The FCC wants to stop cell phones

After the WIRED report Last week, Meta’s smart glasses app contained a code that enables the company to activate facial recognition features on devices. The company removed the code this week without commenting on why or whether it plans to add this functionality back to the app later. Another WIRED investigation this week found that xAI’s Grok still hosts deeply sexual content, including “nude” photos and videos of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician.

After limiting the release of a new Mythos-class AI model due to concerns about its potential cybersecurity impacts, Anthropic announced an upgrade of the model to partners in its limited access group this week and launched a “secure” version of the model to the public with guardrails intended to prevent the system from being used to fuel cyberattacks. Meanwhile, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued new guidance to federal agencies this week in response to new AI threats that includes a requirement to fix the most pressing software vulnerabilities in less than three days.

As Europe looks to decouple and insulate itself from big US tech companies, WIRED has created a timeline tracking all the ways EU governments, companies and other organizations are turning away from US technology. A new open source project called Encrypted Spaces could be used to make countless mainstream collaboration applications more private and resistant to surveillance through end-to-end encryption. Pharmacy sites and illegal scam sites have hijacked Spotify’s search rankings using fake podcasts, according to a new joint US Congressional report.

The 2026 World Cup is in full swing, and WIRED has looked at the surveillance technologies, from counter-drone technology to facial recognition, that are being used in American, Canadian and Mexican stadiums. We also mapped every Flock license plate reader near a US World Cup stadium. More broadly, Amnesty International said this week it had concluded that fans in the three host countries – both local residents and visitors – face potential human rights violations as a result of the FIFA tournament.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued two Florida police departments over their use of FACES, one of the oldest facial recognition tools in the United States, after its alleged misuse led to the wrongful arrest of a Fort Myers man. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has put the future of the key surveillance authority in jeopardy after selecting Bill Bolt, described as “completely unqualified,” as acting director of national intelligence. (Trump has since selected a replacement nominee for this permanent role.)

And there’s more. Every week we round up security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in depth ourselves. Click on the titles to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

As difficult as digital anonymity has become in the modern world, obtaining a phone number without revealing almost any identifying information — whether by purchasing a temporary phone or registering an account with a privacy-preserving phone company — has remained perfectly legal in the United States. Now the FCC wants to change that.

Late last month, the FCC released a proposal for a new rule that would implement “know your customer” requirements for cellular networks, requiring cellular providers “at a minimum, to obtain and maintain the name, physical address, government-issued identification number, and alternate telephone number of any new and renewed customer before granting access to their services.” The proposal is described as a measure similar to money laundering laws designed to make it more difficult for fraudsters to exploit phone networks. But privacy advocates say it also threatens a final channel of anonymity for those seeking to evade phone surveillance — whether they are journalists, whistleblowers, activists or simply people seeking to avoid widespread data collection in another aspect of their communications.