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Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced.

In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how:

• The Settlement embeds age assurance technology and age-gates into Meta’s social media products and requires all users—minors and adults—to undergo a rights-threatening age estimation process
• The Settlement places severe restrictions on Teens that can largely only be modified by the Teens’ parents and only then in exchange for giving their parents a ton of information about their online community and usage;
• The Settlement seems to empower the attorneys general to enforce Meta’s content restriction on “age inappropriate content,” categories that Meta itself has had trouble administering without excluding information about sexuality, sexual and reproductive healthcare, and abortion medication;
• The Settlement actually requires Meta to collect, analyze, and retain more information about its Teen users—when the pressure should have been on Meta to diminish its surveillance capitalism. And the Settlement in no way limits the attorneys general from seeking the user information for their own law enforcement purposes.

Note: A chunk of the settlement addresses unauthorized users under age 13, and Meta’s obligations to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Meta policy has banned users under 13 since the company opened to the public in 2006. Aside from the age assurance frameworks that support both those and the other parts of the Settlement, the under-13 provisions are not addressed in this post. Those provisions essentially require Meta to detect and delete all under-13 accounts.

Further note: All U.S. states are parties to the Settlement except Florida, New Mexico, and Texas. The Settlement includes D.C., American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico.

Age Gates Reinforced By Age Estimation Technology

In the Settlement, Meta agrees to age-gate Instagram and Facebook, thus making age gates a legal mandate. And further, Meta will now enforce these age gates with age assurance technology, ditching its previous practice where the person signing up for the services self-attests to their birthdate. This concession firmly embeds deeply flawed age estimation technology into the online experience of millions of people around the world. First and foremost, the age verification setup seriously threatens online anonymity and privacy for everyone, as we’ve said before. The technology also just adds a layer of creepiness into the use of any service. In the Settlement, Meta pledges to, within one year, apply one or more age assurance methods to each Instagram or Facebook user in the states and territories that joined the Settlement. [P. 10, §II.A.1]

1. Age Assurance Framework. Within one (1) year of the Effective Date, Meta will adopt an age assurance framework (“Age Assurance Framework”), wherein it will apply one or more age assurance methods developed by a third party and licensed to customers (“Commercially Available Age Assurance Methods”) or age assurance methods developed by Meta (“Proprietary Age Assurance Methods”) (collectively, “Age Assurance Methods”) to each Meta SMP user in the Settling States. For the purposes of this Section II.A, an age assurance method developed or acquired by Meta that uses the same or functionally identical technology and methodology to a Commercially Available Age Assurance Method shall be treated as a Commercially Available Age Assurance Method. The Age Assurance Framework must include Age Assurance Methods to evaluate whether a Meta SMP user is a Teen User or U13, as described in Section II.A.6. New users of Meta SMPs who have not yet had their age assessed by an Age Assurance Method pursuant to Meta’s Age Assurance Framework shall receive the Default Protections pursuant to Section II.A.10 of this Agreement.

Those methods might include commercially available products, as well as proprietary age estimation process Meta might have or develop. Meta also pledges to consider age signals from Google and Apple operating systems and app stores. [§II.A.5] Meta has previously advocated for age assurance requirements to fall on Google and Apple rather than on individual services.

This age assessment essentially dumps users into one of three age-range buckets: 18+, 13-17, and under-13. Users under 13 have long been barred from Meta products, but this Settlement creates new obligations to search for and detect users who may have said they were older.

For those estimated to be over-18, the Settlement guarantees no direct benefit to you: no privacy protections, no greater user controls for your own accounts, no dent in Meta’s surveillance capitalism.

Those estimated to be 13-17 years old will be limited to Teen User accounts.

Those estimated to be under-13 will lose their accounts altogether.

Those who open new accounts will have two weeks to submit to age estimation, and if they decline to do so, Meta is now required to treat them as a Teen User by default, even if they self-identify as being 18 and older. [P. 18, §II.A.10.b]

(b) Fourteen (14) days or more after creating a Meta SMP account, Meta SMP users who have not yet had their age assessed by an Age Assurance Method pursuant to the Age Assurance Framework shall be treated as Teen Users for the purposes of this Agreement regardless of their stated age, except that Meta SMP users with a stated age of 18 years old or older shall receive the protections described in Section II.A.10.a.ii.

What about people with existing accounts, who are well past that two-week period to submit to age estimation? Will they also be defaulted to Teen User status if they decline age estimation? It seems so—the AGs would likely not have accepted a settlement that did not require Meta to take action against existing teen users who choose to forgo the age assurance process. Perhaps Meta will use its existing store of information about its current users as a type of permitted proprietary age assurance process? Thus, perhaps, an adult user whose Facebook account is itself older than 18 will be assessed as being over-18? Or a user who is identified as the spouse of a user who has been age-assured? But Meta can only rely on a proprietary process if it meets the accuracy standards set out in the Settlement Agreement, and that seems to require a formal assessment of accuracy.

How accurate does the age assurance process need to be?

The Settlement sets maximum false-positive rates for both commercially available and proprietary age assurance methods [Pages 12-13, §II.A.6]. Within two years, each shall be no more than 10% for ages 16-17 and no more than 3% for ages 13-15. 

6. Age Assurance Standards.
(a) U18 False Positive Rate Thresholds.
(i) Any Commercially Available Age Assurance Methods deployed by Meta for any new and existing users in the Settling States shall
meet or fall below the following U18 False Positive Rates excluding method circumvention within one year of the Effective Date: 10% for minors aged 16-17 and 3% for minors aged 13-15.
(ii) Any Proprietary Age Assurance Methods deployed by Meta for any new and existing users in the Settling States shall meet or fall below the following U18 False Positive Rates excluding method circumvention within 1 and 2 years of the Effective Date: 
(A) Year 1: Within one year of the Effective Date: 14% for minors aged 16-17 and 7% for minors aged 13-15.
(B) Year 2: Within two years of the Effective Date, 10% for minors aged 16-17 and 5% for minors aged 13-15.

Notably, there is no limit indicated in the error rate for false negatives, when the process wrongly identifies an adult as being under 18. The Settlement generally shows little concern for those falsely placed in its Teen User category. The Settlement only requires Meta to maintain an appeal process for users whose age range is wrongly assessed. [P. 17, §II.A.9]

9. Appeals Process. Users claiming to have been mis-identified as minors must be offered a Clear and Conspicuous means to appeal the decision. Decisions on all user appeals must be made in a timely manner and communicated to the user along with a basis for the decision.

Meta must also employ measures to discourage age estimation circumvention, including placing limits on the number of attempts any user might make. [P. 16, §II.A.7] As part of this, Meta agrees to proactively monitor adult accounts to determine whether a user needs to undergo additional age estimation. [P. 16, §II.A.7.c] This is just one of the ways the Settlement embeds Meta’s active surveillance of its users for the next ten years (see below for more).

(c) Incorporating a proactive monitoring system that requires users to undergo an additional Age Assurance Method where a user is determined, including based on their conduct on Meta SMPs, to have likely circumvented the Age Assurance Method and is: (A) likely a Teen User after having been previously assessed as 18 or older; or (B) likely U13 after having been previously assessed as 13 or older. Users Meta determines are likely Teen Users after having been previously assessed as at least eighteen may choose not to undergo additional age assurance but then will be treated as Teen Users; and 

Any age assurance process Meta uses must be tested annually.

Data minimization

The Settlement does have data minimization requirements for the data collected during the age assurance process. [§II.A.8] But there are numerous holes. The Settlement requires that all information obtained and retained as part of the age assurance processes thereafter be “immediately enqueued for deletion, after which it shall be deleted after a reasonable period of time.” The “reasonable period of time” is not defined. And the Settlement defines a category of “Retainable Data” that may be retained for 90 days. This includes “metadata about the age assurance method used by the user information ... where required to ensure the ongoing integrity of age assurance systems, including but not limited to the ability to identify circumvention and related patterns over time, and only for as long as it is required for those purposes.” The Settlement requires that all data collected by Meta or its vendor be stored according to industry-standard data security measures,” a standard that unfortunately does not eliminate the risk of a data breach.

8. Data minimization and security.
(a) Except as set forth herein, all data collected by Meta from users of Meta SMPs in the Settling States for the sole purpose of conducting age assurance, all data maintained from known U13s, and all data collected by a vendor for use in a Commercially Available Age Assurance Method shall be held for the minimum period required to determine a user’s age status and thereafter immediately enqueued for deletion, after which it shall be deleted in a reasonable period of time. Meta may retain (1) U13 data only to the extent required for purposes of developing, training, testing, and measuring the performance of the U13 Age Model (“U13 Data”), provided that any U13 data that constitutes Personally Identifiable Information as defined by 16 C.F.R. Part 312.2 will be protected using Meta’s highest data privacy and security standards, and (2) metadata about the age assurance method used by the user information (“Retainable Data”) only where required to ensure the ongoing integrity of age assurance systems, including but not limited to the ability to identify circumvention and related patterns over time, and only for as long as it is required for those purposes. For the avoidance of doubt, U13 Data cannot be used for purposes such as ads targeting and delivery, marketing, or algorithmic optimization efforts. Any U13 Data and Retainable Data shall be maintained at the coarsest viable granularity and cannot be used for any other purpose unless legally required. Any Retainable Data that is no longer required for the purposes set forth herein shall be deleted within 90 days. The terms above shall not pertain to the user’s stated date of birth, stated age, nor the outcome of the Age Assurance Method (e.g., “teen or adult” classification).
(b) Data collected by Meta or a vendor, or transmitted by a vendor, must be collected and stored using industry-standard data security measures and as required by law, including encryption in transit and at rest.
(c) The Parties agree to discuss in good faith potential modifications to this provision as necessary to permit Meta to improve the efficacy of its Age Assurance Framework while preserving the principles of data minimization and security set forth in this Section.

Restrictions For Teens (And Anyone Who Opts Out of Age-Gating)

Teen User Accounts are subject to time, feature, and content restrictions. These will be applied to those estimated to be 13-17 as well as any new user who declines to submit to the age assurance process and to existing users who decline to submit to age estimation and for whom Meta cannot ascertain that they are older than 17.

Time restrictions

Teen Users will be subject to the following time restrictions (§II.B). These measures seem to assume that most of teen’s social media use is frivolous and unserious (not that those are in and of themselves bad; the right to play is among young people’s human rights), ignoring the fact that teens use social media for school and personal research, conducting activism campaigns, and other endeavors that might naturally not fit within these time limits, and that some teens may need to work at the restricted times to support their families and themselves:

• Night Access Mode – no access (except messaging) to Instagram and Facebook from Midnight to 6 AM, and no push notifications from 10 PM – 7 AM.
• School mode – no push notifications from 8 AM – 3 PM Monday-Friday from Aug 15-June 15.
• Daily cumulative time limit of 2 hours per day across Instagram and Facebook, resetting at midnight, excluding video and audio content at least 22 minutes long, absent artificial prolongation, defined by the Settlement as “longform content.”
• “Productive pauses and notices” designed to “reduce or prevent excessive, mindless, or unintended teen usage.” This means that a teen’s usage will be momentarily paused after 60 and 90 minutes of daily cumulative use with notices sent every 15 minutes of continuous use. According to the Settlement, these productive pauses and notices will look like this:

exhibit_g_meta.jpg

To be clear, the ability to set time limits, blackout times, and scheduled pauses are all useful features that should be available and easy to implement for users of all ages. Such tools would have allowed teens, and all users, the ability to design their own safe experience, customized to their own needs, online. Such user controls would have recognized that teens have human rights, agency, and autonomy.

But that’s not what these restrictions are. They are not tools that give the teen users control. Rather, they are imposed, top-down, on teens and anyone else who declines to submit to Meta’s age assurance process.

Feature restrictions (§II.C-D)

Within four months of the effective date of the Settlement, Meta must offer teens an option for a non-personalized feed, which is defined as a feed of chronologically ordered posts from friends and follows. Teens will also be able to disable autoplay as part of an “optional protective settings” package. Each of these settings must be “viewable within three user gestures and clearly labeled, easy to notice, viewable without scrolling, and discoverable in an intuitive location within” the service. 

Again, these would be useful user controls that should be offered to users of all ages. And while a Teen User potentially has control over these features, they cede that control to their parent once they enroll in Parental Supervision, part of the Parental Supervision Tradeoff discussed below.

Also, by default, teens will not see the number of likes or other reactions to their posts.

Teens will also not have access to what the Settlement calls “Cosmetic Procedure Filters,” that is, “any digital filter or augmented reality effect that distorts, sculpts, redefines, or idealizes a user’s face in a way that cannot be achieved without cosmetic surgery or extreme make-up techniques.”

X. “Cosmetic Procedure Filter” shall mean any digital filter or augmented reality (AR) effect that distorts, sculpts, redefines, or idealizes a user’s face in a way that cannot be achieved without cosmetic surgery or extreme makeup techniques. For the avoidance of doubt, “Cosmetic Procedure Filter” does not include: (1) Fantasy/Character Effects: Filters that change a user’s facial structure for the purpose of turning the user into a non-human or fictional character (e.g., an elf or cartoon) or an animal (e.g., a dragon or puppy); (2) Makeup/Smoothing Effects: Filters that smooth skin or alter appearance in ways that can be achieved by ordinary makeup techniques without altering the appearance of underlying physical facial structure or meaningfully changing skin tone; or (3) Parody and Exaggeration Effects: Effects that entertain users by distorting their appearance through parody, satire, or exaggerated forms (e.g., extreme visual distortions outside the scope of normal cosmetic procedures). To help operationalize this definition, the Settling States will provide Meta illustrative examples and guidance of AR effects that are Cosmetic Procedure Filters and AR effects that are not Cosmetic Procedure Filters in a letter to be sent within two (2) months of the Effective Date.

Meta has had rules about cosmetic effects directed at teens since 2019. But the Settlement will give the states a major role in helping Meta identify what features are and are not Cosmetic Procedure Filters. 

Content restrictions (P.1, §II.E, as defined by §I.C, E, F)

For content, Meta is basically pledging to continue its existing practices limiting Teen Users to age-appropriate content and accounts, to default Teen Users to age-appropriate experiences. This includes limiting access to accounts that “regularly share content that is inappropriate for teens” such as content from the following Meta community standards categories: Adult Nudity & Sexual Activity, Restricted Goods & Services, Suicide, Self-Harm or Eating Disorders.

C. “Age Appropriate Experiences” refers to content that is appropriate for Teen Users based on input from experts, parents, and teens. For the purposes of this Agreement, Age Appropriate Experiences shall mean content captured in Meta’s applicable Ages 13+ content setting, which is tied to policies inspired by movie ratings for ages 13+ and parent feedback.
D. “Age Assurance Methods” shall have the meaning set forth in Section II.
E. “Age Inappropriate Accounts” refers to accounts that regularly share content that is inappropriate for teens or that have account information that otherwise suggests the account is inappropriate for Teen Users. For the purposes of this Agreement, Age Inappropriate Accounts shall mean accounts that: (1) regularly share Age Inappropriate Content in the following categories: Adult Nudity & Sexual Activity, Restricted Goods & Services, Suicide, Self-Harm or Eating Disorders, or (2) have account names or profile photos or bios that suggest the account is otherwise inappropriate for minors, based on Meta’s policies for the following categories: Adult Nudity & Sexual Activity, Restricted Goods & Services, Suicide, Self-Harm or Eating Disorders.
F. “Age Inappropriate Content” refers to content that is generally perceived by U.S. parents, youth experts, and teens as not being appropriate for Teen Users. For the purposes of this Agreement, Age Inappropriate Content shall mean content prohibited by Meta’s Community Standards concerning bullying and harassment; nudity and sexual activity; child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity; sexually explicit language; suicide, self-harm and eating disorders; graphic violence and incitements to violence; gambling; and restricted substances or goods (including illegal drug use), as well as policies specifically focused on protections for Teen Users, including those regarding high-risk viral challenges and risky stunts.

The issue here is that some of these categories are problematic. For example, the Restricted Goods & Services standard has been used by Meta to justify removing information about abortion medication, as we detailed in our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign, and in our comment to the Meta Oversight Board. And under the Adult Nudity & Sexual Activity standard, Meta blocks teens from “real world art of visible genitalia ... where the nudity is the focus of the image” and has a history of applying the standard inconsistently, including with respect to representations of indigenous women, breast cancer awareness posts,  educational posts about ovulation, and posts about testicular and breast self-exams. And it has disproportionately applied the standard negatively to gay and lesbian content as compared to straight content.  

And even more worrisome, even though this is just Meta continuing its existing practices, the Settlement empowers the states to enforce its provisions. [P. 40, §IV.C.1.i; §VII.C] That means that over the next ten years, the duration of the Settlement, Meta will face the threat that a state attorney general will pursue legal action against it because it disagrees with how Meta interprets these categories of community standards, and pressures Meta to eliminate Teen User access to posts about sexuality and reproductive and sexual health. And Meta will now lack the hard-earned First Amendment defenses to make its own curatorial decisions. 

C. Notwithstanding anything in Sections VIII.A-B above, a Settling State may take any action, including but not limited to legal action to enforce compliance with the Agreement, without delay if the Settling State believes that a threat to the health or safety of the public requires immediate action.

The Parental Supervision Tradeoff 

All of these Teen User restrictions can be modified – but only if the Teen User enrolls in Parental Supervision that links their account to a parent’s or guardian’s account. Once their accounts are linked, parents can modify the Teen User settings to make them less restrictive (they need the teen’s permission if they want to make them more restrictive).

Parental Supervision comes with huge tradeoffs. There is a huge privacy tradeoff: in exchange for designating someone as their Parent, the Parent gets a lot of information about the Teen’s use: the usernames of all of the teen’s connections, reports on how much time the Teen User spends on a Meta service, the time spent watching longform content, usernames of all those messaging with the Teen User, and any evidence Meta has about suspected secondary accounts. The Supervising Parent also gets notices of the teen’s repeated searches related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. [P. 28, §II.G] And there are huge autonomy tradeoffs: once enrolled in Parental Supervision, the ability to control features like recommendations and autoplay, discussed above, transfer from the Teen user over to their parent.

Parental Supervision
1. Meta agrees to provide Supervising Parents with information concerning the amount of time their Teen User is spending on Meta SMPs, including separately for time on the Meta SMP, time using the Meta SMP’s messaging features, time viewing Longform Content (to the extent excluded from the calculation of daily limits pursuant to Section II.B.3.a.i), and the usernames of the Teen User’s social connections and individuals messaging the Teen User, and usernames of any user reported by a Teen User. In addition, Instagram will notify Supervising Parents should their Teen User engage in repeated searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders, and Facebook will notify Supervising Parents should their Teen User engage in repeated searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders.
2. For Teen Users, Supervising Parents will be notified on a daily basis when the Teen User communicates directly with each adult user for the first time with the Teen User and shall provide a link to the adult user’s profile to provide information such as their stated hometown or city or mutual connections, to the extent the information is publicly available.
3. Upon a Teen User enrolling Parental Supervision, Meta SMPs shall prompt the Supervising Parent to review their Teen User’s settings to consider making updates to support how their Teen User spends their time on Meta SMPs. Meta shall not preselect, recommend, or encourage settings to Supervising Parents that are less restrictive than the default settings in this Agreement.
4. Meta SMPs will periodically suggest checkups for Supervising Parents to do with their Teen Users to evaluate their settings and usage.
5. Meta SMPs agree to continue to take steps designed to encourage enrollment in their Parental Supervision tools.
6. If a Teen User is enrolled in Parental Supervision, Meta shall notify the Supervising Parent if the Teen User creates or explicitly links a new secondary Meta SMP account within their Accounts Center or has been linked to a Soft Matched Account through Meta SMPs, including a link to the secondary account’s profile. Meta SMPs shall automatically apply the Supervising Parent’s approved time management settings in Section II.B and content restrictions to all explicitly linked Meta SMP accounts and all Supervised Accounts for a Teen User belonging to the same Meta SMP.

Unfortunately, Meta doesn’t have a great way to learn whether there exists a genuine parent-Teen User relationship. But it will try to get it right. [§II.G.8] 

This may be ultimately workable for young people with healthy and safe relationships with their parent or guardian. But obviously it is not good at all for a Teen User lacking such a safe relationship. 

More Surveillance, Not Less

Moreover, rather than pushing Meta away from the collection, analysis, and retention of user data, the Settlement requires Meta to do more of it for the next ten years. Several provisions of the Settlement require Meta to carefully track its users' use of Instagram and Facebook for the purposes of determining whether its age assurance framework and Teen User restrictions are working as intended.  

For example: 

• Meta promises to review detected U13 users’ friend networks to identify other possible U13 users. [§II.A.6.(b).(i).(D)] 

• Meta will incorporate a “proactive monitoring system” to identify possible Teen Users among those who were initially determined to be older than 17 by its age assurance process. [§II.7.(c)] 

• Meta pledges to utilize and improve its existing “soft matching models” that track signals such as “device IDs, phone numbers, and email addresses” to identify duplicate accounts. [§II.B.6.(a)] 

• Meta will continue to monitor Teen Users’ activity to “regularly evaluate the prevalence of Teen User exposure to Age Inappropriate Content, and Teen User exposure to experiences that are not Age Appropriate Experiences,” [§II.E.3] and also to “regularly evaluate the prevalence of Teen User exposure to Harmful Experiences on Meta SMPs.” [§II.F.3] 

• Monitor Teen Users’ messaging to identify message threads with potentially suspicious accounts. [§II.F.4] 

• The Settlement also requires Meta to actively monitor use of its services so that it can supply data to the Independent Auditor that will now monitor its compliance with the Settlement. “The Independent Auditor is entitled to access the non-privileged information, personnel, systems, and records that are reasonably relevant and sufficient to evaluate Meta’s implementation of the Injunctive Relief Terms, including, but not limited to, access to raw data; aggregated data; information; internal documents and communications” plus information from its age assurance processes, data regarding Teen User responses to the Productive Pauses, data regarding its models for soft matching of secondary accounts, data regarding the prevalence of Teen User exposure to Age Inappropriate Content and Harmful Experiences, and to experiences that are not Age Appropriate Experiences. [§III.E] 

Moreover, one of the chief threats of Meta’s surveillance is the honeypot of data it creates that may be accessible to governments for law enforcement and other investigations. Nowhere in the Settlement do the 52 attorneys general pledge to not try to access all of the data the Settlement requires Meta to collect and retain. 

Meta Has To Pay The States And Pays To Establish Norms Beyond Meta

The Settlement also includes annual payments from Meta to the states, apparently proportionate to the size of each state’s teen user base. Over the ten-year life of the Settlement, these annual payments will total over $11 billion. And the states then get an additional $5 billion if Meta competitors adopt the same measures. 

This quirk of the Settlement incentivizes the States to pursue similar age assurance processes and at-least-as-restrictive teen user measures for Meta’s chief existing competitors for teen use, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap, and for any new service that may gain widespread teen use over the life of the Settlement Agreement. If the states are able to get Meta’s competitors to adopt the same measures, then the states will get the additional $5 billion in annual payments. That’s quite the incentive for the states to pursue litigation and regulatory measures against those companies. All of this will further entrench age assurance, age-gating, and the ceding of teen autonomy as the norm across online services. 

1. In the event the Contingent Monetary Payment Trigger has occurred in a Settling State, Meta shall be obligated to pay to such Settling State ten equal installments in the amount as set out in Exhibit B (each, a “Contingency Installment Payment”).

2. Following the date the Contingent Monetary Payment Trigger has occurred, the Contingency Installment Payments shall be made to the Settling State on January 15 in each subsequent calendar year of the Agreement Term as follows:

(a) At the next scheduled payment date, the Settling State shall be paid the Contingency Installment Payment for that payment date and all prior payment dates.
(b) For each of the remaining payment dates, the Settling State will be paid the Contingency Installment Payment for that payment date.

3. If a Settling State fails to achieve the Contingent Monetary Payment Trigger during the Agreement Term, the Contingency Installment Payments shall be permanently forfeited by such Settling State and retained by Meta. For the avoidance of doubt, no Settling State will have an obligation to repay the Contingency Payment

The Settlement is thus a bad deal for all users of Facebook and Instagram. It normalizes age gating and age assurance for millions of internet users. It denies teens the tools to create their own safe experiences online and places their social media experience firmly under the control of either Meta or their parents. And rather than addressing Meta’s collection, analysis, and retention of data about teens’ use of Instagram and Facebook, it binds Meta to continued surveillance, and does nothing to protect access to such data by the states. 

The California legislature passed Assembly Bill 1709 (A.B. 1709) today, which functions as a sweeping ban on social media use for young people under the age of 16. This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can't access offline. That’s why we’re urging Governor Gavin Newsom to veto the measure. 

Should the law go into effect in January, platforms would be prohibited from offering virtually every functional recommendation algorithm and basic input, such as who a user follows or what posts they like, to anyone under 16. These so-called "addictive features," are in reality the basic tools that online services use to identify what other user-generated content a particular user might want to see. Users also rely on these features to find audiences for their own speech, as well as community. By labeling these basic tools as "addictive," the bill relies on sweeping generalizations regarding the unsettled science of youth social media use. Because nearly every major service relies on automated feeds, the ultimate result is that young people under 16 will still be locked out of major digital services as they currently exist.  

A.B. 1709 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare.

A.B. 1709 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. Denying young people access to digital forums (or stripping out the basic tools needed to navigate them) does nothing to make young people safer or healthier. Research shows that social media bans are ineffectual, and can be harmful when they deny young people opportunities to develop their own voices and perspectives, whether that means sharing art, practicing religion, or engaging in politics. 

Far from protecting children, the bill will also severely restrict access to constitutionally protected speech and push platforms to implement invasive age-verification methods, such as requiring government IDs or biometric scanning. Age-gating requirements will force everyone to give big tech companies even more personal information. To verify who can pass through online gates, companies will collect even more data, concentrating power in corporate hands rather than protecting users. This creates massive honeypots of sensitive personal data, severely damages online anonymity, and exposes users of all ages to heightened data breach risks. 

Finally, A.B. 1709 introduces legal confusion by creating provisions that conflict with already enacted legislation like A.B. 1043 and S.B. 976. Rather than offering regulatory clarity on already-passed laws, California will only end up spending valuable resources to defend a law bound to be tied up in court.  

For more details, you can read our full letter to the Governor here. 

The history of technology is rife with copyright panics.  In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses, like time-shifting and cautioning courts to avoid rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. We believe that courts now should be similarly wary about the hype surrounding AI.

Hollywood’s hyperbole has echoed that of composer John Phillip Sousa, who claimed in 1906 that the player piano and the gramophone would destroy music composition; portrait artists who feared the camera would replace the paintbrush. None of these things happened. Cameras, for example, sparked a resurgence of portraiture and, by making it possible for more people to create images, led to unexpected developments—like the rise of photojournalism.

New markets, new ideas, and new creators are actually what copyright is supposed to promote, not restrict. Using copyright to lock in existing gatekeepers and massive rightsholders’ profits helps neither the public nor individual artists.

Generative AI has sparked the latest wave of anxiety and with it a massive wave of litigation. In multiple cases around the U.S. and the world, rightsholders are asking courts to do precisely what the Supreme Court warned against: dramatically expand copyright protections based in substantial part on hyperbole and speculation. They should decline to do so.

Copyright owners claim that unless courts abandon 300-year-old copyright principles—and give rightsholders the power to control non-infringing works created by others—an imagined flood of AI-generated works will devastate creative markets. Under this “market dilution” theory, building generative AI tools cannot be fair use because those tools might be encourage the proliferation of competing works.

As EFF has explained to the courts in multiple amicus briefs in Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC and In re Mosaic LLM Litigation, that’s not how copyright works. In fact, accepting this theory would undermine copyright’s constitutional purpose: promoting the creation of expressive works for the public’s benefit. Because copyright law is designed to encourage others to build freely on existing works, it punishes infringement, not competition. The “market dilution” theory would eviscerate not only the fair use doctrine, but also other limits on copyright that work specifically to prevent rightsholders from unfairly suppressing competition by claiming broad ownership over tropes, genres, styles, and so on. In other words, publishers would wield unchecked veto power over any expression that might conceivably compete with a work they own.

The result? Art doesn’t get created, ideas are never expressed, and we’re all worse off. Copyright shouldn’t be a tool to silence future creative competitors—whether or not they use AI in their work.

And the plaintiffs in these cases get at least two other things wrong. First, research shows that large generative AI models are unlikely to produce infringing works because the more data on which a model is trained, the less any individual training example matters to any particular output.

Second, AI tools aren’t necessarily displacing human creativity. To take a just a few examples:

• Boston-based artist Nettrice Gaskins uses AI to create Afro-futurist art, including a portrait of Octavia Butler displayed at the San Francisco Airport

• Indian artists Prateek Arora and Varun Gupta use generative AI to reimagine Western science fiction.

• Philadelphia-based artist Alex Smith uses generative AI to reimagine Afrofuturism with queer, plus-sized Black superheroes.

• Ana Miljački, a professor of architecture at MIT, used generative AI to create a “non-liner documentary” film on Yugoslav World War II memorials and the values they embodied.

• A research-creation project used AI generated visual art to both amplify the voices of activists in the Iran Woman Life Freedom Movement and evaluate AI’s role in sociopolitical advocacy through art.

• AI company Bronze works with musicians like Disclosure and Jai Paul to create songs that never sound the same when played back twice, challenging audience conceptions of what music could be.

It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way.

Given this range of experimentation, courts should be reluctant to decide in advance what tools do and do not foster “human creativity.” Like the VTR, large language models are general purpose tools, used by humans to do a broad variety of things far beyond generating lyrics. The effects of this particular technological innovation will doubtless be far-reaching, disruptive, and potentially harmful for some—but distorting copyright law is not the way to address those harms.

Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned person accessing publicly available information, then sharing that information more widely in the hopes it will intimidate their target or worse. 

This guide is a followup from a previous post that describes a methodology for you to clean up your digital footprint and get a firm entry into the art of open source intelligence. There's a slight bit of repetition here, but with a slant towards using those now-familiar tools and methods toward what to do in the context of incident response. The best thing you can do is familiarize yourself with this post and its tactics before something happens, then return back to it for reference when needed.

Incident Log

An incident log is a way to keep track of suspicious or harmful activity online. It doesn't need to be beautiful or complex, just a place where you can quickly note details around the different things you're seeing online. Noting times, places, people, and the general nature of what you see ought to be enough. In the event that law enforcement gets involved, this sort of record will be helpful. 

The process of finding and noting hateful incidents online can be incredibly stressful, so now is a good time to revisit the team roles you might have already thought of in the previous blog post. If you haven't yet done that, here's a brief refresher:

Assign Team Roles

Remember, privacy–and responding to doxxing–is a team sport. Knowing who you trust is as important as identifying threat actors. Having trusted people ready to assist is invaluable in this type of situation. Refer them to this blog post or specific recommendations in it. If you've already plotted out a list of designated team roles, now is the time to remind everyone of their responsibilities. That might look like monitoring the hate forums where activity happens, keeping track of events in the incident log, setting up web alerts, locking down your social media accounts, or contacting law enforcement to reduce the likelihood of SWATing (a type of attack where bad actors call the police on their target, hoping to incite violence or disruption of peace by bringing law enforcement to their door).

Monitoring Hate Forums

So often the victims of doxxing and harassment campaigns are positioned that way because of bias or bigotry. If you're a part of a community who is the target of such abuse, you are likely already aware of the places where such bigots gather and the language they use. Safely and privately accessing those sites to check for organizing against you or those in your community is a crucial step to take. Take great care to do so privately. We recommend you use the Tor browser for such information-gathering missions. It’s also advisable that you don’t engage with anyone in those places.

Again, this step can be particularly stressful; asking a friend for help is a good idea, or you can thoughtfully apply some of the advice from the next section to automate the process.

Set Up Search Alerts

Google alerts is a free service that Google offers to alert you when a particular keyword—like your name—is freshly indexed by their search engine. Doxxing efforts done by anonymous trolls may not trigger an alert, but if you're the target of smear campaigns in the media, or the victim of abuse by very prominent media figures, those things are more likely to appear. Updates can come pretty frequently, so we advise leaving the monitoring of these alerts to a person that you trust.

For a more sophisticated approach, you could use a tool like Open Measures to automate the task of tracking coordinated campaigns. It's important to note that this type of tool is more likely to miss nuanced language or oblique references to you and your community.

Hardening Your Public Facing Accounts

For accounts that you can't or don't want to shut down, at the very least you must review the privacy and security settings on them and consider raising that bar. If two-factor authentication isn't already on, now is the time to do so. For social media accounts, consider switching the account to "private," where users have to request to have access to your page. For peace of mind, especially on accounts that you have to keep using, consider muting certain terms and blocking accounts so that you're less likely to encounter stressful content when on the app. Every app's options are different for this sort of thing, so be prepared to spend a few minutes figuring out what the menu is like and where the options are.

Shut Down Affected Accounts

If a particular account is being targeted with hate, or signs are pointing to an account of yours being the source of information people are using against you, shutting down that account may be the best decision for now. Depending on the app, account deletion may be temporary and you may be able to recover the account after you've done so and things have cooled off.

Revisit Your Data Broker Removal Strategies

Although this is more of a doxxing preventative measure, it's a good idea to get on top of removing the information that's available about you via data brokers. In case you're unaware, the data broker industry is an unregulated viper’s nest of privacy threats, often contributing to or directly supplying the sources of information that are used in doxxing campaigns. Although there are plenty of services that offer to file data broker opt-out requests on your behalf, a recent study revealed that doing it DIY is still more effective than relying on these paid services. That said, a paid service may still be worth its money if you'd rather have someone else take care of it.

Revisit Public Records

As covered in the previous blog post, your information may be made available through public records that you have little to no control over. You may be able to limit the convenience of that information being available by requesting to have it taken down from sites that republish it. Check through voter records, business registration records, court and property records, and the like. If you aren't able to limit that information from appearing on such mirroring sites, at least gaining awareness of where they are and the specific contours of what they contain will help you strategize against the harms they may cause.

Consider Contacting Law Enforcement

For many, talking to law enforcement will only make things worse. On the other hand, SWATing is a tactic often used in these types of coordinated attacks. If you think that's a possible outcome in your situation, it could be a good idea to get ahead of it and contact law enforcement to let them know what you're dealing with. It's in their best interest to be aware of fraudulent calls, and will make them less likely to show up at your door with guns drawn.

Revisit PACE Documents, Enact Those Steps

If you're involved in any kind of activism or community organizing you may be familiar with PACE documentation. It’s an acronym for coming up with contingency plan reactions if unwanted things come up: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Escape/Emergency. Think of it like a panic button, a routine checklist of things to do if shit hits the fan. Maybe it involves some of the recommendations from this blog post. The point is to have something readymade, and some thoughts and strategies prepared, if the doxxing escalates to increased levels of harm and danger.

This is another step that's best done in a community with trusted people. The point is to keep your community organizing or community work moving, but with special contingency measures enacted to keep you and everyone else safe while remaining aware of this incident. This step is highly personalized and relies on a bit of prep work having already been done.

Put A Lock on Your Bank Accounts and Cell Subscriptions

One of the tactics those who are doxxing you might use is trying to get into your social media or other accounts through “SIM swapping,” an attack where they contact your cellular provider pretending to be you in order to hijack your phone number. They can then use that number and pivot to stealing other accounts you authenticate yourself to with your phone. Likewise, those targeting you might try to steal access to or disrupt your bank accounts through similar techniques. 

Get ahead of them by placing security passwords or pin codes on these highly sensitive accounts, if your bank or cellular provider provides this extra security measure. Most cell providers offer some sort of SIM swapping prevention method, but they all use different names for this feature, so be sure to look up the process in your provider’s documentation (here are guides for the major U.S. providers: Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile).

Regulate Your Nervous System

It’s an understatement to say that being doxxed is scary and potentially very dysregulating. You're much more likely to make safe, smart decisions if you are able to maintain a sense of control around your mental state. Recognizing that capability, as well as having a strategy to keep calm in the face of a crisis is just as important as having good digital security hygiene. Do what you need to do, be it involving the help of friends, taking a break, or whatever else, to stay afloat during this process. 

Flexibility and Resiliency

The reality is that the more you experience cultural marginalization, the higher the chances are that adversarial actors will resort to such tactics as doxxing and coordinated harassment campaigns. The fervor of those adversaries is often stoked by hateful public figures and politicians. And the plausible deniability of public records can limit the recourse you have to stop them. We hope that after reading this and the previous post, we’ve also brought to surface the idea that you can have great control over your digital footprint. Even more, that you can continue to share information online without unnecessarily compromising your safety and security. 

Until we have digital privacy protections for everyone, it’s up to us to take matters into our own hands. Privacy, security, and dignity online are achievable. If you follow this guide, the previous one, and stay clued into the strategies laid out on Surveillance Self-Defense, you're well on your way.

Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone. It's a tricky thing to protect against when the jerk doing it is often able to use legal and accessible means to do so. The odds are stacked against everyday internet folk when there's little to no comprehensive data privacy legislation keeping us safe. The responsibility is on each of us to protect ourselves, but the good news is that there's a lot you can do to reduce your digital footprint and take control of your data.

This post is part one of a two-part series discussing safety and response to doxxing. This first part focuses on prevention and ways to reduce your overall footprint. The second focuses on incident response, as in, steps to take if you're in the midst of being doxxed. There will be some crossover and redundancy between these two posts, so it's worth reading each and gaining familiarity with the steps well ahead of time.

OSINT

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a broad term within information security. It focuses on the tools and means available to us for investigation and information retrieval. OSINT sits at the heart of doxxing campaigns but is also an important part of the process of preventing them. Typically it is a way of describing a methodology of piecing together scraps of information to form a dossier on a subject.

There are fancy multipurpose tools (like Maltego or Lampyre) that combine many datapoints into accessible graphs and datasets. As helpful as they can be for traditional penetration tests or corporate OSINT campaigns, they’re best used for investigations focused on organizations, mapping together details like employee email charts, LinkedIn profiles, and company network maps. They may not fit the needs of everyday people or liberation movement workers. Instead, we recommend referring to different OSINT resource lists that index together a bunch of different tools, then using those resources to create a list for yourself of which tools may be most helpful. 

Many, if not all, of the resources we cover below will be referenced in those guides, and themselves fall under the OSINT category. It’s important to note that the tools we reference in this particular blog post are only relevant at the time of publishing. The bigger ideas have a much longer shelf life than various tech tools. That said, in no particular order:

Breach Databases

When a company gets hacked and their customer data is leaked, that information often ends up in “breach databases,” that is, troves of peoples' data available for sale and reuse in illegal trades online. Because of the sensitivity of that type of information, it can potentially be used in doxxing campaigns. Some resources, like haveibeenpwned, note pieces of vulnerable identifying information in those databases and make it easy for people to see if their information is included. Others, like DeHashed, offer a similar sort of tracking, but for a fee. 

You may not have control over a company's digital security that could put your own data at risk, but you can gain insight into whether your information is already out there. This gives you the opportunity to control the accuracy of that data (such as changing your email address or phone number). Doing so is extremely inconvenient, but unfortunately, it may be the only agency you have when another’s company’s digital insecurity puts your own safety at risk.

Open Records

Public records (such as voter records, property records, business registration, medical licensing information, and more) present a dilemma. It is in the public interest for there to be levels of transparency on such information. On the other hand, making such personally-identifiable information accessible to those with ill-intent can lead to serious consequences. 

Instead of requiring a formal request through the courts, mirroring sites make this information easy to find online. Such sites often have forms where you can request your information be taken down. This doesn’t necessarily remove the records from existing, but it does remove a layer of convenience in accessing them.

Some states have programs called “Address Confidentiality Programs” that offer people the right to supplant address information with proxy addresses, keeping public records open but that specific piece of information potentially hidden.

Social Media

Going through and tightening the security and privacy settings of your various social media accounts is always a good idea, but it’s especially important if you are in the process of minimizing your digital footprint. Consider turning your discoverability to “private” or “hidden” (verbiage and details depend on the app) so that only users vetted by you are able to see your account.

To get a quick overview of the various accounts you have registered online, especially if you've been online for a long time, use a username search engine like What's My Name or Namechk to see where your usernames have been registered. They may not be entirely accurate, but they are effective and quick. These tools are also helpful if you are at risk of being impersonated online and want to get an overview of where that may be taking place.

Data Brokers and Removals

Data brokers are craven, pernicious companies that present an existential risk to everyone in the digital age. Until that industry is no more, it's up to us to protect ourselves and the ways that it endangers us by selling personal, sensitive information. The most effective way to get your information removed from their stores is to file requests manually. Yael Grauer's BADBOOL project compiles and prioritizes the worst offenders in this industry and the means you can use to request data removals from them. This process can be grueling and time-consuming, so it may be worth investing in a service that automates the process. Though they've been found to be less effective than the DIY approach, there are some services that have stood out amongst the others in terms of efficacy when tested by third-party reviewers. If you’re a resident of California, you can more easily opt out through the new and exciting DROP tool.

Reverse Image Searching and FR Services

Services like PimEyes and Lenso have jumped on the profit-driven opportunity to create facial recognition as a service. They contribute to law enforcement investigations and predictive policing systems, as well as providing commercial services to abusers and stalkers. The gist of their service: upload a picture of someone (in this case, yourself) and it will use facial recognition technology to determine where else online that person has appeared. If your image is being shared online without your consent, this service will find out. 

Willfully participating in these services does mean having your image mapped, scanned, and stored by their systems. But if you believe you're under the type of targeted harassment that includes your image being shared online against your will, it may be worth that tradeoff.

Extra Monitoring, Automated

This section is less about data minimization, and more about laying extra protections down in the event that doxxing or other coordinated harassment seems imminent. If you're in the Google ecosystem of products, consider enrolling in their Advanced Protection Program, which offers a number of different features to keep you and your account safe. 

If you're the focus of coordinated attacks that span from online communities to media outlets participating in the harassment, a service like Open Measures is worth looking into. It tracks, maps, and analyzes the spread of hateful information online. They provide free access to their open-source API, so with some technical fancy-footwork, you can automate this process.

Get Others Involved

Coordinated harassment is often a process of daisy-chaining targets and tactics together until there’s a meaningful process of harm being inflicted. This means that people in your community are also at risk. As we always say, privacy is a team sport. Get others involved in the process; there’s strength in numbers. 

A great way to do this is think of the activities you and your group are up to. What roles do individual members take on? Figure out a way to tack on some of the responsibilities you’re coming up with here onto those team members. Find ways to talk about it and share strategies, preferably using secure technology like Signal. You can coordinate together which tasks each person could take on, perhaps pulled from this blog post.

It's a Process; Keep Yourself Apace for the Marathon, Not the Race

The process of data minimization and reclaiming agency over your digital footprint can be grueling and stressful. Don't underestimate the toll it can take on your mental health. Take breaks, employ the help of friends, and take the time to make sure you're first addressing the parts that are most relevant to your threat model. It may feel like there’s nothing to be done about protecting your digital privacy, but that’s just a symptom of surveillance capitalism’s psychological effect on its victims. There’s much you can do to stay safe, to protect yourself and others. Refer to this post and to the Surveillance Self-Defense project. 

Regulating commercial location tracking has reached a turning point. Last year, we published our rubric for what comprehensive and protective location privacy laws should look like, outlining the baseline standards states should meet to shield individuals from pervasive location surveillance. Since then, state lawmakers across the country have begun responding to calls like these, with Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia enacting new consumer privacy restraints on an industry that profits off our physical movements.

Yet, even as these states move the ball forward to restrict location tracking, most of their laws leave significant gaps that still must be filled. Other states – and Congress – need to get into the game, too, and ensure protection of everyone.

Why Location Privacy Is Important

Imagine spending a couple of hours in a coffee shop, a friend's house, or a healthcare clinic, only to discover yourself under police investigation because your cell phone’s location data exposed your presence there.

This is the reality of geofence warrants for location data, the controversial surveillance technique recently scrutinized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States. Through geofencing, tech companies and law enforcement can map everyone who was present within a specific area over a certain window of time, inverting standard constitutional protections by turning every innocent bystander into a potential suspect. While the Supreme Court's ruling in Chatrie established that accessing location data via geofencing constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring constitutional protections, law enforcement demands via these warrants are only part of the problem. That same geolocation tracking is used by commercial data brokers operating in a largely unregulated market. These brokers regularly harvest, aggregate, and sell physical location data to anyone with a credit card (including government agencies, which are among their regular clients). Especially for individuals seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, attending a protest, or visiting an immigration law clinic, this pervasive commercial location surveillance represents an immediate threat.

In Part 1 of this series, we urged lawmakers to protect people from the growing harms of location tracking tools across all areas of public life. The real-world consequences of this unregulated market impact us all. An anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy group spent millions of dollars buying app location data to track priests across multiple dioceses and used app-harvested location data to “out” a priest after purchasing his Grindr location signals. Privacy advocates posing as private investigators gained access to Locate X, a location-tracking tool developed by Babel Street, and demonstrated how the tool tracked a device traveling from Alabama, where abortion is banned, to an abortion clinic in Florida, where access is less restricted. Data brokers like Near Intelligence have sold precise location data of reproductive health clinic visitors directly to political groups. Location data has been used to locate U.S. military personnel in war zones. Law enforcement and private entities have also weaponized location tracking directly against political protesters: surveillance contractors and authorities have utilized location data derived from real-time bidding ad networks to track individuals attending demonstrations.

The unregulated sharing of location data has created an ever-larger funnel for data brokers to capture and monetize our movements. For example, a recent EFF investigation identified several advertising Software Development Kits (SDKs) in Android apps that by default collect and share users' location data whenever app-level location permissions are granted. These advertising libraries automatically feed users' location data into ad systems that location data brokers have used to track people. Because defaults direct real-world outcomes, app developers who fail to carefully scrutinize the third-party SDKs they use, and disable unnecessary data collection, could inadvertently expose their users’ movements to commercial data brokers.

State Legislative Progress

Last year, we outlined six essential core principles that any meaningful location privacy law must contain:

• Strong definitions,
• Clear rules,
• Affirmation that all precise geolocation data is sensitive,
• Empowerment of consumers through a strong private right of action,
• Prohibition of “pay-for-privacy” schemes, and
• Transparency through clear privacy policies.

While the bills we highlighted from California, Illinois, and Massachusetts are yet to pass into law, a new wave of state location privacy legislation has taken effect across Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia.

These five laws represent progress, and share two strong features.  First, all five of these states ban the sale of precise geolocation data. This will remove a strong incentive to collect and store this information in the first place. Other types of privacy laws have likewise banned the sale of sensitive types of data, like the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act (BIPA), which bans the sale of biometric information such as face scans.

Second, all five states broadly define the protected data to include all kinds of locations across the board within a particular distance of a person or their device, rather than protecting just narrowly-defined “sensitive” locations. This all-locations protection sets these laws apart from California’s A.B. 45 of 2025, for example, which only restricts location tracking within 1,850 feet of a family planning center. Protecting location data only near specific locations (like health care facilities) is insufficient: if an individual travels across state lines for care, a data broker can still track their route right up to the boundary of a protected zone and pick it up immediately upon departure, making it easy to infer their destination.

These five laws vary regarding whether, on top of the ban on sale, they require consent and/or minimization for other kinds of processing of precise geolocation data. Maryland’s Online Data Privacy Act (MODPA) requires strict minimization. Specifically, a data controller cannot collect, use, store, or disclose a consumer’s precise geolocation data (or other sensitive data) unless doing so is “strictly necessary to provide or maintain a specific product or service requested by [that] consumer.” Minimization is an important privacy protection because it imposes a duty where it belongs: on the company processing a person’s data. Maryland requires doubly strong minimization. First, the data processing must be “strictly necessary,” and not just “necessary,” or even worse, “reasonably necessary.” Second, the necessity of data processing must be tied to what the particular consumer requested, and not to what a generic customer might hypothetically have thought was reasonable, or the company’s own purposes, or whatever the company buried in its own long-winded legalese.

Connecticut requires both strong consent and weak minimization. Specifically, it forbids a data controller from collecting, using, storing, or disclosing a consumer’s precise geolocation data (among other sensitive data) “without first obtaining [that] consumer’s consent”. Connecticut has a strong definition of consent: “a clear affirmative act signifying freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous agreement,” which is absent from “agreement obtained through the use of dark patterns.” On top of this strong consent, Connecticut also requires a weak form of minimization: the data processing must be “reasonably necessary in relation to the purposes for which such sensitive data are processed”. But this does not weaken Connecticut’s strong consent rule.

New Jersey requires consent to collect, use, store, or disclose a person’s precise geolocation data (and other sensitive data).

Virginia protects location data with both minimization and consent, but only for one kind of people (known children) and only for one kind of data processing (collection). Under Virginia’s minimization rule, a data controller cannot collect such data from such people unless doing so “is reasonably necessary for the controller to provide an online service,” and in such cases, “only … for the time necessary” to do so. This would be a much stronger rule if the authors struck the modifier “reasonably” before the word “necessary,” or better yet, substituted the modifier “strictly.”

Beyond its ban on sale, Oregon does not limit the processing of precise geolocation data.

Gaps in Current Legislation

While these enacted bills mark steps in the right direction, major loopholes remain that leave users vulnerable.

The Enforcement Void: Why Every Law Needs a Private Right of Action

A privacy law without a Private Right of Action is a law "without teeth”.

None of these five state statutes expressly empower consumers to directly sue companies that violate their location privacy rights. Relying exclusively on state Attorneys General or specialized regulatory agencies creates a critical bottleneck, since no regulatory agency possesses the staffing or budget required to investigate every data privacy violation. Additionally, government enforcement priorities shift across administrations, leaving enforcement vulnerable to political pressures and corporate lobbying.

The best way to ensure effective enforcement is a free-standing, explicit Private Right of Action written directly into the privacy statute. Some legislative privacy proposals instead attempt to provide remedies by piggybacking on state laws against unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices (UDAP). But this is often hit-or-miss depending on each state’s specific UDAP law, including who must have what kind of injury to have standing to bring a private action, and the scope of remedies. For instance, while Maryland’s MODPA provides that a violation of the statute constitutes a banned UDAP, it appears that the new law’s enforcement mechanics were drafted in a way that provides only government enforcement through the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, rather than granting consumers a private right of action.

Any a private right of action should come complete with statutory liquidated damages to remedy non-economic harm, and prohibitions against mandatory arbitration. This ensures that compliance isn't optional. Until corporate bad actors face direct accountability from the very people whose personal location data they unlawfully exploit, state privacy laws will rely on overworked regulators to police an industry that profits off our every move.

The "Pay-for-Privacy" Trap

Privacy is a fundamental right, not a luxury tier. So EFF opposes pay-for-privacy schemes, in which companies charge a higher price to people who exercise their privacy rights. To prevent these schemes, data privacy legislation must prohibit companies from retaliating against consumers who exercise their statutory privacy rights, including by charging a higher price. For example, if a statute bars a company from processing a person’s data absent their consent, and that person withholds consent, the statute must bar the company from responding by charging a higher price.

Unfortunately, all three of these states that require consent to process precise geolocation information (Connecticut, New Jersey, and Virginia) have only weakly limited pay-for-privacy schemes. While all three prohibit discrimination against customers who withhold consent, all three also have a wide loophole: for discount programs. To make matters worse, none of these three states prevent the discount programs from selling customer data to third parties. But people should not have to surrender their data privacy to join a discount club for regular customers. Thus, the far better approach is to eschew this loophole, as in the ban on pay-for-privacy in last year’s location data privacy bills in Illinois and Massachusetts.

These exceptions allow companies to charge higher prices or downgrade service quality for users who exercise their privacy rights. In practice, this converts privacy into a privilege for those who can afford it, forcing economically vulnerable communities to trade away their sensitive location movements in exchange for essential discounts or services.

Dark Patterns

Any law that requires consent also needs to ban company techniques that subvert consent. These are often called dark patterns, predatory design, and manipulative user interface (UI/UX) practices.

Connecticut’s definition of “consent” excludes “dark patterns,” as noted above. That state defines dark patterns as “a user interface designed or manipulated with the substantial effect of subverting or impairing user autonomy, decision-making, or choice,” including any practice that the FTC refers to as a dark pattern. Other consent-based privacy rules must do so, too.

Conclusion

The recent wave of state legislation demonstrates that momentum is building against location surveillance. However, state leaders must go further.

To build privacy protections that withstand corporate workaround attempts, future bills must apply to all locations universally, give individuals the legal standing to enforce their own rights in court, and fully prohibit pay-for-privacy. Until comprehensive data privacy legislation with real teeth is enacted nationwide, users can consult EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense Guide to learn practical steps for reducing location tracking on their personal devices.

This post is adapted from a video recorded by EFF and the Trevor Project. Head over to our TikTok or Instagram to watch! 

EFF answers all the queer digital rights questions you submit to us through our LGBT Q&A. You asked us: What’s one thing I can do today to improve my safety and security online as an LGBTQ+ person? 

And for this question, we’ve brought in our friends from the Trevor Project to answer together:

Hi, I’m Tommy from the Trevor Project! The Trevor Project’s mission is to end suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) young people. Our vision is to create a world where all LGBTQ+ young people see a bright future for themselves.

EFF and the Trevor Project know that digital security and online safety can feel overwhelming, especially because we all have different levels of concern for different parts of our online lives. Some might be focused on the dangers of doxxing, another might only want to ensure they're not outed. And queer people can be particularly vulnerable to these kinds of online threats. 

This might seem like a big task, but the one way you can do today to protect yourself is to revise the information you’ve shared with services and platforms to ensure you’re as in control of your information and data as possible:

Protect Your Personal Information

Be cautious about sharing sensitive details like your full name, address, school, phone number, and personal photos as it might expose identifying information you want to keep private. Consider using an avatar as your profile picture to avoid sharing your personal photos if that makes you more comfortable. Keep it lowkey when talking about work stuff or sharing details about where you’re studying.

If you do share personal photos, don’t accompany them with information that identifies your location or frequent whereabouts, and make sure EXIF data in photos is turned off (which could inadvertently include your location); the easiest way to do this is to take a screenshot of the photo and share that instead. Don’t post pictures with obvious spots in the background, like your front door or porch. 

Understand the Importance of Login Information

When you create an account on websites and platforms, you can often use your phone number or a third party account, such as Facebook, Google, or Apple. These external accounts might share data with the apps you're logging into, but they can be helpful if you struggle with managing a lot of logins. Deciding if that trade-off is worth it is up to you but, when you can, use strong, unique passwords for your accounts, and be sure to enable two-factor authentication when offered. 

Review Permissions with Social Media Apps

Review which apps have access to things like your location and camera roll, and possibly change those permissions in line with what information you would like to keep private. Location is particularly important. For example, some apps might need some location information to function. But you can typically at least deny access to your device's "precise location" or enter in a city or zip code manually.

Consider What You Share When Speaking with Others Online

It’s important to be mindful of what you share with others when you post online or speak with people. Avoid disclosing sensitive information like financial details, and trust your gut if something feels off. It’s also useful to review your profile’s privacy settings and information now and again to make sure you’re still comfortable sharing what you’ve listed there.

Good privacy decisions begin with proper knowledge about your situation and a community-oriented approach. To dig in deeper, read EFF’s blog post on Building a Community Privacy Plan and the Trevor Project’s Guide to Online Safety for LGBTQ+ Young People.

EFF, Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil are putting forward recommendations to strengthen robust privacy and data protection safeguards in the context of Brazil's elections. The recommendations stress the close relationship between violations of personal data protection and challenges to the integrity of electoral processes. They underscore how privacy and data protection guarantees are a crucial tool for curbing the targeted spread of false or manipulative content and other problematic strategies used by political actors that are amplified by digital technologies such as artificial intelligence systems. 

The recommendations are part of a broader regional initiative and build on the legal and institutional safeguards already in place in Brazil. They seek to promote greater coordination among oversight institutions, civil society, and digital platforms, and encourage the solid implementation of privacy and data protection guarantees as drivers of electoral integrity. Read the full document below. 

The Link Between the Integrity of the Electoral Process and Privacy 

Protecting the integrity of the electoral process in the face of internet and social media use is a challenge that many policymakers are addressing or are willing to address. Online, content that can affect the integrity of the electoral process is increasingly personalized. This phenomenon is so concerning that it has been identified as one of the main global short- and medium-term risks. 

In an era of generative AI, the economic cost and technical difficulty of producing and spreading false or synthetic content to deceive, manipulate, or simulate authenticity have been considerably reduced. That intensifies concern over the integrity of the electoral process. Meanwhile, online privacy and personal data protection remain unfinished business in Latin America. 

There is an intrinsic connection between the ability to collect and process large amounts of personal data and the way false or manipulative content is created and distributed—on social media and messaging apps in particular, and on the internet in general. For this reason, applying strict laws and policies on personal data protection and privacy makes it possible to reduce the impact of false or manipulative content. This is especially important in electoral contexts, where such content affects and impoverishes public debate, directly affecting political and electoral rights and the integrity of the electoral process. 

This phenomenon predates the emergence of the internet. However, the rise of new technologies accelerates the generation and spread of false and manipulative content. This is supported by the very economic model that sustains the platforms, amplifying its effectiveness and reach. On the one hand, social media platforms have content recommendation algorithms that use personal data to generate profiles to which they can then serve targeted advertising content, including explicitly political propaganda. This technique is known as "microtargeting." 

Political microtargeting seeks to have a direct or indirect impact on democracy. It is used to persuade voters, to encourage or discourage turnout at the polls, or to raise funds using information that is deliberately taken out of context, inaccurate, or erroneous. 

The control exercised by these companies raises serious concerns about people's rights. By having access to massive amounts of personal information, these companies have the ability to shape the content that users see and interact with. This happens through the construction of profiles that can reveal habits, social relationships, political preferences, and opinions, to mention a few examples. Personal data is the fuel that amplifies risks to the integrity of the electoral process. That’s true whether it’s provided by the users themselves or generated by the platforms from their interactions online. 

For disinformation actors, access to sophisticated tools—such as those used to create "deepfakes" through generative AI, or "bots" programmed to spread content and seek to manipulate public opinion—boosts the effectiveness of this microtargeting in terms of quality and scalability, making it harder to detect as false or manipulative content. AI-generated avatars and synthetic characters that simulate voters, influencers, hosts, commentators, or community leaders can produce footage that appears spontaneous, fabricate the voices of artificial political actors, and make it harder for users to identify if a given public statement was created or mediated by technology. 

In this context, paid promotion with nanotargeting seeks to reach increasingly specific profiles with customized content, and AI-based tools are used to assess and map its impact on social networks. Drawing on the personal data of groups of voters, profiles of "synthetic voters" are created to test messages or strategies in search of the most efficient way to influence real voters. 

This rapid expansion of AI systems and hyper-personalization with data can lead to a problem of "epistemic erosion" for democratic societies, as pointed out by the UN's Independent Scientific Panel on AI Governance in 2026. 

At Access Now, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we point to the enforcement of personal data protection laws and public privacy policies as an efficient mechanism for improving the quality of our democracies and reducing the manipulation of public discourse in digital environments and its impact in electoral contexts. Measures to broaden access to information for electoral decision-making, and to ensure transparency about campaigns' and political parties' use of digital technologies built on the massive processing of personal data, also play a relevant role in guaranteeing the integrity of the electoral process. 

Recommendations for Safeguarding the Integrity of Electoral Processes in Brazil in the Face of New Technologies 

Concern about the effects of spreading false, manipulative, or deliberately decontextualized content is particularly heightened in electoral contexts. From Argentina to Mexico, many countries in Latin America, including Brazil, are holding or will hold significant electoral processes in the coming period. 

Providing the public with quality information from a range of sources is an essential element for the exercise of political rights. In order to safeguard the electoral process, these countries must enforce their privacy and personal data protection laws through their competent authorities, in coordination with their judiciaries and electoral courts. 

Access Now, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation propose the following recommendations to protect the integrity of the electoral process by guaranteeing privacy and data protection during electoral contexts: 

1. Strengthen personal data protection guarantees and policies as a key element for the integrity of the electoral process, in particular the principles of necessity, purpose, and proportionality:

• Prohibit the processing of sensitive personal data (such as philosophical beliefs and the labeling of ideological leanings), including inferred data, that reveals or could reveal people's political preferences for the purpose of targeting political content. In electoral contexts, the processing of sensitive personal data is only legitimate when the person has given their consent in advance, explicitly, and with strictly limited and clearly disclosed purposes of use and transfer. 
• Processing must be carried out only on personal data that is strictly necessary for the purpose being pursued. 
• Prohibit adding users to instant messaging groups for political outreach purposes, except in exceptional cases involving lists of political party members or where prior and informed consent has been given by the data subject. 
• Free, specific, and informed consent means that the person is able to make a real choice, set apart from other choices, and does not run any risk of deception, intimidation, coercion, denial of access to products or services, or other significant negative consequences if they do not give their consent. 

2. Political parties, federations, and coalitions must improve the information made available to the general public about their personal data processing activities in electoral contexts, including: 

• The personal data processing policy adopted, in compliance with data protection legislation and electoral legislation, including the measures adopted to prevent breaches of the general protection principles, to record personal data processing operations, to obtain consent appropriately, and to ensure technical and administrative security in data processing; 
• Communication channels where the data subject can obtain information about the processing of their personal data, exercise the rights provided by law, and request to opt out of receiving electronic and instant messages. 
• Information about the profiling they carry out for electoral purposes and about the procurement and use of data-based digital technologies in this context, including for purposes of paid promotion, microtargeting, network analysis, and prediction of voters' reactions or behavior. 

3. Strengthen cooperation mechanisms between the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) and the Superior Electoral Court in order to: 

• Improve communication channels and strengthen joint initiatives to oversee compliance with data protection guarantees in the electoral context, with the publication of periodic enforcement reports. 
• Identify and dismantle coordinated strategies that compromise the integrity of the electoral process and carry out online activities that pretend to be "organic" and citizen-based when they are in fact funded or coordinated by a party, government, or company, such as bot farms, fake personal accounts managed by a single entity, AI avatars and synthetic characters that simulate real voters in order to manipulate public opinion, among others. 
• Within the scope of their powers, require the preparation and publication of a data protection impact assessment in cases involving the use of sensitive personal data or emerging technologies for voter profiling. 

4. Authorities, political parties, communicators, and social media platforms must ensure, as far as possible, that the population has access to adequate and relevant information for electoral decision-making. 

• Political parties, electoral authorities, and data protection authorities must allocate a percentage of their communications budget to warning about the consequences of microtargeting in electoral contexts; and about the use of AI avatars or synthetic voters to simulate support, rejection, outrage, or spontaneous political mobilization. 
• Strengthen alliances with fact-checkers and other relevant communicators, such as civil society organizations, influencers, and others, to identify campaigns that compromise the integrity of the electoral process and to inform the public about such alliances through different channels, including official government channels.
• Systematize the electoral proposals developed by candidates and their electoral platforms according to thematic areas to facilitate comparison between political parties. 
• Agree on strategies between authorities and online platform companies, including social media platforms and chatbots, at the start of electoral periods, so that priority is given to content developed by electoral authorities. 
• Every body, protocol, or policy created that involves authorities or public entities must be communicated in accordance with proactive transparency standards. 

5. Platforms must disable microtargeting tools for political and electoral content during previously established periods. 

6. Authorities, technical actors, academics, civil society, and/or social media platforms must collaborate in creating an algorithmic impact analysis lab that makes it possible to oversee compliance with these recommendations. 

• Produce reports on the results achieved, in particular those that document the existence of microtargeting, the use of personal data for targeting, and exposure to varied content in electoral contexts. 
• Establish strict cybersecurity protocols so that the labs prevent access to real users' private information. 

7. The authorities responsible for overseeing personal data protection and electoral matters must have sufficient functional, economic, and technical autonomy and independence to guarantee the proper exercise of their powers. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted unlawful investigations into dozens of individuals who have documented ICE activities in their communities, social media users who criticized the government, and international students who attended a protest.

A favored tool in these speech chilling investigations are administrative subpoenas sent to technology companies, requesting basic subscriber data about their users. For example, from 2018 to 2020, ICE sent nearly 500 administrative subpoenas to Meta, Google, and Twitter (now X), according to documents obtained by Just Futures Law. In just the second half of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent 21 administrative subpoenas to Reddit, according to its Transparency Report.

While some subpoenas are routine, ICE has been forced to withdraw others after users challenged them in court or companies pushed back. These challenged subpoenas exceeded the agency's statutory authority and violated users' First Amendment rights.

Below is a non-comprehensive list of DHS subpoenas that we gathered going back to 2025, looking at public reporting and court cases. This is likely an undercount. The full scope is hard to pin down because these subpoenas typically only come to light when a user is given notice and challenges them in court, or when a company documents them in a transparency report (so far, only Reddit appears to break out specific numbers on DHS subpoenas). In addition, DHS has been slow to respond to our Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits seeking records that would show how many administrative subpoenas ICE has sent to social media companies since 2025.

If you know of other subpoenas that are not on this list, please reach out to info@eff.org. While the government has abused the subpoena process in other areas, particularly to hospitals, this list focuses on DHS and ICE subpoenas to technology companies for user data. 

DATE ISSUED

(and link to subpoena)

TARGETED COMPANY INDIVIDUAL USER TARGETED  OUTCOME  3/17/25 Facebook  Momodou Taal, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest Withdrawn 3/23/25 Google  Momodou Taal, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest Withdrawn 4/1/25 Google  Amandla Thomas-Johnson, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest Google disclosed data to ICE on 5/8/25 9/4/25 Meta  6 accounts in Southern California that documented immigration activity, including LB_Protest, Long Beach Rapid Response Network, and Stopice.net Withdrawn after court challenge on 11/24/25 9/11/25* Meta (Instagram) Pennsylvania account called "MontCo Community Watch" that documented immigration activity Withdrawn after court challenge on 1/16/26 9/11/25* Meta (Facebook) Pennsylvania account called "MontCo Community Watch" that documented immigration activity Withdrawn after court challenge on 1/16/26 10/30/25 Google  Retired Philadelphia user who emailed criticism to U.S. prosecutor   Withdrawn after court challenge on 2/5/26 2/4/26* Google Social media user who regularly posts criticism of the President Subpoena challenged in Court 2/19/26* Reddit "Tired_Thumb," user who posted about ICE officer Withdraw after court challenge on 3/27/26; replaced with grand jury subpoena 2/27/26* X "podslurp,” who posted publicly available address information about ICE officer Withdrawn May 2026; replaced with grand jury subpoena 3/7/26 PayPal/Venmo "Voices of Racial Justice," a racial justice organization in Minnesota  PayPal/Venmo disclosed data 3/20/26 4/3/26* Google (YouTube) @TheDonLemonShow, GeorgiaFort, @DemocracyNow, and seven other accounts that reported on protest at Minnesota church Google Objected 4/7/26 4/12/26* T-Mobile Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort and others T-Mobile disclosed data on 4/12/26 First half of 2025 Reddit  Reddit account Subpoena withdrawn after questions from Reddit Second half of 2025 Reddit  11 Reddit accounts that posted content "critical of ICE actions" 3 subpoenas withdrawn after Reddit objected

* = denotes summonses issued under 19 U.S.C. 1509, an authority that has been abused in the past, according to DHS's inspector general.

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) build a searchable map of everywhere a driver goes, fed into databases that police, ICE, and private vendors can query after the fact. Networked across a city, ALPRs are purpose-built to track everyone regardless of suspicion. ALPRs are not a surveillance tool that can be made safe with the right policy or feature update—they are irredeemably harmful.

EFF's position is that ALPR mass surveillance—the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion—should not exist. Because it nonetheless does, EFF also urges courts and state legislatures to impose strict, enforceable restrictions, such as warrant requirements and deletion deadlines.

EFF's position is that ALPR mass surveillance—the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion—should not exist. Because it nonetheless does, EFF also urges courts and state legislatures to impose strict, enforceable restrictions, such as warrant requirements and deletion deadlines. EFF applies every tool available to eliminate ALPR surveillance and the harm it enacts.

The Case Against ALPRs

A note about scope: This post addresses ALPR mass surveillance. It does not address the wider universe of automated traffic enforcement (ATE) such as conventional red light and speed cameras that solely ticket a specific violation, without retaining or networking data on uninvolved drivers. But lawmakers and purchasers should guard against efforts by vendors to piggyback on ATE contracts to market ALPR mass surveillance systems.

ALPRs are frequently marketed as a narrow tool for specific purposes, such as recovering stolen vehicles. But in practice, these sensors sweep up data on every driver who passes a camera, and store it in searchable databases. That indiscriminate collection and retention is precisely why ALPR-fed surveillance systems can be easily weaponized against immigrants, political dissidents, and other targeted communities as ICE and other federal agencies escalate their assault on civil liberties. There is no configuration of an ALPR network that eliminates this risk, because the risk is the mass surveillance itself, not a misuse of it.

Of course, ALPRs cause other predictable harms. Innocent drivers are recurringly arrested and menaced by police because of ALPR errors. Officers regularly abuse ALPR systems to stalk past and potential romantic partners. Creating any database of personal information—including ALPR surveillance databases—inherently creates risk of data theft and subsequent harm to data subjects. And ALPR surveillance of protests and targeting of activists chill participation in First Amendment-protected dissent. But even if these downstream harms could all be prevented (and they likely can’t), ALPRs would remain an intolerable form of mass surveillance.

Fighting on Every Front to Eliminate ALPR Surveillance

At the city level, EFF works with community members and decision makers to outright refuse ALPR purchasing. ALPRs are not inevitable. The same decision mechanisms used to facilitate runaway surveillance purchasing in U.S. localities can be turned against these systems to dismantle them.

EFF also pushes state legislatures to establish strict state-level limits on ALPR surveillance, such as data-deletion rules and use restrictions. Building such constraints into statute can mitigate the harms of existing ALPR systems.

In courts across the country, EFF files amicus briefs arguing that warrantless police searches of ALPR databases violate the Fourth Amendment. In California state court, EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are suing on behalf of two community groups, SIREN and CAIR-CA, arguing that the San Jose Police Department's practice of letting officers search stored plate data—to the tune of over 100,000 times a year—without a warrant violates the California Constitution. We’ve also sued to block California law enforcement from sharing ALPR data with federal and out-of-state agencies, in violation of a California statute.

A big part of EFF’s work is exposing the harms of ALPR surveillance. Our investigative team tirelessly collects information about how law enforcement uses ALPRs with public records requests, sues to enforce such requests, and publishes reports about them. We’ve also successfully lobbied for a State Auditor investigation of law enforcement’s use of ALPRs.

Coordinated Action Against Mass Surveillance

EFF practices integrated advocacy because all of these tools work best together. City refusals, statehouse restrictions, impact litigation, and investigative activism are different levers EFF pulls toward the same end: eliminating ALPR surveillance, and building the durable public power needed to keep it off our streets. A council vote against a Flock contract and a warrant argument in Santa Clara County Superior Court are both, at their core, the same fight: rejecting mass surveillance infrastructure outright, and using every venue available to eliminate its harmful presence and consequences.

Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users' privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests. And the data minimization and security measures don’t keep states from using data collected under the agreement for other law enforcement purposes – which could include things like criminal investigations of abortions or gender-affirming care.