Gothamist: New digital hall passes track bathroom breaks, gather data in NYC schools. “Permission to use the bathroom has taken an Orwellian turn at more than 150 New York City public schools, students say. New digital hall passes allow teachers to more closely monitor how long a student is spending in the bathroom — and who else has requested a bathroom break.”

Mashable: Trump’s new White House app is a security and privacy nightmare. “X user @Thereallo1026 went so far as decompiling the White House app and found that it’s sharing the exact location data of its users every 4.5 minutes and sending that information to a third-party server.”

Ars Technica: FBI started buying Americans’ location data again, Kash Patel confirms. “Three years after saying it had stopped buying location data of Americans without a warrant, the FBI acknowledged it has restarted the purchases. During questioning at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the location data purchases have produced valuable […]

Me, in 2021: "piracy of open source makes no sense"

Me, in 2026: "They did it. They fucking did it. Look at what they fucking did. With various states pushing age verification and biometric identification laws on developers, and distro developers complying far too easily, now it has actually become *necessary* to pirate Open Source software"

Two *very* notable examples of developers who are *already* adding fascism to FOSS: #systemd (as expected) and XDG / #freedesktop .

[1] https://lemmy.world/comment/22746018

#Linux #OpenSource #Piracy #OpenSourcePiracy #DigitalSovereignty #DigitalSurveillance

MinnPost: These warrants let police sweep up data from anyone near a crime scene. A bipartisan Minnesota bill says they should be illegal. . “Law enforcement can request data related to crime scenes – or more expansive areas – and work backwards to look for suspects. A group of bipartisan Minnesota lawmakers says they should be illegal except in emergency scenarios. They argue reverse […]

Series: "Made in America, Watched Worldwide"

"Across the world, surveillance technology – often made by Silicon Valley and sold with the U.S. government’s blessing despite sanctions – is increasingly monitoring the moves of citizens who have done nothing wrong. The consequences of getting caught in this expanding digital cage can be dire..."
https://apnews.com/surveillance-digital-cage v @yaelwrites, et al.
#surveillance #DigitalSurveillance #tech #technology

Lifehacker: How to Stop Social Media Platforms From Tracking You When You Share Posts. “When you hit the share button on social media apps such as Instagram, Facebook, or Threads, these sites tack on a tracker to the link you’re sharing. This tracker means that Instagram can tell who you’ve shared the link with, and it likely uses this information to further optimize its algorithm for ads. […]

As expected, now a new service ``systemd-censord`` is being proposed for Debian.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2026/03/msg00018.html

#DigitalSurveillance #Debian #Systemd

Having a VERY annoying time with a job offering that requires to take an *external*, *automated*, *AI-driven*, *once-only* online test.

Just about as soon as I entered it locked controls, not letting me even click the help or info options, and started filling RAM until the tab crashed. Tried reloading, told me I had a few chances remaining. Restarted the test, RAM filled again, tab crashed. Tried again, test timeout.

And now I'm locked out of the external system so I can't even continue or request an alternative on this end.

I'm tempted to ask the job offerer for a manual, or at least human-driven test, but if that doesn't work I'm gonna pass on this offering.

The external test provider that repeatedly crashed was Pendula / SHL, btw. And I hear in this field they are one of the *better* ones! I've heard the ones used for universities are *ridiculous*.

#AntiAI #Pendula #DigitalSurveillance

Here's what concerns me most from a privacy perspective. These bills don't just verify age once. They create a persistent identity layer inside the operating system that applications can query at will.

The commercial age verification vendors who would provide this infrastructure (Yoti, Veriff, Jumio) charge $0.10 to $2.00 per check, require proprietary SDKs, demand API keys tied to commercial accounts, and operate cloud-only with no self-hosted option. Your age verification data goes to a third-party cloud service. Every time.

Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions.

#ageverification #followthemoney #privacy #digitalsurveillance

@TheLastOfHisName https://beige.party/@TheLastOfHisName/116222062028401019