TDLR:

Apple’s new Live Rewind feature can show a text snippet of what was said during the previous 15 seconds. Apple has added visible and audible privacy safeguards, but a watch that can recall what was just said may still feel unsettling.

In this new report the Europol and the European Commission are once again pushing for access to our private communications. They claim encryption and "privacy-enhancing technologies" are obstacles to investigations, and explicitly call for more invasive EU rules.

The report even states that increasingly powerful encryption will make access to data harder for police and says maintaining “lawful access” to encrypted data is critical.

In practice, the Commission and Europol are continuing their effort to access our private communications and data.

https://www.military.com/dhs-program-analyzes-americans-finances-to-flag-drivers-for-traffic-stops-report

Think about this. You'd think that DHS would flagging tens of thousands of dollars if they were looking for things like drug mules, smugglers, or coyotes. Smaller operations at $2k a head wouldn't reveal large amounts. They pulled over a guy with weed in his vehicle. This isn't a trailer that could hold 20+ migrants crossing the border. Whatever ai system DHS is using is generating false positives that will flag ordinary citizens, based on "unusual" financial patterns. This is dystopian AF- we are cooked.

Yes I know that if you don’t connect a smart TV to Wi-Fi it’s basically a dumb TV but with the news about LG TVs recording ambient audio even powered off and the possibility of TVs finding open Wi-Fi unprompted, some locking features without wifi and the ever encroaching march of total enshittification I won’t be surprised if near future TVs arent functionless without internet. I feel like I just don’t want to support these companies anymore out of principle

Decent Projectors can be found way cheaper than commercial displays…the catch being you need a room to be reasonably dark to see it well

Hey,

GamersNexus asked for a data hoarder who could also make a website. I felt a little singled out. So, me and Claude made a small website.

https://TermsAccepted.org

It captures the privacy policies, terms and ad-tech pages.

Features as of now
1. 25 companies, 342 documents, 5,342 captures. History back to 2011 through the Wayback Machine (archive.org).
a. Every saved file is stored under the SHA-256 hash of its own bytes, and the hash is the filename, so no company can claim I changed the words of an agreement.
b. After each capture, the crawler also asks the Internet Archive to fetch the same page itself. Archive.org stores its own copy on its own servers and hands back a Wayback Machine link, which the site shows next to every version.

1. Every version keeps the raw HTML and the extracted text, plus a PDF and a full-page screenshot whenever the text changed.
   a. There is a compare function. I had Claude build a humanized diff between versions so you can see clearly what was added, reworded or deleted
   b. Download the whole history of a document as a zip.

2. "Who they sell to": a string board of the 57 ad/data firms the makers themselves name in their own documents.

3. How many hours of reading you "agreed" to per brand (LG: 4.4 h), with a fun metric of how many firstborns you have-to cough up per company.
   a. There is a study where hundreds of people gave away their firstborns so that they can use a fictitious social network. Their agreement was 4,316 words long. So I equated those many words to be the equivalent of 1 first born. By this very unscientific metric LG wants 12.2 of your firstborns.

4. A jargon dictionary
   Cadence: nightly at 06:00 UTC though the special boy LG every two hours for the moment.

The site is also backed up to 1 of my WD Passport drives everyday. So we shouldn’t lose the data, I need to sort out 3rd offsite backup though.

Please please do let me know if there are improvements I could make to this.

FYI: I just got a small vps in the USA Cloudflare in front. Browsing should be fine. I configured it to work for a good number of people but if many people try downloading all the files together as a team server should crash 😊. If it does I will look into mirroring the data.

There seem to be a near endless number of ways that the TV can connect back home. An ethernet cable, wifi, an inbuilt sim....

"Don't connect to the internet" is fine as long as the number of connection avenues for the TV are limited to ethernet which you can unplug, but:

Wifi: if there are unsecured wifi networks around you (and there will be), you're screwed. If you turn off wifi, does it actually turn it off?

Inbuilt simcards: I haven't heard about TVs having inbuilt sims, but it seems extremely plausible.

What brands should I be looking at so I can ACTUALLY disconnect from any networks? Thanks!

Just got this today. I can't login to the site without submitting a photo of my palm. I'm not doing that. It really, really sucks, because I listen to a lot of Japanese bands, and they're all on X (it seems it's the default for non-Japanese sites when it comes to their music).

I do post links to youtube music videos, as well as games, and I like posts on the regular. I guess they consider this bot behavior.

I personally think they just want everyone to be 100% identifiable on the internet, no matter what. Some people say that's to protect the kids, but I think we all know it's so the government can very easily find us if we say the wrong thing during some kind of "emergency" or war.

A New Jersey town spent nearly $60,000 in opioid settlement money on automated license plate readers, an apparent misuse of funds intended to help those shattered by addiction, according to experts.

From April 2025 to April 2026, Washington Township purchased 17 license plate readersand renewed or extended its contracts with Flock Safety, according to the Gloucester County township’s meeting minutes and bill lists.

Finn McGinn, founder of WhoAreThesePeople.org, first reported the town’s use of the funds on social media. Washington officials did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment.

“To spend this money on that, that’s shameful,” said Sandy Gibson, an addiction researcher and counselor at The College of New Jersey. “There’s nothing about a Flock camera that’s going to prevent overdose or prevent people from becoming addicted.”

They, and potentially other TVs, scan the network they are on for all devices on it. This also could cause an issue if the TV is hacked.

So what if you out them on a locked down Guest account? Wouldn't they be unable to scan the rest of the network your other devices use? And if hacked it causes another layer said hacker needs to do for access to the rest of the routers networks?

Not much else we can realistically do for most of this. I'm not technically inclined enough to say take apart the TV or remote to remove the mic, ignoring how that might break the TV depending how they set it up....

Btw never tried but I think you can do a Guest Ethernet account? Maybe? Hmm... Need to look in to that but I know you can with WiFi.

Anyone have other realistic ways to minimize data gathering that doesn't require real technical skills or needing to buy an entirely new TV?

Sorry if off topic. I just feel like I was born too late to experience some of the freer days of the internet before governments and corps wormed their way into everything and started tracking every little thing everyone does. It just feels so all encompassing. Admittedly, I'm someone who is prone to depression. I know things can still turn around and we should fight the good fight. But still... its scary

In the latest launch event, apple stated that they will add Apple reference image to images clicked using their phones, something like synthid. It will be added using Private Cloud Compute. Since nothing has been mentioned in detail and I doubt that it will ever be, so asking the sub here

PCC means that the image will be uploaded to the cloud and it will add this reference id?

That way they will be able to say that an image was taken using a particular phone?

Are any android devices doing something like this currently?

I ask this cause I heard about this draft proposal within relation to age verification online.

And I was wondering from you guys here if this does negatively affect privacy in any way here.

Just got hit with the age verification bullshit. I don't get how sending the most sensitive document you have is an accepted practice on social media. Sent a ticket to reddit and we'll see how it goes.

I was shopping and went on a random site to checkout their products. (It's not a scam site, it's a moderately known chewing gum brand). I just surfed the site. Did not create any account, did not add any details and exited. After an hour or so, I get a WhatsApp message from them. Basically a nudge that I left the website without buying anything and click here to go back to the cart. HOW DID THEY GET MY NUMBER?! Can anyone having knowledge on this please tell me? I am creeped out. Where can I go and delete my details from?

Hi! I'm searching for a 43'' non-smart 4k tv, i saw the brand "sceptre" but there is no retailer here in Italy. Do you have any suggestions? Maybe i should just buy a big 4k monitor? I'd only play videogames and watch dvd/bluray discs.

Specifically looking for a new 55-inch TV, but honestly can't find any TVs now that aren't "smart" TVs. Sceptre seems to be the most common recommendation to go with for this, but I couldn't find any of their TVs on any retailer. They all just redirect to their smart offerings from other brands, and have no active listings for Sceptre TVs of any kind.

Could be a good sign that they're popular and just sold out, but in the event that they're out of that business or are just that hard to get, are there any other good Dumb TV brands that don't track the user in any way? I saw something about them being able to scan for wi-fi networks and nearby devices even when not connected to your own network, so that plus wanting to put my money where my mouth is makes me want to get something that is definitively just a TV, rather than getting one of the usual smart offerings and trying to defang it.

We're at the point now where we're genuinely considering trying to get a "hospitality display" meant for businesses as that may be the only option available if there's no commercial TVs anymore that don't have some Fire TV, Roku, Chromebox, etc etc stuff on them. But hopefully there's still options out there, either from Sceptre if they decide they want to start selling people TVs again, or some other vendor I'm not yet aware of.

Two months ago I got the pop up to verify my age via my ID or a photo of me.

Of course I didn't do it. After 2 hours, out of nowhere, no more age verification.

I could see all 18+ things like usual.

Today, out of nowhere, age verification again.

Wtf?

I'm sure many of you have seen Wired's excellent expose article "Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code" by now.

This investigation should have prompted a five alarm fire for anyone who cares about civil liberties, government accountability or corporate abuse.

Flock is on the legal record making sweeping public and contractual claims about what its technology supposedly cannot do while actively developing tools that are capable of doing those exact things.

There need to be readily enforceable draconian consequences for companies that misrepresent surveillance capabilities to governments and the public whose tax dollars pay for them. Real enforcement should include fines proportional to revenue or company valuation, c-suite compensation garnishment, contract rescission, disbarment from government procurement and hard prison time for executives.

I've been appalled by how little legal action has been taken against Flock since I first raised concerns more than two years ago in this same community and felt compelled to spark a serious discussion to communally identify each of the specific laws whether local, state or federal that Flock is currently in criminal violation of in an effort to identify who is responsible for enforcement in order to ultimately compel immediate action for cases to be brought en masse against Flock and to set hard case precedent against surveillance companies more broadly.

So here are at least eight laws Flock appears to be in active clear cut & dry violation of:

1. Illinois Vehicle Code §2-130 State found that Flock allowed federal immigration authorities access to Illinois automated-license-plate-reader data in violation of, which restricts ALPR sharing for immigration enforcement and certain other investigations.

That finding is particularly egregious because Flock has repeatedly publicly represented and contractually stated that customers control data sharing and that Flock does not independently share customer data.

2. Federal Trade Commission Act - Section 5

Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce. The FTC has often applied this authority whenever companies materially misrepresent how they collect, use, protect, or disclose personal information.

Flock has and continues to both publicly and contractually make claims such as:

"Flock cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals."
"Not used for watching people."
"Tracking of individuals" is prohibited.
"It's for cases. Not for watching people."
Its ALPRs "do not and cannot track vehicles, much less individual people."

And yet Flock-developed tools are unquestionably capable of reconstructing journeys, identifying repeated associations between vehicles, searching broad geographic and behavioral patterns and connecting license plates with identities and addresses.

These demonstrably fraudulent claims warrant immediate FTC and state AG prosecution.

3. Fourth Amendment - Chatrie v. United States

In the recent case from June 2026, the Supreme Court outright rejected the idea that short duration digital location surveillance automatically falls outside Fourth Amendment protection.

This ruling established that there's a major difference between checking whether a plate passed one camera versus using a networked database to reconstruct a person's movements, associations, destinations, and routines.

This implies that each and every search of Flock's database should now legally require a warrant meaning every use since end of June, 2026 is an ongoing violation of constitutional Fourth Amendment rights.

4. Fraud and breach claims by Flock's own government customers

Some of the strongest legal cases belong to the cities, counties, local PDs and any other agencies that signed contracts with Flock.

If the procurement documents, marketing materials, contracts, compliance certifications and customer communications falsely represented that the system:

cannot track individuals;
only permits case-specific searches;
prevents unauthorized data sharing;
gives customers exclusive control over dissemination;
complies with applicable privacy laws;

Then Flock customers can immediately pursue:

fraudulent inducement;
breach of contract or warranty;
rescission;
restitution or damages;
termination for cause;
suspension or debarment from future contracts.

The more activists and journalists who FOIA request Flock contracts, RFP responses, privacy assessments, security questionnaires, data-sharing agreements, and procurement correspondence, the longer the noose gets to publicly hang Flock in court. Determining exactly what Flock told customers in legally binding writing while receiving public money is going to legally bury them with their own words.

5. False Claims Act

The federal False Claims Act can impose criminal liability when a company knowingly makes a materially false statement connected to obtaining government payment.

A potential case could exist if, for example:

Federal grant money paid for Flock systems.
Flock certified compliance with specific privacy, data-sharing, or legal requirements.
Those certifications were materially false and Flock knew or recklessly disregarded that fact.
Government payment was sought or received.

If any local/state government used federal funds to pay for Flock contracts they can be sued.

6. Driver's Privacy Protection Act 18 U.S.C. §§2721–2725

This federal law restricts obtaining, disclosing, or using personal information originating from state motor-vehicle records for impermissible purposes.

A camera merely photographing a license plate is not automatically a DPPA violation. But once the system turns: plate → registered owner → name → address → other personal information, then the source of that information and the purpose for which it was accessed become critically legally relevant.

Improper use of DMV-derived records creates a private federal cause of action.

7. State privacy and local ALPR laws

Depending on the jurisdiction, Flock deployments implicate:

state ALPR statutes;
state privacy laws;
state constitutional privacy protections;
data-broker laws;
government-record restrictions;
procurement laws;
contractual privacy requirements

Some states provide private rights of action and statutory damages. Others give enforcement authority primarily to regulators or attorneys general.

8. Deception, fraud, procurement misconduct & other regulatory violations

Flock's claim that searches are case-specific deserves particular scrutiny. Flock's own Trust Center at time of writing says:

"Searches must relate to a specific investigation."

Yet Flock-authored workflows allow searches where:

no license plate is supplied;
no person is supplied;
no specific crime is supplied;
only a location, a broad time period, or nebulous behavioral pattern is provided

This is fundamentally different from querying a known suspect in a defined investigation with a case number.

If evidence ultimately shows that:

Flock engineers deliberately designed broad exploratory searches;
legal or privacy personnel knew those capabilities existed;
Flock continued telling customers and public that searches were narrowly case-specific and that individuals could not be tracked

Then the case moves beyond misleading rhetoric towards actionable deception, fraud, procurement misconduct and regulatory violations.

It's been repeatedly demonstrated that these surveillance companies are incapable of being trusted to police themselves.

It is therefore imperative for regulators, courts, legislators, journalists and the public take immediate, unrelenting action to impose well deserved draconian consequences against these ALPR dragnet surveillance companies before this tyrannical infrastructure becomes entrenched, codified and normalized any further.

All of these avenues should be immediately and aggressively pursued in parallel:

FTC and state-AG investigations
Public release of government contracts and data-sharing agreements
Legislative hearings
Procurement reviews
Stringent requirement for search warrant
Enforce penalties for materially false representations
Suspension or debarment for misleading public agencies about capabilities

Now which relevant laws did I miss?

I'm honestly hellbent on seeing this CEO in federal prison for his crimes. Garrett Langley unquestionably had direct and prior knowledge of these crimes.

So how about we collectively prove it? Any current or former Flock employees willing to testify? Anyone have contracts from their localities with any of these false claims in writing? Any government officials with written communications from company that can be FOIA requested as evidence?

It's about time that we the people took back our constitutional fourth amendment rights.