The "KIDS Act" Is an Age Surveillance Bill, Take Action. Tell Congress to reject this age-gating bill

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process. 

The package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.

Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.

Carmaker Volkswagen is facing criticism from privacy-conscious drivers after GrapheneOS users reported being locked out of the company’s mobile app, leaving some unable to log in, sync vehicle data, or remotely control their cars.

Reports began surfacing on the GrapheneOS forum and Reddit’s r/degoogle community, where users described suddenly losing access to Volkswagen’s app despite using fully updated devices.

The issue appears to affect Volkswagen’s app ecosystem rather than a specific vehicle model, so owners that rely on VW Connect, We Connect, We Connect ID or related services could potentially be affected.

Some posters pointed to the apparent contradiction that Volkswagen’s software continues to support older, end-of-life Android versions while rejecting GrapheneOS installations.

One affected user, Aaron94, said Volkswagen’s app stopped working entirely after a logout.

Despite enabling compatibility settings and trying multiple workarounds, they were unable to log back in.

Another user, XavDub, reported similar problems. “First symptom, sync did not work anymore from the app, so I tried to logout to login again, but it’s since just impossible,” they wrote, adding that testing on a standard Google Pixel running stock Android worked normally.

When XavDub contacted the German car maker, the company responded that GrapheneOS “is not an official Volkswagen offering” and advised them to contact their OS provider instead.

The timing has raised eyebrows because Volkswagen recently changed the APIs used to access vehicle data.

According to German tech title Heise, the change disrupted third-party tools used by owners for smart charging, solar energy integration, and home automation.

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It’s shaping up to be a cruel summer for GrapheneOS users. Earlier this month reports emerged that age-verification provider Yoti, used by Sony, Facebook and TikTok, had allegedly flagged GrapheneOS users during verification processes, prompting widespread backlash in privacy communities.

For the past few days, we have been working on an open-source, self-hosted real-time speech-to-speech translation tool called PolyTalk. The goal was that there are people and organisations who need privacy around the tool they are using, and for the speech-to-speech translation, we haven't had many options.

We built the tool with Ollama, Faster Whisper, and Piper.

The tool is not limited to speech-to-speech translation only, but you can also share any of your tabs, whether you're watching a YouTube video in another language, the tool will give you audio output in your target language.

We are aware of how often context and tone get lost in translation, so we ensured translation quality by processing complete sentences instead of individual words.

Now we are focused on context support and tone adaptation.

If this interests you, here is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/PolyTalkIO/polytalk

Sorry, the article is more of a broad overall comparison, and I wanted to help others who are new to LoRa tech a well. Might help explain why each are beneficial.

For those currently running a repeater or device, or even experience with several nodes, which do you run? What brand? Any recommendations or suggestions?

I plan on using both but worried signals might be crossed or interfere since their frequencies are so similar. MC for at home and MT for on-the-go or shtf and we all need to meet up, etc.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1211514/danish-privacy-activist-lars-andersen-raided-by-police

Police go directly for the circuit breaker panel to avoid being filmed

This post will be in English, because there apparently is a lot of interest in what happened to me yesterday.

I'm a libertarian danish privacy activist and former police officer and I have been doing activism for about 15 years.

I have had a bit of time to think about my arrest and the actions of the masked police that broke down my door - with no prior warning.

The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published "my two favorite numbers" by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn't tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen's social security and phone number.

I also published a screenshot of me trying to interview Mette Frederiksen on what app, asking her about her wanting to ban encryption (CSA) and introducing mass surveillance via granting the police intelligence services access to all sorts of information (medical journals, social media posts, DNA registers ment for research and so on).

That resulted in me being arrested by armed and masked police breaking down my door without me having any chance of opening it for them.

When the two civilian dressed masked men entered the apparentment one of them immediately went for the circuit breaker panel to shut off the power to my router. They then removed my Google Nest cameras - because they knew that the cameras contains local storage.

That way they could avoid having video of the (in my view) illegal arrest. Only the few moments before the power is cut was filmed. There is video of me asking them for the charges - and them refusing to tell me (which is illegal). But I can't access it, because they took the cameras.

I'm not even sure if that is legal. In Denmark it is (nominally) totally legal to film the police. That way it is possible to know what happened and it's not just your word against there's.

Denmark and the West are moving in the wrong direction, and it makes me sad.

Source: Lars Andersen on X(Twitter).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1183337

Comments

This week, EFF joined Foxglove, Human Rights Watch, and 60 other organizations in writing to the UK’s Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, raising serious concern about the Home Office’s decision to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) to assess asylum-seeking children from 2027. 

The letter points to four key concerns:

Discrimination 

As with most face estimation and recognition tools, there is ongoing bias in the deployment of these technologies. With FAE, many have highlighted its baked-in failures and discrimination, particularly in relation to women and people of color. Evidence shows that FAE is most accurate for estimating the ages of Eastern European men, but even then it consistently produces errors. The Home Office itself noted “that FAE performance can vary depending on ethnicity” and skin tone. 

Inaccuracy

The Home Office has admitted that FAE systems are imprecise for analyzing 16-to 18-year-olds, with even the “top systems” having an “error margin of around 2.5 years here.” This is exactly the age range for which the Home Office has chosen to deploy this technology. And this error margin will be widened yet further because children seeking asylum often suffer from trauma-induced aging. 

Lawfulness of Use of Children’s Data

Major concerns exist around the lawful basis on which the Home Office, or its chosen third-party FAE vendors, could have sought consent to collect and process photographs or data from asylum-seeking children to train this system. Further, there is no clarity on the images and/or data that this technology has been trained on. 

Lack of Necessary Disclosure 

The Home Office claims “extensive testing has already been carried out across diverse groups, including different ethnicities, genders and age ranges, indicating promising performance and accuracy.” But these purported “promising” results have not been published, nor have any Equality or Data Protection Impact Assessments. 

The letter continues by requesting clarification on several key questions regarding these concerns. EFF and partners have provided the UK government 21 days for a response, and we urge the Home Office to take on this uphill task in good faith and release the information.

You can read the letter in full here.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/48272905

Federal immigration officers often use facial recognition technology to identify immigrants in the field. Now, a newly revealed document from the Department of Homeland Security outlines plans to give local police working on its behalf the same type of technology.

The document, first reported earlier this month by the tech news outlet 404 media, is a Privacy Threshold Analysis, which is essentially a federal report assessing whether the privacy implications of a tool warrant further government study.

The tool in question is a mobile app called the ICE Task Force Module, which allows local police to scan the faces of people they stop in their communities.

The app then compares the facial scan against more than 250 million government records. Those include the State Department's visa records and records from the Traveler Verification Service, used by the Transportation Security Administration at airports to verify identities on international flights.

Once police scan a person's face, the app then instructs an officer either to "not detain or arrest," or it gives the officer a reference code to obtain more information from ICE.

The photos captured by the app are then stored in an internal DHS system for 15 years, the document states.

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Those local officers, called "ICE non-federal law enforcement officers" in the document, are likely participants in the federal 287(g) program. A subset of that program, the Task Force Model, gives local police the authority to arrest immigrants on ICE's behalf during their routine police duties. There are about 1,300 police agencies participating in the Task Force Model nationwide.

The DHS analysis "raises more questions than I think it answers," says Clare Garvie, deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Program at New York University School of Law's Policing Project.

For one, the document says the app launched last September, which suggests police are already using it.

It also seems to work similarly to Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that ICE and officers with Customs and Border Protection already use, but it's unclear whether the new app uses the same technology or something entirely its own.

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Privacy experts told NPR that allowing local police to conduct similar surveillance could create a chilling effect on freedom of speech, if people begin to worry they'll face repercussions for attending protests, for instance, or for legally observing ICE activity in their communities.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged at a congressional hearing this month that the agency has used facial recognition technology on protesters and had been able to identify people who were present at protests in Oregon who were also at the recent protests outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, N.J.

What's more, Garvie says, facial recognition technology is not always accurate, and there have been cases of people detained by ICE who were wrongly identified by the technology.

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"This app wouldn't work if they didn't have databases to pull people's pictures from and compare against," says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy. "They're playing semantics. They're certainly not being forthright. You know, do they have a database of protesters? Maybe they don't call it that."

He says allowing police to use this technology to do immigration enforcement is a significant expansion of ICE's operations.

"It makes this sort of face surveillance ubiquitous on American streets," Quintin says. "I don't think that Americans should tolerate law enforcement being able to scan anyone's face at any time for any reason to try to determine their identity. This is the new form of 'papers, please.'"

With no serious debate, including on proposed amendments, Canada is blazing full speed ahead with Bill C-22, which would threaten encryption and increase surveillance. Also known as the Lawful Access Bill, Bill C-22 is currently moving forward quickly to a vote despite the many, many criticisms civil liberty groups and the tech industry have hurled at it.

As we’ve discussed before, Bill C-22 is dangerous on multiple levels. It pushes for requirements for metadata retention, expands information sharing with foreign governments, and establishes a mechanism that allows Canada’s Ministry of Public Safety to demand that companies create backdoors, effectively breaking encryption. That mechanism was a key facet of Part 2 in Bill C-22, and the government prevented it from being independently debated.

In a deep analysis of the bill, Citizen Lab and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association detail every one of flaws of this proposal, concluding that most elements are unsalvageable. 

A wide range of tech companies agree. Signal, Apple, Google, and several VPN providers oppose the bill, and some have said they’d likely be forced to either cut Canadians off from certain features or shut down services in Canada altogether.

The Canadian government wants this dangerous, complicated, overreaching bill passed before June 19. Bill C-22 is riddled with privacy problems that affect millions of people. It should be debated and studied fully, not jammed through on an arbitrary deadline. 

OpenMedia is offering a tool for Canadians to contact their elected representatives about the bill. Actions taken on OpenMedia's website are governed by OpenMedia's privacy policy, not EFF's.

Just a little artwork of my own.

As the title says. Im trying to migrate towards privacy based choices all around. A VPN has been tough, I cant access some websites and i dont think i could convince my wife to adopt using it. I still use it anyway.

Incogni was built by Surfshark in 2021 and is now owned by Cyberspace B.V., the Netherlands-registered holding company created when Surfshark merged with Nord Security in February 2022. That same corporate family, traced back to Lithuanian venture builder Tesonet, also backs Oxylabs, one of the largest residential proxy and web-scraping infrastructure providers on earth