Subject: A Popular Streaming Service May Owe You $2,500
Source: Cord Cutters News
https://cordcuttersnews.com/a-popular-streaming-service-may-owe-you-2500/
A prominent national law firm is investigating one of the country’s most widely used digital library platforms, raising significant questions about what happens to the private reading and streaming habits of millions of public library users across the United States.
Hoopla Digital, Inc. is a digital media platform that allows library members to access eBooks, audiobooks, movies, and other digital material online and through its mobile app. The service is available through thousands of public library systems nationwide and has become a go-to resource for Americans looking to access entertainment and educational content at no personal cost. But the platform is now under legal scrutiny over how it may handle the personal data of its users.
Labaton Keller Sucharow LLP is investigating potential claims against Hoopla on behalf of consumers who used the platform and whose reading or content viewing activity, together with their personally identifying information, may have been disclosed to third-party tracking or analytics providers without proper consent.
The implications of such disclosures are considerable. The information allegedly disclosed to third parties may include details of a user’s content use on Hoopla, such as the materials the user viewed, borrowed, read, or streamed. For many library patrons, the expectation of privacy around what they read or watch is deeply held — one long protected under traditional library confidentiality principles. The idea that a digital platform might be quietly transmitting that information to outside companies without users’ knowledge strikes at the heart of those expectations.
These disclosures may violate federal and state privacy laws, including the Video Privacy Protection Act, known as the VPPA, and other state consumer privacy laws.
For Hoopla users, the case raises a pointed question: when you borrow a digital book or stream a film through your library card, who else is watching?
Source: Nextgov/FCW
https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/06/anthropic-suspends-top-ai-models-after-us-export-control-order/414173/
The Trump administration has ordered Anthropic to restrict foreign national access to two of its most advanced artificial intelligence models, prompting the company to disable the systems for all customers and escalating a fight over how Washington should control frontier AI tools with powerful cybersecurity capabilities.Anthropic said Friday evening that the U.S. issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, including foreign nationals inside the United States and foreign national employees of the company. Anthropic said the order effectively forces it to abruptly disable both models for all customers while it works to comply, though the directive will not affect access to its other models.
That dual-use potential has placed Anthropic at the center of a broader policy fight over how the government should treat advanced AI systems that can help defenders find flaws but could also assist in offensive cyber operations.
The shutdown would likely complicate any near-term plans to test or deploy Anthropic’s most capable cyber-focused systems, especially for federal agencies and critical infrastructure partners. It also raises unresolved questions about how the government plans to balance trusted access for U.S. agencies and allies with fears that adversaries or unauthorized users could misuse the same systems.
Source: Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com/signal-veterans-want-to-encrypt-slack-google-docs-and-basically-every-other-app-2000771623
Encrypted Spaces provides “verifiable, encrypted, untrusted storage.” A team of developers, including the co-creator of the Signal protocol and contributors from Microsoft and Harvard, are building out open-source software that can help bring the sort of hardened privacy and security offered via Signal’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to more collaborative types of apps, such as Slack, Google Docs, and Discord. The project is known as Encrypted Spaces, and although it is currently described as being in a “Research Preview” phase, code already exists on GitHub.
Rather than producing a suite of individual apps, the project is built as infrastructure for developers to create encrypted apps of their own. “We want to provide the technological surface area for developers to build all these apps in a privacy-preserving way,” Nora Trapp, an engineer at Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab and former technical lead at the Signal Foundation, told Wired. “You can think of it as the Signal protocol for collaboration apps,” Johns Hopkins Computer Science Professor Matt Green added.
The idea is to take the complexities of cryptography out of the equation and create a platform where there’s really no reason not to build end-to-end encryption into these sorts of collaborative apps from the base layer. Zero-knowledge proofs, which are a broader technology also central to privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash, are used to allow a central server to keep each end user updated on the latest version of a document or other area of collaboration without the server ever having access to unencrypted data.
Doesn’t Proton Already Offer This? Of course, it should be noted that various options for E2EE collaboration apps already exist. For example, Proton has its own suite of workspace and productivity apps that can be viewed as encrypted alternatives to equivalents offered by Google. There’s also the blockchain-based, Web3-type system called Fileverse, which has options for documents and spreadsheets. CryptPad even offers an E2EE version of Trello. Signal itself also has group chats at this point, and Encrypted Spaces is reported to have originated from that expanded development for the messaging app.
Governments Aren’t Going to Like This – While it’s still early days for Encrypted Spaces, one thing is already known for sure: A project like this is likely to stoke the flames of long-running debates over encryption that have repeatedly put app developers and governments at odds. Just last week, Signal President Meredith Whittaker reiterated that the company would leave the United Kingdom rather than comply with measures she views as undermining encryption and user privacy.
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Filed: Privacy & Security
Subject: Meta Tested Military Facial Recognition for Smart Glasses
Source: Android Headlines
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/06/meta-smart-glasses-military-facial-recognition-testing.html
Meta has pulled dormant facial recognition frameworks from its Meta AI companion app following a WIRED investigation exposing a secret software licensing agreement. The tech giant partnered with Rank One Computing, a high-profile defense contractor that provides biometric tools to the FBI, CIA, and U.S. military. While Meta scrubbed the unreleased “NameTag” system before user deployment, the crossover raises serious ethical debates regarding public privacy and consumer surveillance.
A digital backdoor inside 50 million phones. According to uncovered licensing documents, Meta acquired access to Rank One’s core facial recognition tools alongside its specialized “liveness detection” feature. This system effectively allows a camera to determine if it is looking at a real, breathing human being rather than a static photograph or a mask.
Meta never actually activated these tools for the public. Still, software experts found remnants of Rank One’s integration code sitting completely dormant inside the standard Meta AI companion app. The code, which has already shipped out to more than 50 million smartphones worldwide, lived side-by-side with an unreleased, proprietary face-scanning feature that Meta internally named “NameTag.”
Once the investigation brought these hidden frameworks to light, Meta moved at lightning speed. The firm completely erased the dormant code strings on June 5—exactly one day after the initial security leaks broke.
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Source: Good Info Newswire
The Mystic Alerts Act is heading to the full US House for approval. Here’s everything you need to know about the bipartisan bill.
On June 12 it was announced that the bipartisan bill advocating for emergency alerts to be sent out via satellite during natural disasters would be making its way to the full US House. The announcement comes following a key committee vote that took place last week during which the bill was cleared for this next step.
One of the Texas reps in support of the bill, Republican August Pfluger, previously spoke during the House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting about the importance of adopting the Mystic Alerts Act. Pfluger said, “This legislation ensures that during natural disasters, Wireless Emergency Alerts can still be delivered via satellite when traditional networks go down or service is unavailable.”
Sending the alerts via satellite is crucial, as it would allow the wireless emergency alert system to reach residents regardless of whether cellular service is available. As it currently stands, these alerts are most often sent via cellular networks, meaning if those become overwhelmed or damaged, people may not receive critical alerts in time to get to safety. Another aspect of the legislation stipulates that satellite networks would also now serve as a backup warning system during emergencies and disasters should the initial system fail.
Subject: The evidence is on camera. Keeping it there requires an identity resilience strategy
Source: Route Fifty
https://www.route-fifty.com/cybersecurity/2026/06/evidence-camera-keeping-it-there-requires-identity-resilience-strategy/414210/
COMMENTARY | Footage captured by CCTV and other devices is only as trustworthy as the identity infrastructure controlling it.
As law enforcement expands its digital footprint, the same happens to its attack surface. And adversaries have taken notice. Recent examples of stolen data include informant identities, crime scene photos, weapon licensing records and video evidence.
Hackers aren’t just locking public safety organizations out of systems. They’re positioning themselves to manipulate what law enforcement sees and what courts see:
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The consequences are severe. Case dismissals. Civil liability. Wrongful releases. Broken chains of custody.
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Subject: Estonia Is Giving AI Agents ‘Personal Identification Codes’
Source: Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com/estonia-is-giving-ai-agents-personal-identification-codes-2000773016
Source: Route Fifty
https://www.route-fifty.com/artificial-intelligence/2026/06/worries-mount-about-another-state-ai-law-preemption/414244/
[…] “For years, state lawmakers have worked tirelessly to address the risks and harms of social media created by Big Tech companies,” the letter says. “The lessons of the social media era are clear: allowing Silicon Valley to write its own rulebook leaves industry unaccountable and leaves American families vulnerable to AI’s dangers.”
Other opponents of preemption agreed that state lawmakers remain the best people to regulate, especially as they see the effects on their constituents more quickly than their federal counterparts.
“The preemption is what makes this bill illegitimate as a democratic matter, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” said Teachout during the press conference. “We have to return to the core principle of people governing themselves, and that means people being able to respond in real time to the most significant technological development in generations.”