UK regulator Ofcom spent more than £1.1 million on communications related to the Online Safety Act, in the period from February 2024 to July 2025 www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r... + www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r... #FOI #govcomms #influencers

Rah. It’s a perfectly valid way to spell your name. T’was t’best way t’know you’re own selves’! Big hugs to all the O’Bros out there…

The internet should be a place where people can find the knowledge they need to make decisions about their lives. Shadowbanning abortion content punishes educators and people who need the info. It’s time for platforms to stop hiding account suppression behind excuses of algorithms and “bugs.”

No. No they should not. And California has had it with unaccountable, anonymous federal officers.

A.B. 566 makes the California Consumer Privacy Act more user-friendly. And the easier it is to exercise your rights, the more power you have. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Move info on this website: olivia.science/ai by @olivia.science QR code goes here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

A better ruling would be to ban the unnecessary collection of personal data for profit. There are better business models for democracy than those based on #surveillance. #AIEthics www.npr.org/2025/09/19/n...

Ofcom investigates 22 more porn sites under new age-check rules www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet... press release with links to case summaries Expansion of anti-porn campaign under UK's Online Safety Act, including one site where Ofcom hasn't identified the provider. #censorship #openweb #techpolicy

🚨Our governments are about to decide whether 450M Europeans deserve privacy - or not. Help ensure your country says NO to Chat Control: Call you local representatives! Privacy is not negotiable. Speak up now. ✊ #privacy 👉 More on how to stop Chat Control: tuta.com/blog/chat-co...

Europe is still pushing for the scanning of all your outgoing messages for potential child sexual abuse material (the so called 'chat control' proposal). This is bad for privacy, cripples end-to-end encryption, and makes apps like WhatsApp and Signal no longer secure for business and government use.

White people be like well what if a dog had human rights. Well what if a computer had human rights. Well what if a corporation had human rights. Dude, a whole lot of humans are in line first for human rights.

LLM is software running on computers. Writing about 'humility', 'reasoning', 'honesty about uncertainty' and 'hallucinations' is an unacceptable anthropomorphisation and can only be intended to deceive users. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @olivia.science openai.com/index/why-la...

"The unsettling feeling that your device is spying on you is real — but the culprit isn't a secret microphone. It's the data broker industry," EFF’s @evacide.bsky.social tells @CNET.com. www.cnet.com/tech/servic...

I split AI into 3 non-mutually exclusive types (see Table 1 above): displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. More later possibly, but see Tables 2 to 4 (attached or here: arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960) for the worked through examples. 2/n

Amusing how 99% of people using LLMs forget how these things work: They are advanced probability machines. They generate the next most likely token (word) based in the input and their training. Under the hood, it’s a giant matrix multiplication that has eerily good output.

2/2 However, the words of a certain master must be repeated every time we discuss LLMs: "the ability to speak does not make one intelligent".

Read more [8/8] ⬇️

The judgement doesn't even cite the absolutely crucial passage from it 🤦‍♂️ "To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller *or by another person* to identify the natural

According to the OII's @carlbfrey.bsky.social, a shift toward centralization and concentration could snuff out technology’s productive potential. Read his full piece for the IMF here: www.imf.org/en/Publicati...

Nick Clegg's new book is absolutely atrocious and I cannot in good conscience recommend you read it. Instead, read my review for @newscientist.com about how bad it is www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

Leaving the ECHR won’t “Take Back Control” – it will hand your rights to politicians “The myths are seductive, the reality is very different – without the ECHR your freedoms rest on whichever Home Secretary wakes up grumpy” eastangliabylines.co.uk/politics/jus...

The Austrian Federal Administrative Court has confirmed an earlier decision by the Austrian DPA that the Austrian newspaper DerStandard violated the GDPR when introducing "Pay or Okay”. Unofficial translation of the ecision from the Administrative Court: www.linkedin.com/posts/luisal...

The history of Tor exemplifies the collective aspect of #privacy. We need privacy as a common project to ensure our safety, and responsible leaders in politics and the military understand this. #AIEthics thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-secret-h...

Union flags have gone up in our quiet London suburb, attached to lampposts. It's such a dog whistle. I wish these flags signified the values that make me proud to be British: multiculturalism, tolerance, mutual respect. Instead they feel like a threat of incipient Trump-lite authoritarianism.

Thread. Heartbreaking.

A split is forming "between the internet that people... willing to identify themselves or go through age verification can see and the rest of the internet,” EFF’s @thejasonkelley.com told @APNews.com. “And that’s historically a very dangerous place for us to end up.” apnews.com/article/age...

Government faces questions after review of 11 major UK data breaches

“Huh?! This is definitely not how we—cognitive scientists—use that term. Then I saw the last sentence, “AI-generated definition”, and I realised what went wrong. This was AI slop. Not only that. It was AI slop on ScienceDirect, a “premier platform for scientific, health and technical literature”.”

TW. Needs to be widely shared with cisgender people, especially politicians. Utterly horrifying that Britain has come to this- that most of Britain is just looking the other way while a whole community is being eliminated from society because of lies and hatred. transactual.org.uk/wp-content/u...

A new report from TransActual shows that trans and cisgender people face job loss, violence, vigilantism and wholesale exclusion following the Supreme Court Ruling and EHRC guidance. Read the report at: tinyurl.com/trans-segreg... #Trans #Transgender #Nonbinary #EqualityAct #EHRC #TransRights

And so say all of us!

If you are alarmed by the rise of these attacks on the open internet and what it’s doing to destroy platforms you love, @eff.org is fighting to keep the internet open and stop horrible ideas like identification checks. You can support that vital work here: eff.org/anil

“For example: ‘Should an adult be misclassified as a child user simply because they watch a lot of roleplay game reviews on YouTube, they will have to choose between appealing the decision by the service and uploading their ID or foregoing access to the service entirely.’”

“Age-estimation technology, according to internet civil rights group Center for Democracy & Technology, may deprive some users from technology they should be able to access.”

Latest episode of @seriousprivacy.eu is up! Where we talk children! @heartofprivacy.bsky.social and @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu throw in our views and all the usual weeks news round up! seriousprivacy.buzzsprout.com/840448/episo...

Setting a passcode for your lockscreen is an important step, but it's not the end of the story for securing your phone. ssd.eff.org/module/how-...

Will U.K. try again with a different/narrower Technical Capability Notice? Will #Apple re-enable #cloud end-to-end #encryption for new U.K. users (and let existing users keep it)? 🧐 #ADP

The US director of national intelligence says the UK has withdrawn its controversial demand to access global Apple users' data if required www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

@carissaveliz.bsky.social I started a petition to ask the government to ban the harvesting of behavioural data. Perhaps you could boost it to your network? petition.parliament.uk/petitions/71... #privacy #surveillancecapitalism #petition

Offline, intersex activists have been working for decades to try to get hospitals to stop doing coercive and unnecessary procedures on intersex children and teens to try to somehow “normalize” their gender/sex. www.pbs.org/newshour/hea...

The Children's Commissioner for England wants the UK Government to amend the Online Safety Act to require VPN providers ("in the UK") to screen underage users and prevent them from accessing porn sites. Not sure how that would even work. #VPNs #ageassurance #censorship #openweb

Imagine “Terminator 7: Terms and Conditions, in which humanity’s downfall comes not from nuclear warfare but from everyone absent-mindedly agreeing to Skynet’s new privacy policy, triggering an army of leather-clad enforcers to collect on the fine print” 😂 www.theguardian.com/film/2025/au...

🟢 Do you want to lodge an application with the Court, but you are unsure how? 📽️ Watch this tutorial explaining how to correctly complete an application form. ➡️Fully updated information on the process: www.echr.coe.int/apply-to-the... www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA_i...

She doesn’t need a hero, she is the hero we need. 🤩

"What is harmful content is subjective and arbitrary. It can come to target LGBTQ+ discourse, educational content on women’s health, or trans rights speech," EFF's Paige Collings told Le Monde. (in French) www.lemonde.fr/pixels/arti...

Since we need media and tech competency for teachers, here is my advice on social media if you work in education: 1)avoid using your real name if you are still in a classroom, and especially if you are a young or new teacher. You do NOT want to be easily searchable. They will find you online.

The UK's Online Safety Act's push to protect kids online through content blocking and age checks sounds good—until you look deeper. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Save it for Facebook, ugh. NSFW is an interesting concept when your work is sex work or relationship coaches or something similar. The post was not even explicit. Just a suggestion to reconnect and explore with your partner(s). Ugh…

It’s why the word ‘hallucinations’ in relation to gen AI is misleading. When humans hallucinate, it’s because something’s misfiring in our brains. AI hallucinations are not a mistake. The system is doing exactly what it was intended to do. That’s why they can’t fix it, because it’s not broken. 13/

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...