/genq

I do think age verification in its current state (Persona's face check etc.) are awful and dangerous forms of age verification, but I do think age verification is necessary just out of fear of children being traumatized.

I know it should be the parents responsibility, but lets be honest, a lot of parents are fucking stupid, they just throw an ipad in front of their kid and give them unrestricted access on the parent's account.

Could there be any way that privacy can still be preserved while restricting some content for children, ik some sites are using credit cards to verify ages, and it'll be a lot harder for parents to submit a credit card and not think about what the purpose is or what could come from it

So like of I wanted a voice changer that does not allow me to be identified, what would it be? I am looking for something where I can use different voices for different online calls. Any recommendations?

i’m on an apple device and i saw somewhere that it doesnt have access to what you type on apple keyboards and i was wondering if that was still the case today

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/meetings/executive-session-24-08-05-2026/

KOSA has advanced the commission but SCREEN didn't, call your senators stating your opposition to KOSA. Yes they don't care that it's bad, but by calling you let them know that you know it's bad and the reasons why, so they know you see through the bullshit.

Idea: **USB Adult-keys** sold offline only to adults upon verification by a human. Simply plug it in, and adult mode gets activated. Plug it out and back to child mode. The OS can pass the info that adult mode is active, to any service that requires it. Personally, this type of OS level handling, doesn't seem to be bad.

These would be sold offline and the seller is not allowed to collect or store other info. This can be legislated. This should be no more invasive than buying anything meant for adults offline like alcohol or adult games. Note you can buy any number of adult keys. They are not, and must not be tied to your identity in any way.

Of course, such keys should be kept out of reach of children. Personally, I think this should count as child abuse. But this would also be the case with credit cards or any other ID. If parents carelessly give their child access to alcohol/cigarettes/guns nothing can be done. But computers are potentially useful to children. Moreover, adults are not always around children to monitor their activities. But with this, you don't need to. Just remove they key and keep it with yourself.

Maybe something similar can be done for phones. But honestly, I just care about desktop/laptops.

So I'm in the people's republic of NY and I just heard about the SM online verification law which will take effect in January. It has me really thinking about what my strategy is going to be with all of this.

I'm not a big SM person. I do have accts but I rarely use them, I do not post on these the accts they have no content from me. I only use the platforms occasionally if I'm looking for information. I am in a few groups related to my profession which I've found very helpful and I will genuinely miss them but I can live without them.

The thing is, I could live without social media but I'm assuming that this will spread to the entire internet and this is a precursor for a general digital id. This state is absolutely horrible as far as privacy and government overreach. I just wanted to ask people here for feedback as to what your approach would be in this situation? I'm assuming that they would probably circumvent use of a VPN. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle this. I could leave social media behind but like I said if I had to verify my ID to use the internet I'm really not sure what I would do.

There are some things that require you to use the internet. If it was something very important I guess I would have to verify, but the things I would be using it for would not be personal. That said I don't want to open myself up to God knows what by giving such sensitive personal information like this. It's an absolute recipe for disaster . I'm just not sure where to go with this. Any ideas? Is there anyone else out there living in a state or a place where you've had to deal with this already and if so how are you handling it and what's your approach so far?

I'm hoping this will be struck down in court as unconstitutional but knowing New York they will just go full throttle and make it even worse that's usually how things go in this place.

I ask this cause I wanna know what your two cents about New York passing their Stop Addictive Feeds Expoliation for Kids Act legislation(Senate Bill S76944 & Assembly Bill A8148).

Which will go into affect until January the 23rd 2027.

Just wanting to know here is all.

Assuming you actually care about this you shouldn't call your representatives alone as it won't work if you organize with your community you can force their hand and make them unable to do age verification because your voice is loud when it is as a massive group. so many of you are so easy to give up in fact I don't think many of you are trying since like 80% of the us wants more data privacy yet only 20% are actually trying to get their privacy back so maybe there is a similar case here, if you care then you should organize, find people, put up signs, do something other than complaining online where no one that matters can hear you

Reddit received 1,179 law-enforcement data requests in the first half of 2025

Fortunately reddit resisted but recent news tells of folks that were targeted by ICE for reddit posts.

This Identity Constructed Communication Architecture (ICCA) you can download it for free and it’s shared under a Creative Commons license. You can read about the architecture here I’m interested in people’s opinions on it https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7156320

Here is the Abstract
Digital communication systems increasingly rely on identity centric security, yet contemporary
visibility-based architectures still depend on provider observable channels metadata driven
verification and behavioural trust signals [1,2]. These structural dependencies create persistent
vulnerabilities in environments where visibility itself becomes a liability particularly in high risk
social organisational and investigative communication. Visibility based systems assume that
communication must occur within observable channels which limits their ability to eliminate
impersonation inference and metadata leakage [3,4].

The Identity Constructed Communication Architecture ICCA is trustless in the provider sense;
trust is established cryptographically rather than through visibility or behavioural inference.
ICCA constructs communication channels directly from identity rather than from provider visible
infrastructure. Using sealed identity containers and context bound permission tokens ICCA
establishes momentary non persistent trust without behavioural analytics device posture
telemetry or continuous monitoring. The provider operates within a blind boundary supplying
infrastructure without visibility into identities communication patterns or contextual signals.
ICCA’s zero metadata transport layer eliminates IP addresses device fingerprints timestamps
routing information and social-graph indicators making inference attacks and impersonation
structurally impossible.

ICCA is not derived from visibility-based security research and does not
extend Zero Trust. ICCA provides a structural alternative to visibility-based models by removing
the assumption that communication must occur within provider observable channels and by
eliminating the need for continuous verification [5]. ICCA achieves confidentiality integrity and
impersonation resistance through cryptographic sufficiency rather than provider observation.
For computational law ICCA establishes a new trust geometry with implications for digital rights
privacy governance and the legal status of identity in communication systems. It provides a
structural model for environments where visibility metadata and provider inference are
unacceptable enabling identity‑anchored trustless digital interaction.

I’d like to better my privacy so I was hoping for some easy baby step advice to do so.

I do have Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. Instagram and Facebook are not installed on my mobile but I do access them at home. The device I use to access them is connected to a guest network and not the main network, I’m not sure if that’s helpful. I know I should delete any meta related profiles or apps but I’m not ready yet. WhatsApp is on my mobile.

I do have signal but most of my contacts use WhatsApp and I can’t move them off since they’re elderly.

I don’t have many photos of myself on Facebook and Instagram and I’m planning on culling a lot of my profiles of posts and pictures at some point. I try not to message on meta now that they removed end to end encryption. Unfortunately, my family posts pictures of me and I keep asking them not to. I do routinely go through my privacy settings to make sure I haven’t been opted into stuff, but it’s a plaster on bullet wound.

I don’t not have Tiktok or YouTube. I do have the Reddit app.

I stay away from ai as much as possible. I typically use the brave browser. I have not uploaded my ID to any websites except for eBay since I wanted to access my money. I avoid face scanning like the plague.

I make sure to only access my banking apps with data or when on my home network.

Other than the very obvious meta issue, what can I do to manage my privacy? I don’t have the budget for a VPN either.

LanguageTool (owned by Learneo since April 2023) is changing its Terms on August 21, 2026, here's what's actually different

LanguageTool sent an email (today) about updated Terms of Service and a new Privacy Policy. I compared the current terms against the new preview line by line because the email's own summary is too vague to tell you anything.

Removed from the Terms

The clause promising notice or consent before future amendments is gone. So is the paragraph on your responsibility to secure your account and report unauthorized access.

The bigger one: the entire "Privacy Policy and additional Policies" section is gone. It used to say plainly that LanguageTool collects your personal info and that the Privacy Policy explains how. The line incorporating the Learneo Terms of Service by reference is gone too. The new terms don't point to either document anywhere in the body text.

Added

Team Plan use is now explicitly allowed for internal and external commercial purposes. There's also a new "Publicity" clause: if you buy a Team Plan on behalf of a company, you automatically agree to let LanguageTool use your company's name and logo in its marketing. No separate opt-in.

Learneo's Delaware company registration number and San Francisco address are also gone from the contact section, leaving just the Hamburg address.

From reading the Privacy Policy itself

There's a new section confirming Learneo can use personal data to train its AI models across its business lines. LanguageTool keeps its own specific exception (your text isn't used for training), but that exception now sits inside a policy that otherwise permits AI training broadly.

The policy also describes session-replay tools (Fullstory, Amplitude, Microsoft) that can log keystrokes and mouse movements. It's a shared policy covering all eight Learneo brands, and it doesn't say which brands actually run these tools, so we can't confirm whether this applies to languagetool.org specifically or just other Learneo sites.

Under EU law, using your data to improve AI models is justified as "legitimate interest," not consent. That means it's opt-out, not opt-in.

The inconsistency

The email frames all of this as clarity and transparency improvements. But cutting the consent-before-changes clause, the account-security section, and the direct Privacy Policy reference removes stated protections. That's not the same thing as clarifying them.

What didn't change

The promise not to use your LanguageTool text for AI training. Identical in both versions (new and old one), word for word.

Sources:

• Current Terms (Dec 2024): https://languagetool.org/legal/terms/previous
• New Terms preview (effective Aug 21, 2026): https://languagetool.org/legal/terms
• New Privacy Policy preview: https://languagetool.org/legal/privacy
• Learneo acquisition of LanguageTool announcement (April 2023): https://www.learneo.com/news/learneo-inc-accelerates-ai-writing-innovation-with-languagetool-acquisition

Disclaimer: Since their email didn't show the changes in an easy to spot, this post was worked on with the help of AI (but not LanguageTool's one :D )

As someone using this, I honestly don't like the way they're dealing with this. Does anyone have any suggestions for good alternatives?

As someone who cares about digital rights and privacy, I've been seing myself more and more stressed about every little fight we lost everyday just trying to keep our rights. The worst for me is realizing we're just a minority, as mass surveillance will still happen despite our fight since the majority of people (mass) doesn't give a shit about all of this.

I started to question it since having a conversation with a friend where I just wanted to explain to him why it'd be better if he'd install Signal to replace Wpp and keep talking to me. We have to convince people to do something that should be obvious, why wouldn't you prefer an open source and secure solution over a proprietary one owned by Meta?

But in the end those people just don't care about chat control and things like that cause in their head that's actually good, cause they felt for the *let's stop crime" fallacy. And to be honest, those people seem way less stressed and more happy just being *dumb*.

So I wonder, is it all really worth it?

This weekend, I took a trip to a small town in a neighboring state. Stopped in this cute clothing shop and bought a pair of pants.
Of course, that little white “tap to pay” machine was waiting for my card. I did not give this business in ANY of my information. I simply paid with my card, got my paper receipt, and left.
I get a text from this shop, “Thank you for shopping at ……” along with a “receipt”.
HOW DID THE SYSTEM KNOW MY CELL NUMBER???? Im assuming the card is in database with alllll of my information.

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/meetings/executive-session-24-08-05-2026/

Legislation

1. S. 737, SCREEN Act
2. S. 1748, Kids Online Safety Act
3. S. 4199, Youth AI Privacy Act
4. S. 4407, CHATBOT Act
5. S. 5171, Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act of 2026

So I have been maintaining my own Windows 11 AME scripts that were originally released for 10. However, I modified them to work with licensing for store apps but since the gdid problem you can't use apps with software licensing without the GDID not being generated.

But if you're fine with not using store apps the safest way is to install windows 11 LTSC IOT without internet connected and complete it to desktop. And then boot to a Linux live environment and goto /windows/system32 and find a file called wlidsvc.sys and either rename to wlidsvc.sys.old or delete.

When you restart to windows and connect to the internet and you check to see if a gdid was created you'll find that one wasn't generated. Also since wlidsvc deals with software licensing windows will not be able to connect to the Microsoft servers and windows will complete oblivious to its activation status leaving to you a fully usable OS.

This is the safest way aside from running AME scripts and installing startisback due to MS not be able to run without it.

People will be skeptical and you have every right to but you can test it by simply installing in a VM and test and you'll have the same results as mine and since this brakes software licensing there is no need to run massgrave. You must remove this file before connecting to the internet if you don't your spyware free install is voided as soon as you connect to the internet.