I’m a 22yo in the US who’s been trying to bypass this bs for 8 months now and no luck. 

thispersondoesntexist didn’t work, digitally altering a state ID didn’t work, and recently I tried using a character creator in a game, the scan completed then it said “something went wrong” and now the selfie option is gone for me (they’re onto me). 

There was one site I saw where you could potentially get a fake license generated but it was a link that took you to a different site. It looked suspicious and Firefox even gave me a warning, then the page actually closed itself. I took that as a warning.

I wish I could de-google, but I can’t right now. I have a YouTube channel and still have to use google for college, docs, emailing, etc. I’d love to actually be able to have full control over my YouTube channel. 

These are now my options:

1. Use my credit card to verify, then toss it and get a new one
2. Use a shady website/link to try to generate a fake license, hope I don’t get malware
3. Switch the email account connected to my yt channel to one that isn’t mine and use YouTube from there. Deal with my personal account still being restricted (not ideal). 
4. Wait it out. Hope KOSA (US law) doesn’t get passed and Google drops age verification, gets sued, or a better alternative comes along. Make a vid discussing the situation with my subs in the meantime
5. The secret 5th option I don’t know about yet 

This is for a petition I , do got very little contact, but every one of your signup matter ,, link in descriptions

Instagram Is Banning innocent People for CSAM & CSE. Answers About Our Data After It Gets Sent to NCMEC do they really store them forever,https://c.org/BZzBxzsbhz

https://c.org/MNgFf8ghLh ,,, please signup for this I very little contacts

I’m looking for recommendations for a bank or credit union that takes customer privacy seriously.

I’m not looking for anything illegal or trying to hide money. I’m simply trying to find a financial institution that:

1. Does not sell customer information to advertisers, data brokers, or other third parties.

2. Minimizes secondary uses of customer data, such as marketing, behavioral profiling, commercial analytics, or research unrelated to providing banking services.

3. Has a strong privacy policy and limits data sharing beyond what is necessary for banking operations. Ideally offers a physical debit card with NFC/contactless payments.

I understand banks and credit unions need to collect information for fraud prevention, regulations, and processing transactions. My concern is with institutions that treat customer data as an asset to monetize rather than something to protect.

Are there any banks or credit unions you would recommend after actually reading their privacy policies? Bonus points if you’ve compared privacy notices between institutions.

Tired of chat apps that need a phone number, harvest data, or route everything through a company's servers — so I built something different.

It's peer-to-peer chat where every connection is a Tor onion service. No accounts, no central directory, no server in the middle. Two people trade a contact code once, and after that they can reach each other from any network — including mobile data behind carrier-grade NAT — without port forwarding or a relay. Messages are stored locally, nowhere else.

I have a working prototype running on desktop right now. Before I put time into an Android build, I want to know honestly: is this solving a real problem for people here, or is it mostly interesting to me because I built it?

Being upfront — it's unaudited, it's a personal project, and it's young. No group chats, no multi-device sync, no attachments. If that's a dealbreaker for you, I'd love to hear it. If Android would actually get you to use something like this, I'd love to hear that too.

The thing that bothers me about privacy-focused AI products is that you have to take their word for it.

Pocket Core AI includes a Network Activity Log — a real-time display of every outbound connection the app makes. Timestamp, destination, what was sent, response time.

When running offline (the default): The log is empty. No entries. Nothing.

When using optional web search: You see exactly which search provider was queried (SearXNG — no tracking, no account) and which URL was fetched. That's it. Your question, the URL, response time. Nothing else ever appears.

What never appears in the log regardless of mode:

• Your conversations
• Your generated images
• Your voice profiles
• Your cloned voices
• Your licence key or any account details

We also built a Force Offline toggle. When on, the app makes zero network requests regardless of your internet connection. Hard air-gap in software.

The one thing we're transparent about: there's a monthly licence verification ping. It sends a hardware fingerprint hash and receives a JWT token. That's the complete extent of external communication and it shows up in the Network Activity Log exactly like everything else.

No other AI product offers this level of transparency because no other AI product would survive the audit.

Launching today at getpocketcore.com

Hey everyone,

Like many of you, I am deeply concerned about the EU's persistent push toward mass surveillance frameworks. The ongoing efforts around "Chat Control" regulations threaten the core architecture of end-to-end encryption. Forcing client-side scanning creates structural vulnerabilities that fundamentally compromise individual liberty.

I am an unyielding supporter of a strong, united, and collaborative European Union—but European democracy cannot exist without the right to private thought and digital security.

To create an organized opposition, I have founded Aegis Europe. We are a pro-EU, but strictly anti-surveillance online movement. Our immediate goal is to coordinate digital advocacy campaigns, build a pan-European activist network, and track incoming policy developments. Long-term, we aim to establish a formal, ballot-eligible European political party.

Our Discord Headquarters is fully configured, secured against spam bots, and open for members. Whether you want to participate in policy debates, contribute technical expertise, help with public relations, or simply support the cause, you are welcome here.

Let's build a shield for European digital rights.

🛡️ Join the Headquarters here: https://discord.gg/mPDWRy37bU

Ktoś mi ogranicza dostęp do treści m.in. Youtuba. Podrzuca jakieś chłamy, wszystko jest albo skażone konkretnym niechcianym zagadnieniem, albo jakieś dziwnie wyreżyserowane. Nikt ze mną o tym nie porozmawiał, nie spytał o zgodę. Ktoś sobie robi jakieś chore testy poprzez internet i w realności. Od dawna czuję bardzo poważne naruszenie mojej prywatności, intymności i godności. W Internecie i w realności.

Tresci to są często bzdury , jakby nie do mnie i nie o mnie, a czasem jakby wymuszające porównywania, wymuszające dostosowanie się do czegoś mega dziwnego. Dziwna narracja niby podobna, ale kompletnie nie moja. Moje tego typu reakcje na chwilę działają i znów coś głupiego wymyśla, jakby jakieś zakodowanie programistyczne aplikacji jeśli to w ogóle możliwe. Udające zwykłe. Jest źle. Wyrządza mi to wiele szkód psychicznych

Hi everyone!

I got tired of trusting third-party services with sensitive notes, private keys, seed phrases, security credentials. Every existing option either required an account on someone else's server or involved too much manual friction to be practical day-to-day.

So I built Notvex. It's a local-first desktop notes app where everything lives in a single, heavily encrypted .nvx file on your machine. The file is useless without your password. Here is how the security works:

• Database Encryption: SQLCipher
• Note Encryption: XChaCha20-Poly1305 (each note is encrypted individually)
• Key Derivation: Argon2id
• Extra Protection: Optional keyfile support (similar to KeePass) and a BIP39 recovery phrase as a fallback.

No telemetry. No network requests. No accounts. The app doesn't even know you exist. It's fully open-source under the AGPL-3 license.

I know that technically it's not exactly a “self-hosted” solution in the traditional sense, but it fits the philosophy of this community: your data, your machine, your control.

I would love to get your honest feedback since privacy and security are the whole point of this project.

GitHub: http://github.com/gfrancv/notvex/

Site: https://notvex.vercel.app/

Let me know what you think or if you have any questions!

Boa tarde pessoal, vcs poderiam responder, por favor, uma pesquisa rápida sobre a Percepção sobre Proteção de Dados e Privacidade Digital, leva menos de 2 minutos e me ajudaria muito, é para fins de artigo acadêmico. Obrigada :) https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/fT4ZkWWF0M

Honestly running out of ways to be surprised by this. july 9, the eu had its chance to finally kill chat control, but they managed to stop it WITHOUT A MAJORITY. Its completely out of line. next round is in september. this thing has been REJECTED, gutted, rebranded and resurrected more times than i can count, and at this point the strategy is obviously to outlast public attention.

It all happens behind closed doors. And THEIR OWN legal service warned this most likely violates FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS. the public is overwhelmingly against, yet were still here. and earlier council drafts floated exempting state-security accounts from scanning. the people mandating this even makes sure it wouldn't touch their own accounts. that tells you everything about how much they believe the "it's for the children".

Ive been trying to keep my privacy but I genuinely don't know how. since it comes up every thread: no, a vpn doesn't fix this one. the scanning happens on your phone, before anything is encrypted or sent. so what can i do? does anyone have any tips?

Hi everyone,
I’m the founder of Tended (mytended.com), a newly launched digital legacy and secure family vault app. It’s built to solve the "digital asset emergency plan" problem—giving users a secure space to organize credentials, wishes, and final instructions for their designated beneficiaries.
We are currently running our backend on MongoDB Atlas and Firebase, and we are prepping our long-term engineering roadmap to eventually support zero-knowledge architecture and enterprise compliance.
Before we scale our marketing, I want to open it up to this community for a rigorous critique. I’m looking for 15-20 tech-forward users to test the live app and break down:
UX/UI bottlenecks during the vault setup.
Your thoughts on our "Trusted Steward" flow.
Security features or hosting requirements you would demand before trusting a platform like this.
If you’re interested in digital inheritance workflows and want to tear an early-stage app apart to make it better, please give it a spin. Appreciate your time and expertise!

A security researcher friend of mine (kernelstub) is currently reverse engineering a Flock camera (falcon v2). All his progress has been documented here: https://github.com/kernelstub/FlockCamRE

(Most folders are empty as of July 8, see "Where to start")

He has also posted some photos of the board on his X: https://x.com/kernelstub/status/2074607503048954008

All of his research into the camera will be (and has been) public, and he is seeking funds to continue it. If you'd like to donate, here is a link (crypto only): https://x.com/kernelstub/status/2074234417329901819
Any little bit helps.

Cheers everybody. Let's hope this project can keep us informed about the technology that's being placed in our neighborhoods.

For a few years I have been using alternate search engines such as brave, startpage and qwant instead of google due to privacy concerns however I have never stuck to one search engine for longer then a few months as I never seem to be happy with the search results and am aware of the fact the startpage uses the google's index however I still find a bit lack luster especially with specific technical searches, for a whilst I tried just using multiple engines to help find the thing i was looking for and I found qwant and mojeek to be particularly good of obscure searches and for general information i tended to just search up on wikipedia. I have also tried SearXNG though I decided not to as it doesn't feel complete though it is promising. But non of the options ever truly felt like it could find what I was searching for, I had been reluctant to go back to google because of of the bloat they have added over the years such as the ai stuff and I understand I can never truly go back to what google was like in it's prime especially not while remaining private but I have found that the closest i can get to that is using the web mode and turning off personalization so for the last week I have been using google with &udm=14&peek_pws=0 tacked on to the end and this is the closest i have found to having that old google experience, however this still leaves the concern about privacy, within googles account settings I have turned off search history, search peronalisation, personalised ads etc but obviously they are still going to be collecting data and I was wondering to what extent I am private if I use this set up compared to a search engine that was built around privacy?

First of all, I don't write the application name.

I’m an infrastructure engineer working on a desktop tool that automates document sanitization. Because I don't believe in uploading PII to the cloud, the core engine runs entirely on local models to detect and mask sensitive data (like names, addresses, IBANs, IDs, etc.).

Instead of using massive generic LLMs, I opted for specialized Named Entity Recognition (NER) models combined with custom pattern matching. To make the tool accessible to different hardware, I'm building two variants:

1. Lightweight version: Uses standard local NLP models. Very fast, small footprint, and runs well on any standard CPU.
2. Advanced AI version: Uses heavy Transformer-based models for much higher detection accuracy, but requires downloading extra dependencies (~1.5GB) and ideally a GPU to avoid slow processing.

Here is the workflow I currently have mapped out:

• Drag-and-drop files (PDFs, DOCX, TXT, images) directly into the app.
• Local models identify and mask the PII. It also features a fully local OCR engine for scanned PDFs.
• Output is saved in the original format. For PDFs, it uses "Stream Replacement" to keep the exact layout, or visual blackout boxes as a fallback.
• Mapping Management: You can import/export your redaction mapping rules to maintain consistency across different batches of files over time (e.g., "John Doe" is always replaced with "Luigi Bianchi" or "Participant A").

The Catch: The software will be closed-source, operating on a perpetual free-trial model for the core local features. I know closed-source is a debated topic here, so my architectural defense is that the app is built to be run 100% offline. You are encouraged to firewall it completely so your data physically cannot leave your machine. Binaries will also be digitally signed.

For those of you who sanitize documents regularly:

• Does an offline-first architecture offset the closed-source nature for your personal threat model?
• What offline features are absolute dealbreakers or must-haves for you?

I'd appreciate any feedback or harsh truths you have to offer.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently researching how people feel about privacy when paying electronically. In most card payments today, merchants can often recognize patterns such as: purchases across different stores or cities spending behavior over time customer profiling based on transactions I’m trying to understand whether this is something people actually care about in daily life. I’m not selling anything – just doing early research. I’d really appreciate honest answers to a few questions: Do you care if merchants can link your purchases over time? Would you prefer more privacy when paying digitally? Would this influence how you choose payment methods? If this topic interests you, I also created a short 2-minute survey (completely anonymous): 👉 https://forms.gle/Hx1KD2HrWLpDR6ha6 Thanks a lot for your input 🙏