Is the Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine Dead? Thoughts on Chatrie v. United States danielsolove.substack.com/p/is-the-fou...

The World Cup brings countries together and some of them share more than a spot. In 2025, some nations competed in another race: shutting down the internet. Find out more about internet shutdowns in our report: www.accessnow.org/internet-shu...

Earlier this week, we published the 2026 RDR Index: Telco Giants Edition, an assessment of the human rights policies and commitments of the 12 most prominent telcos around the world. rankingdigitalrights.org/tge26

these are getting weird

last year the UN "ai for good" flagship conference mistreated me and censored my talk because i made the link between the ai industry (their sponsors) and genocide explicit. this year, ITU issues "content guideline" that, on a close read, sounds like a licence to silence criticism of ai/the industry

The IAHR has been one of our closest allies leveraging the data from the RDR Index to guide investors in their engagements with Big Tech and telecom giants. Do share this opportunity in your networks! We’re keen on working with passionate people who value these collaborations :)

New CDT research by Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagodjou, & Michal Luria, maps “dark patterns” in AI chatbots, showing how design choices like playacting, sycophancy, and emotional framing can blur the line between helpful interaction and manipulation. cdt.org/insights/dar...

Fighting internet censorship requires more than noticing when it happens. It requires documenting it, sharing evidence, and building the collective power to respond. OONI makes that possible. Learn how we defend the public's right to know: blog.torproject.org/Defending-th... #FundInternetFreedom

Worrying reporting from @mathieupollet.bsky.social who found that The European Commission dropped their “open source strategy” from the Tech Sovereignty Package ec.europa.eu/transparency... Reminder of what the EC itself said: open source = close to €100b in economic value for every €1bn invested.

"I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write."

"In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point... Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?"

Today, I was scheduled to be a presenter on a panel at Rightscon titled "Is Freedom of Expression Dead? Rethinking free speech in times of authoritarianism." Really sucks that it was cancelled by pressure from an authoritarian government.

A German newspaper reports that @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu has personally intervened to postpone the fine against Google for violating the Digital Markets Act. We call on the EU Commission president to enforce the DMA and fine Google without further delay. 🚨 static1.squarespace.com/static/5e449...

If there's one thing you can dedicate time to read today, make it @nathaliemarechal.net's latest article, a deep dive on where we are in tech policy space and how we must confront our priorities to challenge the root causes behind the concentration of power www.techpolicy.press/tech-policy-...

RightsCon's cancellation marks a major escalation in transnational repression and is a testament to China’s influence on global digital rights far beyond its borders, writes Article19's Michael Caster. He calls for a true reckoning with China’s influence and meaningful cross-movement coordination.

Following our April 29 announcement, we believe it's important to be transparent about the context that led to the decision. We want to explain, where we can, why this was made on such short notice, only days before we were set to host RightsCon. Read: www.rightscon.org/rc26-stateme...

BREAKING: The Chinese government pressured Zambia to screen + exclude Taiwanese speakers attending @rightscon.org, leading to the largest international convention on digital rights being canceled a week before it takes place, the host org @accessnow.org tells WIRED. By @telliotter.bsky.social + me

LinkedIn suggested a post, talking about a paper that did interest me, but I made the mistake of going through the comments. Like I fell deep in r/LinkedInLunatics

Ranking Digital Rights stands in solidarity with digital rights defenders affected by the cancellation of @rightscon.org rankingdigitalrights.org/2026/04/30/s...

Truly feel for the RightsCon team and everyone involved with organizing the conference.

RightsCon is officially cancelled. Devastating for all the colleagues already making their way to Zambia. The government cannot come out unscathed from this.

The Government of Zambia unilaterally decides to "postpone" RightsCon 2026, less than a week before the conference starts in Lusaka. This is an international embarrassment for Zambia and an affront to civil society.

NEW REPORT with two findings: 1) Data centers cause health and environmental problems in the communities where they are sited; and 2) data centers are sited in communities that already have a lot of health and environmental problems techpolicy.press/data-center-...

Excellent analysis by @evangreer.bsky.social @nathaliemarechal.net on the well-meaning but ultimately ill-conceived youth social media ban that passed in the MA House of Representatives www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/22/o...

Ranking Digital Rights is renewing its mission as an independent initiative, doubling down on the need to confront corporate power. rankingdigitalrights.org/2026/04/20/r...

Tried to book trains to Torino from London. No problem booking, but impossible to pay nearly £1000 for two people round trip. We are flying and we really don't want to. The subsidies should be paid to rail not air travel.

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

"this horse is getting so fast, it's going to become a train any day now"

Reddit was considering World too, get them out of everything.

🚨BREAKING Research with @algorithmwatch.org shows how the EU Commission has copy-pasted a Microsoft amendment that will keep information on data centres hidden. The aim? In the face of growing resistance, to prevent NGOs from obtaining key information. 👏 @investigate-europe.eu for investigating

The political project of AI is to abolish labor, and in doing so abolishing the economic argument for labor rights: the super-rich keep us alive and marginally healthy so we can work for them. What do you think happens when they no longer need us to?

It's time to #TalkAboutHumanities so here is a contribution: Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of 'AI': The View from the Humanities www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Lc...

anyone who says people opposing data centers are just nimbys need to stop echoing industry propaganda and see what it’s actually like to live near one

you can’t build democracy on a tech stack that is fundamentally anti-democratic

BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning. And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep. Meet #Webloc, used by ICE, cops & foreign govs to track 500m+ phones. No warrant required. Our @citizenlab.ca investigation + how to protect yourself 🧵/1 citizenlab.ca/research/ana...

New article on why I won't join hands with "anti-AGI" pro-extinctionists like Yudkowsky, and why I think the AGI race is extremely dangerous even though we're nowhere close to building AGI. Check it out! www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/utter-madn...

The far-left hippy loonies at the... er... European Central Bank *cough* are saying that fossil fuel dependency is a major threat to the EU. It calls for the Bloc to meet its clean energy targets and "Transition now – or pay more later". Lefties, eh 🙄 www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/d...

"a term popularized by Palantir" we are cooked

As a lady who has done years of therapy & writing about trauma & the self & politics & social science, it is ONLY through the *struggle* of writing that anything new is ever born. The notion that you give AI all your files and it will "know you" and "develop" your ideas makes me profoundly sad.

Yes, I think that is 100% correct: so-called elites are happy to chug (and regurgitate) the Kool-Aid while the rest of us are like, “can’t you see the emperor is naked? And also trying to make our labor obsolete so he can let us starve?”

I’m also amazed at how poorly even HKS elites understand the basics: 2hrs into the symposium, I was the 1st to point out that “AI” isn’t a thing, it’s an umbrella marketing term that encompasses LLMs, SLMs, ADMSs, expert systems, computer vision, transcription tools, translation tool, etc etc etc

🤢

As always with splashy news, there are so many hot takes about the court cases that found some Big Tech companies liable for deceiving users and for harmful design of its services. While I understand the need to savor the moment and feel vindicated, we must not lose sight of what comes next.

New: Wikipedia has officially banned AI-generated content. After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of LLMs, volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

This is a sign of fear, knowing slop is a real issue and forced to make it sound like they don’t make slop when they’re in the business of providing slop making technology. Keep calling it slop keep calling out slop when you see it and keep coming up with catchy words like DLSSlop.

I think this is a depressing approach to the production of knowledge

Over the last few years, American tech oligarchs have become the greatest argument against their own existence. The sheer scale of their erratic behavior and political interference proves that extreme wealth concentration is a structural threat to society

So... the actual story reported here is that the administration set up a dedicated task force to document EU censorship and THEY COULD NOT FIND ANY. Not that you'd know that from the headline. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

I don't really feel like the press coverage of the metaverse implosion honestly captures the access tech press' role in propping up Mark Zuckerberg's fake innovation mythology if you go back and read "journalism" from this era, 97% was indistinguishable from advertorial

truly incredible that strava leaks are still happening after all this time