Closed Network Privacy Podcast

"Take Your AI Off the Internet"

This is the companion audio for the article "Take Your AI Off the Internet: A Practical Guide to Running Local LLMs" and for the Local LLM Downloads hub. Runtime is about 14–16 minutes. Recorded October 2026. It follows up the local LLM mention in Episode 61.

Back in Episode 61 I mentioned, almost in passing, that you can run an AI model on your own computer, with no account, no cloud and no log on anyone else's server. A lot of you wrote in asking how. This dispatch answers that.

First, the why. When you use a hosted chatbot, your words are processed on someone else's machines, and from there they're within reach of courts, policy changes and product decisions you'll never hear about. In 2025 a federal court ordered OpenAI to preserve ChatGPT conversations, including ones users had deleted. In December the court ordered 20 million de-identified chat logs handed over in the New York Times copyright case, and in January it upheld that order over OpenAI's objection. Separately, a "make this discoverable" checkbox put private shared chats into Google search results. Nobody was hacked in either case. The data simply lived somewhere other than the user's own machine.

Then, the how. I explain what an "open-weight" model actually is and how much hardware you need (8, 16 or 32 GB of RAM). I walk through setup on Mac, Windows and Linux using LM Studio, the easy path, or Ollama, the engine. That includes the right way to handle Ollama's "pipe this script into your shell" Linux installer.

Finally, staying safe while you do it. That covers how to use the Local LLM Downloads hub, why you should prefer safetensors and GGUF files (a model file can be malware), how to verify what you downloaded, the Ollama cloud setting to switch off, and why you should never open Ollama to the internet.

The full written guide has every command, link and source in it. It's on the site and linked below.

https://closednetwork.io/local-llms-take-your-ai-off-the-internet/

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-61-back-on-my-b-s-last-episode/312

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TOPICS

*** Age Verification Update. ***

- "America's Chat Control Doesn't Say 'Scan.' It Says 'Sue.'"

Citizen Lab’s “AdFection” report on Discover-Tech (published October 15, 2026)

https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/

GrapheneOS Update - Clipboard Privacy

GrapheneOS added a fantastic new feature to prevent foreground apps from reading your clipboard. I thought the best way to show the benefits of this new feature was to show you how it could be abused.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGTwnru_9ZU

Motorola Signature 27 confirmed to support GrapheneOS

It’s confirmed: The mysterious Motorola phone getting support for the privacy-focused GrapheneOS will be the Motorola Signature 27 that was announced earlier this week.

https://9to5google.com/2026/09/24/motorola-signature-27-confirmed-to-support-grapheneos/

Self hosting Is becoming normalized!

We Forgot What Tech Enthusiasm Was About: ft. GamersNexus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr92U_8bXjU

AI Labs Are Planning for the "Day After"

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-60-lets-talk-on-reticulum-w-guest-qbit/202

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TOPICS

Reticulum

https://reticulum.network/

Nomadnet

https://github.com/markqvist/nomadnet

MeshChatX

https://meshchatx.com/

Reticulum GO

https://reticulum-go.quad4.io/

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-59-collect-first-justify-later/199

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Special Thanks to - EloquentWinter for creating - A Linux guide on MAC address randomization

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TOPICSIN THIS EPISODE

01

The Man Who Built FISA — And Watched It Break

The FBI lawyer who designed the bureau's FISA safeguards says that after he left in 2006 they were dismantled — and the system ballooned into Section 702.

02

EU Chat Control: The Majority Said No. The Scan Survived.

A parliamentary majority voted against message scanning on 9 July — and it survived anyway on a second-reading technicality, now running to 2028.

03

SCOTUS, Flock & the Cameras That Don't Care.

The Supreme Court ruled that reconstructing your movements is a 'search' — but 113,000+ license-plate cameras keep rolling, and the fix isn't in a courtroom.

04

Your Face Is a Password You Can't Change.

Madison Square Garden's facial-recognition system leaked — watchlists included — after a single phishing call. Why every face database is a breach-in-waiting.

05

Tools to Own the Stack.

Three open-source projects worth your time — one per fight: DeFlock, SimpleX Chat, and GrapheneOS.

Timestamps are estimates based on segment order — update after the final edit.

00:00Cold Open & Episode Rundown

02:00The Man Who Built FISA

08:30EU Chat Control Update

14:30SCOTUS, Flock & the Cameras

20:00Your Face Is a Password You Can't Change

25:00Tools to Own the Stack

28:00Outro

SEGMENT TAKEAWAYS

The Man Who Built FISA

1. FISA (1978) was sold as a reform, but it legitimized surveillance the government had previously run with no statute at all.
2. The FISA court rarely says no because the real filtering was designed to happen upstream, inside the FBI.
3. Bowman built that pipeline — embedded lawyers, months of review, personal sign-off. After he left in 2006, it went passive.
4. The Carter Page applications (17+ errors; a doctored email; a guilty plea) showed the cost.
5. 2008's Amendments Act created Section 702 — blanket categories, no named targets, a queryable database of Americans' data.
6. Thesis: the danger isn't who builds a surveillance system — it's everyone who inherits it.

EU Chat Control

1. Two proposals, one name: 1.0 (temporary, voluntary) vs. 2.0 / CSAR (permanent, mandatory).
2. 26 Mar 2026: Parliament rejected the temporary rules 307–306; the derogation expired 3 April.
3. 9 Jul 2026: more MEPs voted to kill the revived scheme than keep it (reported 314–276), but rejecting the Council needed 361 votes. It survived — extended to 3 April 2028, with an E2E carve-out.
4. The permanent CSAR could be adopted as soon as October 2026.
5. Client-side scanning is the core danger; 500+ scientists call it infeasible; Signal would exit the EU. Watch Germany.

SCOTUS, Flock & the Cameras

1. Chatrie v. United States (29 Jun 2026, 6–3): a geofence is a 'search'; police generally need a warrant. Built on Carpenter (2018).
2. The Court didn't ban geofence warrants and never mentioned ALPRs — a principle above a system it doesn't touch.
3. Scale: 113,000+ cameras; ~20B detections/month across ~5,000 departments vs. ~240M drivers.
4. A 2 Jul 2026 ACLU report documented Flock misleading councils (the Oshkosh 'heat map' reversal).
5. At least 82 jurisdictions have canceled ALPR contracts. The durable fix is local — stop collection.

Your Face Is a Password You Can't Change

1. MSG breached by ShinyHunters via a phishing call; ~45GB / ~26M claimed records, including facial-recognition records and threat profiles.
2. MSG used facial recognition for years — including to bar opposing lawyers. Second breach in under a year; class actions filed.
3. A pattern, not an accident: Clearview's client list leaked in 2020; Mercor exposed biometrics + ID docs in April 2026.
4. Biometrics are irreversible — you can't reissue your face. The safeguard is not building the database.

TOOLS MENTIONED

Open source · not sponsored · no affiliate relationships.

DeFlock · pairs with the Flock segment

Crowdsourced ALPR camera map on OpenStreetMap; has mapped ~half of Flock's ~100,000-camera network so you can see and route around them.

deflock.org

SimpleX Chat · pairs with Chat Control

Messenger with no user identifiers at all — the metadata-resistance layer E2E encryption alone doesn't give you. Audited by Trail of Bits.

simplex.chat

GrapheneOS · pairs with every segment

Hardened, de-Googled Android on Pixel — the endpoint is where client-side scanning and biometric capture actually land.

grapheneos.org

SOURCES & REFERENCES

Segment 1 — FISA

1. Naomi Brockwell × Spike Bowman (YouTube)

Segment 2 — EU Chat Control

1. Closed Network — Chat Control live tracker
2. EU Perspectives — Q&A
3. Euronews — temporary scanning extension
4. Patrick Breyer — Chat Control tracker

Segment 3 — SCOTUS / Flock

1. Truthout — SCOTUS ruling & Flock (Mike Ludwig)
2. Supreme Court — Chatrie v. United States (PDF)
3. SCOTUSblog — geofence ruling
4. ACLU — Flock Safety credibility report

Segment 4 — Facial Recognition / Breaches

1. TechCrunch — worst breaches of 2026 so far
2. The Next Web — MSG 45GB leak
3. Law360 — MSG sued over breach
4. Biometric Update — Mercor biometric breach
5. Privacy Guides — breach roundup Jul 3–9

Segment 5 — Tools

1. DeFlock (project site)
2. 404 Media — DeFlock maps ALPRs worldwide
3. Adafruit — DeFlock overview
4. SimpleX Chat (GitHub)
5. GrapheneOS (site)

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-58-the-price-of-being-watched/198

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Thank You Producers! You Produce This Show!

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Special Thanks to - EloquentWinter for creating - A Linux guide on MAC address randomization

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TOPICS

Encourage curiosity - This week ties together a single thread: someone else holds your data, and therefore holds the power. From algorithmic pricing to supply-chain malware to government scanning to cloud-AI assistants — and the hopeful counter-move, taking your data back. The episode theme is curiosity: in every story, one extra question would have changed the outcome.

Segment 1 — Surveillance Pricing

Inspired by More Perfect Union, "We Found the Radical Solution to Surveillance Pricing"

Surveillance pricing (a.k.a. personalized / surveillance-based pricing) = charging you an individual price based on sensitive data about you — purchase history, browsing, geolocation, social activity, even biometric and financial signals. The economic endgame is "perfect price discrimination": charging each person their exact maximum.

1. DoorDash holds a patent describing promotions based on a user's stress level.
2. Delta Air Lines (with AI firm Fetcherr) has talked about expanding generative-AI pricing to ~20% of domestic fares, with ambitions to go further. Senators (Gallego, Blumenthal, Warner) and House members demanded answers.
3. A Groundwork Collaborative / Consumer Reports / More Perfect Union study found different shoppers charged different prices for identical Instacart items. Former FTC chair Lina Khan has voiced concern.
4. The "radical" fix is a law: New York's proposed One Fair Price Act would ban surveillance pricing outright — one posted price for everyone.

Defensive moves (partial): private/container browsing, block cookies, disable ad personalization, use a VPN, compare logged-out vs. logged-in prices. Honest caveat: this is a structural problem — regulation, not browser tricks, is the real fix.

Curious question: Is this price the market — or is it me being read?

Segment 2 — "Arch malware btw": the AUR supply-chain attack

Inspired by Michael Tunnell and Switched to Linux — developing story, June 2026.

The Arch User Repository (AUR) is community-maintained, unvetted package build scripts (PKGBUILDs). In a ~24-hour window, a coordinated attack poisoned a large number of packages — reports cite 1,500+ touched, with community trackers confirming ~400–500 malicious package names and rising.

How: Attackers adopted orphaned packages (abandoned by maintainers — anyone can claim them) and edited the PKGBUILD to add a pre/post-install hook that pulls a malicious npm package, atomic-lockfile (Sonatype tracked one strand as the "Atomic Arch" campaign).

Payload: A Linux infostealer + optional root-only eBPF rootkit. Targets developer secrets — browser creds/cookies, SSH keys, GitHub creds, Vault/npm tokens, Docker/Podman, VPN configs, shell history, Slack/Teams/Discord/Telegram, crypto wallets. eBPF lets it run in-kernel and hide processes/files/connections.

If you were hit and the rootkit deployed: rotate every credential (from a clean machine) and reinstall from scratch. A normal uninstall is not enough.

Status: Maintainers are removing malicious commits and banning accounts; the official repos of Arch-based distros (CachyOS, Garuda, Chaotic-AUR) were not infected — only users who installed/upgraded a compromised AUR package during the window. Community checker script + affected-package list were published within hours.

Action checklist (Arch users):

1. pacman -Qm → list your foreign (AUR) packages.
2. Compare against the community list / run the checker script (CachyOS advisory).
3. If matched → rotate credentials from a clean machine, then clean-reinstall.

Curious habit: Before installing, ask who maintains this, when did it last legitimately update, and did ownership recently change? On the AUR, read the PKGBUILD — the malicious line was visible to anyone who looked.

Segment 3 — UK Device Scanning: 90 Days to Comply

Inspired by "Signal's Warning: The UK's Phone Scanning Plan Just Got Real"

The UK government signaled that phone makers (Apple, Google) will get ~90 days to start scanning photos on young people's devices for nude images. Running alongside: Online Safety Act powers for Ofcom aimed at encrypted messaging (key report expected ~April). The mechanism: client-side scanning — every message/image checked on your device, before encryption.

Why it matters: Client-side scanning doesn't break encryption directly — it inspects content before the lock clicks shut. The "end-to-end encrypted" label survives, but the privacy guarantee (nobody is looking) is gone.

Signal's position: scanning won't protect children and builds surveillance infrastructure that "endangers us all."

1. Security: once scanning exists on every device, the match-database can be expanded — swap it and you're scanning for slogans, documents, faces. Signal would withdraw from the UK rather than build a backdoor. Mullvad raised parallel alarms.
2. Misdiagnosis: real child safety = better-funded education, social services, AI-platform guardrails — not default scanning. Rallying phrase: "Surveillance is not safety."

Bigger picture: This is a template (cf. the EU's "Chat Control"). Sympathetic justification + a mechanism that, once built, can point anywhere.

Curious question: Not is the goal good? (it usually is) but what else can this machine do once built, and who decides what it points at next?

Segment 4 — iOS 27 at WWDC: the Privacy Fine Print

Apple WWDC 2026 keynote coverage.

Genuine wins: New Siri AI (next-gen Apple Intelligence) uses a tiered architecture — simple requests on-device, moderate ones via Private Cloud Compute (inspectable, hardened). Plus stronger family safety: child-account setup, parental controls, redesigned Screen Time, new Safari safeguards.

The fine print (two concerns):

1. Total context access. Siri AI indexes across your messages, emails, photos, and apps — a unified, queryable view of your whole digital life. Conversation history syncs via iCloud ("with privacy protections"), but strength depends on whether you've enabled Advanced Data Protection (Apple's E2EE for iCloud — not on by default).
2. New Google dependency. Apple made official a Gemini partnership — the heaviest reasoning routes to Google Cloud. Apple says queries are anonymized and tokenized so neither Apple nor Google can link them to you (Federighi: "privacy in AI is non-negotiable"). Critics counter that PCC/anonymization is "only as private as the weakest link" — if Google retains any path to usage data for training/debugging, the guarantee weakens.

Takeaway: Apple's defaults are still among the best of the mainstream — but don't let "privacy" in a keynote switch off your curiosity. On update: review Siri AI indexing settings, turn on Advanced Data Protection, and understand where your hardest queries travel.

Curious question: A magical assistant that knows everything about you is, by definition, a system granted everything about you. Did you make that trade on purpose?

Segment 5 — Self-Hosting 101: What to Migrate First

Original recurring segment — Part 1 (scope). Part 2 next week: hands-on photos build.

Self-hosting = run the services yourself, on hardware you own, instead of renting space on a company's servers. It's the deliberate counter-move to every other story this week. Honest caveat: you become your own IT department (backups, updates, downtime). Don't eat the elephant at once — scope first.

The five candidates (ranked by impact-to-effort):

1. Photos — highest emotional and surveillance value (faces, locations, timestamps). Self-host with Immich (Google-Photos-like: app, auto camera-roll backup, face/object search). Difficulty: moderate; biggest single win.
2. Calendar — a forward-looking map of your life. CalDAV via Radicale or Nextcloud; syncs to your existing calendar app. Easy–moderate; great first project.
3. Contacts — your social graph (everyone else's data too). CardDAV on the same Radicale/Nextcloud server — bundle it with calendar. Easy.
4. File backups — documents and digital paperwork. Often Nextcloud.

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-57-age-verification-is-becoming-digital-border-control/192

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1. Michael Bates - Privacy Bad Ass
2. David - Privacy Bad Ass
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4. David - Privacy Bad Ass
5. Trying - Privacy Bad Ass
6. VO - Privacy Bad Ass
7. MrMilkMustache - Privacy Supporter
8. Hutch - Privacy Advocate
9. Inferno_Potato Privacy Supporter
10. Dolores Y

TOP LIGHTNING BOOSTERS !!!! THANK YOU !!!

1. @bon thousands and thousands and thousands of SATs sats!!
2. @fireflygow - 5,000 sats!!
3. frigolay - 34,540 SATs.. HOLY SHITE
4. wardemoff - 5,000 SATs
5. Silas Thornbrook

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TOPICS

Section 702 reauthorization bill still lacks a warrant requirement

Top Priority Stories for On-Air

1. Utah targets VPNs around age verification — age gates become privacy-tool restrictions.

2. Canvas/Instructure breach — centralized school platforms become student dossiers.

3. Citizen Lab: adtech powers Webloc surveillance — commercial tracking becomes state surveillance.

4. DHS sought Google data over anti-ICE speech — platform-held data becomes political surveillance leverage.

5. GM privacy settlement — cars are data brokers with wheels.

6. Meta removes opt-in encrypted Instagram DMs — defaults are policy; optional privacy dies quietly.

7. New Orleans live facial recognition — local biometric surveillance outruns public consent.

8. LinkedIn GDPR paywall complaint — platforms monetize access to your data while resisting legal access rights.

Full Shownotes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-56-when-the-gatekeepers-fail-eu-age-app-cracked-in-2-minutes-hr-8250-palantir-pressure-signal-notification-leaks-and-taking-ai-local/188

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Episode Summary

This week, every gate the establishment built to control your digital life is leaking. Brussels unveiled its flagship EU age verification app and watched it get cracked in under two minutes by a researcher editing a settings file. HR 8250 — the "Parents Decide Act" — just dropped in Congress, pushing the same age verification infrastructure down into the operating system at the federal level. Meta is reportedly preparing facial recognition for its Ray-Ban smart glasses, and seventy civil rights organizations have told the company to abandon the plan. Thirty lawmakers demanded answers from DHS and ICE about Palantir's surveillance tools, with an 11-point letter and a response deadline of April 24th. In a federal terrorism case in Texas, the FBI recovered deleted Signal messages from a suspect's iPhone — without ever breaking Signal's encryption — by forensically extracting them from the iOS notification database, which keeps decrypted message previews for up to 30 days even after the app is uninstalled. Vercel disclosed a real security incident that started inside a third-party AI productivity tool called Context.ai — one of the cleanest textbook examples of AI-tool supply-chain risk turning into credential exposure that we've ever seen.

On the hopeful side — the quiet good news of 2026 is that running a usable AI model on your own hardware, with no cloud and no account, is finally a weekend project instead of a research project. Simon walks through his month-long experiment running OpenClaw with Ollama on a System76 Oryx Pro and an Apple Mac Studio M1 Max, using Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.1 — what works, what doesn't, and how to get started in 30 minutes.

And finally: a time-sensitive call to action. Congress has 10 days to reform Section 702 of FISA — and it is the strongest leverage moment privacy advocates have had in the program's history. Make the call.

Show Notes -

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TOPICS- Ubuntu, Canonical, and the Slow Erosion of Linux Trust"Your Phone Is Now the Checkpoint"Age Verification, iOS 26.4, and the Architecture of an Identity-Gated Internet

Lunduke List of operating systems out right rejecting or accepting age Verification

https://github.com/BryanLunduke/DoesItAgeVerify

Operating Systems Not Implementing Age Verification

The developers or publishers of these open source Operating Systems have decided to not implement Age Verification, or are currently restricting access in regions with Age Verification laws.

Operating SystemNotes⛔Omarchy LinuxDeveloper statement⛔Devuan LinuxDeveloper statement⛔Slackware LinuxDeveloper statement⛔Vendefoul Wolf LinuxDeveloper statement 1, 2⛔GrapheneOSAndroid-based mobile OS, Developer statement⛔FreeDOSDeveloper statement⛔Artix LinuxDeveloper statement⛔DB48XCalculator firmware, Developer statement⛔Arch Linux 32Developer forbids usage in Brazil, California⛔Ageless LinuxDebian fork created to protest Age Verification⛔Garuda LinuxDeveloper statement⛔Void LinuxDeveloper statement⛔EndeavorOS LinuxDeveloper statementOperating Systems Planning to Implement Age Verification

The developers or publishers of these Open Source Operating Systems have made plans and/or statements that they intend to comply with new Age Verification laws. But, as yet, that Age Verfication functionality is not fully implemented.

Operating SystemNotes🏗️UbuntuPlanning Discussion, Ubuntu VP Statement🏗️Pop!_OSSystem76 Statement opposing, but planning to implement🏗️elementary OSFounder Statement planning to implement🏗️Midnight BSDLicense temporarily forbids usage in Brazil, California, until implementation finished🏗️FedoraPlanning DiscussionOperating Systems Which Have Already Implemented Age Verification

As of the most recent update to this document, no known Open Source Operating Systems have fully complied with legal Age Verification requirements for Brazil or California.

1. Brazil's Digital ECA Went Live March 17 — and Nobody Was Ready

This week's biggest story. Brazil's mandatory age verification law went live on March 17, 2026, and Proton VPN reported a staggering 250% increase in Brazilian sign-ups between Monday and Tuesday, as users scrambled to avoid submitting biometric scans and identity documents just to access social media. Th Yahoo!e law — the Digital ECA — bans self-declaration as a verification method, and fines run up to 10% of a company's Brazilian revenue or R$50 million (~$9.5M USD) per infraction. It Adafruit gets stranger: the law contains its own internal contradiction — Article 37 says regulations cannot impose "mass, generic, or indiscriminate surveillance mechanisms," but Article 9 bans self-reported age and Article 12 demands "auditable" verification. An Adafruitd it's pulling in Linux distros — Ubuntu Linux landed on Brazil's regulatory watchlist, and Rockstar Games simply pulled its storefront from Brazilian customers entirely rather than absorb the compliance burden. St MysteriumVPNrong standalone episode or a tight follow-up segment.

2. Discord: Leaked 70,000 IDs — Then Rolled Out ID Collection to Everyone

A gift of a story for Closed Network. In October 2025, Discord disclosed that hackers breached third-party vendor 5CA and exposed approximately 70,000 government-issued ID images used for age verification. A single compromised account gave attackers access for 58 hours. Stateofsurveillance Discord's response? Beginning in early March, Discord started locking all users into a "teen-appropriate experience" unless they proved they were adults — through a face scan or government ID upload via a third-party vendor. Electronic Frontier Foundation The EFF called it out directly: Discord delayed the global rollout to the "second half of 2026" after backlash, and said one of its initial partners, Persona, "did not meet the bar" for on-device processing. Electronic Frontier Foundation The through-line for Simon: the system that leaked 70,000 IDs isn't fundamentally different from the one being rolled out to 200 million users.

3. Colorado SB26-051: Every OS Must Card You at Setup

Colorado's SB26-051 "Age Attestation on Computing Devices" passed the Senate on March 3, 2026 with a 28–7 vote. LegiScan The bill doesn't regulate websites — it shifts responsibility directly to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure. OS providers would be required to collect a user's date of birth at account setup, generate an age bracket signal, and make it available to developers via API every time an app is downloaded or launched. Biometric Update The kicker: the bill never specifies how age is actually determined — account holders just "indicate" their birth date. No ID check. No verification mechanism. Any user could lie and the system would accept it. It's FOSS Strong angle: this is California AB 1043's little sibling — but potentially even more technically sweeping because it explicitly covers Linux distros and general-purpose computing devices.

4. Character.AI Rolls Out KYC — AI Companions Now Require Government ID

Character.AI's March 2026 update mandates that users prove their age through KYC protocols. If you cannot verify your identity, you cannot chat with the bots. AGILE LEADERSHIP DAY The angle here is mission creep — age verification has now expanded from social media and adult content to AI chatbots. The EU AI Act's rules for high-risk AI systems take full effect by August 2026, and the Act strictly prohibits AI systems from deploying manipulative techniques or exploiting user vulnerabilities related to age — forcing platforms like Character.AI to definitively prove they are not exploiting minors, which means knowing exactly how old their users are. AGILE LEADERSHIP DAY This is a natural bridge episode connecting age verification to the AI regulation space.

5. Congress: KOSA vs. The App Store Accountability Act — Two Very Different Bills

Two bills now moving through Congress take fundamentally different approaches — KOSA requires companies to conduct risk assessments, restrict default settings on minors' accounts up to age 17, and give parents oversight tools. The App Store Accountability Act attempts to stop the problem before a child ever opens an app: requiring age verification at the account level and parental consent for every minor's download. Fortune Also notable: COPPA 2.0 covers ages 13 to 16, bans targeted advertising to minors entirely, and creates a dedicated FTC enforcement division — closing the loophole that allowed companies to treat teenagers as unprotected users. Fortune

6. The Bypass Problem Is Getting Worse — AI Deepfakes Are Now a Tool

A Brazilian lawyer told Rest of World: "Age-verification technologies are not infallible. Minors are using increasingly sophisticated techniques, including VPNs and AI-generated deepfakes or selfies." Rest of World On Roblox, one user posted a video showing a crude face painted on a thumb passing the age check and being assessed as 13–15 years old. Another user wrote they used a fake ID of Joseph Stalin and it got accepted. Rest of World This is darkly funny and devastating at the same time — and directly undermines the entire premise of facial age estimation as a security measure.

What does Google keep on you?

Austin Evans downloaded his Google Takeout - 527 GB of data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcHrqgz30pk

Acess the blog article and podcast - https://closednetwork.io/why-the-iphone-is-the-most-surveilled-device-on-the-planet/

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-54-why-the-iphone-is-the-most-surveilled-device-on-the-planet/179

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Intro Clip Credit - Jack Rhysider - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/glpvcVQsChE

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-53-locked-out-how-governments-and-google-are-closing-the-open-internet/178

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Show Notes

In 2026, two massive shifts are quietly closing the open internet — one driven by governments, one by Google. The first: California, Louisiana, Illinois, Texas, Utah, and countries across the world are passing laws requiring operating systems to collect your age at device setup and broadcast it to every app you install. The second: Google is requiring every Android app developer — even those who never touch the Play Store — to submit government ID, pay a fee, and register with Google, or have their apps blocked from 95% of Android devices worldwide by 2027. Both policies hit the privacy community hardest: the apps most threatened are the open-source tools, anonymous utilities, and F-Droid staples that privacy-conscious users depend on. In this episode, we break down both stories in plain language, connect the dots between them, and walk through practical steps every listener can take — from DeGoogled phones to VPNs to backing up your APKs before the window closes. If you care about who controls your device, this episode is essential listening.

Timestamps

1. 0:00 — Cold Open: Two Stories, One Threat
2. 5:00 — Part 1: OS-Level Age Verification — What It Is
3. 10:00 — The US Laws (California, Louisiana, Illinois, Texas, Utah, Colorado)
4. 18:00 — The International Wave (Australia, UK, EU, and beyond)
5. 23:00 — Why This Matters for Everyone's Privacy
6. 28:00 — Part 2: Google Closes Android
7. 33:00 — What Developer Verification Actually Requires
8. 38:00 — Who Gets Hurt (F-Droid, anonymous devs, privacy tools)
9. 46:00 — Who Is Fighting Back
10. 52:00 — Connecting the Dots: The Same Story, Two Actors
11. 62:00 — What You Can Do Right Now
12. 75:00 — Wrap-Up & Takeaways

Key Laws & Legislation Referenced

1. California AB 1043 (Digital Age Assurance Act) — Effective January 1, 2027
2. Louisiana HB 570 — Effective July 1, 2026
3. Illinois SB 3977 — Effective January 1, 2027
4. Texas SB 2420 — Mobile-focused age verification
5. Utah SB 142 — Partially in force, additional provisions through December 2026
6. Colorado SB26-051 — Proposed; effective date January 1, 2028
7. UK Online Safety Act 2023 — In force July 25, 2025
8. Australia Online Safety Act — Social media ban December 2025; search engines June 2026
9. Google Developer Verification Policy — Enforcement begins September 2026; global 2027

Organizations & Movements Referenced

1. Keep Android Open (keepandroidopen.org) — Campaign opposing Google's developer verification
2. F-Droid (f-droid.org) — Open-source Android app repository; signed the open letter
3. Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) — Digital rights advocacy; fighting both issues
4. Free Software Foundation (fsf.org) — Open-source advocacy; signed the open letter
5. Tor Project (torproject.org) — Anonymity network; signed the open letter
6. Proton AG (proton.me) — Privacy-focused email and VPN; signed the open letter
7. Nextcloud, Fastmail, Vivaldi, Article 19 — Also among the 37+ open letter signatories

Tools & Platforms Mentioned

1. GrapheneOS (grapheneos.org) — Most privacy-hardened Android alternative; AOSP-based; exempt from both policies discussed
2. CalyxOS (calyxos.org) — Privacy-focused Android alternative; AOSP-based; exempt
3. LineageOS (lineageos.org) — Broad device compatibility; AOSP-based; exempt
4. /e/OS (e.foundation) — DeGoogled Android; AOSP-based; exempt
5. F-Droid (f-droid.org) — Open-source app repository; source-code audited apps
6. Signal (signal.org) — End-to-end encrypted messaging
7. Orbot — Tor for Android; available on F-Droid
8. Proton Mail / Tutanota — End-to-end encrypted email
9. APK Extractor — Tool for backing up installed app files