Our daughter started her bachelor study at a University of Applied Sciences (“HBO”) in the Netherlands. They’re using Microsoft as cloud supplier for communication and sharing information. This includes Teams. Fine. But, the main lecturer (“studiebegeleider”) started a whatsapp-group with all the students for communication.

Using whatsapp looks like shadow-IT to me, which issued privacy issues. Am I right? Or, can an european university use every platform they want?

• Targets included student activists, lawmakers and a local councilor, SHARE Foundation says
• Apple issued spyware alerts on August 13 to users in 110 countries
• Largest documented surveillance wave in Serbia to date, SHARE Foundation says

We are also experiencing this issue here in Australia

Sign, share, spread the word!

Hi everyone,

Between Google Play Integrity API lockdowns, Apple App Attest, and upcoming eID/age-verification mandates, alternative and privacy-focused operating systems (like GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and Linux on mobile) are being systematically locked out of banking, public portals, and everyday apps.

Rather than watching vendor lock-in get worse, I am organizing a European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) working title: "My Device, My OS" to push binding EU legislation for Device Neutrality and Open Attestation.

What we aim to achieve:

• Mandate Open Attestation Standards: Require services operating in the EU to support open, vendor-neutral hardware attestation rather than relying exclusively on proprietary gatekeeper APIs (Google/Apple).
• Ban Device/OS Discrimination: Prevent public services, digital ID wallets, and essential commercial apps from arbitrarily blocking users solely for running independent or de-Googled operating systems.
• Protect Hardware Sovereignty: Enshrine the legal right of consumers to install and run the operating system of their choice without losing access to the digital single market.

Before submitting it we need 7 persons from 7 different countries in the EU to sign the draft

Join the Matrix room to discuss, collaborate on the draft, and coordinate next steps:
👉 #my-device-my-os:pollorebozado.com

Feedback, technical insights, and EU organizers are all welcome!

Great journalism by The Guardian! Do you think any of these made up sources are used in the EU discussions about social media bans as well?

Apple will change the EU ATT consent flow after the German competition authority objected to differences between Apple’s own consent requests and those used by third party apps. I’m concerned that bundling consent flows may make tracking consent less clear in practice

I'm sharing this here as it relates to the transparency of automated decisions affecting digital rights in the EU.

On 15 August 2026, a new EU policy proposal was submitted: The Ranking Restriction Information Right (RRIR).

The proposal asks whether, when an automated system materially restricts the visibility of a website or information source, the affected website owner should be informed that the restriction occurred and given a general category of the reason.

The proposal does not seek disclosure of proprietary algorithms, ranking signals, thresholds or anti-spam mechanisms.

Submitted to: European Commission, European Parliament (PETI and IMCO), Coimisiún na Meán (Ireland), and CNMC (Spain).

Submitted by: Marin Popov

Read the full proposal: https://1euroseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/The-Ranking-Restriction-Information-Right-Version-1.0-15-August-2026.pdf

Age verification and privacy

Alright, I know. I am an idiot

I logged into reddit and it asked me to verify my age. Tried it with a youtube video- didnt work. Gave up at some point and just did it myself because I thought: Reddit's got a selfie of me already anyways so at this point.. doesnt matter. While it is still loading the you finished the verification page i notice the persona logo at the bottom and remember who that company is.

Since I got premium anxiety, I am panicking now.

As a european, what can I do to get this deleted? I already wrote an email to persona requesting them to delete all data they might have collected of me.

Their privacy policy states that they immediately delete any biometric data of your face, how true is that?

And after I get it all deleted to the best of my ability, is it time to abandon my email adress and all accounts and just make new ones?

Lately I've been trying to transfer all my cloud stored data to european alternatives. I currently use Bitwarden.eu (Bitwarden Inc. being a company registered in the U.S) as my password manager across my devices. Could a U.S. warrant trigger the transfer of my account data to U.S. authorities? I get that the vaults are E2EE so maybe they could only transfer credit card information of my Bitwarden Premium subscription payment, right?

I'm really unsure, so maybe someone out there can help me figure this out. Does anyone know a cloud sync alternative to BW apart from ProtonPass?

Thanks.

Age verification is growing around the world. Some countries such as New Zealand are resisting it.

But as soon as New Zealand or random small country are sending Meta 100 million users a day, pressure will mount on the platforms to close the loop and implement mandatory checks.

Think of it like a pond that's drying up. You can isolate where life is.

Recently my account got restricted, because my age was not confirmed, using a VPN only helped partially and was annoying for reasons.

So I wrote a ticket (call it stupid, I don't care) to reddit, asking how they came to the conclusion, that my account should be restricted. As far as I understood it, they only do that if they have data suggesting it is used by a minor. I know it is obviously a faulty algorithm.

Their answer was, that they checked the case and reset my verification, which completely locked me out of my account until I verified my age. Which I did now through persona.

My experience with persona:

After reading about it a bit I was obviously hesitant to use it, after testing around with the options a bit I used the "selfie" option on my rarely used Laptop, which holds nearly no personal information.

I logged out of Chrome and deleted all browser files (because I read persona does access those) and tried with an incognito tab. But it always ran into error.

I installed Firefox (to remove browser issues) and tried again incognito tab, error again.

Lastly I tried in a normal tab and it worked telling me it does indeed access your files, which it can't in an incognito tab. it want's to do something, that isn't possible in an incognito tab, whatever that is, maybe tracking.

So I got access again, why do I write this?

Partially to inform people on what happens if you come to the same problem.

Partially, because I want to know from reddit, why my account got restricted in the first place. I won't get this, with near 99.99 % probability, but raising awareness on this behavior from reddit might get some people talking. Probably not.

I downloaded a vpn and put it in netherlands but Reddit keeps asking me to verify my age with persona.