Tracking Opt-Outs Are Useless, Cal.com's Closed Source Chaos, Both Good & Bad Political News, and More!
Our top stories this week:
- Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
- Mastodon receives Sovereign Tech Agency funding
- Cal.com is going closed source. Discourse is not.
- Republican Mutiny Sinks Trump’s Push to Extend Warrantless Surveillance
- Netgear Scores the First Exemption From the FCC’s Foreign-Made Router Ban
- Federal Government Announces Bipartisan “Parents Decide Act” to Protect Kids Online
TWIP Live 🔴
Updates from the Team
New Interview: Carissa Véliz on AI
Time for another heavy-hitting interview! Recently Nate got to spend a little bit of time with Carissa Véliz, professor of ethics at Oxford and author of Privacy is Power, which we highly recommend. Our conversation centered primarily on AI but with a focus on privacy, ethics, and what we can do retake our societal destiny back from the AI companies. Her new book, Prophecy, comes out on April 21st. In the meantime the interview will be available on the 19th on YouTube and PeerTube. (We'll try to update these links when we have a direct link available.)
News
This week's news briefs talk about HackerOne pausing their Bug Bounty program due to the rise of AI bug reports, India abandoning biometric ID app requirements (for now), a Fiverr data breach, Mastodon's announcement that end-to-end encrypted DMs are coming soon, Chrome adding defenses against cookie-stealing malware, and privacy concerns from librarians in Canada.
Sources
Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
According to an audit from a company called webXray, 55% of sites it checked set an ad cookie in a user's browser even when the user opted out via Global Privacy Control (GPC). Needless to say, the companies disputed these findings. GPC is meant to be the more enforceable replacement to Do Not Track requests, which were a huge failure and ironically often made users easier to track.
Matthew Gault
Mastodon: Sovereign Tech Agency funding
Mastodon has been awarded €614,000 fromthe Sovereign Tech Fund, which they will use for a wide range of improvements to Mastodon specifically and the wider Fediverse. These include blocklist synchronization, remote media storage, automatic content detection (primarily for spam and illegal content), end-to-end encrypted DMS, and more. €90,000 will be set aside to donate to other Fediverse projects who wish to implement these protocols.
Cal.com is going closed source (& Discourse Response)
Cal.com - a popular, self-hostable appointment scheduling tool - has declared their intention to stop being open source. They claim this is due to the increased risks posed by AI cybersecurity tools. Many in the community, however, are not buying this claim. Discourse issued a tongue-in-cheek response summing up many of these arguments, mainly that it won't work anyways. Cal.com will leave a community version available but warn against using it seriously.
Sam Saffron
Republican Mutiny Sinks Trump’s Push to Extend Warrantless Surveillance
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has failed to be renewed, but the fight is not over yet. It received a 10-day extension til the end of April, and even if it doesn't get full renewal some kind of loophole from the FISA Court will allow it to run until Marhc 2027 regardless. Still, there's potential this may be the beginning of the end for warrantless data collection on American citizens.
Dell Cameron
‘No more excuses’: Von der Leyen says EU age checking app is ready
The EU's age verification app was unveiled this week. It can verify using passport, national ID, or "trusted providers such as banks or schools." While this does appear to be a standalone app, it also appears designed to be something that other countries can plug into as a framework for their own localized apps. The app is open source and available on GitHub. Already one of our community regulars has written about his experience using it and a user on X claims to have found some vulnerabilities. At this time we have no information on the validity of these claims, but time will tell.
Eliza Gkritsi
Gottheimer Announces Bipartisan “Parents Decide Act” to Protect Kids Online
This is a brand new story hot off the presses, so we're unfortunately a bit limited on more neutral sources covering it. As a result this comes from a congressman's press release. A federal "Parents Decide Act" has been put forward - a bipartisan effort - which would require operating-system level age verification. Now is a great time to contact your politicians and let them know why this is a terrible idea.
Forum Updates
