I discovered this article after it was censored from the Reddit privacy community.

Thank goodness there are still some places where you are allowed to criticize the rich and powerful.

Original post

This action was taken under an unannounced rule that can label and censor criticism of anyone or anything with "FUD."

You'll find it's only used to protect the rich and powerful, though.

Unable to simply delete the post, the moderators scrubbed comments from anyone who named and shamed CEO James Dolan, but allowed his supporters to remain uncensored.

Criticism of basically anyone rich or powerful was removed.

Criticism of Tucker Carlson was removed.

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

• Evan Greer via BlueSky

Heise blacklisted

The post

Censored, all comments locked.

The removal reason

Why this is bullshit

This is not a normal removal message. Most of this removal reason is from a template, the portion including "Now blacklisted" was manually added and has never been used before.

Heise is based in Germany, where the best privacy laws (the GDPR) are enforced strictly. If this site is blacklisted, then any site can be blacklisted.

"Please link to a credible source" is part of the original community rules, and maybe the moderator who edited the message forgot to remove it, because Heise is credible.

US border security questions are suppressed

The post

Censored, all comments locked.

The removal reason

Why it's bullshit

Their post is based on legitimate concerns from legitimate news sites. There is no FUD here, there is no attack on any "privacy mainstay" unless the moderators believe the US surveillance apparatus needs to be protected by them.

And if we needed more evidence the moderators are protecting the DHS, they also removed this comment from the thread's OP:

Bonus: mods censor a guide to safe border crossing

The post

The removal reason

Why this is bullshit

No rules were broken. Moderator carrotcypher cannot even be assed to fabricate one. (Why not just blacklist The Guardian too?)

Original post text

Given the recent detainment of a French person who got detained because he said something bad about the current administration in his WhatsApp messages. It makes me wonder if WhatsApp is truly end to end encrypted as they claimed. How did they even single him out?

As a corollary question, if I were to pass Customs, and if I delete WhatsApp , Reddit etc just before I reach the counter, will they be able to find out that I just deleted the apps minutes ago? I’ll be deleting them from my phone but keep them on the cloud.

It looks like the Privacy Act might be a way to audit DOGE on a per-person level. Jamie Raskin has suggested mailing them a formal request for your data.

While there does appear to be precedent for this, I can't find much more information about it. So this is more of a thread in search of info.

Here is some from NPR:

The Privacy Act was once a quite sleepy law in my privacy classes. It's gotten increasing prominence in part because there's been so much compliance with the Privacy Act. You know, every agency now has to put out, you know, notices about having new collections of information in databases. And there's chief privacy officers at every agency. You have to pay attention to it and adhere to its commitments, which are to ensure that you don't collect information you shouldn't be collecting for a proper purpose, and that you're not sharing it unless you meet the conditions of the Privacy Act.

Context

Senate Bill (SB) 1047 is legislation proposed by Senator Scott Wiener for regulating AI models that cost over $100 million to train. The bill was designed to hold AI companies accountable for potential damages caused by their models.

It gained widespread support from the population of California and a broad coalition of labor unions, AI safety advocates, Hollywood figures, and current and ex-employees of AI megacorporations.

However, many giant corporations including Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI opposed the bill, asking Gavin Newsom to veto it.

Mozilla's statement

On August 29, Mozilla joined the corporations to endorse a veto, publishing its own statement:

Mozilla is a champion for both openness and trustworthiness in AI, and we are deeply concerned that SB 1047 would imperil both of those objectives. For over 25 years, Mozilla has fought Big Tech to make the Internet better, creating an open source browser that challenged incumbents and raised the bar on privacy, security, and functionality for everyone in line with our manifesto.

Today, we see parallels to the early Internet in the AI ecosystem, which has also become increasingly closed and consolidated in the hands of a few large, tech companies. >We are concerned that SB 1047 would further this trend, harming the open-source community and making AI less safe — not more.

Mozilla has engaged with Senator Wiener's team on the legislation; we appreciate the Senator’s collaboration, along with many of the positive changes made throughout the legislative process. However, we continue to be concerned about key provisions likely to have serious repercussions. For instance, provisions like those that grant the Board of Frontier Models oversight of computing thresholds without statutory requirements for updating thresholds as AI proves safe will likely harm the open-source AI community and the startups, small businesses, researchers, and academic communities that utilize open-source AI.

As the bill heads to the Governor’s desk, we ask that Governor Newsom consider the serious harm this bill may do to the open source ecosystem and pursue alternatives that address concrete AI risks to ensure a better AI future for all.

Source: Mozilla (PDF).

Gavin Newsom vetoed this bill on September 29th.