Smiles #7 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Data Brokers Are Ignoring Privacy Law. We Deserve Better. Of the many principles EFF fights for in consumer data privacy legislation, one of the most basic is a right to access the data companies have about you. It’s only fair. So many companies collect

One study shows four in ten data brokers are leaving consumers exercising their privacy rights on read—in violation of California law. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Facial recognition technology discriminates against people of colour | Letter Letters: Alba Kapoor from Amnesty International responds to an article about the Met’s increased use of the technology

Facial recognition technology is biased, error prone, and disproportionately deployed on already disadvantaged communites. Amnesty International. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org The issue of publicly saving shared LLM chats is bigger than just Google.

More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org

🔗 www.404media.co/more-than-13...

Annie and Lakeesha struggle in school. AI teacher assistants treated them very differently. A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of tea...

"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white" www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/a...

Is Digital Public Infrastructure a colonial technology?
What would decolonising DPI look like.
Some early thoughts here >
appropriatingtechnology.org/decolonising...

‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe

"[Microsoft Azure] has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank" www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Microsoft continues to aid genocide

Ron Deibert is absolutely the voice that the infosec industry needs to be listening to right now. We are in a moment where fascism is consolidating power and most of the infosec industry is either playing along or is busy bragging about how much AI they've shoved into their products.

Listen, we are in a terrible and difficult time where the horrors can often feel overwhelming. Lean into the things that bring you joy. If that means that sometimes you're wringing that last drop of dopamine out of watching bad people suffer as the result of their poor choices, you do you.

I really don’t understand why so many of you are on Substack. You’re not on xwitter, so what are you doing?

Mhmm 😒

US government will ingest all federal data into AI models, WH tech director says That's one of the national-security reasons the U.S. needs to lead the world in AI, said OSTP's Michael Kratsios.

Our taxes are training data, medicare, the justice system, the weather, the museums, the military www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/...

Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying Rayhunter is a new open source tool we’ve created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out cell-site simulators (CSS...

At EFF we spend a lot of time thinking about the tech used by police and authorities to spy on you while you’re going about your everyday life, like cell-site simulators (CSS). Rayhunter is an open source tool we’ve created that we hope empowers everyone to help search out CSS around the world.

Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines | TechCrunch Search engines are indexing links to ChatGPT conversations that have been made sharable with a link.

👀 FYI (although I don’t know how many people reading my skeets have to worry about this)

A big thing for many claims by companies. There are a lot of lies about how helpful the ads and services are.

You Went to a Drag Show—Now the State of Florida Wants Your Name EFF has long warned about this kind of mission creep: where a law or policy supposedly aimed at public safety is turned into a tool for political retaliation or mass surveillance. Going to a drag show...

A bar hosted a drag show. Now Florida wants a list of names.

it's really demoralising to watch in real time that everything we have been warning against materialise one by one

Systemic Blowback: AI's Foreseeable Fallout The rush to adopt electronic health records led to costly errors and burnout. What happens when AI follows the same path?

“‘Systemic blowback’—large-scale negative outcomes that result from decisions to accelerate the adoption of new technology without consideration for the broader potential impacts.”

Period-Tracking App Flo Settles Health Data Sharing Class Action Flo Health Inc., maker of a popular menstrual tracking app accused of sharing sensitive health data of millions of women with Meta Platforms Inc. and Google LLC, reached a settlement Thursday, partly ...

“Meta remains the only defendant in the case.”

Senators Could Vote Imminently to Remove Their Homes, Travel Info From Internet The Senate could vote imminently to allow members of Congress and their staff to demand websites take down info about their houses and travel details.

Privacy for me but not for thee: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

reading this story this morning gave me joy. more cities should shun falun gong.

Data Brokers are Selling Your Flight Information to CBP and ICE For many years, data brokers have existed in the shadows, exploiting gaps in privacy laws to harvest our information—all for their own profit. They sell our precise movements without our knowledge or ...

Companies are Selling Your Personal and Location Data to police forces and immigration agencies via data brokers.
www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Grindr Won’t Let Users Say 'No Zionists'

🔗 www.404media.co/grindr-no-zi...

Keep talking about this because I think it is really important!

These excellent principles are exactly the guidelines we've been using to build the @peergos.org social web protocol since 2013. We've refused to take any investment, especially VC investment, and are set up as a non profit so we can make the right decisions to empower people and protect democracy.

"What if we make every Amazon Ring into a snitch to the police?" is apparently one of those zombie ideas that keeps getting back up every time we kill it.

really don't care if you disagree with me, i think constantly filming everything everywhere is bad, i think the widespread deployment of facial recognition is bad, i think the fact there are cameras everywhere inside of arenas & that increasingly you have to use your face to buy a hot dog is bad

Glad I know about this 🙂

When it comes to the average number of recommended or required apps by grade level, our research found that elementary school level children had the HIGHEST average number of required/recommended apps! 😳

Check out our Findings Report 3 in the link below👇: internetsafetylabs.org/resources/re....

What It’s Like to Be a Student Who Hates ChatGPT “Everyone is using it”—almost everyone.

you've heard about the college kids who can't do anything without ChatGPT's help—but what about the students who oppose generative A.I. for myriad reasons and refuse to rely on it as a shortcut? well, I found and spoke with a few of them here: slate.com/life/2025/07...