Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

7 hours 29 minutes ago

California lawmakers have amended A.B. 1709, but the core problem remains: the bill is still a ban on social media access for youth under 16, and it still threatens the privacy and First Amendment rights of all Californians.

Proponents of the bill may argue that the recent amendments represent a compromise, but a close look at the text shows no major changes. As the bill moves forward in the Senate, we must continue to urge lawmakers to vote NO.

Take Action: Tell Your Senator to OPPOSE A.B. 1709

A "Compromise" That Still Denies Access

Under the newly amended Section 22683, platforms are prohibited from offering "addictive features" to users under 16. A platform can allow a minor to keep an account only if it strips away these features, which include what the bill calls "addictive feeds," auto-play, and anything else the Attorney General designates in future rulemaking.

However, the bill defines "addictive feeds" so broadly that it covers virtually every functional recommendation algorithm. The bill applies this label to any presentation of user-generated content recommended "in whole or in part, on information provided by the user." That includes basic inputs like who a user follows, what posts they like, or their self-expressed interests. By calling these basic tools and features “addictive," the bill also makes broad conclusions about the unsettled science behind social media use, youth, and addiction.

Because almost every major social media service uses automated feeds to deliver content, the end result of AB 1709 remains the same: young people under 16 will be denied access to major social media services as they currently exist.

Even if a platform attempts to comply by stripping away recommendation systems for minors, this still violates the First Amendment. Recommendation systems are the primary tools that users rely on to find speech and disseminate their own. Forcing young people onto a stripped-down, dysfunctional version of social media burdens their constitutional right to access information and participate in public discourse.

AB 1709 Still Forces Invasive Age Verification

The amendments do not eliminate the privacy threats posed by age gating. Although the bill references the age-signaling framework in AB 1043, Section 22684 explicitly states that a covered platform "shall verify the age of a user” and makes platforms liable every time a person under 16 makes it through an age check. 

Because AB 1043 does not actually specify how verification should occur without requiring additional proof, AB 1709 will, in practice, force platforms to implement the strictest forms of age verification. To comply, platforms will likely require users to upload government-issued IDs or submit to biometric scanning. Forcing users to turn over their personal information will create massive honeypots of sensitive personal data, destroying online anonymity and exposing users of all ages to security breaches. And relying on biometric systems to verify users’ ages is problematic because the systems have historically had high error rates estimating ages across race and gender lines.

Take Action: Tell Your Senator to OPPOSE A.B. 1709

Lawmakers Must Reject AB 1709

The amendments to AB 1709 also introduce legal confusion, creating provisions that conflict with already enacted legislation like SB 976. Rather than providing clarity or protecting young people, AB 1709 creates a tangled regulatory scheme that sacrifices constitutional rights for political grandstanding.

Denying minors access to digital forums—or stripping those forums of the basic tools needed to navigate them—is censorship. California should not set a national precedent of cutting young people off from digital lifelines, communities, and speech.

We need to keep the pressure on as AB 1709 moves through the Senate. Contact your state senator today and tell them that minor tweaks to a bad bill do not make it good policy.

Rindala Alajaji

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

7 hours 35 minutes ago

The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.  

Unlike many state-age verification laws—which have been harmful in their own right—the SCREEN Act has no requirement that a significant portion of the website consist of sexually explicit content that is harmful to minors. The bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users. The result is that the bill would apply not only to adult content sites like PornHub or OnlyFans, but also streaming services like Netflix, and social media platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Bluesky, if they host any adult content.

The SCREEN Act does not merely require users to attest they are adults. It specifically states that “requiring a user to confirm that the user is not a minor shall not be sufficient.” In practice, that means platforms would have to verify users’ ages using methods tied to their real identities. Providing proof of age online is dramatically different, and far more invasive, than showing your ID at the door to a bartender or bouncer. In the physical world, the bouncer at the door looks at your ID card, confirms you’re old enough, and gives it back to you. Under the SCREEN Act, the “bouncer” will be a digital age-verification service that captures your personal information and saves it to a database for an unspecified amount of time. 

The consequences of the bill won’t be limited to minors. If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. 

Even worse, the SCREEN Act is a privacy and data security nightmare. One provision of the bill requires services to take reasonable steps to protect the data collected and to not maintain for longer than is necessary. But these are terribly weak protections that impose no meaningful collection, use, or retention limits on services collecting people’s private information. 

In other words, the third parties tasked with verifying a user’s age on a platform could sweep up a lot of personal info they don’t actually need and then could use that information for any number of purposes, so long as they deem their actions reasonable. Companies would then be allowed to keep the information users have been compelled to turn over for as long as possible, raising security and privacy issues along the way.

The SCREEN Act Attacks Your Right To Use VPNs

The SCREEN Act also targets virtual private network (VPN) users and providers. The bill requires covered websites to verify users' ages based on their IP addresses unless the service can determine that the user is outside the United States, and specifically requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses. In practice, this discourages the use of VPNs and proxy servers, which millions of people rely on for legitimate purposes such as protecting personal privacy, securing public Wi-Fi connections, safeguarding journalists and activists, and preventing data tracking. 

VPNs mask your real location by routing your internet traffic through a server somewhere else. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server's IP address, not your actual location. It's like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn't know where you really live. VPNs are a privacy and security tool used by millions of internet users every day, and their use should not be treated as suspect. It is particularly galling that the SCREEN Act forces users who intentionally take steps to protect their privacy to identify themselves.

The SCREEN Act creates onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize the data security and privacy of all internet users. 

India McKinney

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

8 hours 10 minutes ago

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, and the way people search for information. Parents, teenagers, teachers, and schools are struggling with tough questions about when AI should, and should not, be used. It makes sense for Congress to hold hearings and examine how AI should be used by minors. But the recently introduced CHATBOT Act answers those questions with a one-size-fits-all mandate governing how teenagers access AI through federally prescribed parental monitoring systems. 

The Bill Requires AI Companies To Build Family Monitoring Systems 

Parents are approaching AI in different ways. Some closely supervise how their children use chatbots, while others might set more general rules about technology. Many families are still figuring out what role AI should play in schoolwork and everyday life. 

The CHATBOT Act would take that decision away from families and AI providers. Instead of letting families and AI providers decide what parental controls should look like, Congress would require every covered AI chatbot to build the same federally prescribed “family account” system. 

As part of the required parental-consent process for teens, AI companies must offer parents a "family account" that provides access to a "full record of the conversations and activity" of teen users and tools to "monitor, analyze, and understand, at scale" those conversations. They must also send alerts if a teen attempts to bypass or disable parental controls. 

This isn’t simply an optional parental-control feature. The bill requires every covered AI provider to build this monitoring infrastructure, and present it as part of the parental consent process. Congress is prescribing a single, highly invasive model of how families should supervise teenagers’ use of AI. 

The CHATBOT Act Creates New Privacy Risks For Families 

Parents and families have different ideas about how much independence teenagers should have. Understandably, they also have very different expectations for 8-year olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. The CHATBOT Act effectively requires AI providers to build the same monitoring architecture for users of very different ages. 

And this mandated data collection will create new privacy and security risks. Once Congress requires AI companies to create a permanent, centralized record of teen AI conversations for parental review, that will be a valuable vault of extremely personal information. That raises serious questions about what would happen in cases where someone else gains access to it through account compromise, family disputes, or other security failures. 

The vast archives of conversations created by the government-mandated family accounts won't be interesting only to parents. They will become valuable targets for hackers, identity thieves, civil litigants, and anyone else seeking access to the deeply personal information of others. The CHATBOT Act requires the records to exist, but addresses none of those risks. 

Families are still figuring out what role AI should play in schoolwork and everyday life. Congress shouldn’t freeze one answer into federal law by requiring every AI company to build the same prescribed monitoring system. 

The CHATBOT Act Applies A Children’s Law To Teenagers 

The CHATBOT Act takes the basic structure of COPPA, a nearly 30-year-old law that applies to children aged 12 and under, and applies the same “verifiable parental consent” to older teenagers. 

That’s a dramatic expansion of the law. Congress enacted COPPA to prevent kids from handing over detailed personal information to online services without making sure parents approved. For nearly three decades, Congress has required parental consent before websites collect personal information from any user under 13. COPPA is not simple to comply with, which is why so many internet companies, large and small, simply bar kids under 13 from having accounts. That includes major social media sites and AI. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, and blogging platforms like WordPress all keep out users under 13. Children under 13 are also not allowed to use Microsoft Co-Pilot, Google Gemini, or ChatGPT. Anthropic does not allow users under 18 to use its AI model, Claude. In cases where younger kids maintain social media accounts despite the rules, studies show the vast majority of them are creating those accounts with parental consent.  

In short, COPPA’s protections against collecting personal information from minors without parental consent already apply to the AI services CHATBOT Act seeks to regulate. Worse, the CHATBOT Act takes COPPA’s privacy protections and inverts them—it will result in AI services likely collecting more information about young users. 

But the CHATBOT Act extends that model to high school students using AI assistants that are rapidly becoming tools for learning, research, writing, coding, and creative work. It then mandates specific, invasive surveillance tools that go well beyond anything COPPA requires. 

The bill requires providers to offer these “family accounts,” with these specific features, as a default for teenagers. By doing so, CHATBOT effectively treats a high school senior the same way it treats an elementary school student. 

Supporters may argue that parents of teens don’t have to create a family account. But every family with a teenager will still have to go through the bill’s parental-consent process before a teenager can use a covered AI system. Providers will need practical ways to verify that an adult is, in fact, the teenager’s parent. And parents of kids under 13 have no option to consent to their kids’ use of an AI system—the bill’s only option is to create a family account.

Congress should not extend the COPPA parental-permission model to millions of older teenagers, and it would be harmful to do so. The government does not require COPPA-style parental permission before a 17-year-old checks out a library book, uses Wikipedia, types search terms into Google, or reads a newspaper online. It shouldn’t require parental permission simply because the same question gets asked of an AI assistant. 

The CHATBOT Act Will Pressure AI Companies To Check Users’ Ages 

The bill says it doesn’t require age verification. But like many recent “kids online safety” bills, it imposes obligations that depend on a company knowing whether a user is under 18. 

Specifically, the bill requires AI systems to either disable access to young kids, get parental consent, or the creation of a family account if a service has reason to believe a user is a minor. The standard means that services don’t need to have actual knowledge of a user’s age to be later held liable for improperly letting them use their AI tools. That creates a practical problem. Given the potential liability of getting something wrong, AI companies will likely require stricter forms of age verification to figure out who is under 13, a teenager, and who is a parent. Some providers might ask for government-issued identification.  Other companies may rely on age estimation systems that use facial scans or other signals to guess a user’s age. Neither of these approaches is good for users’ privacy or security. One collects more information than is necessary, and the other inevitably makes mistakes. 

Congress shouldn’t force companies into that choice, or families into this position. In the name of protecting children, the CHATBOT Act will result in online services collecting even more information from kids and families, creating privacy and security risks. Parents who want family accounts like those described in the bill should be free to choose AI services that offer them. But Congress shouldn’t pressure every provider to collect more information about everyone’s age simply to comply with the law. 

A Better Way Forward

Congress doesn't have to choose between doing nothing and creating a sweeping new federal parental-monitoring mandate. Existing law allows regulators to police deceptive AI products, protect children's privacy under COPPA, and hold companies accountable when they market unsafe or misleading products to families. 

Lawmakers have urged the FTC to crack down on AI-enabled toys that make unsubstantiated educational claims or illegally collect children's data. Those are regulatory actions that can be taken right now. 

Finally, the FTC is currently investigating how AI companies test their products, protect children and teens, comply with COPPA, and enforce age restrictions. The results of that inquiry could be useful guidance to Congress, and to the public debate around these issues. 

Cracking down on bad actors, while learning more about how families are already making decisions about AI use, is a much better path forward than building one, federally-prescribed model of parenting or product design.

Joe Mullin

[B] 「ネタニヤフとトランプとICC]【西サハラ最新情報】  平田伊都子

10 hours 57 minutes ago
ICC国際刑事裁判所所長は日本人の赤根智子女史です。ICJ国際司法裁判所所長も日本人の岩澤雄司氏です。その法の支配を遵守する日本に向かってトランプ軍事政権国務長官のルビオ氏は、ICCからの撤退を強要しました。そのうえ、ルビオ氏はICC国際刑事裁判所の解体を指令しました。 その心は、ネタニヤフ氏だけでなくトランプ氏にも、「御用だ〜〜!」と、ICCの捕手が迫ってくるからです。
日刊ベリタ

【オピニオン】天皇・皇室 平和日本の象徴のはず 国家主義のシンボルに?=丸山 重威

11 hours 17 minutes ago
 皇室典範の改定が成立した。皇室典範は、日本国憲法が成立して以来、「国の在り方」の問題として論じられてきた。その改定にあたっては、これが、憲法に基づく象徴天皇制を支える法律であることを考え、「国の在り方」から論じなければならなかったが、女性天皇の否定、象徴天皇制の展開に消極的な政府の意向を反映し、前時代的な典範を踏襲するにとどまった。問題は全く終わっていない。むしろ深まっている。明治憲法の名残り 皇室典範は、基本的に天皇家の家法だ。明文化したのは、明治維新で、立憲君主国を目..
JCJ

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

13 hours 5 minutes ago

This post is available as a printable one page handout in English and Spanish.

Recordings of law enforcement, whether by bystanders or by those directly encountering officers, can be powerful tools of government accountability and can support movements for social change. But recording officers can come with risks. Below are important legal and practical considerations related to recording the police and other law enforcement officers.

Can I legally record the police or immigration officers?

Yes. All Americans have a First Amendment right to record law enforcement. This includes local police and federal officers such as those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Although the Supreme Court has not squarely ruled on the issue, nine different federal appellate courts have recognized and affirmed this right, relying on decades of Supreme Court precedent.

Courts typically frame the right to record law enforcement as the right to record officers exercising their official duties in public. This right extends to bystanders as well as people recording their own interactions with law enforcement, such as livestreaming their own traffic stops. The right also applies to private places where the recorder has a legal right to be, such as in their own home.

You may take photos, or record video and audio. Courts have held that wiretap laws, which generally protect private conversations, do not prohibit civilians from audio recording law enforcement. That’s because officers exercising their official duties, particularly in public, do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Neither do civilians in public places who speak to law enforcement in a manner audible to passersby.

What are some limitations on the right to record law enforcement?

Courts have been clear that behavior that obstructs or interferes with effective law enforcement or the protection of public safety is not protected. Officers can't order you to move because you are recording, but they may order you to move for public safety reasons even if you are recording.

If the law enforcement officer is off-duty or is in a private space that you don’t also have a right to be in, your right to record the officer may be limited. For example, a Los Angeles jury in 2026 found two women guilty of felony stalking after they followed an ICE agent to his home and livestreamed the pursuit.

What are some other considerations when recording officers?

Even if you believe you are appropriately exercising your First Amendment right to record law enforcement, officers may nevertheless escalate the situation and/or retaliate against you. Below are some things to keep in mind.

  • Stay calm and courteous.
  • If you are a bystander, stand at a safe distance from the scene that you are recording. But note that officers may approach and confront you, closing that distance in an effort to accuse you of interfering with and possibly also assaulting a federal officer.
  • Be alert and mindful of the possibility that officers may illegally retaliate against you in a number of ways, including arrest, destruction of your device, and bodily harm. They may also try to retaliate by harming the person being arrested. 
  • Consider the sensitive nature of recording in the context of an arrest. For example, the person being arrested or their loved ones may be concerned about exposing their immigration status, so think about obtaining consent or blurring out faces in any version you publish to focus on ICE/CBP conduct (while still retaining the original video). 
  • Law enforcement may not search your cell phone or other device without a warrant based on probable cause from a judge, even if you are under arrest. Thus, you may refuse a request from an officer to review or delete what you recorded. You also may refuse to unlock your phone or provide your passcode.
What can I do to protect my footage?

How well protected your photos or video footage are depends on both the device and the way you’re recording. If you’re uploading video to a livestreaming service, it can save that video to the cloud if you enable that setting. But what if you want to protect your recordings  stored locally?

Modern smartphones generally protect data, including videos, using encryption. This means if your phone is locked and protected by a strong passphrase, it is more difficult for an officer to delete what you’ve stored on the device. Removing biometrics such as face and fingerprint unlock can protect your device contents further. You can check your settings by following the steps in our Surveillance Self-Defense guides (see below) to ensure device encryption is turned on.

Want more information?
  • Read more about your right to record law enforcement: https://www.eff.org/issues/right-record
  • Read EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense technical guide: https://ssd.eff.org
Sophia Cope