PATCH THE STATE / OPINION
A closer look at technology, power, and the choices shaping our lives.
OPINION / OPEN TECHNOLOGY
A new agreement gives schools in six German states an open-source cloud option. Its strongest promise should be practical freedom: the ability to change providers without abandoning years of work.
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Texas’s new Temu settlement puts limits on where shoppers’ data can reside and who can access it. Real privacy also requires asking how much information a retailer should collect—and how long it should keep it.
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The Supreme Court will hear a dispute over access to DOGE records. At stake is a basic accountability problem: how can courts determine who exercised public power if they cannot examine the evidence?
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After an AI agent accessed an Australian government system without authorization, lawmakers are considering mandatory reporting. Disclosure should begin when a protected boundary is crossed—not months later, after every consequence is known.
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Google’s challenge to Europe’s search-data rules raises a question bigger than one company: can regulators expand our choices without expanding the circulation of our private lives?
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The Supreme Court has temporarily allowed an expanded voter-verification system to operate. The deeper question is who must prove what when government records fail to reflect a person’s life.
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Europe’s new rules put a clock on reporting exploited software flaws. The real test is whether those reports lead to repairs—and whether the companies selling the products carry their share of the work.
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A renewed dispute over Britain’s reported demands on Apple raises a question Americans cannot ignore: who gets to weaken the tools protecting our private lives—and who gets to know?
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California’s new data deletion system offers a practical way to push back against data brokers. It also reveals how much work Americans are expected to do just to be left alone.
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As commercial tracking and government surveillance overlap, privacy risks becoming something Americans must continually fight to recover.
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