Tootfinder

Fight Chat Control – Protect Digital Privacy in the EU: The EU (still) wants to scan your private messages and photos.
The "Chat Control" proposal would mandate scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos. This threatens fundamental privacy rights and digital security for all EU citizens.
🇪🇺 https://

A Content-dependent Watermark for Safeguarding Image Attribution
Tong Zhou, Ruyi Ding, Gaowen Liu, Charles Fleming, Ramana Rao Kompella, Yunsi Fei, Xiaolin Xu, Shaolei Ren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10766

A Content-dependent Watermark for Safeguarding Image Attribution
The rapid growth of digital and AI-generated images has amplified the need for secure and verifiable methods of image attribution. While digital watermarking offers more robust protection than metadata-based approaches--which can be easily stripped--current watermarking techniques remain vulnerable to forgery, creating risks of misattribution that can damage the reputations of AI model developers and the rights of digital artists. These vulnerabilities arise from two key issues: (1) content-agn…

Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage,
barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes
by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus.
Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide -- the United States.
⚠️ Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state,…

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

A look at CollabScan, a tool to scan short-form videos for pirated content, offered by Collab, a digital content studio founded by Vine creators (Tubefilter)
https://www.tubefilter.com/2025/08/28/collab-collabscan-digital-rights-manage…

Short-form creators can't keep their content out of pirates' hands. Collab wants to help. - Tubefilter
Since the dawn of digital content, piracy has been a problem for creators of all kinds. But those who make short-form content are particularly vulnerable, Vine might have perished (RIP), but these days, thanks to the rise of TikTok, short-form content is everywhere. Collab works with creators who publish videos on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and more. And some things never change: short-form content is still harder to protect than long-form videos.

Q&A with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, who will leave the role later this year after leading the nonprofit since 2015, on privacy, encryption, AI, and more (Dell Cameron/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/eff-cindy-cohn-stepping-down/

Cindy Cohn Is Leaving the EFF, but Not the Fight for Digital Rights
After 25 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn is stepping down as executive director. In a WIRED interview, she reflects on encryption, AI, and why she’s not ready to quit the battle.

https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-valley-uyghurs-tech-xinjiang-8e000601dadb6aea230f18170ed54e88
“Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built …

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

Section 702 Debate: A Call for Digital Privacy Rights
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5543090-congress-must-defend-privacy/

Evaluation and Comparison Semantics for ODRL
Jaime Osvaldo Salas, Paolo Pareti, Semih Yumu\c{s}ak, Soulmaz Gheisari, Luis-Daniel Ib\'a\~nez, George Konstantinidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05139

Evaluation and Comparison Semantics for ODRL
We consider the problem of evaluating, and comparing computational policies in the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), which has become the de facto standard for governing the access and usage of digital resources. Although preliminary progress has been made on the formal specification of the language's features, a comprehensive formal semantics of ODRL is still missing. In this paper, we provide a simple and intuitive formal semantics for ODRL that is based on query answering. Our semantics r…

🗡️ 'Stop killing games': Demands for game ownership must also include workers' rights
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-08-games-demands-game-ownership-workers.html

'Stop killing games': Demands for game ownership must also include workers' rights
When French video-game publisher Ubisoft announced it was shutting down servers for The Crew, a popular online racing game released in 2014, it wasn't just the end of a title. It marked the beginning of a broader reckoning about the nature of digital ownership, led by players angry at the company's decision to deny them something they had paid for.

Digital welfare fraud detection and the Dutch SyRI judgment
Marvin van Bekkum, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23843 https://arxiv…

Digital welfare fraud detection and the Dutch SyRI judgment
In 2020, a Dutch court passed judgment in a case about a digital welfare fraud detection system called Systeem Risico Indicatie (SyRI). The court ruled that the SyRI legislation is unlawful because it does not comply with the right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights. In this article we analyse the judgment and its implications. This ruling is one of first in which a court has invalidated a welfare fraud detection system for breaching the right to privacy. We show that the …

Q&A with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, who will leave the role later this year after leading the nonprofit since 2015, on privacy, encryption, AI, and more (Dell Cameron/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/eff-cindy-cohn-stepping-down/

Cindy Cohn Is Leaving the EFF, but Not the Fight for Digital Rights
After 25 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn is stepping down as executive director. In a WIRED interview, she reflects on encryption, AI, and why she’s not ready to quit the battle.

Excellent article by @… , a staff writer for Privacy Guides, on the risks of government overreach to privacy.
This section focuses on the issue of chat control:

Some years ago (2023) my office, on behalf of Digital Rights Ireland, lodged a mass complaint about the Government’s use of the Public Service Cards.
This wasn’t the first such complaint we’d made, but it was on behalf of the most people- over 1000, if memory serves.

DIRF: A Framework for Digital Identity Protection and Clone Governance in Agentic AI Systems
Hammad Atta, Muhammad Zeeshan Baig, Yasir Mehmood, Nadeem Shahzad, Ken Huang, Muhammad Aziz Ul Haq, Muhammad Awais, Kamal Ahmed, Anthony Green
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01997

DIRF: A Framework for Digital Identity Protection and Clone Governance in Agentic AI Systems
The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) pose significant threats to the integrity of personal identity, including digital cloning, sophisticated impersonation, and the unauthorized monetization of identity-related data. Mitigating these risks necessitates the development of robust AI-generated content detection systems, enhanced legal frameworks, and ethical guidelines. This paper introduces the Digital Identity Rights Framework (DIRF), a structu…

There's a popular "digital rights" perspective that turns "not having kids on social media before 14 or 16" into a binary. That allows to make this a thing about overreach and censorship and all that. In combination with the complexities of ensuring access/restrictions it builds a great straw man.
But I do totally think that just throwing kids into general social media (think Instagram, TikTok but also Bluesky or Mastodon) is harmful to them and is just us older…

California’s Governor should sign S.B. 7,
a common-sense bill to end some of the harshest consequences of automated abuseat work.
EFF is proud to join dozens of labor, digital rights, and other advocates in support of the
“No Robo Bosses Act.”
Algorithmic decision-making is a growing threat to workers.
Bosses are using AI to assess the body language and voice tone of job candidates.
They’re using algorithms to predict when employees are organizing a union o…

Yes to California’s “No Robo Bosses Act”
California’s Governor should sign S.B. 7, a common-sense bill to end some of the harshest consequences of automated abuse at work. EFF is proud to join dozens of labor, digital rights, and other advocates in support of the “No Robo Bosses Act.”Algorithmic decision-making is a growing threat to...

Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/citizen-lab-director-warns-cyber-industry-about-us-authoritarian-descent/

Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent | TechCrunch
Ron Deibert, the head of the prominent digital human rights groups Citizen Lab, sounds the alarm at the Black Hat security conference about the "dramatic descent into authoritarianism," but one that the cyber community can help to defend against.

Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent
Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community and asking them to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism.
🕵️

Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent | TechCrunch
Ron Deibert, the head of the prominent digital human rights groups Citizen Lab, sounds the alarm at the Black Hat security conference about the "dramatic descent into authoritarianism," but one that the cyber community can help to defend against.

A look at CollabScan, a tool to scan short-form videos for pirated content, offered by Collab, a digital content studio founded by Vine creators (Tubefilter)
https://www.tubefilter.com/2025/08/28/collab-collabscan-digital-rights-manage…

You are cordially invited to the #EFF Awards Ceremony in San Francisco on September 10! Read about the winners and how to claim your ticket - and join the mailing list.
https://www.eff.org/event/eff-awards-2025#

EFF Awards 2025
For over 30 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has presented awards recognizing key leaders and organizations advancing innovation and championing digital rights. The EFF Awards celebrate the accomplishments of people working toward a better future for technology users, both in the public...

Amazon Prime added all seasons of The Osbournes on the 22nd. I wonder if this sort of thing is automated? Something scanning the news and obtaining streaming rights to things automatically.
I have noticed digital movies sometimes going on sale when a star or director is accused of... crimes. Got all the X-Men movies for a steal in 2019.

Ron Deibert,
the director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses,
is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community
and asking them to step up and join the ⭐️fight against authoritarianism. 
On Wednesday, Deibert will deliver a keynote at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas,
one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals of the year. 
Ahead of his talk, Deibert …

Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent | TechCrunch
Ron Deibert, the head of the prominent digital human rights groups Citizen Lab, sounds the alarm at the Black Hat security conference about the "dramatic descent into authoritarianism," but one that the cyber community can help to defend against.

Prompt template for a fictitious LLM agent in a content-flagging experiment
Marie-Therese Sekwenz, Daria Simons, Alina Wundsam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21842 https://

Prompt template for a fictitious LLM agent in a content-flagging experiment
Digital regulations such as the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) represent major efforts to shape human-centered and human rights-based frameworks for society. Yet, as these laws are translated into practice, challenges emerge at the intersection of technology, law, and design. This paper presents a qualitative case study examining how designers act as mediators between abstract legal requirements and real-world digital experiences for users, focusing on the design of content reporti…

En och, er worden nog steeds e-books met Adobe digital rights management verkocht.
Die koop ik niet. Nooit. Geen zin om overal de DRM af te slopen.
Dan koop ik de papieren versie wel, die kan ik wel aan de buurman geven als ik hem uit heb.

A coalition of European writers, publishers, and others warns that Europe's AI Act is not properly protecting copyrights and is selling out the creative sector (Scott Roxborough/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

European Creators Slam AI Act Implementation, Warn Copyright Protections Are Failing
Europe’s writers, actors, musicians and producers accuse the EU of selling out creative industries in favor of GenAI giants and demand urgent reforms to safeguard IP rights.

Sources: ESPN and MLB have a deal framework giving ESPN exclusive rights to sell out-of-market regular-season games digitally and in-market games for five clubs (Andrew Marchand/The Athletic)
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6567327/2025/08/21/ml…

MLB, ESPN have agreement for network to sell all out-of-market and some in-market games: Sources
ESPN would continue to broadcast around 30 regular-season games, but not “Sunday Night Baseball.”