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Article URL: https://github.com/phyolim/outerloop

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837653

Points: 1

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Article URL: https://www.foiclinical.com/posts/alert-cyclospora-cayetanensis-multistate-outbreak-with-midwest-epicenter/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837638

Points: 3

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Good, dumb TVs, those without a web connection, are nearly impossible to find. But you can minimize companies getting your data and block ads.

Article URL: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/the-extraordinary-life-and-quiet-death-of-the-worlds-largest-iceberg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837591

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

From the sudden retirement of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to the unstoppable advance of "apex agentic adversaries," get a front-row seat to the unfolding security revolution and its massive real-world stakes.

• Why Fable5's re-release has disappointed.
• Opera becomes the first browser to offer "Paste Protect."
• Microsoft BlueHammer exploit is "hammering" systems.
• Industry legend (TCP creator) Vint Cerf on AI.
• Chrome turns 150 with too many fixes to load.
• Google fails to sidestep a $4.67 billion EU fine.
• One last (we can hope) Chat Control vote next week.
• AirDrop & Android Quick Share are exploitable.
• How to bypass Claude's and ChatGPT's guardrails.
• My own Sunday spin with SpinRite.
• A legendary hacker uses AI on a widespread library

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1086-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Sponsors:

• blackhat.com/us-26 and use code TWIT
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This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series. The second part sets out recommendations for companies and policymakers.

Six years ago—one month into a global pandemic—we argued that the automated moderation processes many platforms were rapidly adopting should be highly transparent, easily appealable, and temporary. We warned that "protocols adopted in times of crisis often persist when the crisis is over."

That warning proved prescient. The use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify, flag, and moderate content has become the new norm—a permanent feature of how platforms govern speech online. In this two part series, we’re take stock of this new norm, and considering what platforms can and should do to ensure that AI serves online expression rather than stifling it.

A brief history of automated content moderation

From spam filtering and keyword blacklists to the hash-matching technologies used to identify child sexual abuse material and terrorist content, automated technologies have been used in commercial content moderation for many years. While these tools have long posed risks to freedom of expression, their use was, for quite some time, relatively limited in scope.

Then, in 2017, a blog post published by Facebook (now Meta) described the company's "fairly recent" use of artificial intelligence to identify, classify, and remove violent extremist content. At the same time, Facebook emphasized caution, noting that it did not want to suggest there was "any easy technical fix."

Just one year later, Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the U.S. Senate's Commerce and Judiciary Committees and disclosed that "99 percent of the ISIS and Al Qaida content" removed by Facebook was flagged by AI "before any human sees it." He also stated that Facebook was "developing A.I. tools that can identify certain classes of bad activity proactively and flag it for our team at Facebook." At the time, we raised concerns about the ethical implications of using AI in this manner.

Then came 2020. The sudden reduction of the human moderation workforce, combined with a dramatic increase in social media use—and with it, a surge in misinformation—created the perfect conditions for platforms to expand their reliance on AI-driven moderation. It quickly became apparent that companies'—and particularly Meta's—approach to moderation during the pandemic represented a backslide in transparency, freedom of expression, and access to remedy. The increased reliance on automation was a significant factor.

The costs and benefits of AI content moderation

We knew in 2020 that the use of AI to moderate content would present problems for online freedom of expression. Today, those problems are well-documented. A 2025 joint declaration by special rapporteurs and representatives of the United Nations (UN), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Organization of American States (OAS), and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) states:

“The use of AI content moderation can lead to over-removal, discrimination and censorship. Reliance on inherently biased datasets and opaque training processes can amplify pre-existing inequalities, risking homogenisation of expression, and erasure of linguistic and cultural diversity.”

EFF and many of our allies have documented these impacts. For example, our 2019 paper co-authored with Witness and Syrian Archive examined the impact of extremist content regulations—and their implementation through automation and AI—on human rights documentation. A 2020 report from Human Rights Watch highlighted the consequences of these removals, noting: "There is no way of knowing how much potential evidence of serious crimes is disappearing without anyone's knowledge."

The Center for Democracy and Technology's recent series on content moderation in the Global South demonstrates persistent inequities in content moderation of four “low-resource” languages—so-called because the relative scarcity of training data makes it more difficult to develop equitable and accurate AI models for them. 

Content moderation often disproportionately impacts vulnerable and historically marginalized groups, and AI content moderation is no different. GLAAD recognizes the role AI plays in scaling content moderation but notes that “when moderation systems lack nuance, transparency, and human oversight, they can fail to curb harassment and wrongly suppress legitimate LGBTQ content.”

These failures are not incidental. They are a predictable consequence of deploying automated systems to make complex judgments about language, culture, context, and identity at scale.

All of that said, automated content moderation can offer important benefits. The primary one: helping to spare human content moderators who must review content that varies from whimsical to horrific, often for little pay and with devastating mental health consequences. Outsourcing this work to the bots can offer some relief—though it’s worth noting that the humans hired to train the AI models face a similar dynamic.

In addition, AI models could potentially be trained over time to be more precise, accurate, and dynamic, helping to mitigate over-censorship and disinformation. The jury is still out on whether this potential will be realized; what we do know is that new approaches to the persistent problem of over and under-enforcement are desperately needed.

Automated moderation is no longer an experiment

Getting the balance between real costs and potential benefits depends a lot on the details: how automated systems are designed, trained, implemented, and audited.  

Despite advances in the sophistication and scale of automated moderation systems, many of the transparency, accountability, and due process safeguards advocated by civil society, researchers, and human rights experts have yet to be fully realized. At the same time, automated systems have become increasingly central to how platforms enforce their rules and govern online speech.

The question today is not whether companies will use AI to moderate content, but under what conditions they should do so. And now as ever, the answer is not that the public should just trust that platforms’ deployment of increasingly powerful systems will serve, rather than inhibit online expression. In fact, as automated systems become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in platform governance, the need for transparency and accountability becomes more urgent. 

This is part 1 of a 2-part series. You can read the second part here.

In the global race to build and dominate the AI industry, it can sure seem like the interests of ordinary people sit last on the agenda. It's just the opposite for EFF. While companies furiously jam AI tools into their veins and your eyeballs, EFF’s technologists, activists, and attorneys have been meticulously cutting through the hype to ensure AI can serve your privacy and free expression. Technology has leaned into a new era, and this summer you can help EFF fight for the people.

JOIN EFF

Over the next two weeks, we’re encouraging you to support the cause as an EFF member for as little as $10 each month. You can get great member swag every year like our privacy puffy stickers, Claw Back t-shirt, and Privacy Badger Crewneck.

Fight mass surveillance! Pictured: Claw Back member t-shirt and Privacy Badger Crewneck.

AI tools—beyond their marketing fluff—demonstrate both incredible potential and real danger. With the support of members around the world, EFF detangles the possibilities from the anxieties and threats with the care and nuance it deserves. In recent months, EFF:

• Mobilized people against the GUARD Act, which would require problematic age verifications systems for AI companions.
• Joined civil society partners to call out a General Services Administration proposal that would make AI tools less safe and less useful.
• Sued for answers under the Freedom of Information Act to uncover how the government is using AI to evaluate requests for medical care.
• Testified before the U.S. Congress Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection.

The scope of AI, both the good and the bad, multiplies every day. If we want the AI-powered benefits of efficiency, scientific discovery, and greater accessibility to knowledge, then we also need strong protections against surveillance, harms to creativity and innovation online, perpetuating systemic bias, and privacy violations now.

With AI taking over the public consciousness, you can be assured that EFF will never stop advocating for you. Together, we can ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people.

Join EFF

____________________

EFF is a member-supported U.S. 501(c)(3) organization. We've received top ratings from the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator since 2013! Your donation is tax-deductible as allowed by law.

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A. 

You Asked: Is there a way for me to wipe data about me online that could point to my queer identity?

EFF’s Answer: You cannot protect everything all the time, but there are ways to wipe information about yourself online. 

Most information available about you online will typically be found in two places:

1. The site where you voluntarily posted the data, such as your pictures and videos on social media, comments in user reviews and forums, and even classified postings for items you’ve sold.
2. A data broker. These companies collect personal information, repackage it, and sell it to the highest bidders. This information often includes your address, phone number, details about your family members, and more. 

So you might not want this information out there, especially if it points to your queer identity. 

The best time to take steps to protect yourself is before anything bad happens, because once this information is in the hands of bad actors you have fewer options.

To see what information people might find about you online, you can look for it for yourself. This is as simple as opening up a search engine and entering your name, nickname, handle, avatar and seeing what comes up. It can also be worth searching for your address, phone number, and email addresses to check what's out there.

Do this in a private browsing window or a separate browser than the one you normally use to ensure you’re not logged into any accounts that might skew the results, like a Google account. 

It’s also best to try to make a lot of your information hard to find in the first place—and we’ve got you covered on how to do this. 

1. Establish a strong security baseline: use unique passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and set up two-factor authentication for your online accounts to add an extra layer of protection when logging into your accounts.
2. Add our install-and-forget tracker blocking tool, Privacy Badger, which lets you browse in peace and stops the sorts of web trackers that compile information about your habits for advertising purposes and for data brokers.
3. Remove your advertising ID on your phone to help prevent some tracking there, too (directions for Android or iPhone). This way less information about you is available for purchase, making it harder for corporations to profit from your online activities.
4. Ask data brokers to delete your personal data. You might spend the time doing it yourself. If you’re in California, you can use the Privacy Protection Agency’s tool for this. You also might use professional services like EasyOptOuts and Optery to help minimize the information available about you online from data brokers and similar sources.
5. You can remove yourself from Google results by heading to the “Results about you” page, then entering your information. Once set up, you’ll get notifications if some new types of information about you appear in Google Search. Just remember that this will not remove the information from the internet, it just won’t show up in Google’s search.

You also should consider auditing your digital footprint on public-facing social media and forums. Different people have different tolerance for risk when it comes to announcing who we are and what we are doing in these online spaces. You can make a list of every social media or forum account you’ve had over the years, and review the public-facing content about you, including your name, contact information like email addresses or phone numbers, and pictures that might show your home or workplace. You can also review the account settings to ensure you’re comfortable with the privacy options and that you’ve got strong login credentials.

For more in depth advice check out our Surveillance Self Defense guide on managing your digital footprint.

X Corp. should not be able to escape privacy compliance because it changed its name. 

On May 15, X Corp. filed a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set aside or modify an order issued in 2022 requiring the company to report regularly to the FTC for its violations of user data. The order or “consent decree” is a result of misleading the platforms’ 140 million users by using private information given to secure accounts, like phone numbers and email addresses, for targeted advertising. It also fined the company $150 million for the infraction. As part of an open comments period, EFF and allies including Demand Progress Education Fund (DPEF), National Consumers League (NCL) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) call on the FTC to reject this petition.

The 2022 order was a renewal of an order stemming from a previous violation. Back in 2011, Twitter (now X) reached a settlement with the FTC after the regulator found Twitter had failed to secure users’ personal information, resulting in exposure of that data to hackers. The settlement banned the company from misrepresenting its data protection measures, required it to set up safeguards on user data, and regularly report its security posture for twenty years. The renewal updated the expiration of X’s obligations to 2042, but if the FTC accepts X's petition, it would end much sooner.

In arguing to set aside the order, X remarks that since the order in 2011 it has “built an entirely new privacy and information security program staffed by new personnel operating under new leadership with a … philosophy grounded on the importance of privacy and information security.” 

These sweeping assurances that corporate restructuring led to a fundamental change in X’s policy and practices around user data should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, given evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s quiet rollout integrated its AI model Grok with the platform in 2024, trained (without meaningful consent) on X user data. The company was also subject to a massive data breach in 2025. Even if a rotation of leadership led to prioritizing privacy and information security, our letter highlights that this would not be sufficient grounds to remove the order, “because the FTC orders bind the corporate entity. Those obligations do not dissolve when the employees who negotiated or administered it depart.”

X argues that its entry into the AI space should be reason not to continue the oversight, claiming that “terminating the Order is critical to advancing American leadership in artificial intelligence.” Here again, broad-stroke claims that the guardrails in place “[diverts] engineering resources from innovation to compliance paperwork” ignores the dangers that AI introduces to user data. Far from being a reason to waive the order, clever attacks on models trained on user data has the ability to supercharge the types of secondary use violations that led to the 2022 order renewal. After all, an entire art has been developed around engineering LLM prompts to reveal the data a model was originally trained on.

Our response to X’s petition debunks many claims the company uses in its arguments. For example, there’s little evidence the order placed an undue financial burden on X. In our letter, we note that the compliance cost is merely “a rounding error against the $200 billion valuation of X Corp. following the xAI merger.”

Strong safeguards on our information require eagle-eyed oversight when that data is abused and misused for profiteering ventures. X’s actions not only showed us this in the past, but continue to do so in the present day. We and our civil society partners urge the FTC to take the clear, sensible path and reject X’s petition.

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A. 

You Asked: I live in the UK, and we have age verification now on a bunch of websites (including Reddit) and now on iPhones. Can you explain what sort of data companies are actually collecting when they check for age and whether there are any real threats to my safety? 

EFF’s Answer: Age verification is a process where a website or service checks your age to determine whether a user is over a certain age, in the UK this age is 18. 

As of July 2025, all platforms in the UK that host content considered by the UK government and the country’s telecommunications regulator Ofcom to be harmful are legally obligated to check that their users are over the age of 18. If not, users cannot access the content. 

There are various privacy implications for data sharing with age verification. Unfortunately, because services may use different methods to verify users’ ages, you’ll usually have to do a little digging to learn how each provider you have verifies their users, and consider what information might be harmful to your personal safety: 

• The data itself: What info does each method require users to disclose?
• Access: Who can see the data during the course of the verification process? Does anything other than the age result leave your phone or device? Is the provider told your date of birth, or just if you’re over 18? Which third party services see the information you send?
• Retention: Who will hold onto that data after the verification process, and for how long? Sometimes it’s deleted immediately. Sometimes it hangs around forever, waiting for a data breach.
• Audits: How sure are we that the provider’s stated claims around data access and retention will happen in practice? For example, are there external audits confirming that data is not accidentally leaked to another site along the way? Ideally these will be in-depth, security-focused audits by specialized auditors like NCC Group or Trail of Bits, instead of audits that merely certify adherence to standards. 
• Visibility: Who will be aware that you’re attempting to verify your age, and will a third party provider know which platform you’re trying to verify for? Will they hang onto that data to build a profile of you?

Last year, Ofcom outlined a number of methods for online services and platforms to check users' ages. Let's look at some methods in more detail. 

Facial Age Estimation 

First up we have facial age estimation, where you show your face via photo or video, and a technology provided by a company like Yoti or Persona analyses it to estimate your age. Most of these third-party verification services upload your photo to their servers during this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been estimated, the facial image is immediately and permanently deleted.” 

You might not want to use facial age estimation if you’re worried about a current picture of your face accidentally leaking—for example, if elements in the background of your selfie might reveal your current location. Some services like k-ID and Private ID will analyse your face directly on the device, so only the age result will leave your phone. 

If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check system, be sure to snap your selfie without anything in the background that you'd be concerned with identifying your location or embarrassing you, in case the image leaks. 

Photo-ID Matching

Photo-ID matching checks whether your photo matches a document that confirms your identity, such as a driving license or passport. This is usually considered the most sensitive, since your ID has quite a bit of information on you. For example, if you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time, these are compared to confirm they match. Like with facial age estimation services, you’ll usually be sent to a third-party provider, such as Yoti or Incode. You’d hope that they’d delete the data immediately, but that’s not always the case. Incode for example doesn’t automatically delete the data you give it once the process is complete; though if you’re reaching them through TikTok, TikTok does claim to “start the process to delete the information you submitted,” which should include telling Incode to delete your data once the process is done. 

If you want to be sure, you can ask Incode to delete that data yourself. But you’re relying on a service you don’t generally have a choice about doing the right thing, and we’ve already seen how that can fail. A previous system that Discord used to verify age had you send a picture to their general help forum, where all of the IDs sat around forever, until they got exposed in a massive data breach. Discord no longer uses that system to verify users’ ages. So, it might be fine, but unless you look into the exact company and all their practices, it’s hard to know. You can check out EFF’s guide for a few of the major platforms. 

Open Banking

Next is open banking, where you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the online service. The user's full date of birth is not shared. Credit card age checks are also used for pornography services, where you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card in the UK, this shows you are over 18 and can therefore access a service.

Email Verification 

Email-based age estimation is also quite prevalent, where users provide an email address, and a third party technology analyses other online services where it has been used—such as banking or utility providers—to estimate your age. That third party will aggregate some data on you in the process, but the only new information they’ll find out is that you want to verify your age using a particular email address.  

Mobile Operator Checks

Mobile network operator age checks give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18. 

There is no perfect, privacy protecting verification service

Unfortunately, none of these verification options are perfect in terms of protecting information, especially when this is compounded by the additional risks that LGBTQ+ people face with data sharing. The data can reveal someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status that can be used by employers, governments, family members, scammers, or bad actors to inflict harassment, discrimination, arrest, or violence. 

There is still no widely available way to verify age online without compromising privacy—but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture. These are just a few of the reasons that EFF is against age-gating mandates and is working to stop and overturn them in the UK and around the world.

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois governor to veto the measure. 

Under this new regime, digital platforms are forced to collect and share users' ages to platforms and websites. It also strips away basic, everyday features like personalized content feeds and overnight notifications for young people unless they can secure "verifiable parental consent."

H.B. 5511 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. That’s why we sent a letter to formally urge Governor J.B. Pritzker to veto the bill.

Much of H.B. 5511 is modeled after controversial legislation passed in California (A.B. 1043) and New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, both of which have already drawn immense blowback from open-source communities, privacy advocates, and tech stakeholders. For Illinois to copy this suspect age-bracketing regime before either law has even gone into effect, been tested in court, or proven functional is premature, economically risky, and legally wasteful.

H.B. 5511 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. That’s why we sent a letter to formally urge Governor J.B. Pritzker to veto the bill. Far from protecting children, the bill will effectively dismantle online anonymity, jeopardize data security, and severely restrict access to constitutionally protected speech for young people and adults alike. Finally, these schemes cut off vital lifelines for vulnerable youth in non-traditional families and pose an existential threat to the open-source ecosystem that underpins the modern internet.

For a deeper look at the constitutional, policy, and technological concerns with H.B. 5511, you can read our full letter here. 

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.  

The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic devices of people who happen to be in the vicinity of a crime. EFF had joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in filing an amicus brief in the case. 

JOIN EFF

The decision in Chatrie is important: It is the first digital surveillance decision by the Court since its landmark 2018 ruling Carpenter v. United States, which involved prolonged tracking of people’s movements using cell phone location data. The new case expands that ruling by confirming that even shorter-term surveillance of location data can constitute a search because it can still reveal “private matters,” including “a wealth of detail about a person’s familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”  

The case is also important because the Court also recognized the records generated by the apps on a user’s phone—records we necessarily share with third-party tech company—are a user’s “own” and require Fourth Amendment protection. This is true, regardless of whether those records are “emails, documents, photographs, [ ] calendars” or location data. This will likely have broad implications for data generated by other apps on our phones, even if we click “agree” to sharing that data with third-party tech companies.  

Geofence warrants don’t name a suspect or a specific individual or device the way typical warrants do. Instead, they compel companies—almost always Google—to provide information on every electronic device in a given area during a given time period. This creates a high risk of suspicion falling on innocent people and can reveal sensitive and private information about where individuals have traveled in the past. 

Geofence warrants are the digital equivalent of police going person to person, home to home, without suspicion that any device holder has a connection to a crime. This turns innocent bystanders into suspects, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

In Chatrie, a 2019 geofence warrant compelled Google to search the accounts of all its hundreds of millions of users to see if any one of them was within a radius police drew around a Northern Virginia crime scene. This area amounted to several football fields in size and encompassed numerous homes, businesses, and a church. 

A federal district court in Virginia in 2022 held that the geofence warrant plainly violated  the Fourth Amendment. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, the court said. The judge noted the government lacked particularized probable cause as to every individual within the geofence, which swept up innocent people and covered over 70,000 square meters in a busy area. 

The decision set an important precedent in finding the warrant overbroad and unconstitutional and was later followed by a 2024 federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” However, the Chatrie lower court allowed the government to use the evidence it obtained because it relied on the warrant in “good faith.” A much divided en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2025 affirmed this “good faith” finding in the lower court’s opinion. 

Google in 2023 announced changes to how it stores location data, with the effect of eventually making it impossible for the company to respond to geofence warrants. Since July 2025, mass geofence searches of Google users’ location data have not been possible.  

However, Google is not the only company collecting location data, nor the only way for police to access mass amounts of data on people with no connection to a crime. As we’ve written about extensively, data brokers collect and aggregate location data from many different apps on our phones and provide that data to police. And police can use “cell tower dump” warrants to get access to data on everyone within range of specific cell towers. Suspicionless searches like these drag a net through vast swaths of information in hopes of identifying previously unknown suspects—ensnaring innocent bystanders along the way. 

Chatrie could have wide-ranging implications beyond location data as well. The Supreme Court affirmed that app data is subject to the Fourth Amendment, because users “reasonably view” it as their own and reasonably expect it “to be shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’ of the government.” Justice Gorsuch, in an opinion concurring in the judgment, called location data a user’s “personal property,” no different from myriad other “effects” explicitly protected by the text of the Fourth Amendment.  As the Court concluded, “the point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them,” so the Fourth Amendment has to protect more than just location data generated by the act of carrying the phone itself. 

The Court ultimately did not decide whether the particular warrant at issue in Chatrie was “reasonable” or whether the “good faith” doctrine applied. The case now heads back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to address these questions.  

But regardless of how the Fourth Circuit rules on remand, this Chatrie opinion will shape how lower courts address police access to location and other data going forward. We look forward to citing Chatrie to press future courts to recognize broad Fourth Amendment protections for user data.

This Pride month, we’re calling on the dating app Grindr to prioritize LGBTQ+ user safety by making privacy the default across its platform. That means no more sharing personal data with advertisers or training AI on private information without users’ opt-in consent.

Grindr is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community; and for queer people, privacy violations can have life-altering consequences. Information that reveals someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status can be used by employers, governments, family members, scammers, or bad actors to inflict harassment, discrimination, arrest, or violence. For example, data from Grindr and other gay dating apps was sold by data brokers and used to 'out' (the act of disclosing someone's sexual orientation without permission) a gay priest in 2021. 

Despite being the world's most popular gay dating app, Grindr has repeatedly mishandled users' sensitive data. Grindr has been caught sharing users' HIV status and precise location with advertisers without obtaining valid consent, resulting in reprimands and fines in several countries. Its former Chief Privacy Officer even sued, alleging the company fired him for raising concerns about Grindr prioritizing “profit over privacy."

Grindr ended several of its most egregious data sharing practices after they were exposed. But more changes are needed if Grindr wants to earn back trust and prove its commitment to users’ privacy and safety. This Pride month, we’re calling on Grindr to make privacy the default and ensure the immediate implementation of two changes to better protect its users:

Opt Users Out of Behavioral Advertising by Default

Grindr currently allows users to opt out of behavioral advertising, but that protection is not enabled automatically (except in some unspecified regions). As we’ve long warned, behavioral advertising relies on the collection and sharing of personal data across a vast network of advertisers, intermediaries, and data brokers. Once information enters this ecosystem, users have little control over where it goes or how it is used: people’s most private and intimate information can be aggregated, sold, and combined with information from other sources to create detailed personal profiles.

By default, Grindr appears to share data with numerous advertising and tracking companies. Using TrackerControl, an app developed by privacy researcher Konrad Kollnig, we recorded Grindr contacting 20 third-party tracking domains during 15 minutes of app activity (see Grindr_TrackerControl_06-23-2026.csv for exported results). TrackerControl observed Grindr contacting Big Tech companies and ad-tech intermediaries, many of which have faced significant legal scrutiny for privacy violations. Several of these companies auction off ad space through a process called “real-time bidding,” which can expose user data to hundreds of additional companies and be exploited by data brokers. 

The dangers of Grindr’s default settings exposing users’ personal data to this ecosystem are not hypothetical. Between approximately 2017 to 2020, a location data broker collected the precise movements of millions of Grindr users from digital advertising networks and made them available for sale. The commercially available data was allegedly so detailed that, in some cases, it could be used to infer romantic encounters between specific Grindr users. 

Although Grindr has stated that it no longer shares precise location data or profile information with advertisers, it acknowledges sharing other personal data, including mobile advertising identifiers (MAIDs)—unique, persistent device IDs that allow advertising companies and data brokers to connect data about the same individual across different sources. MAIDs are not anonymous, and an entire industry exists to link them to more directly identifying information, like emails and phone numbers. According to Grindr’s privacy policy, companies receiving users’ MAIDs “are aware that such data is being transmitted from Grindr,” which could expose a users’ sexuality to the advertising and data broker ecosystem.

Opt Users Out of AI Training on Personal Data by Default

Grindr should stop training its AI models on users’ personal data without opt-in consent. 

Grindr has been investing heavily in AI features as its CEO strives to make Grindr an “AI-first business.” New AI features include a wingman chatbot, profile recommendations based on users’ inferred “type”, summaries of previous interactions with other users, and AI-generated insights about other profiles (like responsiveness, typical online hours, and engagement patterns). By default, Grindr uses its users’ personal data to train the AI models behind these features.

Grindr claims to never use sensitive health information for AI training and requires users to opt-in to AI training on “special-category” data, which includes chat content and precise location. But Grindr automatically enrolls users in AI training on other private information, including profile photos, age, taps, and display names. Users must navigate several levels of Grindr settings to prevent these personal details from being used to train Grindr’s AI.

AI systems trained on personal data create new privacy risks, including the possibility that personal information may be retained, reproduced, or exposed in unexpected ways. For example, researchers have been able to extract training data from AI systems like ChatGPT.

Beyond AI training, Grindr enables AI-powered features by default and allows both “special-category” data and other personal information to be processed by those features. Even users without access to premium-subscription AI features could have their data automatically used to power those features for other users. “Behavior-based profile insights” (pictured below) could expose information that users would never choose to share publicly, like the types of people they interact with on Grindr, their typical online hours, and how often they initiate conversation with other users.

Image of the “Profile Insights” feature from a Grindr blogpost promoting its premium, AI-first subscription

Regardless of whether new AI features leak private information, users deserve meaningful control over how their personal data is used and by whom. Grindr notifies users that their personal information may be used to train AI and that they can opt out on a separate settings page, but this notice does not specify the type of data used (i.e. profile photos, taps) and it is unlikely that people carefully read or understand it. Closing the notice or clicking its only button (which is “Proceed”) maintains Grindr’s default of using personal information for AI training. To respect users’ autonomy, Grindr should require opt-in consent before training AI models on personal data.

Notice displayed in the Grindr app about the use of personal data for new AI features

Celebrate Pride by Demanding Better Privacy

Grindr must immediately stop prioritizing profits over users’ safety. The ability to opt-out is not an acceptable substitute for opt-in consent, especially given the added risks of data sharing for LGBTQ+ users. Defaults matter—studies show that most people cannot or do not change the default settings of technologies they use.

If Grindr wants to back up its claim that it “takes user privacy very seriously,” it should make privacy the default across its platform, rather than something users need to go through complicated processes to opt in to. 

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.

What’s RSS and How Do I Use It?

RSS has been around since 1999, but its real publicity glow-up came from Google Reader, a newsreader service that Google offered between 2005 and 2013. Despite the alarm bells people rang at the time, the death of Google Reader wasn’t the death of RSS, and many replacements have come and gone over the years.

RSS may seem complicated, but it boils down to one general concept: when websites publish new content, like news articles, blog entries, webcomics, videos, or podcasts, that content gets added to an RSS feed, where your RSS reader (aka newsreader, feed reader, or aggregator) will show you that content in chronological order. If you’ve ever used a podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify to follow different podcasts, you’ve used RSS. You can think of it like an internet-wide “follow” button, where you can track the contents of websites, users, and more.

People talk about RSS like it’s a power user’s secret trick to making the internet more usable, but the real secret is that it’s not that hard to set up and use. Here’s what you need to do:

• Find an RSS reader: RSS readers come in many forms. Feedly, NewsBlur, or The Old Reader, are web-based, but have their own apps (though they also support third-party apps). Others, like NetNewsWire, are app-based, and support either using a web-based RSS reader like Feedly, or a local file. Some live in browsers or web extensions. There’s an abundance of choice in RSS readers, and part of the fun is finding one that best accomplishes what you want to do. But don’t worry about finding the right RSS reader right away. One of the many magic tricks of RSS is that it is platform agnostic, and nearly every RSS reader—whether it's a website or an app, supports importing and exporting a list of the sites you subscribe to. This means you can change RSS readers in a couple minutes. If you need some help finding an RSS reader, Wired, The Verge, and Privacy Guides all have useful roundups. 
• Collect your feeds: As for adding websites to your feeds, the process is straightforward. Most RSS readers are designed to help find the feed for a site for you, so you don’t need to go hunting down a special link. Just drop the URL of what you want to follow in your reader, and if an RSS feed exists, it should be able to find it. If not, some sites, including ours (and our current podcast, EFFector as well as our last series, How to Fix the Internet), provide direct links to our RSS feeds.
• Sort, filter, and build your feed: Adding a bunch of new feeds can be overwhelming, particularly for news sites. RSS readers typically include folders, which let you group similar feeds together and can be great for lifting up low-traffic updates you don’t want to miss. Your reader may also have different filters, like the option to block any article that contains “sponsored post.” 

RSS Is the Best Way to Follow the News

It can be very difficult to follow the news, whether that means politics, tech policy, or your hobbies. Solutions like Google News or Apple News have tried to make this simpler, but many find that their algorithmic feeds are as often a source of frustration and annoyance as they are genuinely useful. And no matter how often you tap on news stories that matter to you from publications you respect, there may always be stories that refuse to bubble up.

RSS can make reading the news much easier, reliable, and more private. The vast majority of news sites have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, and many, including CNN, The New York Times, BBC, Wired, Politico, and many others, offer RSS for specific sections or special feeds that include the full text of articles for subscribers, so you aren’t just pummeled with a firehose of news all day long (we’ll get to a tip below in the next section that tackles this problem if they don’t have separate feeds, though). In many cases, you can read articles right in your RSS reader, never being forced to engage with wonky comments sections or poor design choices on websites.

Of course, the news isn’t just general news sites, it also includes hobbyist or more niche sites, local news offerings, and blogs. Most of these sorts of websites also offer RSS feeds, as do newsletter platforms like Substack or Ghost. 

RSS Offers One Way to Fix Some Social Feeds

Decentralized social media like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, use RSS for user feeds, so you can follow your friend’s posts on Bluesky or Mastodon without actually having an account on either. This can be especially helpful for news sources, too—where you likely wouldn’t want to subscribe to a feed of everything a national news organization publishes because that would include dozens if not hundreds of stories a day, you can instead subscribe to their social media posts, which often get you the most breaking or important news.

The internet is more than just Facebook.

Some legacy social media works with RSS, too, including YouTube, Reddit (though that is currently at risk), and Tumblr. But others, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, wall off posts behind account requirements that seem to pop up if you simply look at an account page for too long, let alone come in from an RSS feed. These walled gardens prevent information from getting out there, which ranges from annoying, like when your favorite local brewery only posts their food truck schedule on Instagram, to dangerous, like when local public services only post to a Facebook page.

The internet is more than just Facebook. It’s more than Mastodon or Bluesky, too. It’s a decentralized smorgasbord of websites, tools, feeds, newsletters, social profiles, and more, and treating it as such will help us wrangle the information we want and trust. 

Other Surprising Places You’ll Find RSS Feeds

When in doubt, try copying and pasting the URL for a site into your RSS reader of choice, you might be surprised to find a feed that proves useful to you. Many places on the internet may offer RSS feeds without you even realizing it. For example, if you want to keep an eye on an artist’s prints that you like, but you don’t have Instagram where they usually post, you might be able to subscribe to their webstore, as some shopping platforms, like Big Cartel, create XML feeds that some RSS readers can read. And for something even more tweakable, even Google Alerts can be turned into RSS feeds.

RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around.

If you prefer to track policy over products, then you’ll be happy to know that government sites often support RSS, including most U.S. government sites, many of which break them into different sections like the U.S. Department of State’s various feeds. Many local governments or other public services, like fire departments may offer the same. Some universities (and university newspapers) also sometimes offer some RSS feeds. 

And even if a website doesn’t have an RSS feed, there are workarounds from tools like RSSHub, RSS-Bridge, and RSS.app that require varying levels of technical expertise or a willingness to pay subscription fees.

RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around. RSS has come in and out of fashion, been declared dead, and has come back, every time. Open systems are the best way forward to a free, equitable internet, and the resilience and continued reinvention of RSS has shown just how creative the web community can be with open protocols.

Correction: clarified that Big Cartel creates an XML file, not an RSS feed.

Posted by Eric Lynch, Product Manager, Android and Dom Elliott, Group Product Manager, Google Play

Modern digital security is at a turning point. We are on the threshold of using quantum computers to solve "impossible" problems in drug discovery, materials science, and energy—tasks that even the most powerful classical supercomputers cannot handle. However, the same unique ability to consider different options simultaneously also allows these machines to bypass our current digital locks. This puts the public-key cryptography we’ve relied on for decades at risk, potentially compromising everything from bank transfers to trade secrets. To secure our future, it is vital to adopt the new Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standards National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is urging before large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers become a reality.

To stay ahead of the curve, the technology industry must undertake a proactive, multi-year migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). We have been preparing for a post-quantum world since 2016, conducting pioneering experiments with post-quantum cryptography, rolling out post-quantum capabilities in our products, and sharing our expertise through threat models and technical papers. For Android, the objective extends beyond patching individual applications or transport protocols. The imperative is to ensure that the entire platform architecture is resilient for the decades to come.

We are beginning tests of PQC enhancements starting in the next Android 17 beta, followed by general availability in the Android 17 production release. This deployment introduces a comprehensive architectural upgrade that is being rolled out across the operating system. By integrating the recently finalized NIST PQC standards deep into the platform, we’re establishing a new, quantum-resistant chain of trust. This chain of trust secures the platform continuously—from the moment the OS powers on, to the execution of applications distributed globally. Android is swapping today’s digital locks for advanced encryption to help enhance the security of every app you download—no matter how powerful future supercomputers get.

Securing the foundation: Verified boot and hardware trust

Security on any computing device begins when the hardware starts; if the underlying operating system is compromised, all subsequent software protections fail. As quantum computing advances, adversaries could potentially forge digital signatures to bypass these foundational integrity checks. To secure the platform against this looming threat, Android 17 introduces two major post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) upgrades:

1. Upgrading Android Verified Boot (AVB): The AVB library is integrating the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA). This provides quantum-resistant digital signatures, ensuring the software loaded during the boot sequence remains highly resistant to unauthorized modification.
2. Migrating Remote Attestation: Android 17 begins the transition of Remote Attestation to a fully PQC-compliant architecture under the current standards. By updating KeyMint's certificate chains to support quantum-resistant algorithms, devices can securely prove their state to relying parties, maintaining trust in a post-quantum environment.

Empowering developers: Android Keystore updates

Protecting the underlying operating system is only the first layer of defense; developers must be equipped with the cryptographic primitives necessary to leverage PQC keys and establish robust identity verification.

Implementing lattice-based cryptography, which requires significantly larger key sizes and memory footprints than classical elliptic curve cryptography, within the severely resource-constrained Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), represents a major engineering achievement. This capability is designed to support the hardware roots of trust and can now generate and verify post-quantum signatures.

Building on this hardware foundation, Android 17 updates Android Keystore to natively support ML-DSA. This allows applications to leverage quantum-safe signatures entirely within the device’s secure hardware, isolating sensitive key material from the main operating system. The SDK exposes both ML-DSA-65, and ML-DSA-87, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate these using the standard KeyPairGenerator API. This establishes a new era of identity and authentication for the app ecosystem without requiring developers to engineer proprietary cryptographic implementations.

Ecosystem scale: Bringing hybrid signing to Google Play apps and games

Android is committed to ensuring the platform is PQC resistant and extending the chain of PQC resistance to application signatures. The mechanisms used to verify the authenticity of applications are being upgraded to ensure that app installations and subsequent updates are strictly tamper-proof against quantum-enabled signature forgery. The platform will verify PQC signatures over APKs to enable this chain of trust.

To bring these critical protections to the wider developer community with minimal friction, the transition will be supported through Play App Signing. This approach provides an immediate bridge to quantum safety for the majority of active installs. Google Play will let developers automatically generate 'hybrid' signature blocks that combine classical and PQC keys.

Updating keys across billions of active devices is a complex operational endeavor. Play App Signing leverages Google Cloud KMS, which helps ensure industry-leading compliance standards, to secure signing keys. By managing signing keys securely in the cloud, Google Play enables developers to seamlessly upgrade their app security to PQC standards without the burden of complex, manual key management.

During the Android 17 release cycle, Google Play will handle the generation of quantum-safe ML-DSA signing keys for new apps and existing apps that opt-in, independent of the applications target API . Later, developers will be able to choose their own classical and ML-DSA signing keys and delegate them to Google Play for their hybrid key upgrade. To promote security best practices, Google Play will also start prompting developers to upgrade their signing keys at least every two years.

The cryptographic roadmap: From authenticity to privacy

Google’s post-quantum transition began in 2016, and Android 17 marks the first phase of Android’s post-quantum transition:

• Securing the foundation: We are upholding the integrity of our attestation and Chain of Trust by incorporating ML-DSA into Android Verified Boot.
• Empower Developers: The inclusion of ML-DSA support within Android Keystore and Play App Signing allows developers to safeguard their users and application.
• Ecosystem Scale: By using hybrid signatures for APKs, developers can create a protected transition that preserves current trust while adding post-quantum defenses to block unauthorized updates.

Our roadmap further integrates post-quantum key encapsulation into KeyMint, Key Attestation and Remote Key Provisioning. This evolution is intended to bolster the security of the entire identity lifecycle—from hardware-level DICE measurements to our remote attestation servers—ensuring the Android ecosystem remains resilient and private against the quantum threats of tomorrow.

Posted by Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team

Today we're announcing a new program in Chrome to make HTTPS certificates secure against quantum computers. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recently created a working group, PKI, Logs, And Tree Signatures (“PLANTS”), aiming to address the performance and bandwidth challenges that the increased size of quantum-resistant cryptography introduces into TLS connections requiring Certificate Transparency (CT). We recently shared our call to action to secure quantum computing and have written about challenges introduced by quantum-resistant cryptography and some of the steps we’ve taken to address them in earlier blog posts.

To ensure the scalability and efficiency of the ecosystem, Chrome has no immediate plan to add traditional X.509 certificates containing post-quantum cryptography to the Chrome Root Store. Instead, Chrome, in collaboration with other partners, is developing an evolution of HTTPS certificates based on Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), currently in development in the PLANTS working group. MTCs replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs. In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single "Tree Head" representing potentially millions of certificates, and the "certificate" sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree.

Why MTCs?

MTCs enable the adoption of robust post-quantum algorithms without incurring the massive bandwidth penalty of classical X.509 certificate chains. They also decouple the security strength of the corresponding cryptographic algorithm from the size of the data transmitted to the user. By shrinking the authentication data in a TLS handshake to the absolute minimum, MTCs aim to keep the post-quantum web as fast and seamless as today’s internet, maintaining high performance even as we adopt stronger security. Finally, with MTCs, transparency is a fundamental property of issuance: it is impossible to issue a certificate without including it in a public tree. This means the security properties of today’s CT ecosystem are included by default, and without adding extra overhead to the TLS handshake as CT does today.

Chrome’s MTC Propagation Plan

Chrome is already experimenting with MTCs with real internet traffic, and we intend to gradually build out our deployment such that MTCs provide a robust quantum-resistant HTTPS available for use throughout the internet.

Broadly speaking, our rollout spans three distinct phases.

• Phase 1 (UNDERWAY): In collaboration with Cloudflare, we are conducting a feasibility study to evaluate the performance and security of TLS connections relying on MTCs. To ensure a seamless and secure experience for Chrome users who might encounter an MTC, every MTC-based connection is backed by a traditional, trusted X.509 certificate during this experiment. This "fail safe" allows us to measure real-world performance gains and verify the reliability of MTC issuance without risking the security or stability of the user's connection.

• Phase 2 (Q1 2027): Once the core technology is validated, we intend to invite CT Log operators with at least one “usable” log in Chrome before February 1, 2026 to participate in the initial bootstrapping of public MTCs. These organizations have already demonstrated the operational excellence and high-availability infrastructure required to run global security services that underpin TLS connections in Chrome. Since MTC technology shares significant architectural similarities with CT, these operators are uniquely qualified to ensure MTCs are able to get off the ground quickly and successfully.

• Phase 3 (Q3 2027): Early in Phase 2, we will finalize the requirements for onboarding additional CAs into the new Chrome Quantum-resistant Root Store (CQRS) and corresponding Root Program that only supports MTCs. This will establish a modern, purpose-built trust store specifically designed for the requirements of a post-quantum web. The Chrome Quantum-resistant Root Program will operate alongside our existing Chrome Root Program to ensure a risk-managed transition that maintains the highest levels of security for all users. This phase will also introduce the ability for sites to opt in to downgrade protections, ensuring that sites that only wish to use quantum-resistant certificates can do so.

This area is evolving rapidly. As these phases progress, we will continue our active participation in standards bodies such as the IETF and C2SP, ensuring that insights gathered from our efforts flow back towards standards, and that changes in standards are supported by Chrome and the CQRS.

Cultivating new practices and policy for a more secure and reliable web

We view the adoption of MTCs and a quantum-resistant root store as a critical opportunity to ensure the robustness of the foundation of today’s ecosystem. By designing for the specific demands of a modern, agile, internet, we can accelerate the adoption of post-quantum resilience for all web users.

We expect this modern foundation for TLS to evolve beyond current ecosystem norms and emphasize themes of security, simplicity, predictability, transparency and resilience. These properties might be expressed by:

• Grounding our approach in first principles, prioritizing only elements essential for establishing a secure connection between a server and a client.
• Utilizing ACME-only workflows to reduce complexity and ensure the cryptographic agility required to respond to future threats across the entire ecosystem.
• Upgrading to a modern framework for communicating revocation status. This allows for the replacement of legacy CRLs and streamlined requirements to focus only on key compromise events.
• Exploring “reproducible” Domain Control Validation to create a model where proofs of domain control are publicly and persistently available, empowering any party to independently verify the legitimacy of a validation (i.e., serve as a “DCV Monitor”).
• Enhancing the CA inclusion model to prioritize proven operational excellence. By establishing a pathway where prospective MTC CA Owners can first demonstrate their reliability as Mirroring Cosigners and DCV Monitors, we ensure that acceptance is based on verified performance and a reliable track record.
• Evolving the third-party oversight model to prioritize complete, continuous, and externally verifiable monitoring. This shift would focus on ensuring a high standard of transparency and consistency, providing immediate and reliable insights into performance that can replace the function of annual third-party audits.

To secure the future of the web, we are dedicating our operational resources to two vital parallel tracks. First, we remain fully committed to supporting our current CA partners in the Chrome Root Store, facilitating root rotations to ensure existing non-quantum-resistant hierarchies remain robust and conformant with the Chrome Root Program Policy. Simultaneously, we are focused on building a secure future by developing and launching the infrastructure required to support MTCs and their default use in Chrome. We also expect to support “traditional” X.509 certificates with quantum-resistant algorithms for use only in private PKIs (i.e., those not included in the Chrome Root Store) later this year.

As we execute and refine our work on MTCs, we look forward to sharing a concrete policy framework for a quantum-resistant root store with the community, and are excited to learn and define clear pathways for organizations to operate as Chrome-trusted MTC CAs.

Posted by Lyubov Farafonova, Product Manager, Phone by Google; Alberto Pastor Nieto, Sr. Product Manager Google Messages and RCS Spam and Abuse

We’ve shared how Android’s proactive, multi-layered scam defenses utilize Google AI to protect users around the world from over 10 billion suspected malicious calls and messages every month1. While that scale is significant, the true impact of these protections is best understood through the stories of the individuals they help keep safe every day. This includes people like Majik B., an IT professional in Sunnyvale, California.

Despite his technical background, Majik recently found himself on a call that felt dangerously legitimate. While using his Pixel, he received a call that appeared to be from his bank. The number looked correct, the caller knew his name and his address, and the story about a "suspicious charge" made perfect sense. "I’m usually pretty careful about this stuff," Majik recalled, "but I stayed on the line longer than I normally would. Even knowing how these scams work, it was convincing in the moment."

The turning point came when his phone displayed a Scam Detection warning during the call, which provided a critical moment to pause and reflect. Majik hung up, checked his bank app directly, and confirmed there was no fraudulent charge. For Majik, Scam Detection was the intervention he needed: “The warning is what made me pause and avoid a bad situation”.

While stories like Majik’s show how our existing protections provide a robust shield against scams, our work isn't done. As scammers evolve their tactics and create more convincing and personalized threats, we’re using the best of Google AI to stay one step ahead.

A recent evaluation by Counterpoint Research found that Android smartphones provide the most comprehensive AI-powered protections of any mobile platform. We are committed to building on this foundation by expanding our AI-powered protections to more users and devices, while rolling out new features that utilize on-device AI to defend against increasingly sophisticated threats.

Expanding Scam Detection for Calls to Samsung Devices

To help protect you during phone calls, Scam Detection alerts you if a caller uses speech patterns commonly associated with fraud. We are bringing these protections to more of our users through new regional expansion and availability on new devices. Scam Detection for phone calls on Google Pixel devices is available in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.

Scam Detection is already helping millions of users to stay safe from scammers, and we are expanding this feature to more manufacturers, starting with the Samsung Galaxy S26 series in the U.S. We are continuing to work with our partners to bring these industry-leading protections to even more users.

Powered by Gemini’s on-device model, Scam Detection provides intelligent protection against scam calls while ensuring that the processing stays on your device. This keeps your conversations private while delivering warnings in real-time. To preserve your privacy, the phone conversation processed by Scam Detection is neither stored on your device, nor shared outside of the device. To ensure you stay in total control of your experience, Scam Detection is turned off by default. When enabled, the feature only applies to calls identified as potential scams and is never used in calls with your contacts. You can easily manage these preferences in your phone settings whenever you choose.

Enhanced Protection Against Messaging Scams

We want everyone to feel secure when they open their messages, no matter where they are or what language they speak. To make this possible, we’ve now expanded Scam Detection for Google Messages to more than 20 countries. This includes support for several languages including English, Arabic, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Beyond reaching more people, we are also making our protections more intelligent. We are enhancing how Google Messages identifies fraudulent texts by utilizing our Gemini on-device model on the latest Android flagship devices in the US, Canada, and the UK. The added power of Gemini’s on-device model allows for a much more nuanced analysis of complex conversational threats.

For example, it can better detect the subtle conversational patterns used in job offer scams or sophisticated romance baiting scams (also known as “pig butchering”), a deceptive tactic where a scammer builds a long-term "relationship" with a potential victim to gain their trust, before tricking them into a fraudulent investment. Because these methods rely on gradual manipulation and don’t present typical warning signs, they need more advanced capabilities to catch them at scale. These advanced protections are now rolling out on Google Pixel 10 series and other select devices, and will be available on the Samsung Galaxy S26 series.

Gemini-powered Scam Detection alerts a user to a job offer scam

Using the Best of Google AI to Set the Standard in Mobile Scam Protection

Android continues to set the standard in mobile scam protections by leveraging advanced AI to identify and intercept threats as they happen. As scammer’s strategies shift, we remain committed to developing equally adaptive and intelligent defenses. Our goal is to provide you with peace of mind so you can continue to connect and communicate with confidence, knowing our multi-layered defenses are there to help protect your financial and personal data against mobile scams.

Disclaimers

1: This total comprises all instances where a message or call was proactively blocked or where a user was alerted to potential spam or scam activity.

Posted by Vijaya Kaza, VP and GM, App & Ecosystem Trust

The Android ecosystem is a thriving global community built on trust, giving billions of users the confidence to download the latest apps. In order to maintain that trust, we’re focused on ensuring that apps do not cause real-world harm, such as malware, financial fraud, hidden subscriptions, and privacy invasions. As bad actors leverage AI to change their tactics and launch increasingly sophisticated attacks, we’ve deepened our investments in AI and real-time defenses over the last year to maintain the upper hand and stop these threats before they reach users.

Upgrading Google Play’s AI-powered, multi-layered user protections

We’ve seen a clear impact from these safety efforts on Google Play. In 2025, we prevented over 1.75 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play and banned more than 80,000 bad developer accounts that attempted to publish harmful apps. These figures demonstrate how our proactive protections and push for a more accountable ecosystem are discouraging bad actors from publishing malicious apps, while our new tools help honest developers build compliant apps more easily. Initiatives like developer verification, mandatory pre-review checks, and testing requirements have raised the bar for the Google Play ecosystem, significantly reducing the paths for bad actors to enter.

User safety is at the core of everything we build. Over the years, we’ve continually introduced ways to help users stay safe and make informed app choices — from parental controls to data safety transparency and app badges. We’re constantly improving our policies and protections to encourage safe, high-quality apps on Google Play and stop bad actors before they cause harm.

Apps on Google Play undergo rigorous reviews for safety and compliance with our policies. Last year, we shared that Google Play runs over 10,000 safety checks on every app we publish, and we continue to check and recheck apps after they’ve been published. In 2025, we continued scaling our defenses even further by:

• Boosting AI-enhanced app detection: We integrated Google’s latest generative AI models into our review process, helping our human review team continue to find complex malicious patterns faster.
• Preventing unnecessary access to sensitive data: We prevented over 255,000 apps from getting excessive access to sensitive user data and continued to strengthen our privacy policies. Our commitment to privacy-forward app development, supported by tools like Play Policy Insights in Android Studio and Data safety section, has empowered developers to continue to: minimize privacy-sensitive permission requests, and prioritize the user in their design choices.
• Blocking spam ratings and reviews: Whether they lead to review inflation or deflation, spam ratings and reviews can negatively impact our users’ trust and our developers’ growth. We’re continually evolving our detection models to help ensure app reviews are accurate. Our anti-spam protections blocked 160 million spam ratings and reviews last year, including inflated and deflated reviews. We also prevented an average 0.5-star rating drop for apps targeted by review bombing, protecting our users and developers from unhelpful reviews.
• Safeguarding kids and families: Our approach to kids and families is built on the core belief that children deserve a safe, enriching digital environment. Our commitment is to empower parents with robust tools while providing children with access to high-quality, age-appropriate content. Last year, we announced new layers of protection, in addition to our existing safeguards, to prevent younger audiences from discovering or downloading apps involving activities like gambling or dating.

Enhancing Google Play Protect to help keep the entire Android ecosystem safe

We also continued to improve our protections for the broader Android ecosystem, by expanding Google Play Protect and real-time security measures like in-call scam protections to help keep users safe from scams, fraud, and other threats.

As Android’s built-in defense against malware and unwanted software, Google Play Protect now scans over 350 billion Android apps daily. This proactive protection constantly checks both Play apps and those from other sources to ensure they are not potentially harmful. And, last year, its real-time scanning capability identified more than 27 million new malicious apps from outside Google Play, warning users or blocking the app to neutralize the threat. To benefit from these protections, we recommend that users always keep Google Play Protect on.

While fraudsters are constantly evolving their tactics, Google Play Protect is evolving faster. Last year, we expanded:

• Enhanced fraud protection: Google Play Protect’s enhanced fraud protection analyzes and automatically blocks the installation of apps that may abuse sensitive permissions to commit financial fraud. This protection is triggered when a user attempts to install an app from an "Internet-sideloading source" — such as a web browser or messaging app — that requests a sensitive permission. Building on the success of our initial pilot in Singapore, we expanded enhanced fraud protection to 185 markets, now covering more than 2.8 billion Android devices. In 2025, we blocked 266 million risky installation attempts and helped protect users from 872,000 unique, high-risk applications.
• In-call scam protection: We also introduced new protections to combat social engineering attacks during phone calls. This feature preemptively disables the ability to turn off Google Play Protect during phone calls, stopping bad actors from being able to trick users into disabling their device's built-in defenses to download a malicious app while on a call.

Partnering with developers for a more secure, privacy-friendly future

Keeping Android and Google Play safe requires deep collaboration. We want to thank our global developer community for their partnership and for sharing their feedback on the tools and support they need to succeed.

In 2025, we focused on reducing friction for developers and providing them with tools to safeguard their businesses:

• Building safer apps more easily: We’re helping developers streamline their work by bringing insights directly into their natural workflows. It starts with Play Policy Insights in Android Studio, which gives developers real-time feedback as they code. We focused first on permissions and APIs that grant deeper system access or handle personal data, like location or photos. This gives developers a head start on policy requirements, including prominent disclosures or usage declarations, while they’re still building. When developers move to Play Console to prepare their apps for submission, our expanded pre-review checks help catch common reasons for rejection, like improper usage of credentials or permissions and broken privacy policy links, ensuring smoother, faster reviews.
• Stronger threat detection with Play Integrity API: Every day, apps and games make over 20 billion checks with Play Integrity API to protect against abuse and unauthorized access. In 2025, we added hardware-backed signals to make it even harder for bad actors to spoof devices and introduced new in-app prompts that let users fix common issues like network errors without leaving the app. We also launched device recall in beta to help developers identify repeat bad actors even after a device has been reset, all while protecting user privacy.
• Building trust through developer verification: We’ve seen how effective developer verification is on Google Play, and now we’re applying those lessons to the broader Android ecosystem. By ensuring there is a real, accountable identity behind every app, verification helps legitimize authentic developers and prevents bad actors from hiding behind anonymity to repeatedly cause harm. After gathering feedback during our early access period, we’ll open up verification to all developers this year. We’ve also added a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists, which will allow them to distribute these apps to a limited number of devices without the full verification requirements.
• Greater security with every Android release: In Android 16, developers can protect users’ most private information, like bank logins, with just one line of code. We’ve integrated this feature automatically to certain apps for an instant security boost against “tapjacking,” a trick where bad apps use hidden layers to steal clicks for ad fraud.

Looking ahead

Our top priority remains making Google Play and Android the most trusted app ecosystems for everyone. This year, we’ll continue to invest in AI-driven defenses to stay ahead of emerging threats and equip Android developers with the tools they need to build apps safely. To empower developers who distribute their apps on Google Play, we’ll maintain our focus on embedding checks to help build apps that are compliant by design, while providing guidance to help proactively avoid policy violations before an app is published. We’ll also roll out Android developer verifications to hold bad actors accountable and prevent them from hiding behind anonymity to cause repeated harm.

Thank you for being part of the Google Play and Android community as we work together to build a safer app ecosystem.

Posted by Nataliya Stanetsky, Fabricio Ferracioli, Elliot Sisteron, Irene Ang of the Android Security Team

Phone theft is more than just losing a device; it's a form of financial fraud that can leave you suddenly vulnerable to personal data and financial theft. That’s why we're committed to providing multi-layered defenses that help protect you before, during, and after a theft attempt.

Today, we're announcing a powerful set of theft protection feature updates that build on our existing protections, designed to give you greater peace of mind by making your device a much harder target for criminals.

Stronger Authentication Safeguards

We've expanded our security to protect you against an even wider range of threats. These updates are now available for Android devices running Android 16+.

More User Control for Failed Authentications: In Android 15, we launched Failed Authentication Lock, a feature that automatically locks the device's screen after excessive failed authentication attempts. This feature is now getting a new dedicated enable/disable toggle in settings, giving you more granular control over your device's security.

Expanding Identity Check to cover more: Early in 2025, we enabled Identity Check for Android 15+, which requires the user to utilize biometrics when performing certain actions outside of trusted places. Later in the year, we extended this safeguard to cover all features and apps that use the Android Biometric Prompt. This means that critical tools that utilize Biometric Prompt, like third-party banking apps and Google Password Manager, now automatically benefit from the additional security of Identity Check.

Stronger Protection Against Screen Lock Guessing: We’re making it much harder for a thief to guess your PIN, pattern, or password by increasing the lockout time after failed attempts. To ensure you aren’t locked out by mistake (by a curious child, for instance), identical incorrect guesses no longer count toward your retry limit.

Enhanced Recovery Tools

We're also enhancing our recovery tools to make them even more helpful. This update is now available for Android devices running Android 10+.

More Control for Remote Lock. Remote Lock (android.com/lock) is a crucial tool that lets you lock your lost or stolen device from any web browser. We are adding a new optional security question/challenge to the process. This helps ensure that only you, the real device owner, can initiate a lock, adding another layer of security to your recovery flow.

Proactive Protection: "Default-On" in Brazil

Keeping our users safe is a top priority, which is why we're working to make theft protection available out-of-the-box for more Android users. For new Android devices activated in Brazil, two of our key theft protection features are now enabled by default:

• Theft Detection Lock: Uses on-device AI to sense motion and context that may indicate a "snatch-and-run" theft. If a theft attempt is detected, it will quickly lock the device screen to help protect your data.
• Remote Lock: Allows users to lock their device from any device that provides a web access to android.com/lock without the need to have enabled the feature in advance.

This helps ensure new devices have a critical layer of theft protection from day one.

Continuing To innovate in Device Theft Protection

We’re always evolving our protections to stay one step ahead of thieves. Our ongoing updates help ensure that no matter where you go, you can have greater peace of mind knowing your device and data are protected by Android’s multi-layered defenses. Keep a lookout for even more Android theft protection updates.