Topical Topics & The Power of Public Shaming

There’s a lot of conversation happening right now in the realm of privacy and surveillance, and the pushback is actually forcing hands that aren’t easily forced. Here are some stories I’m following this week.

The Rise of Age Verification and the Fall of Discord

There’s been a global push for laws requiring age verification to access certain types of content or websites that may be considered ‘harmful’ to children. Proponents believe that this is the best way to protect children from pornography, unsuitable content, explicit material, and even social media generally. Opponents see the privacy implications written all over the walls.

Whenever we hear something is being implemented to ‘protect children,’ it should raise at least an orange flag, if not a red one. It’s a classic wolf cry that typically leads to problematic policy implementations that affect everyone, some more than others. If you’re not sure how to feel, maybe take a look at who’s for it and who’s against it.

In general, the requirements for proving age can be anything from biometrics and facial recognition to requests for government identification or credit cards.

Considering how lackadaisical the government and tech companies have been lately about handling our personal data, it’s easy to see where this could go very wrong. Data breaches are common, with barely an ‘our bad’ in response. So sure, let’s give those guys copies of our government IDs, what could go wrong?

We’ll also see algorithmic bias become considerably worse if we outright tell them explicitly where we live, our age, gender, etc. And none of that is to mention that anything you post on the internet could be directly connected to your personal identity—which could be a real problem if, say, Reddit, Meta, and Google were voluntarily giving DHS info of anti-ICE users.

So where does Discord come into all this? Before we get into it, if you’re not familiar with Discord, it’s a group messaging platform originally marketed to gamers but currently seeing much wider use amongst all sorts of digital communities. I’ve admittedly used it in the past but would not recommend it since their privacy practices are abysmal at best.

Pressing on—age verification has not been going well for them, and it’s a bit of a canary in the coal mine. First, they started implementing facial recognition for age verification, and it was easily bypassed. Then they went for collecting government IDs through a vendor who was later hacked, exposing 70k users’ IDs.

And just recently, they announced they’re back at it but with a new vendor—Persona. Of course, Persona was quickly identified as being backed by Peter Thiel—co-founder of Palantir and lactose-intolerant Epstein lunch date. If you’ve never heard of it, Palantir—a company I’ll deep-dive into someday (probably when I’ve lost the will to live)—is currently working closely with ICE and the federal government to develop some ELITE surveillance tools. Cool!

After receiving considerable backlash from users including cancelled paid accounts, archived servers, and a public lashing around the web, Discord quickly tried to distance themselves from Persona, and even tried to make light of the age verification. We’ll see how it all plays out, but it’s not looking good for them or their planned IPO. Whoops.

Ring-a-Ding-Ding, Ring’s Back in the Ring

Ring, the popular but problematic doorbell camera system owned by Amazon, has re-entered the ring with a fun—and not at all dystopian—new feature that they’ve dubbed “Search Party.” ICYMI, check out their ~$8M-10M Super Bowl ad… and get your tissues ready!

So a thing about Ring that you may not know is that back in October, they entered into a deal with Flock Safety—you know, the company that makes those crime-fighting cameras you see up on poles that track every vehicle and person that passes by and despite not having any federal contracts still somehow get regularly used by ICE and to track women across the country post-abortion—that would allow their users to ‘securely and privately’ share footage with local public safety agencies during active investigations.

Well, that partnership came to an end following the backlash from the Super Bowl ad, probably because a bunch of people with eyes saw the ad and thought to themselves… wait just a gosh-darned second… couldn’t they use that AI to track… people? Which, arguably, shined a light on the previously announced deal as being—perhaps—problematic.

A Story That Made Me LOL

So there’s an ongoing lawsuit about the allegedly horrendous conditions detainees were subjected to at the Broadview ICE detention center in Chicago—I know, not funny right? Truly not funny. But hear me out…

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case requested camera footage from within the facility that covered some 10 days of time. The government at first responded that the footage was “irretrievably destroyed” and couldn’t be produced. Later, they changed the story and said it was actually never recorded in the first place due to a system crash. Then the plaintiffs’ lawyers toured the facility and requested footage from different cameras they discovered. Guess what the government had to say now…

From 404 Media:

For this footage, the federal government first claimed that it could not afford the storage space necessary to take the footage that it did have and produce it for discovery to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing Broadview’s detainees, then purchased 78 terabytes of empty hard drives and gave them to the federal government, according to court records. This included three 8-terabyte SSDs and three 18-terabyte hard drives.

So DHS actually had the gall to claim that despite their $107.9 billion 2025 budget, they couldn’t afford to buy a few hard drives. But that’s not all.

DHS, inexplicably, LOST 3 of the 5 hard drives they were given. The plaintiffs’ lawyers are waiting on footage from 5 critical cameras that covered isolation cells, which are purportedly where the worst conditions would be found, but the Government claimed it ran out of storage space, and then later admitted that “it cannot find three of the five hard drives that should be in its possession.”

Read the full story, it really is a ride: https://www.404media.co/government-loses-hard-drives-it-was-supposed-to-put-ice-detention-center-footage-on/

Articles I’m Working On

I’ve got a few articles in the works right now, but I could use a push on which one folks would like to see most, so send me a note if you have a preference. Here’s what’s in progress:

• The Current State of Surveillance in the U.S.
• What is Lockdown Mode and Should You Use It?
• Protecting Your Privacy at Protests

What do we think?

Also! In the realm of actual fun good news, the Women’s Privacy Project has officially hit 100 subscribers! Thanks for joining the party everyone!

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Keep on keepin’ on,
KL