Spyware, AI, censorship, surveillance…
Another week, another stack of headlines that say a lot about where the internet is heading. From age verification and AI image generation to VPN restrictions and election shutdowns, here are the eight stories worth your attention.
The UN's Answer to Bad Age Verification Laws
Age verification laws are spreading fast, from Australia's under-16 social media ban to the EU's Digital Services Act, trading privacy for a thin layer of protection. This week, UNESCO and Réseau Canopé released a different kind of response, a family guide called Growing Up in a Connected World, built with input from 37 experts.
The guide skips ID checks entirely and instead covers screen time, misinformation, and cyberbullying in plain language, leaning on device settings and real conversations families can start tonight. It also reminds readers that kids have privacy and free expression rights of their own, treating parents as capable partners instead of another database to build.
Meta's AI Image Tool Lasted 96 Hours
Meta rolled out Muse Image inside Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Meta AI app this month, letting anyone @-mention a public Instagram account inside the chatbot and generate new AI images using that person's face, with no message sent and no permission asked. Private accounts and minors were excluded, but every adult public account was opted in by default.
Creative Artists Agency and SAG-AFTRA, representing more than 160,000 film and television workers, called the opt-out design an utter miscalculation of public sentiment, and Meta pulled the @-mention feature within four days. The content-reuse setting that fed the tool remains active by default, and Meta's invisible watermark may not satisfy the EU AI Act's visible-labeling rule starting in August.
Elections Show the Internet a Government Actually Wants
Governments that shut down the internet during elections aren't reacting to a crisis, they're revealing a decision made well in advance. Venezuela blocked social media and anti-censorship tools around its 2024 election while journalists were detained and dissenters disappeared, and Bangladesh cut mobile internet for eleven days during 2024 protests before an interim government took over.
Serbia, Kenya, and Uganda show the same pattern outside the usual list of authoritarian states, with Freedom House recording Kenya's steepest ranking decline after a seven-hour shutdown during tax protests. Freedom on the Net 2025 tracked a 15th consecutive year of declining internet freedom, and elections keep being the moment that trend becomes impossible to explain away.
Paris Weighed Buying the Spyware Morocco Was Already Using on Its Ministers
France's government explored buying Pegasus spyware from NSO's French reseller starting in mid-2019, while Morocco's domestic intelligence agency was already running the same software against French officials, a program the country would go on to repeatedly deny. Emmanuel Macron ultimately rejected the purchase, but future prime minister Sébastien Lecornu had already been targeted from that July onward.
A former Moroccan intelligence officer using the pseudonym Safir has now detailed how the agency hid its fingerprints through a private intermediary tied to a UAE defense group, with journalist Omar Radi among those targeted and later pardoned. The revelations landed the same week Lecornu led twelve ministers to Rabat for what his office called a high-level reconciliation meeting.
Wearable Makers Are Failing Basic Privacy Tests
EFF reviewed ten major wearable makers, including Amazfit, Apple, Coros, Garmin, Google, Oura, Polar, Suunto, and Whoop, and found only Apple and Google currently publish transparency reports showing how often governments request user data. Oura updated its privacy policy in June after a journalist pressed the company, but seven companies never responded at all.
Apple Watch is the only mainstream wearable offering end-to-end encryption, and only for data stored inside the Apple Health app, while every other device leaves the company able to see and store everything. Heart rate spikes and step counts have already been used as evidence in criminal investigations, and surveillance vendors openly market wearables to investigators for exactly that reason.
Labour Signals a UK VPN Ban Announcement Is Just Days Away
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has promised a robust statement on VPN restrictions this month, following a rollout that already covered AI chatbot limits and teen curfews. The bill has been bouncing between the Lords, which voted to ban VPN access for under-18s outright, and the Commons, which substituted a broad ministerial power to restrict children's VPN use instead.
Internet Matters research found only 7% of children use a VPN to bypass age checks, dwarfed by fake birthdays, borrowed logins, and shared devices. The EU's digital chief and French officials have separately signaled VPN restrictions are next on their own agendas, meaning a robust UK announcement hands them a ready-made template.
Public Education Shouldn't Run on Big Tech's Terms
UNESCO marked the World Youth Skills Day on July 15th by launching a Skills for the Future Platform alongside a new Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms built with UNICEF and the ITU. The Charter names the problem directly, pointing out that platforms like Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams were built for workplace productivity, not learning.
It calls for student and teacher data to stay under national jurisdiction and public control by default, and takes direct aim at asking families to click through lengthy terms just to access compulsory education. UNESCO also centers media information literacy, the ability to evaluate sources and recognize when a platform's design is working on a student rather than for them.
Internet Shutdowns and the Meaning of African Democracy
Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented 313 internet shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, a new record, with 30 of those shutdowns across 15 African countries. Tanzania imposed a five-day nationwide blackout during its October 2025 elections while security forces turned on citizens in the streets, and the African Union declared the vote undemocratic.
Uganda cut connectivity during its January 2026 elections despite warnings from human rights bodies, but civil society is pushing back, with the ECOWAS Court ruling Senegal's shutdown unlawful and the International Criminal Court linking shutdowns to crimes against humanity. On the eve of Nelson Mandela Day, the question is whether an election counts when a government can silence the network.
Be part of the resistance, quietly.
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Ina is an occasional contributor covering the strange and overlooked corners of the internet – surveillance, data grabs, and the invisible systems that know more about us than our friends do.
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