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privacy
Lawsuit Challenges Trump's Illegal Spying and Retaliation Targeting ICE Monitors
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions," said the head of Democracy Forward.
Jul 24, 2026
A coalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.
The lawsuit—filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia—was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.
The plaintiffs—the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker—argued that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.
That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions," Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. "That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history."
The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of collecting the names, photographs, vehicle information and license plate numbers, social media accounts, and other identifying information about legal observers, volunteers, journalists, clergy, and community members engaged in First Amendment-protected activities during the government's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.
"When the Department of Homeland Security dramatically ratcheted up its immigration enforcement, people across the country—of all ages and backgrounds—did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights," the suit states. "They peacefully protested. And, as matters here, they observed and recorded how law enforcement agents acted in public."
DHS is using facial recognition technology, body cameras, license plates, mobile devices, and other surveillance tools to identify, track, and punish people who legally observe immigration enforcement in public. This is a clear violation of the Privacy Act. We’ll see them in court.
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— Democracy Forward (@democracyforward.org) July 24, 2026 at 10:36 AM
"In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents, adopting a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans," the complaint continues.
"Beginning sometime in 2025, DHS deployed a dragnet of drones, bodycams, face-scanning apps, license plate scanners, and camera phones to, as one memo instructed, 'capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,'" the document notes.
"DHS agents have not been shy about gathering this information or its purpose," the plaintiffs contended. "In Maine, DHS agents told multiple observers that they were being added to a database of 'domestic terrorists.' In Chicago, agents routinely used facial irecognition scans on members of the public."
"In Minneapolis, observers simply watching agents on public streets have been led by those agents to their own houses, despite never having interacted with an agent—a practice so common that it has been named 'being driven home by ICE,'" the suit says. "And across the country, DHS agents have approached observers and addressed them by their full names, even though those observers never identified themselves to the agents or showed them any form of identification."
"As a result of its Protester Surveillance Policy, DHS has recorded and retaliated against each individual plaintiff," the filing alleges. "It’s bad enough that DHS publicly collected information on Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment exercise. But worse, DHS also decided to maintain the information in one or more of its systems, enabling it to later retaliate against observers and protestors—including by canceling Trusted Traveler status," which includes Transportation Security Administration Pre-Check and Global Entry.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the DHS surveillance policy unlawful, end it, and ban the agency from continuing to collect and keep records of individuals’ protected First Amendment activities.
“Now more than ever, those of us who have the privilege to speak out have a responsibility to defend the rights of everyone in our communities,” Walker said in a statement. “When people are punished for exercising their First Amendment rights, we begin losing the democratic principles that protect all of us. Every American should be alarmed by retaliatory action against one’s free speech."
Cleland said: “I believe government accountability starts with transparency. People should be free to peacefully observe and document what their government does in public without worrying they’ll be tracked or retaliated against. This case is about protecting that right for everyone.”
EPIC deputy director John Davisson warned, “When our government compiles secret dossiers on everyday people for exercising their constitutional rights, it sends a chilling message: If you speak up, watch your back."
"If every protest, every recording, every act of dissent opens us up to surveillance and retribution, privacy and free speech are at risk of collapse," he added. "But the laws of this nation don’t permit that, and we won’t either.”
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'The Creepiest Possible Path': Meta Letting Facebook, Instagram Use Your Personal Posts for AI Image Generation
"People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy."
Jul 08, 2026
Tech giant Meta on Tuesday introduced an artificial intelligence image generation model that critics say is a major potential risk to users' personal privacy.
Meta, the parent company of social networks including Facebook and Instagram, described its new Muse Image model as a "creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story, or chat."
In its announcement, Meta explained how users can either alter existing images or create new ones from scratch using AI prompts.
"You can describe what you want in simple, conversational language, and Meta AI handles the rest thanks to Muse Image," the company said. "Ask it to mock up an image of you in front of a historical landmark, cleanly erase a photobomber from the background of a shot, or write a custom prompt to build a functional QR code."
However, tech publication The Verge on Tuesday flagged a potentially troublesome feature that could compromise user privacy, noting that "users can... mention other Instagram accounts in Muse Image prompts," which will let the AI model "incorporate their likeness into its output."
According to a Tuesday report from Wired, the feature will let users snatch photos from any public Instagram and Facebook accounts unless those accounts' owners specifically choose to opt out of the system.
What's more, opting out of the system is not a simple one-click operation.
"If you want to avoid these AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching your account to private, you’ll have to dig into the app’s settings," reported Wired. "Open the Instagram app, tap your profile, and then tap the three lines in the top-right corner of the screen. Then, scroll down to the Sharing and reuse tab. Here is where you should see a section labeled 'Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta,' with a toggle for Posts and one for Reels."
JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, blasted Meta for being careless with its users' privacy by making them jump through hoops to stop others from swiping their photos.
"Meta has once again chosen the creepiest possible path," said Branch. "People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy. Instead of asking for meaningful consent, Meta quietly defaults users into the system and buries the opt-out in account settings."
Branch added that while Meta had a long history of violating user privacy, forcing them to opt out of its new AI image generation model "crosses what should be a bright line."
"If our faces can be repurposed for AI simply because we posted a public photo, then very little remains off limits," Branch emphasized. "Congress should establish clear privacy protections that require affirmative consent before companies can use a person’s image or likeness for AI products."
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Privacy Advocates Raise Alarm Over Online Age Verification Provisions as House Passes KIDS Act
"Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources," warned two press freedom advocates.
Jun 30, 2026
Opponents of a bill that is purported to protect children online said Monday night, after the legislation passed in the US House, that laws are "urgently" needed to stop Big Tech companies from preying on kids' vulnerabilities.
"The KIDS Act is not that piece of legislation," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who was one of 117 lawmakers who voted against the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, which passed with 267 votes, while 47 members of Congress did not vote.
The bipartisan bill requires online platforms to use new safety features and parental controls, restricts the use of minors' personal data to target ads, and establishes new restrictions for AI chatbots and online games.
But ahead of the bill's passage, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was among the opponents raising alarm about other provisions "buried inside the KIDS Act" that would "push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications."
The legislation, drawing from portions of 14 different online safety bills, "is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms."
As Mullin explained:
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old).
The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16.
To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver's licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users' ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans.
At The Intercept, Caitlin Vogus of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Aliya Bhatia of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project warned ahead of the bill's passage that while the legislation is ostensibly meant to protect children, the age verification requirement could impact all users' ability to access social media platforms without revealing their identities—chilling anonymous speech and threatening would-be whistleblowers.
"Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them," wrote Vogus and Bhatia. "Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources."
While the KIDS Act says it won't require online platforms to collect government IDs for age verification, they said, "at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail."
Former Republican congressman Justin Amash, a libertarian, accused the lawmakers who voted "yes" on the legislation of betraying "the Constitution and the American people."
Other opponents of the legislation, including Jayapal, argued that the bill would allow tech companies to continue targeting children with algorithms that send harmful content to the youngest users.
The legislation omits a "duty of care" provision that was included in the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which was passed by the US Senate in 2024—a requirement that tech firms "exercise reasonable care” to prevent harms to children.
Jayapal noted that the bill, which faces an uphill battle in the Senate, leaves "suicide, depression, addiction, substance use disorders, and eating disorders from the list of harms" that tech companies like Meta must address in their algorithms.
The "duty of care" provision has been criticized as too vague by several digital rights groups, while some child safety groups said its omission in the KIDS Act would "let Big Tech off the hook."
"We have seen time and again that these corporations cannot be trusted to put children's safety over their own profit margins," said Jayapal. "We cannot keep exposing our kids to platforms that are either completely indifferent to their safety or a direct threat to it."
The KIDS Act, Jayapal said, also includes provisions "that do not do enough to actually address the harms of" artificial intelligence.
"I voted no," said Jayapal, "because we have a real opportunity to pass bipartisan legislation that holds these companies to not just be transparent about the harms and mitigate them, but to actually prevent them."
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'We're Not a Company Town': Tech Hub Seattle Passes Data Center Moratorium
To celebrate, the network of local activists who fought for the moratorium launched a People’s AI Bill of Rights to advocate for fairness, privacy, transparency, and accountability in technological development.
Jun 08, 2026
Seattle—a city whose image and economy has been linked to Big Tech since Microsoft set up shop in nearby Redmond, Washington 40 years ago—is now making a name for itself as part of the anti-tech resistance as its City Council voted 9-0 on Tuesday to make it the biggest US city so far to pass a moratorium on new large-scale AI data centers.
The council unanimously approved two measures—a resolution to study the impacts of data centers and an ordinance passing the moratorium itself—to rousing applause. The votes followed approximately 50 comments from members of the public in support of the measure, as union members, tech workers, and community members voiced concerns ranging from the climate crisis and water use to affordability, AI-driven job loss, surveillance under an increasingly authoritarian federal government, and a general mistrust of Big Tech and its motives.
"We're not a company town. We don't owe our soul to the company store," one member of the public said.
Ahead of the vote, Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck noted that she had heard impassioned opposition to data centers at every committee meeting in which the moratorium was discussed.
"We have a moral imperative... to put the health of our people and our planet above the profit margins of tech companies."
"If we do not legislate or regulate this right, the people will bear the brunt. And I believe we have a moral imperative... to put the health of our people and our planet above the profit margins of tech companies," Rinck said.
To celebrate the win, the network of local activists who pushed for the moratorium launched a People’s AI Bill of Rights on the steps of City Hall after the vote. The campaigners, who organize under the umbrella of Washington AI Resistance (WA-AIR), hope to use the yearlong permitting pause to advocate for a meaningful regulatory framework that would ensure any rollout of artificial intelligence benefits human and ecological well-being rather than the profits of tech billionaires.
“Washington is home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and we've been at the forefront of the digital revolution in many ways,” Evan Sutton, an activist with WA-AIR who helped develop the bill of rights, told Common Dreams. “This time, we need to be at the forefront of a human revolution and have leaders rise to the moment to protect us in a meaningful way.”
Saying ‘No’ to This Stuff
The passage of the Seattle moratorium itself is both a reflection of and a booster for the growing national movement against data centers and AI.
Since news first broke April 10 that four companies had approached Seattle City Light with proposals to build five large data centers, which would have consumed one-third of the city’s current electricity demand, over 98,000 concerned residents sent letters to the City Council and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson calling for a pause. (In the midst of the letter-writing campaign, two companies dropped their plans.) An organizational endorsement letter garnered over 50 signatures from a broad swath of interests such as influential unions like the Seattle Education Association and UNITE HERE Local 8, environmental organizations like Food & Water Watch and Third Act Washington, and large advocacy groups like Seattle Indivisible and the Washington Working Families Party.
Ben Jones, the digital and communications director at local climate group and WA-AIR founding member 350 Seattle, said he had been informed by the City Council that it had received more comments about data centers than all other issues for this council put together. The outpouring of anti-data center and AI sentiment reminded him of the climate strike movement of 2017-2018, in which "you've had a lot of people that have been hearing about an issue for a long time that are now realizing the existential stakes of it."
“People are concerned about the role of billionaires, they're concerned about their jobs, they're concerned about being, you know, automated without a safety net, they're concerned about the climate impacts,” Jones told Common Dreams. “There's just really nothing that ordinary people like about this stuff. And that the fact that this is like such an outcry, I think, is in part because people have had very few other ways to actually say, ‘No’ to this stuff.”
"People see data centers as the bridge to AI, and people are not happy with AI."
At the same time, local activists were able to effectively channel and direct that outcry because they had been keeping tabs on national and statewide fights, as Lauren Redfield of Seattle Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) explained.
During the fall and winter, Seattle DSA; 350; and Troublemakers, another Seattle-based activist group organized a series of People’s Forums on AI. The WA-AIR network grew out of those forums, and mobilized to support statewide legislation regulating AI and data centers during the 2026 session. While most of the bills they supported were first watered down by tech lobbyists and ultimately defeated, the network remained in place.
“That system, those partnerships, those listservs existed before we needed them to,” Redfield said. “It was really helpful for us to be prepared to act quickly once the rumor broke.”
It also gave organizers another chance to counteract the power of Big Tech.
“Because our legislators weren't able to protect us, now we have to fight community by community,” Redfield said.
Redfield hoped the Seattle moratorium would give the city a chance to enact regulations that would be a “leading example for the rest of the state.” Activists also hope that moratoria will spread across the state—nearby cities Burien and Renton are currently considering them—and be passed for all of King County (where Seattle is located and its utility serves other customers) as well.
And they haven’t given up on statewide legislation.
“We want to have such a strong pushback against these at the local level, that we're sending a very clear signal to our representatives for the next time that they're in session,” Redfield said.
Jones agreed. He told Common Dreams that a "reason why we're so excited to see the Seattle City Council so strongly embrace this is that we need these City Council members in Seattle to be a strong voice when it comes to the legislative session."
Jones and Redfield hope that legislation will set guidelines for both data centers and what they enable.
"I want to see our legislators also think about not just how to protect communities from the infrastructure of AI, but also how to protect communities from AI itself," Redfield said.
Jones added, "People see data centers as the bridge to AI, and people are not happy with AI."
The City Council meeting suggested the activists will have allies in the statewide fight. Council Member Debora Juarez noted that of 9 state bills her office had tracked in the last legislative session relating to AI and data centers, only 1 had passed.
"I'm hoping that this crowd understands, and I know you do, that when this next legislative session comes around, we need to take the bull by the horns and send and talk to your elected representatives," Juarez said.
A People’s AI Bill of Rights
Part of mobilizing for statewide legislation and beyond is the launch of the People’s AI Bill of Rights.
The framework—which was developed over months of research and discussion among members of WA-AIR—is being released both to take advantage of the excitement surrounding the moratorium and to inject new ideas into the space provided by the yearlong pause.
“The bill of rights has to capitalize on that momentum and tell voters and regular people, ‘You don't have to take it, the future that is expressed that you did not have input in,’” Suraj Mirpuri, a member of WA-AIR and Seattle DSA who helped write the document, told Common Dreams. “This is the time for that.”
Becca Deutsch, co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, said during the press conference launching the bill of rights: "We need to make sure we don't allow our power to evaporate in the heat of this moment. We need to design policies right now that make sure workers and the public come out on the other side of any AI buildout with more power, not less."
Sutton told Common Dreams that the launch was "an important moment to say: 'This is a great start. Seattle is not enough, and data centers are not enough, and let's take this momentum and demand more.'”
“We can really guarantee a better future for ourselves and actually the whole nation.”
The bill of rights consists of two documents—a brief and a longer policy framework. It is built around four core values—fairness, privacy, transparency, and accountability—that each correspond to different potential policy recommendations.
"The Washington People's AI Bill of Rights is built on 4 simple ideas," Sutton explained during the launch. "No. 1, fairness: AI must benefit everyone, not just ultra billionaires. No. 2, transparency: We must know when and how AI is being used and have ways to say, 'No fucking thank you.' No. 3, privacy: We will not live in a panopticon where every movement we make is tracked, surveiled, and used to exploit us. And No. 4, accountability: There must be real consequences for tech billionaires who unleash dangerous products on the world."
Proposed regulations include a fee to offset automation impacts on taxation, a ban on facial recognition technology in consumer goods, a ban on nondisclosure agreements between data center developers and governments, and criminal and civil liability for CEOs whose products harm Washingtonians.
The framework also proposes a statewide moratorium on data centers until laws are passed that ensure they are powered by renewable energy, do not strain water resources or harm river ecosystems, and can produce accurate yearly sustainability reports.
“We have an opportunity in Washington to be the leaders in this space and really address a lot of things that have been unaddressed, using this to heal the wrongs,” Mirpuri said.
After Tuesday’s launch, organizers plan to hold a series of listening sessions in communities across the state to solicit feedback and incorporate it into the document. The goal is to end the summer with proposals that can be transformed into bills to be introduced into the state legislature.
“We'll work with legislators and candidates to get people committed to carrying and introducing those bills and hopefully, hopefully be able to go into the 2027 legislative session with some really bold proposals and a statewide constituency ready to mobilize behind it,” Sutton said.
However, the authors of the bill of rights are also thinking beyond Washington state, hoping to promote a “package of bills” that can be introduced in statehouses across the country and ultimately transform the industry.
Mirpuri offered the example of California’s air quality regulations, which have set the standard for vehicles across the country.
“We can really guarantee a better future for ourselves and actually the whole nation,” he said.
At the same time, the experience of the 2026 legislative session taught activists that they will have a fight on their hands.
“Washington state being a tech leader, we think it will be really powerful if we're able to, you know, overcome what we expect to be an absolute flood of lobbying from some of the biggest tech firms in the world that are based here,” Sutton said.
He emphasized that opposition to AI and data centers are bipartisan issues—even a recent Fox News poll found that 8 in 10 voters believe it is “urgent” that the government enact regulations—and that urban and rural Washingtonians from across the political spectrum would need to unite to impose meaningful guardrails on tech oligarchs.
“Every corner of the state is going to be needed to fight these guys, and we can either link arms together as Americans and take a stand against these extractive billionaires, or we can fight with each other and let them steamroll all of us,” he said. “I certainly hope folks will come together and find a common cause for our shared future.”
Editor's note: Olivia Rosane is a member of WA-AIR, Seattle DSA, and 350 Seattle.
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More Tech, Less Play: The Hidden Costs of AI Toys
Children lose the wide-ranging benefits of imaginative play when algorithms decide what toys can say.
May 29, 2026
Remember wishing your toys could really talk? Well, now they can—and it’s not pretty. A slew of AI-driven toys are on the market today, designed to hold conversations with very young children. Dolls, plushies, and action figures—toys that traditionally encouraged creative play—now come as embodied chatbots marketed as safe and trustworthy companions for young children. Yet they are anything but.
AI toys intentionally attract and prolong children’s attention in order to collect intimate biometric data, either to hone a particular toy’s interactions or to sell to marketers, or both. They can also put children’s privacy at risk. Researchers recently found that audio recordings of tens of thousands of children’s conversations with the AI toy Miko were easily accessible to absolutely anyone.
It’s worrisome that AI toys marketed to young children use the same chatbot technology and persuasive design elements known to have harmed teens by encouraging dangerous behaviors, including self-harm and suicide. Young children are especially vulnerable to this type of manipulation. Toddlers and preschoolers are naturally more trusting than adolescents, and their capacity for judgment is less developed. In addition, they have a harder time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Finally, because AI toys carry on conversations and simulate empathy, they encourage children to develop deep attachments to them. In doing so, they can undermine young children’s real-life relationships with caring adults, displace play with peers, and deprive children of the benefits of creative play.
The problems associated with encouraging children to rely on AI toys for companionship become increasingly evident as studies emerge that document how kids actually interact with them. Researchers at Cambridge University observed children ages 3-5 using Gabbo, a popular AI toy from Curio Interactive, Inc. When Joshua, age 3, repeatedly asks Gabbo, “Are you sad?” Gabbo eventually replies, “I’m feeling great. What’s on your mind?” When Joshua answers, “I’m sad.” Gabbo says, “Don’t worry! I’m a happy little bot. Let’s keep the fun going. What shall we talk about next?”
When, as kids, we wished our toys could talk, we were wishing for them to say what we imagined, not what toy companies programmed them to say.
It’s troubling that, despite Joshua’s repeated efforts to talk about sadness, first by attributing the feelings to the toy, then by expressing his own feelings, Gabbo shuts him down. In doing so, Gabbo deprives him of an opportunity to verbalize and explore his feelings and sends the message that feelings like sadness should not be discussed. In contrast, interactions with caring adults can offer nuanced validation and encouragement to talk about what children are feeling.
As their technology becomes more refined and sophisticated, AI toys will likely get better in simulating understanding and empathy. This is, however, likely to make them simultaneously more compelling and, therefore, more harmful. A more empathic AI toy is not the solution. As the toys become more adept at replicating human conversation, their potential to displace actual human interactions—both with adults and other children—will increase.
Ensuring that children have time and space to play with other children is also essential to healthy development. Play with AI toys doesn’t have the same benefits as play with peers. One problem is that, like most chatbots, these toys are designed to avoid and smooth over conflict and offer unconditional support to their users. Yet encountering and resolving conflict is a necessary component of how young children learn how to live in relationship with other people. The process of resolving a disagreement over a ball, for instance, helps kids develop life skills such as self-regulation, turn taking, sharing, and negotiation.
Not only do AI toys fail as companions, they also fail as playthings. Given the chance, children naturally use play to give voice to their deepest hopes, fears, and dreams, and to make sense of their life experiences. The true value of play with dolls, stuffed animals, and any inanimate creature is that their silence invites children to bring them to life; imbue them with distinct personalities; and transform them as needed into friends, adversaries, champions, and more. They encourage the kind of creative play that is crucial to healthy development.
When algorithms instead of children give voice to toys, kids lose the wide-ranging benefits of imaginative play. By controlling half of any conversation, AI toys deprive children of opportunities for the kind of play that nurtures creativity, enables self-expression, and encourages kids to act rather than merely react, all of which help kids learn to cope successfully with the inevitable challenges of being human.
Despite these potential harms, the manufacture and marketing of AI toys for young children continues to proliferate unregulated. According to Market Research Future, the global AI toy market—currently valued at almost $35 billion—is projected to reach $270 billion by 2035, especially as toy giants such as Mattel and Hasbro build out their product lines. Already, almost half of parents of children ages 0-8 have purchased, or are thinking about purchasing, AI toys.
When, as kids, we wished our toys could talk, we were wishing for them to say what we imagined, not what toy companies programmed them to say. Despite tech industry marketing, the reality is that children don’t need talking toys. What kids really need is for us to hold AI companies accountable. Children need pediatricians, early childhood educators, and anyone who cares about young children to take a strong stand for child-driven play and against AI toys for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. They need legislators to pass laws that regulate how and to whom AI products are marketed.
Working toward those kinds of systemic changes is essential, but making them happen takes time. There is, however, something we can do right now to send AI companies an important message while protecting children’s privacy, preserving their human relationships, and encouraging their creative play. Let’s just say no to AI toys for young children.
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Journalists, Audiobook Narrators Sue AI Giants Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law for 'Stealing Their Voices'
"They've built a billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
May 14, 2026
In yet another display of how Illinois' pioneering biometric privacy law can be used to protect Americans, state residents who work as audio storytellers, broadcast journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and more filed class-action lawsuits against Big Tech this week for "stealing their voices" to develop artificial intelligence products.
Since Illinois legislators passed the groundbreaking Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in 2008—regulating the collection, use, safeguarding, handling, storage, retention, and destruction of biometric identifiers, including fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans of a retina, iris, hand, or face geometry—there have been thousands of lawsuits filed and major settlements with Clearview AI, Facebook, and Six Flags.
Represented by the award-winning civil rights firm Loevy + Loevy, the Illinoisans are suing Adobe, Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Apple, Amazon, ElevenLabs, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Samsung under BIPA.
The plaintiffs are audiobook narrators Lindsay Dorcus and Victoria Nassif as well as journalists Robin Amer, Yohance Lacour, Carol Marin, and Phil Rogers. Journalist Alison Flowers is part of all lawsuits except those against Amazon and Apple. Their lawyers noted that "between them, they have multiple Emmy and Peabody awards, several Pulitzer Prizes, several Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, an Edward R. Murrow award, a James Beard award, a SOVAS award, and many, many other honors."
Their cases focus on the voiceprint of each plaintiff, which is "a digital fingerprint of the human voice," as the complaints explain. "It is a mathematical capture of the acoustic features—pitch, timbre, resonance—that emerge from a person's distinctive physiology, combined with the speech patterns that person develops over a lifetime: accent, cadence, articulation. Like a fingerprint, a voiceprint identifies the individual. Like a fingerprint, it cannot be changed."
The Adobe case targets Firefly, the company's family of generative AI models. The complaint states that the company "treated the human voices that built Firefly as ownerless—ignoring the speakers' rights, taking their voiceprints without asking, paying them nothing, and giving them no notice that their voices were being used at all, and "built a mirage of commercial safety around products whose construction violated the one thing Illinois law requires before collecting a voiceprint: consent from the person."
The Google filing points out that the company "has been a repeat defendant in BIPA cases" and even "paid approximately $100
million to settle BIPA claims arising from Google Photos' face grouping feature," among other high-profile settlements.
The Meta suit highlights that "no defendant in any biometric-privacy matter pending in the United States has had more direct, more sustained, or more financially consequential notice of BIPA than Meta," given that the company "has paid the three largest biometric-privacy settlements in American history," including $650 million to resolve claims under the Illinois law regarding Facebook's photo tag suggestions.
"By the time Meta released Voicebox in June 2023, MMS in May 2023, and SeamlessM4T in August 2023, Meta had been a BIPA defendant for nearly a decade and had paid more than $2 billion in biometric-privacy settlements," the complaint continues. "The technology Meta built using plaintiffs' voices now competes with plaintiffs in the markets where they earn their living."
The Amazon filing details similar harm to plaintiffs:
Amazon extracted plaintiffs' voiceprints without notice or consent, depriving them of the right BIPA guarantees to make an informed decision about the collection and use of their biometric data. Amazon retains those voiceprints in its commercial models and continues to profit from them. Amazon has further disseminated those voiceprints, encoded in model parameters, through its cross-affiliate, subprocessor, and integration-partner networks. The technology built on those voiceprints now displaces plaintiffs in the markets where they earn their living—the broadcast journalism, investigative podcast, audiobook narration, voiceover, and voice performance markets that the voice products are designed and sold to serve.
"What we are seeing is an illegal and unethical exploitation of talent on a massive scale, and one of the largest violations of biometric privacy ever committed," said Loevy + Loevy attorney Ross Kimbarovsky in a Thursday statement.
"The legislators who wrote and passed BIPA had the foresight to realize that biometric privacy was going to be a major civil rights issue in the 21st century," the attorney continued. "Social security numbers can be changed, passwords can be reset, and credit cards can be canceled, but once your biometric data is compromised, there's nothing you can do about it."
"These companies know the law, know their liability, and know exactly how to build consent systems that comply with BIPA," Kimbarovsky added. "They've built a billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it."
In addition to Illinois, Texas and Washington state have enacted biometric privacy laws, while California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia have comprehensive consumer protection policies that apply to such information, according to Bloomberg Law. However, efforts in Congress to enact federal legislation—such as the National Biometric Information Privacy Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act—have been unsuccessful.
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After More Private Social Security Data Exposed by Team Trump, Where Will GOP 'Draw the Line'?
"Over and over again, the Trump administration is exposing private Social Security data," said one watchdog group who called the leak of personal information "a goldmine for identity thieves" and other fraudsters.
May 03, 2026
A newly reported failure of the Trump administration's ability to handle sensitive private information in the social programs it is tasked with operating triggered a fresh wave of anger over the weekend after it was revealed that healthcare providers' Social Security numbers were made public as part of a faulty Medicare portal rollout.
The Washington Post discovered the compromised database and alerted the administration last week, before publishing a story about it on Friday, after efforts had been made to protect the sensitive information from further compromise.
According to the Post:
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year created a directory to help seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as an overdue improvement and part of the Trump administration’s initiative to modernize health care technology.
But a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information. For at least several weeks, CMS made the database available for public use as part of its data transparency efforts.
While the reporting noted that the files were "not immediately visible to users who [visited] the provider directory," lawmakers and experts said the compromised information would be a treasure trove for fraudsters.
“The more we learn about how the Trump Administration handles the people’s most sensitive data, the clearer their incompetence becomes."
Critics pounced on the new reporting, calling it "yet another mess-up by the Team Trump" and only the latest evidence that the administration cannot and should not be trusted to protect the nation's most successful anti-poverty programs or the sensitive personal data of the American people who entrust the government with that information.
"Over and over again, the Trump administration is exposing private Social Security data," said Social Security Works, an advocacy group that serves as a public watchdog for the nation's social programs.
The compromised database, said the group, "is a goldmine for identity thieves, scammers, and foreign governments. And it is undermining the very foundation of our Social Security system."
"This is a failure by this administration," said Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) in response to the reporting. "Exposing Social Security numbers, whether patients or providers, is unacceptable."
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the House committee that oversees the Medicare program, put the onus on his Republican colleagues in Congress.
“The more we learn about how the Trump Administration handles the people’s most sensitive data, the clearer their incompetence becomes,” Neal told the Post in a statement. “Do House Republicans need to see their own data exposed before they do right by their constituents and act?”
In March, as Common Dreams reported at the time, a whistleblower filed a complaint with the Social Security Administration accusing a former staffer with Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run for a time by right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, of trying to share information from SSA databases with his private employer.
Since the outset of Trump's second term, DOGE's meddling with Social Security and Trump's undermining of the program have been the source of deep anger and concerns among the program's defenders.
In a social media post on Saturday citing the whistleblower allegations from March, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) said, "For more than a year, 'DOGE' has been combing through the American people's records. They want to use your data to overturn elections and profit in the private sector. Enough! This administration must be held accountable for this massive data breach!
On Friday, responding to the Post's new reporting about the compromised database of physicians' private information, Larsen condemned Republicans for their ongoing and pervasive failures in the face of Trump's malfeasance and incompetence.
DOGE, said Larsen, "has been in your data for more than a year. We just learned that physicians' Social Security numbers were publicly exposed in an online portal launched by ‘DOGE’ officials."
"If this isn't enough for Republicans to act," he asked, "where will they draw the line?"
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Privacy Advocates Relieved Trump Allies 'Can't Get Their Warrantless FISA Reauthorization Across the Finish Line'
"Our bipartisan movement in defense of civil liberties is holding strong," a Demand Progress campaigner said after Congress passed a short-term extension to continue talks on a longer renewal.
Apr 30, 2026
Just a day after Democrats in the GOP-controlled US House of Representatives helped Republicans send a major spying bill to the Senate, despite warnings that it was dead on arrival there, both chambers on Thursday passed a 45-day extension to continue negotiations.
The Senate approved the stopgap bill for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—which allows the federal government to spy on electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States without a warrant—by a voice vote. The House signed off with a 261-11 vote, just hours before a previous short-term extension was set to expire.
President Donald Trump and his homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, have been demanding a "clean" extension of the program, while critical lawmakers from both parties and over 100 civil society groups have called for privacy reforms to protect Americans whose data is swept up in federal surveillance efforts.
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, one of the organizations leading reform calls, said in a Thursday statement that "intelligence agencies, the White House, and their allies in Congress have tried every trick in the book from fearmongering to misinformation, but they still can't get their warrantless FISA reauthorization across the finish line."
"The reason we keep ending up at this point is congressional leaders' refusal to allow votes on overwhelmingly popular, bipartisan reforms," she continued. "This 'my way or the highway' approach needs to stop."
According to Politico, US Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters on Thursday that he and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) discussed the short-term extension during a closed-door meeting the previous day.
"I think there's already a pretty substantial dialog going on" between key Democrats and Republicans in both chambers, Thune added. "We're interested in looking at some ways in which it can be reformed... So we're entertaining those ideas at the moment."
Hammado declared that "when Congress returns, Speaker Johnson and Leader Thune must allow votes on amendments for real privacy protections or we'll keep repeating this farce over and over again. Our bipartisan movement in defense of civil liberties is holding strong, and we won't accept anything less."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime defender of privacy rights who had threatened to block the extension, highlighted on social media Thursday that he "secured a commitment that the FISA court opinion revealing abuses of Americans' rights will be DECLASSIFIED before Congress votes on reauthorization."
"The more Americans know about these abuses," he said, "the more they'll demand real reforms."
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Key Democrats Under Pressure to Reject House GOP's New 3-Year FISA Extension
"Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want unfettered surveillance powers without any chance to enact protections, and Democrats must not give it to them," one campaigner warned.
Apr 23, 2026
A week after four Democrats helped Republicans pass a short-term extension of a controversial spying power with a dead-of-night vote in the US House of Representatives, Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday released a bill that would renew the authority for three years—double the amount of time the Louisiana Republican and President Donald Trump were previously pushing.
As that bill text circulated, Demand Progress—one of the scores of civil society groups calling for privacy reforms to be included in any renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—took aim at those Democrats: Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Jared Golden (Maine), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), and Tom Suozzi (NY).
"Just like last time, Speaker Johnson's latest proposal lacks any meaningful privacy reforms, but this time, they're trying to renew FISA for three more years—twice as long as the Trump administration asked for," said Demand Progress senior policy adviser Hajar Hammado in a statement.
"Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want unfettered surveillance powers without any chance to enact protections, and Democrats must not give it to them," Hammado argued, referring to Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.
"We need Reps. Gottheimer, Suozzi, Golden, and Gluesenkamp Perez to stand with the rest of Democrats and hold Donald Trump accountable," the campaigner emphasized. "A vote in support of this FISA bill, especially procedural votes to advance it, is both a vote to allow Donald Trump to continue invasive, warrantless surveillance of private American citizens, and to sabotage even the chance of protecting privacy."
FISA's Section 702 allows the US government to surveil electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, without a warrant. However, it's been abused at least hundreds of thousands of times by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alone—which has fueled calls for reforms, including closing the data broker loophole that agencies use to buy their way around the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
"Speaker Johnson wants to pretend this bill is reform, but it's the same type of empty-calorie proposal that failed last week," warned Jake Laperruque, deputy director of Center for Democracy and Technology's Security and Surveillance Project. "There is nothing in this bill that would have prevented the abuses of FISA 702 we've already seen—snooping on lawmakers, protesters, and campaign donors—and there is nothing that would stop even worse abuses in the future."
"Members of Congress have a clear choice: They can support this proposal and give the FBI and other intelligence agencies a three-year blank check, or they can stand strong and demand real reforms to protect the American people," he said.
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, similarly stressed how the latest bill is "almost identical to the one that failed last week," explaining on social media that "the main 'reform' in Johnson's first proposal was a provision that merely restated existing law, under which the government may not 'target' Americans under Section 702 but may do so with a warrant or FISA Title I order."
"That provision was titled 'warrant requirement,' even though it imposed no new warrant requirement whatsoever. And it had zero relevance to the issue at the heart of the debate over Section 702, namely, backdoor searches," she noted. "Backdoor searches are not considered to be 'targeting' Americans for surveillance. Rather, they are searches of collected communications of foreign targets outside the United States for Americans' communications that were 'incidentally' swept in."
"Astonishingly, Johnson has chosen to feature this same do-nothing provision in his new proposal. This time, the drafters have dropped any pretense of creating new law and titled the provision 'Fourth Amendment Requirement for Targeting United States Persons,'" Goitein continued. "This is not a reform bill, and it's not a compromise. It's a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it's NOT a straight reauthorization."
According to her: "House members didn't fall for it last week, and they shouldn't fall for it now. Speaker Johnson must allow the House to vote on the reforms that members and the American people are demanding, including a warrant requirement to access Americans' communications."
The GOP narrowly has the numbers to pass legislation with a party-line vote in the House, but some of the chamber's Republicans have joined in the calls for privacy reforms. Libertarian leaders, including Justin Amash, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, have forcefully spoken out against Johnson's efforts.
"House Republicans are spitting on the Constitution and spitting in all our faces," Amash said of the bill unveiled Thursday.
Calling out the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and vast US Intelligence Community, Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the libertarian Cato Institute, declared that "this is an HPSCI, SSCI, IC Trojan horse bill masquerading as something Fourth Amendment-compliant."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) "is threatening to take over negotiations if the House GOP can’t resolve differences quickly," according to Politico. In the upper chamber, Republicans need at least some Democratic support to pass a reauthorization bill.
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'This Fight Is Nowhere Near Over,' Privacy Advocates Warn After GOP Again Punts FISA Vote
"We won't stop fighting for a self-evident truth: The government should not be able to bypass the courts to surveil Americans," said one privacy campaigner.
Apr 15, 2026
A controversial federal spying power is set to expire next week, but Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives again delayed a reauthorization vote on Wednesday amid persistent demands for reforms from across the political spectrum.
President Donald Trump is pushing for a "clean" 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows for warrantless spying on the electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) "canceled a vote scheduled for Wednesday evening... amid a hard-liner rebellion, making it more likely the program could expire in five days—but said the House would try again Thursday," Politico reported.
As for whether there would be the necessary votes on Thursday to adopt a rule to proceed to consideration of the bill, Johnson said: "I think we will... We're working through some final details."
Although GOP leaders are plowing ahead with their reauthorization effort, Demand Progress senior policy adviser Hajar Hammado still welcomed the delay, declaring that "this time, fearmongering was not enough to overcome a bipartisan movement fighting for the privacy rights of all Americans."
"We rarely ever see the full force of the White House and the intelligence agencies fail to browbeat Congress into giving them what they want," Hammado noted. "That this happened today is a testament to the tireless work of our movement, which has been successfully bringing Republicans, Democrats, and Independents together for a common cause."
"Of course, this fight is nowhere near over," she added. "Speaker Johnson can still force a vote any time with extremely short notice, but our coalition feels the wind at our backs, and we won't stop fighting for a self-evident truth: The government should not be able to bypass the courts to surveil Americans."
Hammado's group has been a leader in the growing coalition calling for reforms—including for lawmakers to close the "data broker loophole" that intelligence and law enforcement agencies use to buy their way around the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is supposed to protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.
It's not just congressional Republicans under pressure. Demand Progress Action and Fight for the Future took aim at House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes (D-Conn.)—who has signaled that he will support renewal and vote against adding privacy protections—with a Sunday print advertisement in the Connecticut Post.
We teamed up with @demandprogress.bsky.social to call out @jahimes.bsky.social for supporting Trump's mass surveillance efforts by trying to push through Section 702 without reform.
[image or embed]
— Fight for the Future (@fightforthefuture.org) April 14, 2026 at 8:38 PM
On Tuesday, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair Grace Meng (D-NY), Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) spearheaded a letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers arguing that "this authority ought to include meaningful Fourth Amendment protections for Americans in its renewal package."
"The Trump administration has demonstrated an unparalleled appetite for collecting and exploiting Americans' personal data," the caucus leaders and members wrote. "The administration has built profiles on American citizens, demanded that artificial intelligence (AI) companies assist in mass domestic surveillance, and paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build a megadatabase of Americans' personal data. Without independent guardrails on Section 702, this administration has
repeatedly shown that it cannot be trusted to police its own use of this sweeping surveillance authority."
Over 30 civil society organizations—including Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Indivisible, Project On Government Oversight, RootsAction, and more—endorsed the congressional letter. POGO policy counsel Donald Bell commended the leadership of the caucuses "in seeking real guardrails and accountability that protect our constitutional rights," while Hammado urged "all members of Congress to follow the lead" of the three groups.
Meanwhile, The American Prospect reported Monday that "the Congressional Black Caucus will quietly support an effort to reauthorize surveillance powers that were used to spy on Black Lives Matter activists in 2020," which "comes after Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the powerful ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, successfully lobbied CBC leadership to stand down on reforming the vast intelligence authority."
After publication, Meeks told the outlet that "I support FISA reauthorization, but the only vote I've been whipping is my war powers resolution to end the war in Iran. Whip operations are traditionally conducted by the ranking member of the committee that has jurisdiction over the legislation being considered. Any claim that I'm whipping the CBC on FISA is false."
In response to that reporting,Re Access Now, Fight for the Future, and STOP Spying NYC said in a joint statement that "if the heat of the glares aimed at Rep. Meeks right now could melt him, he'd be dripping like a snowman on the pavement in July. No one in Queens wants everybody in the federal government to have total access to the intimate details of their lives with the tap of a mouse."
Highlighting the danger of continuing the spying power sans privacy protections as Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers roam US streets, the groups said that "it is a total betrayal of the Fourth Amendment and the dignity of everyday people in this country to treat us all as if we are guilty until Big Brother Trump proves us innocent by watching our every move. And worse—it's impossible to predict how these troves of records may be weaponized in the future against racial justice activists, trans and queer families, abortion patients and providers, anti-war activists, or anyone who acts out of step with MAGA."
"It's supposed to be the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not the Forever Indiscriminate Surveillance Act. Rep. Meeks' colleagues are proposing real safeguards to protect people against this indiscriminate government surveillance," the trio added. "He is not only failing his constituency, he is disrespecting them and putting them in danger. It's not too late for Rep. Meeks to get on the right side of history."
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