Posts tagged "law"

CIPA and the Environmental Crimes Directive: why forensic web evidence just became the most contested thing in privacy litigation

CIPA wiretapping claims and the new EU Environmental Crimes Directive have one thing in common: they are won and lost on forensic evidence of what a website actually does at runtime. Inbound demand for that evidence has outrun us, so WebSentinel orders are now queued. Here is why both regimes turn on evidence, what that evidence has to prove, and why cookie-banner tooling cannot produce it.

Malta is in breach of the EU Treaties — the IDPC has confirmed in writing that no Maltese citizen is protected under the ePrivacy Directive against any tech company not established in Malta

On 27 April 2026 I lodged a formal complaint with Malta's Information and Data Protection Commissioner against Anthropic. The IDPC has now confirmed in writing that no Maltese citizen has any protection under the ePrivacy Directive against any tech company not established in Malta. That is a direct breach of Articles 7 and 47 of the EU Charter, of Article 19(1) TEU, and of Malta's obligations under Directive 2002/58/EC. This piece walks through the IDPC's correspondence in full, the 2009 Phorm precedent in which the European Commission opened infringement proceedings against the United Kingdom for an analogous failure, and why Malta has now made an Article 258 TFEU complaint to the Commission unavoidable.

The problem with Consent Management Platforms is they are unlawful by design

Every CMP I have looked at in fifteen years sets a cookie before the user has consented to anything. That is a direct breach of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive, restated by the CJEU in Planet49 (C-673/17), and reinforced by the Belgian decision against the IAB TCF. This piece explains, step by step, what a lawful consent flow actually looks like and why every cookie banner you have ever seen is wrong.

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

Anthropic issued with a Cease and Desist

Anthropic ignored the Claude Desktop spyware findings. A formal Cease and Desist has now been issued, with 72 hours before criminal and civil complaints follow.

Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop

Anthropic's Claude Desktop silently installs a Native Messaging bridge into seven Chromium browsers, including browsers Anthropic's own documentation says it does not support, and browsers the user has not even installed.

The Beast behind the Browser: Every Privacy Vulnerability in Chrome and How to Catch It

A forensic reference to every client-side privacy vulnerability in Google Chrome — fingerprinting, storage tracking, header leaks — and how to detect each.