If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Three Seattle parents went looking for answers about their children’s health and Meta was listening. When they typed symptoms and conditions into Seattle Children’s Hospital’s public website, a piece of tracking code recorded what they searched and handed it to Facebook’s parent company, according to a lawsuit now before the Washington Supreme Court. Some of those parents later saw Facebook ads tied to the exact symptoms they had researched. The lawsuit is all about the Meta Pixel, a snippet of code the hospital embedded on seattlechildrens.org. Pixel sits silently behind ordinary browsing and reports user activity back to Meta, which can link that activity to a person’s Facebook account through first- and third-party cookies. A parent logged into Facebook on the same device effectively attaches a name to the medical questions they thought they were asking a hospital in private. Carly Baker, Janssen Ramos Savoie, and Amber Shavies filed suit in October 2023, accusing the hospital of deploying Meta’s software to intercept and record sensitive health information without telling anyone. They argue the conduct breaks Washington’s Privacy Act, a 1967 wiretapping law that bars intercepting private communications without consent. On Thursday, their attorney took that argument to the state’s highest court, which heard the case at Peninsula College in Port Angeles as part of its traveling docket. “In the last decade or so, the corporate surveillance of our online activities has become increasingly invasive — this case is an example of that,” said Ryan Ellersick of Zimmerman Reed, who represents the parents. Seattle Children’s has won at every stage so far. A King County trial judge dismissed the complaint with prejudice and the Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the “click-and-search navigation” of a public website does not amount to the kind of private communication the wiretapping law was written to protect. The hospital’s lawyer, James Sigel, told the justices the statute targets eavesdropping between people and that searching a hospital website is no different from looking something up in an encyclopedia. Several justices pressed on how far the parents’ theory would reach. “In your view, does the privacy act protect all of my communications with Wikipedia if I searched gambling addiction or miscarriage or anything like that?” asked Justice Colleen Melody. The stakes reach well beyond three families. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and a coalition led by the US Chamber of Commerce have lined up behind the hospital, warning that treating routine web requests as wiretapping would expose the entire business of online ad measurement to legal risk. There’s a strong argument that the wiretapping law was never built for this. When Washington’s legislature wrote it in 1967, lawmakers were thinking about hidden microphones and tapped phone lines, not a script that logs which page a parent clicked. Stretching the idea of intercepting a private communication to cover a browser sending a request to a server asks a great deal of statutory language that predates the web by decades. Even sympathetic judges have struggled with where that theory stops, which is part of why Justice Melody reached for the Wikipedia comparison during argument. The parents are reaching for that law because almost nothing else is available to them. The United States still has no comprehensive privacy statute at the federal level. Two serious attempts, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act in 2022 and the American Privacy Rights Act in 2024, died before reaching a floor vote, and the SECURE Data Act introduced in April would preempt stronger state rules rather than build on them. What people are left with is a patchwork of older laws written for older problems. Washington has done more than most states. Its My Health My Data Act, passed in 2023, was written for exactly this category of health information and limits how companies can collect and share it. The protection came too late for these parents, whose searches were allegedly reaching Meta before the newer rules took hold and questions remain about how readily individuals can enforce it themselves. The wiretapping statute, for all its awkward fit, carries an explicit private right of action, which is part of why a 1967 law about eavesdropping ended up as the vehicle for a 2026 fight over ad trackers. The deeper problem is the one this predicament exposes. A company can build a tool that records what you search on a children’s hospital website and ships the result to an advertising giant. Whether that is even illegal turns on whether a court will agree to stretch a wiretapping law written before the personal computer existed. That uncertainty works in favor of whoever is doing the collecting. As long as the law stays this thin, the burden sits with individuals to dig up some old statute that might fit, while the tracking keeps running on the bet that no clear rule forbids it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Seattle Children’s Hospital Spied on Searches, Parents Tell WA Court appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them. Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating. We obtained a copy of the warrant application for you here. Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants. On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer. The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button. Magistrate Judge John Docherty rejected all five, several of them for lack of probable cause. On the warrant aimed at Kelly’s channel, Docherty pointed to a video that “appears to be paradigmatic political speech protected by the First Amendment.” A demand that treats a list of viewers as evidence turns watching journalism or activism into a reason to be identified by the state, which is a steep price for pressing play on a livestream. Prosecutors tried again on March 6, refiling four warrants, including the three tied to Lemon, Fort, and Kelly. This time they cut the request down to the channel owners themselves, dropping the demand for subscriber rosters and asking only for the same categories of identifying data on the three named people. What’s interesting here is that the government already treats the list of people who subscribe to a YouTube channel as something it can ask a court to hand over. Picture that same demand landing in a world where every account is welded to a verified government identity. That world is being built right now. The numbers tell part of the story. By late 2025, half of US states required people to prove their age before viewing some content, with nine states enacting such laws in 2025 alone. The movement started in Louisiana in 2022 as a single-state experiment and turned into a coordinated national push. This is where the St. Paul warrants stop being a niche case. Strip away any identity system and a YouTube subscriber list is a loose pile of usernames, email addresses, and IP addresses, the kind of data the government still has to fight a judge for and, here, lost. Add a mandatory identity system and that same list becomes a register of verified legal identities, pre-collected, standardized, and sitting on a server waiting for a subpoena. The work the DOJ failed to do by warrant gets done in advance by compliance. The systems being built to answer “are you old enough?” are the same systems that can answer “who are you?” and “what did you look at?” A verifier that confirms your age can log the request. What made the warrants alarming was not that they zeroed in on hardened criminals. The judge could not even connect the DaWoke Farmer channel to the defendant the government named and he still saw prosecutors trying to scoop up the channel’s entire audience. Age verification hands that capability to any government that adopts it, wrapped in the language of child safety. The infrastructure does not know the difference between confirming a teenager’s age and identifying an adult who reads something the state would prefer they didn’t. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post DOJ Sought YouTube Subscriber Data appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. California’s Assembly voted 76 to 0 on May 28 to push forward a bill that would bar anyone under 16 from holding a social media account and the system that makes such a ban work easily reshapes the internet for everyone else. Assembly Bill 1709 now moves to the state Senate. To stop under-16s from creating accounts, a platform first has to figure out who is and is not 16, which means running some form of age check on every person who signs up, regardless of how old they are. Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal, who wrote the bill, presents it as a response to platforms that he says are harming young people. Social media, he told reporters, is “wreaking havoc on the minds of our youth,” and the companies behind it “have adopted design choices that malignantly target users’ neurological systems, leading to addiction, depression, and, in grave circumstances, death.” The bill text says the state “has a compelling interest in protecting children and adolescents” from products it describes as built to exploit how young people develop. The legal language describes the requirement in flatter terms, saying AB 1709 “would prohibit a covered platform, as defined, from permitting a user who is under 16 years of age to create or maintain an account on the covered platform and would require a covered platform to implement reasonable measures to prevent users under 16 years of age from accessing or using accounts on the covered platform.” A covered platform is any website, service, or app that makes what the bill calls “addictive features,” things like endless scroll, autoplay, and notifications, available to people under 16. What turns this from a rule about teenagers into a rule about everyone is the verification system it leans on. AB 1709 builds on the Digital Age Assurance Act, California’s age law that takes effect January 1, 2027 and pushes the checkpoint down to the operating system and app store. Under that earlier law, an app asks the device for an age bracket the moment it is downloaded and launched. AB 1709 attaches social media to that system. The age gate stops being a one-time pop-up you can dodge and becomes part of the plumbing your phone runs before the app even opens. Proving you are old enough to use a platform is, functionally, proving who you are. Age assurance at this level tends to mean an ID upload, a face scan, or a chain of signals that ties an account back to a real identity. The teenager the law is written to protect ends up sharing the cost with the adult who simply wants to read a forum without handing a private company a government document first. Anonymous and pseudonymous use of mainstream platforms, the default for most of the internet’s life, gets harder to hold onto with systems like this one. The bill does include guardrails on the data it generates and they read better than nothing. Age assurance information has to be kept “only for the minimum period necessary to complete the verification process,” cannot be used “for advertising, profiling, or algorithmic recommendation purposes,” and has to sit behind reasonable security. Those limits rest on words like “reasonable” and “minimum,” which companies and regulators get to define later. The deeper trouble is that the safest data is the data nobody collects and this law guarantees that millions of new identity records get created and parked with private firms that have a poor record of keeping such things from leaking. AB 1709 also stands up a permanent body to oversee all of it. The bill creates an e-Safety Advisory Commission inside the Department of Justice to advise the Attorney General on enforcement, age verification technology, and online safety generally, and it requires the commission to report to the Legislature and the Governor by January 1 every year. A standing commission with an annual report is a standing commission that has reason to keep finding work and the bill hands it room to grow. The Attorney General may, “in consultation with the e-Safety Advisory Commission,” rewrite the definition of “covered platform” whenever the office decides a wider net is needed to reach services that make addictive features available to under-16s. The verification machinery built to keep children off Instagram is the same machinery that can later be pointed at smaller forums and niche apps, or at whatever the office reads into “addictive features” next. California has a habit of setting the template other states copy and the template here asks every resident to prove their identity to a private company as the price of going online. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post California Assembly Passes Under-16 Social Media Ban appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A body set up to make Europe’s content censorship regime work has accidentally documented why it doesn’t. Appeals Centre Europe, an Ireland-certified dispute settlement outfit operating under the EU’s Digital Services Act, released its second transparency report this week. The numbers it published describe a system failing in both directions at once, and they hand the case against laws like the DSA to anyone who wants it. Let’s start with what the body found when it actually got to look at the disputed content. Across the year from April 2025 to March 2026, it disagreed with the platform’s call 59 percent of the time. Break that down and the picture gets stranger. When users challenged content that platforms had deleted, the Appeals Centre sided with the user 52 percent of the time. When users flagged content that the platforms had chosen to leave online, the body overturned that decision 63 percent of the time. The same companies are deleting things they shouldn’t and keeping up things the regime says they should remove, often in the same reporting period. The machinery the DSA built to produce correct moderation outcomes is producing roughly a coin flip. Legitimate posts get censored. The body reviewing the censorship then has to tell the platform to put them back. More than half the time, when it can see the evidence, it concludes the platform got it wrong. The Appeals Centre received more than 24,000 disputes over the year, with eligible cases arriving nine times faster in March 2026 than in April 2025. That is the scale of disagreement a single dispute body is fielding from across the EU. It is also a fraction of the moderation decisions these platforms make every day, which run to millions. The DSA’s underlying premise is that platforms can review this firehose of human expression and arrive at defensible, appealable judgments about each piece. The error rate on the small sample anyone actually checks suggests the premise was never sound. Then there is the question of whether any of it gets enforced and here the report stops being merely damning. Account suspensions are where the system collapses outright. The Appeals Centre received more than 14,000 suspension disputes. It managed to fully review fewer than 150 of them, because platforms would not hand over the content needed to assess the bans. More than 7,300 disputes ended in what the body calls “default decisions,” meaning the platform failed to supply the material within 30 days and the ruling went to the user automatically. Meta was the standout. Out of more than 4,600 eligible Facebook and Instagram suspension disputes, the company produced the disputed content in fewer than 100 cases. So a European can be banned, file a free appeal under the law that was sold as their protection, win that appeal by default because the platform never engaged, and still find their account gone. The Appeals Centre says that even after it reviews cases and rules, platforms often don’t act on the outcome. In one section covering disputes from civil society groups, the body says it knows of only “a handful” of cases where platforms acted on its rulings, with many disputed posts staying online. An appeals process that produces rulings no one is obliged to honor is nothing more than a complaint box with a logo. Thomas Hughes, the body’s CEO, positioned the findings around enforcement failures. “Online hate and harassment have real-world consequences for many people and communities. In more than two-thirds of our decisions about hate speech, we found that platforms failed to enforce their own policies and left up hateful content. This goes to show that platforms don’t always get it right. If you’re in the EU, you can challenge a platform’s decisions free of charge to Appeals Centre Europe and get an expert, impartial review,” he said. Read the same data without the institutional framing and a different lesson appears. “Failed to enforce their own policies” describes platforms not deleting content that someone, somewhere, has decided is “hate speech.” The hate speech category the report leans on is exactly the kind of definition that depends entirely on who holds the pen. The body overturned platform decisions to leave up reported hate speech 70 percent of the time, with TikTok at 83 percent, Instagram at 74, Facebook at 61, YouTube at 58. Those numbers can be read two ways. One reading is that platforms are derelict. The other is that a vast share of what one reviewer calls hate speech, the platform’s own systems looked at and decided was permissible expression. The disagreement is proof that nobody involved can agree on where the line sits, which is what happens when the rule is a category rather than a law. Brussels spent years promising users a robust system for contesting what happens to their speech online. The body running that system just published the evidence that it doesn’t work and the deepest problem isn’t administrative. You cannot build a fair, reviewable, rights-respecting censorship regime on top of a volume of speech this large. The mess is the message. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU-Backed Appeals Center Accidentally Confirms the DSA Censorship Regime Is Unworkable appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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