For decades, U.S. policymakers have utterly refused to support any meaningful privacy protections for consumers. They opposed any new Internet privacy laws, however straightforward. They opposed privacy rules for broadband ISPs. They also fought tooth and nail to ensure the nation’s top privacy enforcement agency, the FTC, lacked the authority, staff, funds, or resources to actually do […]
It’s hard to find people who care less about the law than law enforcement. Most traffic stops are pretextual. A real (or fake!) moving violation is an opportunity to go fishing for bigger fish. Conversations with drivers move from the standard requests for licenses and registrations towards anything that might broaden the scope of the […]
For years now we’ve written about the problems of the UK’s latest (in a long line) of attempts to “Disneyfy” the internet with its Online Safety Bill. While the bill had faced some hurdles along the way, made worse by the ever-rotating Prime Minister position last year, there was talk last week that some more […]
A couple of years before criticism of Israel-based NSO Group reached critical mass, the malware merchant was sued by WhatsApp. According to the messaging service (now owned by Meta), its servers were used (without its permission and in violation of the terms of service) to deliver powerful spyware to targets of NSO Group customers (which […]
“Politics,” the writer Auberon Waugh liked to say, “is for social and emotional misfits.” Its purpose is “to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.” You could accuse old Bron of painting with a rather broad brush, and you would be right. But he […]
There are lots of ways facial recognition tech can be misused. Since it’s far from infallible, the most common misuse of the tech is accepting matches as statements of fact. What should be considered, at best, an investigative lead, has instead been used to wrongly arrest people for crimes they didn’t commit. The private sector […]
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In the last few weeks I’ve written about how Elon Musk’s “changes” to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I’ve also noted how many more people (including myself!) are realizing how much better social media can be when it’s decentralized, rather than owned and run by […]
When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives. The AG lawsuit filed last March pulls out the traditional “Conservatives […]
Shirking accountability is a standard law enforcement pattern and practice. Those enforcing laws often feel they’re not obligated to follow the law. This attitude is internalized in every sense of the word. It’s not just blowing off outside oversight. The police refuse to police themselves, allowing good officers to go bad and bad officers to […]
A decade or so ago there was a wave of warnings by privacy advocates about how modern toys had become major surveillance devices. Makers of voice recognition toys in particular had a nasty habit, researchers warned, of collecting everything your child says, poorly “anonymizing” the data (a meaningless term), then failing to secure that data […]
Josh Browder — the creator of the DoNotPay AI lawbot that helped users dodge $4 million in parking tickets — thinks his AI is ready to head to the big leagues. Up until now, the bot’s progress (and its creator’s claims) have been incremental. Browder created a version of the bot to assist people in […]
Now that the House is (barely) in the control of the Republican Party, we expected an awful lot of dumb anti-tech laws (the Democrats are also pushing dumb anti-tech laws, but of a different nature). The GOP has, in the recent past, laid out a big long list of bills as part of its “big […]
If you want access to content and communications, it seems pretty obvious you should get a warrant. There are plenty of warrant exceptions, but rooting around in things pretty much everyone believes have an expectation of privacy — whether it’s their house, their phones, or their online document storage services — generally requires a warrant. […]
The 2023 Agile and Scrum Master Training Bundle has 7 courses to help you master various skills needed to be an expert project manager. Courses focus on handling difficult team members, risk management, creating user stories, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A […]
Back when Elon Musk was first exploring taking over Twitter, he spoke with Jack Dorsey who (as text messages released as part of Musk’s lawsuit over the purchase revealed) told Musk that the “original sin” of Twitter was setting it up as a private company, rather than being an open source protocol. This wasn’t a […]
The auto industry in Massachusetts has successfully stalled consumer technology repair reform in the state, after repeatedly and falsely claiming that shoring up consumer repair options would be a massive boon to the state’s sexual predators. In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original […]
At the beginning of the year, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! We’re calling on game designers of all stripes to build analog or digital games based on the works that have entered the public domain this year, including: Check out Duke’s Public Domain Day article or Copyright […]
Every year, a little after New Years, I try to do a post looking at the previous years results on Techdirt, what people were interested in, what commenters were rated highly and whatnot. I always wait until after New Years (unlike some other sites!) to make sure I have the full year’s data. This year, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a response to someone who compared Saudi Arabia jailing Wikipedia administrators to the FBI content flagging revealed in the Twitter Files: One involves a government jailing people for years if not decades for saying unflattering things about the people in […]
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