internal with an error reading "Cannot set registration lock on account with no phone number;" a client that tries sees only a generic bad-request response. Country and region statistics record "n/a" for accounts "that may not have phone numbers" where the server once parsed a number. Locking accounts during account changes now works when there is no phone number to lock on. "Do not allow accounts without phone numbers to perform PNI key operations" shuts those accounts out of the cryptographic operations tied to a phone number.The phone number requirement has been the standing privacy objection to Signal for years. A number leads back to a person, through the SIM it's attached to, and whoever paid for it, and handing one over to join a private messenger has always been an odd fit. Signal hides numbers from strangers by default and lets you block anyone from looking you up by number. Usernames, introduced in February 2024, mean the people you message can reach you without ever learning it. The username announcement still told users that "you will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal."