Privacy & Digital Freedom News — 2026-08-02

The daily reading list for people who care about digital privacy — curated headlines with links to the original reporting. Why we track this: every new SIM-registration law, data-broker leak, and surveillance expansion is a reason anonymous connectivity exists.

EFF Deeplinks

• Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy — <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden"><div class="field__items"><div class="field__item even"><p><span>California lawmakers have amended </span><a href=" 1709</span></a><sp…
• The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites — <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden"><div class="field__items"><div class="field__item even"><p><span>The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider </span><a href=" 737…
• The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family — <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden"><div class="field__items"><div class="field__item even"><p><span></span><span>Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, a…
• EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement — <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden"><div class="field__items"><div class="field__item even"><p><em>This post is available as a printable one page handout in <a href=" and…

Hacker News (privacy)

• The privacy problems hidden in your period tracker
• Flock Defense "No Expectation of Privacy in Public" Is Wrong
• An American Privacy Emergency — Recent and related: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau - - June 2026 (604 comments)…
• Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance

Hacker News (eSIM)

• eSIM was supposed to replace SIM cards, but carriers turned it into a trap
• Cheapest way to keep a UK mobile number using an eSIM
• Implementing automatic eSIM installation on Android
• Been using this Tourist eSIM while traveling, super cheap unlimited data

Schneier on Security

• Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species — The Squid is a new scientific machine : One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organi…
• Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection — The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved…
• Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden — Last month, the story broke (alternate link ) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and&#8212;among other groups&#8212;flags activists that oppose using facial rec…
• American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials — He&#8217;s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone : The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most mod…

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This roundup is generated automatically every day from public feeds. All headlines link to and credit their original sources.