As gadgets and services get smarter, they need more data, and face the hard problem of keeping it safe. Data privacy has become a huge problem for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and any company using artificial intelligence to power its services — and a major sticking point for lawmakers looking to regulate. Here’s all the news on data privacy and how it’s changing tech.
The never-ending fight to end warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act continues, with the House voting 235–191 for a bill that, once again, did not add warrant requirements. The bill now goes to the Senate, which has until tomorrow before the current law expires. Congress already voted in a 10 day extension on April 20.
In a blog post, Proton CEO Andy Yen calls out the privacy and security concerns about the rapid expansion of age verification, but says “the scope of places where age verification is required must be strictly confined to areas like pornography and social media:”
If as a society we conclude that a narrowly drawn age-verification system is both necessary and inevitable, it must be done right. Checks must be conducted entirely client-side, on the user’s device. They should rely on facial scans, not uploaded IDs, that are instantly discarded once processed. The answer to the binary question of whether the user is “of age” must be fully anonymized.
Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that the FBI obtained deleted Signal messages saved inside an iPhone’s notification database. It looks like the iOS 26.4.2 security update addresses this, as Apple says it has fixed an issue where “notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device.”
[Apple Support]
According to journalist Ken Klippenstein, ICE may be working on developing smart glasses capable of facial and biometric recognition. Klippenstein claims the agency wouldn’t just be using this tech on illegal aliens, but all Americans, especially protesters. College students proved this tech is already doable, but thanks, I hate it.
[https://www.kenklippenstein.com]
Over the weekend, Congress voted to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — for 10 days. President Trump has demanded a clean renewal of the controversial wiretapping authority, but he’s been stymied by Republicans who want to include reforms, including closing a loophole that lets the government spy on Americans without a warrant.
The new deadline is April 30th.
The House was supposed to have a procedural vote on renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act today, ahead of the program’s April 20th expiration. Speaker Mike Johnson delayed the debate — again. There’s still a chance the House may vote later today, but it’s unlikely.
After failing to get details about a user who said “TSA sucks and we all know it,” via a traditional court order, DHS is now dragging Reddit in front of a grand jury. The government has grown increasingly aggressive in its attempts to deal with online critics. Reddit has not said whether it plans to fight the subpoena, but according to The Intercept:
“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates, and we take our commitment to protecting that seriously,” the company said in a statement to The Intercept. “We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest.”
As 404 Media reports, the FBI managed to extract Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone by accessing the phone’s notification database, where incoming messages were viewable even after the app was deleted. Signal users may want to turn on the app’s settings feature that hides message content in notifications.
A proposed class action lawsuit claims Perplexity “effectively planted a bug” on users’ computers by embedding trackers from Meta and Google inside its AI search engine, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. It also alleges that Perplexity’s incognito mode “does nothing” to protect user privacy:
Even paid users who turned on the “Incognito” feature still had their conversations shared with Meta and Google, along with their email addresses and other identifiers that allowed Meta and Google to personally identify them.
According to “I Decompiled the White House’s New App,” the Android version has some odd choices for a government app that mostly shows content from the White House website.
That includes enabling location tracking and other monitoring via OneSignal’s analytics (which the company says are opt-in at the OS level), JavaScript loaded from some guy’s GitHub, an injected script to hide things like consent dialogs on pages users open in the app, and other hooks to non-government third-party services.
[Thereallo]
CBP agents at Miami International Airport briefly detained 20 activists, 18 of whom had their phones taken.
Bills like California’s Digital Age Assurance Act will require operating systems to confirm their users’ ages, but the developers of the privacy-focused Android fork said in a post on X on Friday that they’re not planning to age-gate their operating system:
“GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account. GrapheneOS and our services will remain available internationally. If GrapheneOS devices can’t be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it.”
Lawmakers don’t want VPNs to stand in the way of online age verification.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the history of the NSA and mass surveillance in America, and why Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon should worry us.
While end-to-end encryption can keep an account’s data private and hidden even from a service provider, the name of who paid for the account and other metadata is harder to hide.
Anyone else notice that ICE isn’t worried about getting doxed by Meta?
The security camera maker’s Search Party feature, advertised during the Super Bowl, has sparked a surveillance backlash.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
