Latest news with #ElectronicFrontierFoundation
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
U.K. starts enforcing online age check rules
A U.K. law requiring that pornography websites verify the age of their users took effect Friday. The BBC reports that around 6,000 porn sites have said they will start verifying users' ages to comply with the Online Safety Act, although at least one major site was not requiring age checks as of Friday morning. The law also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, which is why sites like Reddit, Bluesky, X, and Grindr have also begun asking users in the U.K. to verify their age through means including selfies or government-issued IDs. This is just one of a number of new child protection laws that could normalize online age checks globally, according to Wired. The approach has been criticized by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a threat to online privacy and anonymity — indeed, it's worth noting that in a recent breach of the dating safety app Tea, many of the affected images were selfies and digital IDs uploaded for account verification. Some internet users may try to get around age checks by using fake IDs, selfies of video game characters, or VPNs.
TechCrunch
3 days ago
- TechCrunch
U.K. starts enforcing online age check rules
In Brief A U.K. law requiring that pornography websites verify the age of their users took effect Friday. The BBC reports that around 6,000 porn sites have said they will start verifying users' ages to comply with the Online Safety Act, although at least one major site was not requiring age checks as of Friday morning. The law also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, which is why sites like Reddit, Bluesky, X, and Grindr have also begun asking users in the U.K. to verify their age through means including selfies or government-issued IDs. This is just one of a number of new child protection laws that could normalize online age checks globally, according to Wired. The approach has been criticized by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a threat to online privacy and anonymity — indeed, it's worth noting that in a recent breach of the dating safety app Tea, many of the affected images were selfies and digital IDs uploaded for account verification. Some internet users may try to get around age checks by using fake IDs, selfies of video game characters, or VPNs.
Irish Independent
21-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
Lobby group weighs in against Ryanair in US legal battle
The lobby group has claimed that Ryanair is attempting to stymie competition by taking on Ryanair sued the website in 2020 in Delaware, alleging that it was screen-scraping the airline's fares without permission. Screen-scraping involves accessing an airline's ticket prices and flight data, and then selling tickets for those flights through a third-party website. After a four-day trial last July, a jury in Delaware convicted of having caused economic harm to Ryanair. The jury awarded the Irish airline just $5,000 (€4,293) – the minimum threshold required to state a claim under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). However, the district court judge who heard the case then agreed with that Ryanair had not met the requirement of proving that at least $5,000 of loss was attributable to which is a prerequisite to any finding of civil liability under the CFAA. Accordingly, the judge overturned the ruling. Ryanair has now appealed against that decision, seeking to have the judge's decision reversed, or to have a new trial. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has weighed in behind The lobby group's founders were US author and lyricist John Barlow and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor. Its backers also included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. It has argued that the continued reliance on the CFAA by companies to take legal actions could stymie competition. 'If unauthorised access can be predicated on a violation of a website owner's stated preferences, rather than hacking technological barriers, then companies will continue to use the CFAA to fend off competition,' the lobby group has claimed in its submission to the US Court of Appeals. 'For example, companies commonly use automated web browsing products to gather web data for a wide variety of uses.' Those practices include manufacturers tracking performance ranking of products in the search results of retailer websites, or monitoring posts on social media, it points out. Inhibiting competition is precisely what Ryanair sought to do here 'If the use of valid credentials in a way that has been disallowed as a matter of stated – or even unstated – policy were a CFAA violation, a company could create a password-protected 'gate', make the key freely available to all, and then send cease-and-desist letters to anyone they don't like,' Electronic Frontier Foundation said in its submission. 'This concern is not speculative. Inhibiting competition is precisely what Ryanair sought to do here, and in keeping with what companies have repeatedly tried to do in the past, with partial success.' Ryanair has already claimed that the travel firm has 'escaped liability' after the Delaware judge overturned the jury's verdict. 'The court impermissibly usurped the role of the jury as the ultimate finder of fact when it found that no reasonable jury could conclude that Ryanair's costs due to Booking's conduct from March 1, 2022, to February 28, 2023 would have exceeded $5,000,' it has claimed.
RNZ News
30-06-2025
- RNZ News
Can US Customs legally search your phone and what can you do about it?
Photo: RNZ Explainer - We carry our entire lives on our phones these days, but that also can make you particularly vulnerable when travelling to another country. When visiting America, US Customs have the right to search your devices - as do many other countries. After the return of Donald Trump to the presidency this year, there have been increased reports of travellers to the US denied entry and some detained in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). New Zealand has recently updated its advice to those travelling to the US to highlight the risks and what travellers may face, including inspection of your laptops, phones and tablets. Is this legal, and is there anything you can do to protect your security? Here's what you need to know. They sure can. It is laid out clearly on the US Customs and Border Protection website . Sophia Cope is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a nonprofit organisation that defends civil liberties. She said Customs have a wide remit to conduct inspections. "Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asserts broad authority to search travellers' devices at ports of entry (like international airports), even devices of American citizens," she said. US Customs claims the searches help fight crime before it enters the country. The CBP defines "devices" to be: "Any device that may contain information in an electronic or digital form, such as computers, tablets, disks, drives, tapes, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players." "These device searches are unconstitutional," the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes on its website, calling searches "exceptionally intrusive" . The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, but border agents have been found to have wide exceptions under legal doctrine. Non-US citizens do not necessarily have all of the same guaranteed constitutional rights that American citizens do. The US government claims that in 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travellers had their devices searched. However, there has been a strong surge in immigration crackdowns since Trump returned to the White House. Trump issued an executive order in January calling to "vet and screen to the maximum degree possible all aliens who intend to be admitted, enter, or are already inside the United States". Customs has the right to vet and screen visitors entering the US. Photo: AFP / Getty Images North America If you're a non-citizen trying to enter the US, refusal to comply with a device search may result in being denied entry, Cope said. "American citizens have the most leverage to refuse to comply because they must be let back into the country," Cope said. "However, they can be detained for several hours, subjected to additional questioning, and their devices can be confiscated for days, weeks, or months." US green card holders should also be let back in the country, but that has sometimes changed in recent months, she said. "We've seen the current administration display a willingness to challenge green card status, and so these travellers should take that into consideration." Donald Trump's administration has tightened border security. Photo: AFP "These searches have been used to identify and combat terrorist activity, child pornography, drug smuggling, human smuggling, bulk cash smuggling, human trafficking, export control violations, intellectual property rights violations and visa fraud, among other violations," the CBP website states . CBP also says searches can be used to see what a visitor's "intentions" are in coming to the US: "Furthermore, border searches of electronic devices are often integral to determining an individual's intentions upon entry to the United States and thus provide additional information relevant to admissibility of foreign nationals under US immigration laws." The CBP says it can retain copies of information obtained from a border search if it contains evidence of violation of law, or more broadly, "if the information relates to immigration, customs, or other enforcement matters." Data that is retained is kept in the CBP's systems, which it says have "robust access controls limiting user access to only those with a need to know". CBP should not access data stored in cloud services, Cope said. "CBP's 2018 policy expressly prohibits officers from looking at live cloud content on devices seized at the border/airports/other ports of entry. Border agents must put a device in airplane mode or otherwise disconnect it from the internet." The EFF has put together an extensive digital privacy guide for travellers , she said. The Foreign Affairs Ministry updated its travel advice to New Zealanders in May, including warnings about possible detention at the border . The US is under guidance for travellers to "exercise increased caution" on the government's Safe Travel website . A spokesperson for MFAT said that as of late June, 16 New Zealanders had requested assistance with immigration difficulties in the US since January. "This is made up of issues at the border and also in the community. It doesn't mean these people were detained," MFAT said. MFAT's Safe Travel website warns that on arrival to the US, "your travel documents, reasons for travel, or belongings (including electronic devices) may be subject to scrutiny and inspection". There have been multiple reports of people visiting the US having trouble at the border over political speech. Australian Alistair Kitchen was detained and questioned about views on Israel and Palestine before being deported from LA to Melbourne. He told RNZ's Jesse Mulligan that his name was called over a loudspeaker before he was even through the Customs queue. "I was pulled into the back room and my phone was demanded and my passcode was demanded and I realised at that moment that this wasn't random or ad hoc but they had been waiting for me, and they told me as much. Australian writer Alistair Kitchen. Photo: Supplied "They said, the reason you're here is because of these posts you wrote online about the protests at Colombia (University) ... and I had taken those posts down days before I got on the plane." The Department of Homeland Security has denied Kitchen was deported over his political views. "The individual in question was denied entry because he gave false information on his ESTA application regarding drug use," it said in a statement, although Kitchen maintains he was first singled out for screening over his political posts. Social media can leave plenty of traces even if they are not on your phone. "Social media apps can contain cached or copied content that is on the device's hard drive, even though the original content is principally stored on the social media company's servers," Cope said. "Thus, when a device is in airplane mode, some of that content may be viewable on the device, even if it's otherwise private. As such, people can delete those apps for the purpose of travel and reinstall them later to avoid border agents accessing cached private social media content." A New Zealand telecommunications expert who asked not to be named told RNZ that "I suspect if you've been online telling everyone what you think about Donald, it's too late" even if you delete information from your phone. The expert said that the information is out there and seen by companies such as Peter Thiel-founded mass surveillance technology company Palantir. "If apps are deleted on a phone but an officer knows ahead of time about a traveller's social media, the lack of the apps on the phone might lead to more scrutiny and questioning," Cope said. "I had prepared," Kitchen said. "You go through the passport control and you do make sure that your social media has been cleaned up, that your phone is missing messages that might have been critical of Donald Trump, for example. ...In my case, it was not sufficient exactly because they had already done this background search on me." US Immigration Customs and Enforcement teams - ICE - have been cracking down on illegal immigration. Photo: US ICE Many other countries can also search your phone at Customs. In New Zealand, Customs has had the power since 1996 to examine all goods crossing the border, including devices. However, Customs said "officers must have 'reasonable suspicion' of criminal offending before searching an electronic device and must have "reasonable cause to believe" that an electronic device has offending material on it before detaining it". If you refuse access, courts can impose a penalty of up to NZ$5000 - but this is only possible if Customs decides to prosecute the traveller. Customs claims on its website that most passengers entering New Zealand do not have their devices searched. The advice from some tech experts is to make a plan before travelling if you're concerned about data on your phone - but it might not be a good idea to buy a pristine cheap "burner" phone for a trip. "We've heard anecdotally that travelling with a temporary device or an otherwise "clean" device devoid of any personal information can itself raise suspicions with border officers," Cope said. "At the same time, travellers may have very sensitive information on their devices, especially if you're someone with ethical or legal obligations for confidentiality such as a journalist, attorney, or doctor. "But even average people may have personal photos or texts or emails that reveal sensitive or intimate things about themselves or their families that they wouldn't want a US federal agent to see. "People should therefore think about what privacy interests they have and mitigate their risks - both of a privacy invasion and of being denied entry or escalating an interaction with a CBP officer - to the extent they feel comfortable." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
The Verge
28-06-2025
- Politics
- The Verge
The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions
Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been 'yes' — now, as of Friday, it's an unambiguous 'no.' Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is relatively straightforward as Supreme Court rulings go. To summarize, its conclusion is that: Around this string of logic, you'll find a huge number of objections and unknowns. Many of these were laid out before the decision: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an overview of the issues, and 404 Media goes deeper on the potential consequences. With the actual ruling in hand, while people are working out the serious implications for future legal cases and the scale of the potential damage, I've got a few immediate, prosaic questions. Even the best age verification usually requires collecting information that links people (directly or indirectly) to some of their most sensitive web history, creating an almost inherent risk of leaks. The only silver lining is that current systems seem to at least largely make good-faith attempts to avoid intentional snooping, and legislation includes attempts to discourage unnecessary data retention. The problem is, proponents of these systems had the strongest incentives to make privacy-preserving efforts while age verification was still a contested legal issue. Any breaches could have undercut the claim that age-gating is harmless. Unfortunately, the incentives are now almost perfectly flipped. Companies benefit from collecting and exploiting as much data as they can. (Remember when Twitter secretly used two-factor authentication addresses for ad targeting?) Most state and federal privacy frameworks were weak even before federal regulatory agencies started getting gutted, and services may not expect any serious punishment for siphoning data or cutting security corners. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies could quietly demand security backdoors for any number of reasons, including catching people viewing illegal material. Once you create those gaps, they leave everyone vulnerable. Will we see deliberate privacy invasions? Not necessarily! And many people will probably evade age verification altogether by using VPNs or finding sites that skirt the rules. But in an increasingly surveillance-happy world, it's a reasonable concern. Over the past couple of years Pornhub has prominently blocked access to a number of states, including Texas, in protest of local laws requiring age verification. Denying service has been one of the adult industry's big points of leverage, demonstrating one potential outcome of age verification laws, but even with VPN workarounds this tactic ultimately limits the site's reach and hurts its bottom line. The Supreme Court ruling cites 21 other states with rules similar to the Texas one, and now that this approach has been deemed constitutional, it's plausible more will follow suit. At a certain point Pornhub's parent company Aylo will need to weigh the costs and benefits, particularly if a fight against age verification looks futile — and the Supreme Court decision is a step in that direction. In the UK, Pornhub ceded territory on that very front a couple of days ago, agreeing (according to British regulator Ofcom) to implement 'robust' age verification by July 25th. The company declined comment to The Verge on the impact of FSC v. Paxton, but backing down wouldn't be a surprising move here. I don't ask this question with respect to the law itself — you can read the legal definitions within the text of the Texas law right here. I'm wondering, rather, how far Texas and other states think they can push those limits. If states stick to policing content that most people would classify as intentional porn or erotica, age-gating on Pornhub and its many sister companies is a given, along with other, smaller sites. Non-video but still sex-focused sites like fiction portal Literotica seem probably covered. More hypothetically, there are general-focus sites that happen to allow visual, text, and audio porn and have a lot of it, like 4chan — though a full one-third of the service being adult content is a high bar to clear. Beyond that, we're pretty much left speculating about how malicious state attorneys general might be. It's easy to imagine LGBTQ resources or sex education sites becoming targets despite having the exact kind of social value the law is supposed to exempt. (I'm not even getting into a federal attempt to redefine obscenity in general.) At this point, of course, it's debatable how much justification is required before a government can mount an attack on a website. Remember when Texas investigated Media Matters for fraud because it posted unflattering X screenshots? That was roughly the legal equivalent of Mad Libs, but the attorney general was mad enough to give it a shot. Age verification laws are, rather, tailor-made methods to take aim at any given site. The question 'What is porn?' is going to have a tremendous impact on the internet — not just because of what courts believe is obscene for minors, but because of what website operators believe the courts believe is obscene. This is a subtle distinction, but an important one. We know legislation limiting adult content has chilling effects, even when the laws are rarely used. While age verification rules were in flux, sites could reasonably delay making a call on how to handle them. But that grace period is over — seemingly for good. Many websites are going to start making fairly drastic decisions about what they host, where they operate, and what kind of user information they collect, based not just on hard legal decisions but on preemptive phantom versions of them. In the US, during an escalating push for government censorship, the balance of power has just tipped dramatically. We don't know how far it has left to go.
