There is a certain strength that comes from learning how to protect yourself. But there is an even greater strength that comes from realizing you were never really protecting yourself at all… you were shrinking.

Making yourself smaller on the outside while carrying entire worlds within. Watching everything. Noticing everything.

You become so familiar with pain that you can recognize it in other people without them ever speaking a word of it. You learn how to read a room before you enter it. You know who feels like safety and who feels like danger. Who carries warmth and who carries harm.

You become so good at seeing what others hide that it unsettles anyone who gets close enough to catch even a glimpse of you. And when they do, you run.

But what happens when someone feels familiar in all the right ways? When every instinct tells you to leave, yet something in you wants to stay even for just a little while.

And somehow they are so much like you that they bolt first.

A deep understanding between two people who never gave themselves a chance because fear arrived before trust ever could. Yet they remain connected in ways neither of them fully understands. The kind of ways only visible to those who have spent so long broken that they can no longer look away from what is real.

It’s the kind of understanding that is rarely spoken, but deeply felt. The kind that sits beneath every conversation, every silence, every goodbye.

And maybe that’s what makes it so terrifying.

Some teach you things. Others force you to learn things on your own.

Like a child left out in the rain without a coat, eventually you get sick from being cold for too long.

Abuse disguised as protection. Protection from who? From what?

When outside felt safer than inside, although outside came with its very own abuse and being far away felt more peaceful than being close, even though closeness was all you ever wanted.

Maybe that’s why you did what you did. Why you accepted what you accepted.

Abuse disguised as protection in such devastating ways that the mind fogs it over just to survive. It buries the truth, softens it, hides it from itself. Until one day it begins to untangle. Piece by piece, everything returns.

And it always seems to happen later. Later, when you’ve already lost so much. Later, when there’s no railing left to grab onto, nothing to keep you from falling. The truth finally arrives, and you’re left standing in the wreckage of everything it took to uncover it.

But that’s where the beauty begins. In the truth.

Pain is only believed when it performs according to expectations. Suffering that interrupts narratives, is seen as deception. Not because it lacks evidence, but because it disrupts order. People confuse clarity with honesty, forgetting that exhaustion erodes language before it erases reality. Discomfort produces doubt faster than evidence produces belief, and those who need the most care are often asked to prove this best. Belief is granted to those who remain palatable, who soften their pain so it is easily digested. What cannot be consumed politely is rejected. And somewhere in all of this, belief ends not where truth falters… but where inconvenience begins.

But what are you supposed to say? Where do you even begin? How do you explain something that has lived inside of you for so long that you’ve built an entire life around not speaking it?

How do you tell people that the mask was always just a mask? That the smile was practiced, the strength they admired was survival and that everything you’ve done to keep moving forward has contradicted the truth so deeply that if it ever slipped out, it would sound like a lie?

They take what isn’t theirs and leave you carrying the weight of it. They invade every corner of who you are until there’s so little of you left that you’re afraid to let anyone get close enough to see it. Close enough to hear it.

They teach you to question yourself. To doubt your memories, your feelings, your own truth. And after a while, the silence becomes its own kind of home.

So you become guarded. Not because you want to be but because it feels safer. You build walls so high that nothing can get in. The problem is, nothing can get out either.

But still, you love.

God, how you love.

You give pieces of yourself away even when you’re running on empty. You keep showing up. You keep trying. You keep hoping that one day someone will see past the walls without tearing them down.

But the damage lingers. It follows you into every relationship, every conversation, every moment where someone gets too close. And sometimes the fear is so much louder than the truth that you push people away before they ever have the chance to stay.

Because when you’ve spent years hiding the truth to survive, there comes a point where you don’t know whether you’re protecting it, or protecting everyone else from it.

A trust and safety analyst in a building somewhere in continental Europe arrives at her desk on the morning of Saturday 4 April 2026, opens her review queue, and finds it changed in a way that the interface does not visibly reflect. The thumbnails are still there. The hash matches are still streaming. The dashboards still glow. What has changed is the legal scaffolding under her seat. As of the previous day, the temporary legal derogation that authorised her employer, a large messaging platform headquartered in the European Union, to scan its private communications for child sexual abuse material has lapsed. Her job has not changed. The work she does, the harm she stops, the cases she refers to law enforcement, all of that continues. The legal authority under which she does it has evaporated, and the replacement statute has not arrived. She is not breaking the law. She is operating in a space the law no longer addresses, doing work that until yesterday was sanctioned and is today, on a strict reading, unauthorised.

That space is not abstract. It is the operational reality, on 30 May 2026, for the trust and safety teams of every major platform with operations in Europe that has, for the past five years, voluntarily scanned interpersonal communications for child sexual abuse material under the protection of Regulation (EU) 2021/1232, the temporary derogation to the ePrivacy Directive. The Regulation was extended once, in 2024, until 3 April 2026. On 26 March 2026, after a final round of negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council collapsed without agreement, the deadline arrived and the legal cover for voluntary detection ended. The permanent successor instrument, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation that has come to be known across European policy circles as Chat Control, remains stuck in trilogue, with the next formal round scheduled for May 2026 and a target deal by July. The interregnum is real, and the interregnum is now.

The expiry coincides, with a timing that policy specialists have called either coincidental or grimly poetic depending on their priors, with the period in which the threat the derogation was written to address has changed its character entirely. On 28 February 2026, NBC News published a long investigation by reporters who had spent months mapping the criminal-court record of AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the United States. The piece documented thirty-six state and federal criminal cases brought within the previous three years across twenty-two states, and tracked a phenomenon that the Stanford policy fellow Riana Pfefferkorn, quoted in the article, described as outrunning the legal categories themselves. Less than a month later the Internet Watch Foundation, the UK-based hotline that processes reports of online child sexual abuse, published its annual analysis of AI-generated material. The report counted 8,029 AI-generated images and videos assessed in 2025 as depicting realistic child sexual abuse. It counted 3,443 AI-generated videos, against thirteen in 2024, a year-on-year change of 26,385 per cent. Sixty-five per cent of the videos were classified as Category A, the most severe under UK law, the category that covers depictions of penetrative sexual activity, sadism, or sexual activity with an animal. Girls comprised ninety-seven per cent of the illegal AI-generated images.

That is the surface. Beneath it sit the structural changes that make the numbers an undercount. The IWF report describes the spread of Low-Rank Adaptation, the technique known as LoRA, which allows a user with twenty existing images of a specific child and fifteen minutes of compute to fine-tune a generative model into a deepfake engine capable of producing infinite further imagery of that child. It describes the appearance of clear-web AI chatbot services that encourage users to act out simulated child sexual abuse scenarios in conversation. It describes the leap from still imagery to full-motion video as a step change that erases what little forensic distance had existed between synthetic and camera-captured material. Each of these developments, taken individually, would constitute a serious escalation. Taken together, with the regulatory cover for the principal mechanism of detection withdrawn at exactly the moment they begin to scale, they constitute the most adverse moment for online child protection in Europe since the IWF began publishing comparable data.

This is the question the next eighteen months will force a decision on. If the technology that creates the harm is advancing faster than the legal frameworks that authorise its detection, and a major jurisdiction has just removed the primary mechanism allowing platforms to look for it, what does meaningful protection for children actually require, and who bears the responsibility for building it? The honest answers are unflattering to almost everyone with a hand on the problem.

The Derogation, the Vote, and the Silence That Followed

The temporary derogation has always been an awkward instrument. It was drafted in haste in 2020 after the entry into force of the European Electronic Communications Code reclassified messaging services as electronic communications, and so brought them, for the first time, within the privacy protections of the ePrivacy Directive that had previously applied only to telephony. The reclassification had the unintended consequence of rendering legally precarious the voluntary scanning that companies like Meta, Google and Microsoft had been performing for years under the looser regime that preceded it. The European Commission acknowledged the problem, and the Parliament and Council adopted Regulation (EU) 2021/1232 to grant a time-limited carve-out. The Regulation was, at the time, framed as a stopgap pending the adoption of a permanent instrument that would either consolidate the legal basis for voluntary scanning or replace it with a mandatory regime.

The permanent instrument, the proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, has been in negotiation since the Commission published its first draft in May 2022. The intervening four years have been some of the most contested in modern European digital policy. The Commission's original proposal would have required providers to assess the risk of their services being used to disseminate CSAM, and where the risk was high, to deploy detection technologies. The proposal included provisions for so-called detection orders that could compel scanning of end-to-end encrypted communications, a provision that critics, including the European Data Protection Supervisor, civil society coalitions across the continent, and a significant bloc of MEPs, argued would constitute an unjustifiable mass surveillance regime incompatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Parliament's position, agreed in November 2023, narrowed the scope considerably. The Council's position, agreed under the Danish presidency in November 2025, restored elements of the broader scanning regime. The trilogue rounds that began in December 2025 have been characterised by negotiators as substantive but slow, with the third round on 26 February 2026 ending without breakthrough and the next not scheduled until early May.

The narrower question of whether to extend the existing voluntary derogation, pending agreement on the broader regulation, came to a head in late March 2026. Negotiations between the Parliament and the Council on a short extension broke down on 26 March, with the Parliament voting against a further prolongation on the grounds, articulated by privacy-focused MEPs, that an extension would relieve pressure on the broader negotiation and entrench a regime that had been intended as temporary. The vote was the end of the road for the derogation. On 3 April 2026, the legal basis for voluntary scanning of interpersonal communications in the European Union ceased to exist.

The IWF's reaction was unsparing. Kerry Smith, the IWF chief executive, described the lapse as “a devastating failure for child protection in the EU, and globally.” Dan Sexton, the IWF chief technology officer, published a blog post under the title “Europe is about to make it illegal to protect children online,” which argued that the technology companies operating in the European Union would lose, on 3 April, the legal right to search their own platforms for child sexual abuse material because politicians tasked with replacing the derogation had failed to do so. The IWF's data carries weight here that abstract argument cannot. The hotline actioned 312,030 reports in the previous year where child sexual abuse material was confirmed, a 7 per cent increase on the year before. During a similar period of legal uncertainty in 2020, before the original derogation took effect, the IWF documented a 58 per cent drop in reports of child abuse material originating from EU-based services over a period of just eighteen weeks. The drop, the IWF noted at the time, reflected a decrease in detection, not a decrease in abuse. There is no plausible reason to expect a different pattern this time.

The vote against extension was not without its defenders. The Centre for Democracy and Technology's European office welcomed the Parliament's decision as a check on the normalisation of mass scanning. Their case, which is the case privacy advocates have made throughout, is that voluntary scanning is voluntary in name only when platforms operate under regulatory pressure and reputational exposure; that the technologies deployed are themselves imprecise, with false-positive rates that generate downstream harms for innocent users; and that any regime authorising routine scanning of private communications sets a precedent that can be expanded in directions the original drafters did not contemplate. These are not frivolous concerns. They are the substance of a serious civil-liberties argument, and they have not lost their force because the derogation has lapsed.

The argument is, however, an argument about what kind of detection regime Europe should have. It is not an argument for the absence of any regime, which is the situation Europe now occupies. The Parliament's vote did not produce an alternative. It produced a vacuum, and the vacuum is being filled, on the operational level, by the discretion of platforms and the patchwork of national laws that govern child protection across the twenty-seven member states. The IWF, the NSPCC, the European Commission directorate responsible for the home affairs file, and a coalition of child-rights organisations have all argued, in different registers, that the absence of a harmonised legal basis is a worse outcome than either the imperfect derogation or the contested permanent regulation. They are not, on the evidence, wrong.

What Detection Actually Looks Like

The mechanisms the derogation authorised are less monolithic than the public debate suggests. The principal technologies are hash-matching against known CSAM datasets, classifier-based detection of previously-unseen material, and behavioural analysis of grooming patterns in text-based communication. Each operates differently, generates different categories of false positive, and carries different implications for the privacy of users whose communications pass through them.

Hash-matching, the workhorse of the field for over a decade, depends on shared databases of known abuse imagery maintained by organisations like the IWF and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The image to be scanned is reduced to a perceptual hash, a numerical fingerprint that survives common transformations like resizing or recompression. The hash is compared against the database. A match flags the image for review. The system works well for known material because the false-positive rate, in the best implementations, is extremely low. It is useless against material that has not previously been seen and registered.

Classifier-based detection addresses that gap. A machine-learning model, trained on labelled examples of CSAM and non-CSAM, returns a probability that a given image is abuse material. The classifier can flag new content for human review. The false-positive rate is higher than for hash-matching, because classifiers operate on the statistical patterns of the training distribution rather than on identity-level matches. Behavioural analysis, the third category, looks for the conversational patterns associated with grooming, with similar trade-offs.

The volume the system handles is hard to overstate. Thorn, the child-safety non-profit founded by the actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, reports that its Safer classifier product has processed 658.6 billion files and 334 million lines of text since 2019, resulting in the detection of more than 12.4 million potential CSAM files and nearly 1.4 million instances of potential child exploitation. The NCMEC CyberTipline received 21.3 million reports in 2025, encompassing 61.8 million images, videos and files. Of those reports, approximately 1.5 million had a nexus to generative AI, with the categories breaking down across CSAM appearing in AI training data, generated or possessed AI CSAM, prompts attempting to elicit CSAM, and altered or manipulated existing CSAM files. Online enticement reports, including sextortion, reached 1.4 million, a 156 per cent increase on 2024.

These are not numbers a discretionary, post-hoc, human-only review can address. They are the operational baseline of a global industry whose ability to find children at risk depends on automated triage at every stage of the pipeline. When the legal authority for that triage is withdrawn in a jurisdiction the size of the European Union, the consequence is not that detection becomes manual. The consequence is that detection becomes selective, fragmented, and dependent on the legal interpretations of individual platform counsels who must decide, in the absence of harmonised cover, whether and on what basis their scanning operations can continue.

The Synthetic Flood

Into this volume, and into this newly precarious legal environment, has arrived the second crisis: the production at scale of imagery that is indistinguishable, to both human reviewers and existing detection systems, from photographs of real children, and which is not in fact photographs of real children at all. The category goes by various names in the trade: AI-generated CSAM, synthetic CSAM, AIG-CSAM. The producers do not care what it is called. The detection pipelines do.

The mechanism is now widely understood. A user with access to an open-source diffusion model, a small dataset of training images, and the technical literacy to operate a LoRA fine-tuning workflow can produce a personalised generator capable of synthesising indefinite quantities of imagery on demand. The compute requirements have fallen below the threshold of consumer hardware. The technical knowledge has been democratised through tutorials hosted on forums that are themselves often dedicated to the production of the resulting material. Thorn's research, summarised in their 2026 reporting on synthetic abuse, finds that one in ten minors say they personally know someone who has used AI tools to generate nude images of other children. The phenomenon is not confined to dedicated dark-web communities. It is in schools. It is in peer groups. It is, by the testimony of teachers and school safeguarding leads who have spoken on the record to UK and US outlets, a problem for which institutional response has not yet been developed.

Thorn's analysts have drawn the structural implication explicitly: the eliminations of contact abuse as a necessary precursor to the production of exploitation material. Historically, the production of CSAM required, in the technical sense, the abuse of an actual child. The image was a record of a crime that had occurred. The detection of the image was therefore also, in a meaningful sense, the detection of the abuse, and the rescue of the depicted child was a tractable goal of the investigative work that followed. The arrival of generative models capable of producing convincing synthetic abuse imagery from a model that has been trained on legal images, or that has been bootstrapped from a small set of photographs of an identifiable child obtained from social media, severs that link. The imagery exists. There may be no child to rescue, because the child in the image was never abused in the production of it. Or there may be a child to rescue, because the imagery has been produced with the explicit intent of extorting or coercing a real person whose photographs have been used as training data. The two categories cannot, on the face of the image, be distinguished.

The consequence for the detection pipeline is what investigators have come to describe, in interviews with technology and policy reporters across the past year, as a flooding problem. The volume of synthetic material entering review queues threatens to overwhelm the capacity of human analysts to triage it. Each item still requires assessment. Each assessment still consumes attention that, in an unbounded queue, is taken away from the assessment of material that may depict a real, identifiable child whose location can be determined and whose abuse can be stopped. The economic logic of the trust and safety function tips, under such conditions, toward the deprioritisation of marginal cases. The marginal cases include exactly the cases where rescue is still possible, and where the cost of failing to identify a real victim is highest.

The detection community has responded with the only tool it has, which is more AI. The US Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Crimes Center awarded a $150,000 contract in late 2025 to the San Francisco-based firm Hive AI for software designed to identify whether a given image was AI-generated. Kevin Guo, the Hive AI co-founder and chief executive, has described the underlying approach as the identification of pixel-level patterns characteristic of synthetic generation, patterns that the company's classifier has been trained to detect across the broad family of contemporary generative models. The tool sits alongside Hive's hash-matching system, which assigns unique identifiers to known CSAM, and which has been developed in collaboration with Thorn. The integration is necessary. Neither tool, alone, can address the combined problem of known abuse, novel abuse, and synthetic material that mimics both.

The technical viability of AI-versus-AI detection is, on the evidence to date, real but bounded. The detectors do not have the generality of the generators. A new model architecture, a new training procedure, a new post-processing pipeline can produce imagery whose statistical signature falls outside the distribution the detector was trained on. The arms race is, in the technical sense, asymmetric. Generators improve continuously and are released, in many cases, into the open-source commons where they cannot be recalled. Detectors must be retrained against each new generation. The lag between the appearance of a new generator and the deployment of an effective detector against it is the window in which synthetic material flows unimpeded into the pipeline. The window does not, at present, close.

The Platforms in the Middle

Telegram, on 21 April 2026, became the highest-profile object of UK regulatory scrutiny in the period covered by this article. Ofcom, the communications regulator that holds enforcement authority under the Online Safety Act 2023, opened a formal investigation into Telegram Messenger Inc., examining whether the platform had met its illegal-content safety duties in relation to child sexual abuse material. The investigation was triggered by evidence from Ofcom's own assessment of the platform and by referrals from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Compliance failures under the Act can result in fines of up to £18 million or 10 per cent of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is the greater, and Ofcom has the further power to apply to UK courts for business disruption measures that could require payment providers, advertisers, or internet service providers to withdraw services from a non-compliant platform.

The NSPCC's response to the investigation was supportive and specific. Rani Govender, the associate head of policy at the charity, said the scale of the abuse on the platform was stark and that the charity strongly welcomed Ofcom ramping up its enforcement. The position is consistent with the NSPCC's longer-running argument that there should be no part of any messaging service where perpetrators can act without detection, a position the charity has held throughout the Online Safety Bill's passage and during the early phase of its operationalisation. Telegram itself rejected the framing of the investigation, asserting that it had made significant strides since 2018 to nearly eliminate the public distribution of CSAM through sophisticated detection algorithms and collaborations with non-governmental organisations, and noting that it had joined the Internet Watch Foundation in December 2024 and deployed detection tools on its public channels.

The Telegram case sits inside a broader pattern of Ofcom enforcement that has accelerated through the spring of 2026. The regulator opened an investigation into X in January 2026 concerning the use of the Grok AI chatbot to generate sexually exploitative content. It opened investigations alongside the Telegram probe into the platforms Teen Chat and Chat Avenue over alleged failures to prevent grooming. It issued direct demands to Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for child-safety evidence by 30 April. The cumulative effect is to establish the UK as the most active regulatory jurisdiction in the developed world on platform-level CSAM enforcement, at exactly the moment that the EU has retreated from its own equivalent regime.

OpenAI's intervention, on 8 April 2026, took a different form. The company published a document called the Child Safety Blueprint, developed in consultation with NCMEC, the Internet Watch Foundation, and the Attorney General Alliance's AI Task Force, whose co-chairs Jeff Jackson of North Carolina and Derek Brown of Utah are named as contributing partners. The blueprint sets out three priority areas: the updating of legislation to cover AI-generated abuse material; the refinement of reporting mechanisms to law enforcement; and the integration of preventative safeguards into AI systems themselves. The company acknowledged, in figures included in the accompanying materials, that it had submitted eighty times more exploitation reports to NCMEC than in the prior year, a number that admits of two interpretations. The first is that its detection has improved. The second is that the volume of attempted abuse on its platforms has scaled accordingly. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

The blueprint is, at one level, an exercise in industry leadership that takes the problem seriously and that engages constructively with the regulatory partners best placed to act on the information it provides. At another level, it is a document published by a single firm, in the absence of any binding cross-industry framework, that asks regulators and legislators to do work that the firm itself cannot do. The IWF's reporting indicates that 8,000 AI-generated CSAM reports were recorded in the first half of 2025 alone, a 14 per cent year-on-year increase, and the proliferation of open-source models means that the contribution of any single model provider to the overall problem is bounded by the contribution of every other model provider, regardless of how seriously each takes its own role. The blueprint is necessary. It is not sufficient.

The Question of Responsibility

The accountability question that the simultaneous expiry of the derogation and the scaling of synthetic abuse pose is one the existing institutional architecture is poorly equipped to answer. The candidates for primary responsibility include, in no particular order: the platforms that host the content; the model providers whose systems are used to generate it; the regulators who set the framework within which the platforms and models operate; the lawmakers who, at the EU level, have failed to replace the lapsed derogation with a workable successor; the hash-matching providers and child-safety hotlines whose pipelines are being flooded; the law-enforcement agencies whose victim-identification work is being undermined; and, in the limit, the users who produce and distribute the material itself.

The platforms argue, with some justification, that the regulatory framework within which they operate has been unstable for the past decade and is now, in the principal European jurisdiction, absent. The model providers argue, with less justification given the trajectory of the technology, that the open-source ecosystem within which much of the harmful generation occurs is beyond their direct control, that their own commercial products incorporate safety measures, and that the responsibility for downstream misuse lies with the user. The regulators argue, where they are willing to argue, that they enforce the laws that exist and cannot substitute for the legislative process. The lawmakers argue, where they argue at all, that the trade-offs between privacy and child protection are genuinely difficult and that the political process is the appropriate forum in which to resolve them. The hotlines argue, increasingly publicly, that the system they are asked to operate has been overwhelmed and that their warnings have been ignored. The law-enforcement agencies, in the figure of the various national crime agencies and Europol-affiliated units, argue that the resources available to them are not commensurate with the scale of the problem they are asked to address.

Each of these arguments is partially correct. None of them, taken alone, addresses the problem the question poses. What the question poses is the structural failure mode of a regulatory regime in which detection authority is withdrawn at exactly the moment the harm scales, in which the technology that produces the harm is advancing faster than the law that authorises its detection, and in which the human consequence (the inability to identify and rescue real victims) is borne by the children whose abuse is being depicted or whose images are being used as training data, not by the institutions whose decisions have created the gap.

The answer the question demands begins with the recognition that no single actor in the system can solve the problem alone. The platforms cannot, because they need legal cover to operate detection at the scale the volume requires. The model providers cannot, because the open-source ecosystem will continue to produce capable generators regardless of what the leading commercial firms do. The regulators cannot, because their authority extends only to the platforms within their jurisdiction. The lawmakers can, but only if they are willing to make difficult choices about the trade-offs between privacy and detection that the current political process has so far refused to resolve. The hotlines can scale detection technology, but only with the funding and the legal cover to do so. The law-enforcement agencies can prioritise victim identification, but only if the upstream pipeline delivers actionable material in a form that can be triaged.

A workable framework, on the evidence assembled in the preceding sections, would have several components. It would restore, at the EU level, a harmonised legal basis for voluntary detection of CSAM in interpersonal communications, with safeguards against scope creep that satisfy the civil-liberties objections that brought down the derogation. It would establish, at the model-provider level, binding commitments to safety-by-design that go beyond the voluntary principles articulated in the Thorn and All Tech Is Human framework and into auditable obligations enforceable by regulators. It would fund, at the hotline and law-enforcement level, the investigative capacity required to keep pace with the volume of reports the detection pipeline now generates. It would treat the distinction between synthetic and camera-captured CSAM as a triage variable, not as a legal exemption, with the production and possession of synthetic abuse material treated as serious criminal offences in all major jurisdictions. And it would, at every level, recognise that the asymmetry between the speed of technological development and the speed of legislative response is itself a structural problem requiring structural response, not a temporary mismatch to be addressed through ad hoc accommodation.

The analyst whose Saturday morning began this article is, on 30 May 2026, still at her desk. The work she does continues. The legal scaffolding under her seat remains absent. Her counterparts in the law-enforcement units that receive her referrals are reviewing review queues whose composition has changed, with synthetic material now a significant fraction of the inflow and the share of cases involving identifiable real victims a smaller fraction of the total. The IWF, the NSPCC, NCMEC, Thorn, Hive AI, and the operational teams inside every major platform continue to work on the problem with the tools that exist, the legal authorities that remain, and the budgets that have been allocated. They are not, in any meaningful sense, the parties whose decisions have created the gap. The parties whose decisions have created the gap are the legislators who failed to extend the derogation, the trilogue negotiators who have not yet agreed a successor, the model providers who released the systems that produce the synthetic material into the open-source commons, and, behind all of them, the political culture that has treated child protection as an issue to be balanced against other priorities rather than as a baseline obligation that the rest of the regime must accommodate.

The question of who bears responsibility for building meaningful protection for children does not, on a clear-eyed reading of the evidence, admit of a single answer. It admits of a distribution of responsibility across the actors who collectively constitute the system, with the heaviest weight falling on the institutions that have most explicitly chosen, through action or inaction, to allow the current state of affairs to obtain. The lapsed derogation will not extend itself. The trilogue will not resolve itself. The synthetic abuse will not abate of its own accord. The work the analyst is doing on Saturday morning will continue. Whether it continues to be authorised, funded, and supported by a regime that recognises its necessity is a choice that has not yet been made, and that the European political process, in the months remaining of 2026, is now required to make.

References

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16. OpenAI. “Protecting Children in the Age of Generative AI.” April 2026. https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/9886ee82-5a5e-4f0a-acaa-a47b01b0a68e/Child-Protection-Blueprint.pdf
17. TechCrunch. “OpenAI releases a new safety blueprint to address the rise in child sexual exploitation.” 8 April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/08/openai-releases-a-new-safety-blueprint-to-address-the-rise-in-child-sexual-exploitation/
18. Thorn. “AI-generated child sexual abuse: The new digital threat we must confront now.” 2026. https://www.thorn.org/blog/ai-generated-child-sexual-abuse-the-new-digital-threat-we-must-confront-now/
19. Thorn. “Safer's 2025 Impact Report.” 2026. https://www.thorn.org/blog/safer-impact-report-2026/
20. Thorn and All Tech Is Human. “Safety by Design for Generative AI: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse Material.” 2024. https://info.thorn.org/hubfs/thorn-safety-by-design-for-generative-AI.pdf
21. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “The Work Never Stops: A First Look at NCMEC's 2025 Data.” 2026. https://www.missingkids.org/blog/2026/the-work-never-stops-first-look-at-ncmecs-2025-data
22. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “CyberTipline Data.” https://ncmec.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata
23. MIT Technology Review. “US investigators are using AI to detect child abuse images made by AI.” 26 September 2025. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/26/1124343/us-investigators-are-using-ai-to-detect-child-abuse-images-made-by-ai/
24. UK Government. Online Safety Act 2023. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents
25. European Union. Regulation (EU) 2021/1232 on a temporary derogation from certain provisions of Directive 2002/58/EC. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32021R1232

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

🐯

Flailing, in peace again And apt for war The two Koreas every day- are sacred but alone And in the pilot ready We saw the shadow queue Alliances to Britain- Beijing,- Confuse the very land And maybe Summer Maybe documents in the wind Or the Holy See Victory to Heaven And angels by Opening doors for Iran This ecstasy and a traitor The North Korean service And sacred scared Neighbours not in public And prayers from West of Android- are there, and are fit to see there Under shining meadow We, the mercy of a scream Have lost our loch and our war Peace to Rome, November Intelligence to Lockheed Our prayer for Massachusetts For tines by heart A kingdom of the CIA In trust and Holy Meandering the sins And pure electric Of odyssey to ruin Oft to near and far And then the suffer Times to law and used A Chinese mercy not of caste For waiting by the tel And census came Theography near at alarm To duly see distress That peace can walk to worry In three whole bombs Two weeks, and not months The Justice to adore And abide in And mercy to the Koreas And, especially Japan Would worry every way And sets a rose- Placed firmly in the evident And baptizes Rome alight For honest few and then The Times repeating menaces Forgotten words and deeds Befiling nights of steel Then Winter war But glorious February to pay And is a friend in meech The curious alone And very cloth The Catholics made a shrine To peace anew and very start To see the world in truth And Justice limbo Did the Earth belong to Iran So Cormorant and deliver A place and not a cue Internment stars at North And bleeding stars by day We sought a year of peace And waited clockish Unmercy to unwell And fabling thin My jest to heart and kidney For all forgotten- first and ever The palace is in Rome.

In Summary: * Shifting gears now. All that remains of this Saturday is listening to the Spurs / Knicks NBA Finals game, and working through the night prayers. No guarantees re: my finishing the NBA Game. But I WILL wrap up those prayers.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Health Metrics: * bw= 232.15 lbs. * bp= 164/95 (71)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:45 – 1 banana * 06:15 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 07:30 – pizza * 11:45 – beef chop suey, fried rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:45 to 12:45 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 12:45 – listen to “Rain Delay Theater” on Chicago Cubs Radio Network as their afternoon MLB game vs the San Francisco Giants is currently on Rain Delay. They still hope to play the game, but rain is falling on Wrigley Field and ... we wait. * 14:20- Opening pitch has been thrown, and the Cubs / Giants game is on. * 17:20 – and the Giants beat the Cubbies, 18 to 3.

Chess: * 09:10 – moved in all pending CC games

This post forms part of the ongoing #TagHub project.

The project uses as reference data Geoscape Datasets for Australian roads and administrative boundaries. Over the years, I have worked with these datasets under commercial licence, but happily they are now available for public use under The Australian Government's Data and Digital Government Strategy. Let's take a look at them.

Geoscape National Roads

Note: National Roads © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

The Geoscape National Roads dataset is a digital representation of the road network of Australia, inclusive of bus ways, walking trails, cycleways, and even ferry routes. The dataset has rich metadata, inclusive of road hierarchy (e.g. national highway, arterial, local road) and travel direction. One facet I like is that each row – and its associated geometry – is defined intersection-to-intserection (e.g. an actual road might be broken into multiple rows, with each row being the segment between two intersections).

The open edition of this dataset varies subtly from the commercially licensed edition. Firstly, the metadata is almost (but not quite) identical:

• road_id – primary key
• contributor_id
• jurisdiction_control – for example Aboriginal Land Council, Botanical Gardens, Commonwealth, Council, Department of Environment and Conservation, Department of Transport, Dept of Defence, etc
• operator – for example Port Authority, SAG: Forestry SA, SAG: Water, Southern Rural Water, etc
• date_created, date_modified
• national_route, state_route
• full_street_name (upper case)
• street_name (upper case) / street_name_label (title case)
• street_type (upper case) / street_type_label (title case)
• street_suffix (upper case) / street_suffix_label (title case)
• street_alias_name (upper case) / street_alias_type (upper case) / street_alias_suffix (upper case)
• feature_type – one of DUAL CARRIAGEWAY, FERRY ROUTE, MOTORWAY, PATHWAY, RAMP, ROUNDABOUT, SINGLE CARRIAGEWAY, VEHICULAR_TRACK, or null
• hierarchy – one of ACCESS ROAD, ARTERIAL ROAD, BUSWAY, COLLECTOR ROAD, CYCLEPATH, FERRY, FOOTPATH, LOCAL ROAD, NATIONAL OR STATE HIGHWAY, SUB-ARTERIAL ROAD, VEHICLE TRACK, or null
• subtype – BRIDGE, FERRY, FIRE TRAIL, PATHWAY, RAMP, ROAD, ROUNDABOUT, TUNNEL, or null
• ground_relationship – ABOVE GROUND, BELOW GROUND, ON GROUND, or null
• lane_count – range 1-6 or null
• lane_description – ONE, TWO OR MORE, or null (note all three values apply where lane_count is null)
• one_way – ONE WAY, TWO WAY, null
• status – CLOSED, OPERATIONAL, PROPOSED, UNDER CONSTRUCTION, or null
• surface – SEALED, UNSEALED, or null
• trafficability – 2WD, 4WD, or null
• travel_direction – BOTH, FROM TO, TO FROM, null
• speed – 10 – 110, or null
• state, source – ACT, NSW, NT, QLD, SA, TAS, VIC, WA (note: no OT)
• horizontal_accuracy – range 1-250
• shape_length, shape

Secondly, there are more limited data formats and datums. My intention is to work with GDA2020 in GDB format.

Geoscape Administrative Boundaries

Note: Administrative Boundaries © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

The Geoscape Administrative Boundaries is a comprehensive set of national boundaries, including government, statistical and electoral boundaries.

The dataset comprises seven products:

• Localities
• Local Government Areas (LGAs)
• Wards
• Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Boundaries
• Electoral Boundaries
• State Boundaries
• Town Points

The ABS Boundaries product is organised in three themes related to 2011, 2016 and 2021 boundary definitions. Of most interest to me is the 2021 ABS Mesh Blocks and Statistical Areas layer within the ABS Boundaries 2021 theme. This is described in detail on the ABS website product comprises:

• Australia
• States and Territories (S/T)
• Statistical Areas Level 4 (SA4s)
• Statistical Areas Level 3 (SA3s)
• Statistical Areas Level 2 (SA2s)
• Statistical Areas Level 1 (SA1s)
• Mesh Blocks (MBs)
• Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSAs) – not part of main structure

Like National Roads, this dataset is available only in limited datums and formats. I am going to work with GDA2020 downloaded in SHP format.

Tags: #TagHub #Geospatial #DuckDB

In the red Volvo, I was listening to Looptroop — Long Arm of the law,

It’s an awesome track,

The lyrics crack me up every time.

It’s about being oppressed by the system, and especially the police

About getting “fucked by the long dick of the law”,

And then somewhat disproportionately

Wouldn't even give me a public defender  For such a small case, not paying on the trains  Still they wanted four thousand kronors, from my bank account  I thought that was a too big amount  But the judge didn't had no sympathy on me

I love it

S.N.I.t. ; De Kooplust van Van Voorbijgaande Aard

*Tingelingeling..Tingelingeling..Tingelingeling*

Van Voorbijgaande Aard stapt goed geluimd en doelgericht een aantal malen door de draaideur de winkel van Alles binnen op zoek naar iets dat node wordt gemist. Hij heeft een duidelijke omschrijving en merknaam van het artikel. Volgens Aard kan er zo niks misgaan. Desondanks overvalt hem een lichte aarzeling bij de uitstalling van zoveel producten waaraan weinig bezwaren kleven. Hij zou zomaar wat anders kunnen kopen erbij. De winkelier ziet de twijfel in Aards ogen en stapt kordaat op hem af.

Winkelier – Dag meneer Van Voorbijgaande Klant kan ik u helpen om een aanschaf van iets uit onze zaak te bespoedigen met een vriendelijk woord?

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Eh, Oh Ja, dat is zelfs een hele zin, maar misschien wel. Ik ben vandaag op zoek naar 4 Augustus 2003. Deze dag kan ik me goed herinneren maar ik kan het origineel niet meer vinden. Ik zit opgescheept met de herinnering.

Winkelier – Dat lijkt me onmogelijk, die dag is voorbij. Die bestaat enkel in u geheugen meneer Klant. Ik vrees dat de Alles voor Belachelijk hoge Prijzen deze dag niet op voorraad heeft en eigenlijk vanaf 5 augustus al niet meer.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Maar kijk ik heb deze 7 inch single meegenomen en deze is op die dag uitgekomen. Het lijkt me dat de dag er dan ook nog echt is, de single is er ook.

Winkelier – De singel is dan wel toen uitgebracht maar bewaard door de jaren heen en alle dagen sindsdien zijn in en om de groeven verdwenen.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Dat lijkt me heel stug. Hier heb ik bijvoorbeeld een krant van die dag op mijn tablet en hier een lijst van boeken die uitgekomen zijn op deze dag, een flink aantal exemplaren, sommige daarvan kan ik nog vinden bij boekhandeltjes punt commer en kwel. Nog een extra bewijs dat deze bijzondere dag niet honderd procent is verdwenen. Zou u zo vriendelijk willen zijn in de computer te kijken of u nog een exemplaar van die datum in het magazijn van deze Alles winkel heeft en of er bij de rest van de aan het label geketende friendshijzes nog toevallig een 4 augustus 2003 in de schappen ligt, alsjeblieft meneer.. Het is nodig. Ik mis deze dag zo.

Winkelier – Maar het is verleden tijd, we hebben hier geen verleden tijd in de omloop!

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Ik zie hier anders allemaal dingen van eerder, dit hier lag er gisteren ook op exact dezelfde plek. Dat is toen nu, u moet het hebben, het is geknecht aan dat oudere spul.

Winkelier – Maar het kan niet, ik kan u alleen spullen verkopen, geen compleet vergaan etmaal. U bent dat en stadium ruim gepasseerd en wij ook. Het komt nooit meer terug.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Nou moe, u bent wel heel stellig. Ik denk dat u het gewoon wil bewaren omdat deze dag dan later nog meer waard wordt dan ie nu al is en dan zet u het online op darkweb voor schimmige verkopers in een al even duister circuit voor een belachelijk hoge prijs, dat denk ik.

Winkelier – Het is niet waar. We hebben gewoon geen dag van toen beschikbaar en we hebben ook niks van doen met darkweb of die schimmige dingen waar u zelf stellig over doet hoor.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Kom nou toch, hier kijk naar de datum, zeer herkenbaar het lijkt me dat u of u baas deze dag wel ergens heeft opgeslagen zodat ik hem kan herbeleven tijdens het uitstallen en exposeren van mij ten tijde van die geweldige dag waarop ik mijn persoonlijk record worteltjes schrappen en de best tijd rijst overkoken verpulverde. U wilt mij toch niet nee verkopen. Ik heb een klantenkaart, ik ben echt! Een van de goeien in de zaak.

Winkelier – Het leven is verschreden meneer, dagen koopt u niet meer terug. We hebben hier geen handeltje in vakantie momenten uit een vervlogen verleden. Kunt u niet gewoon nog een keer worteltjes schrappen en rijst te lang koken.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Dit is niet hetzelfde als eerder, het is een andere tijd, de peentjes zijn minder van kwaliteit en rijst kun je nog amper over koken, zo driftig hebben ze het gemanipuleerd bij het Toverrijst instituut! Ik wil gewoon die dag voor in mijn vitrine kast en dan er in en uit gaan zomaar, beetje er op los herbeleven.

Winkelier – Ik zal iets intoetsen en dan wijs over mijn bril naar voren turen, kijken naar het schouwspel van een database maar het zal allemaal niks helpen. Die dag is er gewoon niet meer, u kunt hem beter vaag herinneren en misschien zelfs vergeten, inwisselen met vandaag.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Tuurt u nu eerst maar even wijs naar het grote scherm en kijk naar de data, wedden dat die dag daar te zien zal zijn..

Winkelier – Niks meneer, ik zie geen enkele dag naar voren komen behalve dagen behorende bij verzendingen en betalingen maar dat zijn ook niet de originele exemplaren. Het is gewoon het plakplaatje er boven zwevend of onder, soms in het midden.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Ik vind dit echt ongelooflijk, dat u zo omspringt met mij, een mens met een klantenkaart, en een pinpas waarmee ik voldoe aan al u hooggespannen verwachtingen en dan wilt u mij niet eens 4 augustus 2003 verkopen. Waar heb ik dit lot aan verdiend! Kunt u tenmiste proberen het te bestellen...

Winkelier – Nee, ik kan het verleden niet reserveren, er is niks meer van over, het is gewoon een hoopje weet ik veel. Ik zou niet eens weten wat ik deed op 4 augustus 2003.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – U was hier toen ook, dat denk ik zeker volgens mij ben ik toen nog langs gekomen voor een tube superglue, dat zou misschien een aanknopingspunt kunnen zijn.

Winkelier – Wij bewaren die gegevens niet zolang, we hoeven dat allemaal niet te weten. U heeft wel gelijk dat ik waarschijnlijk hier was maar dat ben ik 6 dagen per week, bijna een jaar lang maar dat is niet voldoende om deze ene specifieke dag te kunnen herroepen en deze dan daarna aan u beschikbaar ter stellen voor verkoop of huur.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Ik voel diepe teleurstelling. Kent u niet iemand die deze dag wel zo heeft onthouden zodat ik hem kan overnemen. Het is inmiddels echt een moetje anders ben ik hier helemaal voor niks naar toe gekomen. Het is wel 804 meter lopen en ook nog iets omhoog, dat zit al snel in de benen. Dan moet het nut hebben.

Winkelier – Ik heb al vijf minuten heel veel data langs zien gaan van wel vijf jaar terug en verschillende afdelingen rondom tijd, ik zie alleen horloges, bellen, historische geschriften en kalenders opdoemen. Er is niks meer over van die tijd, op die singel en wat oude kranten na, maar al die mensen daarin zijn ook niet meer daar. Het is gedaan, over, ik kan u niet zoveel niks verkopen zonder dat u meteen ziet dat het niks is. Al vraag ik vijfduizend Smægmåånse Døllår dan nog weet u dat het er niet is.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Nou nog mooier dus voor meer dan vijfduizend wel, dan kan ik het krijgen. Nou ik weet genoeg, ik vertrek. Ik ga dit hier, deze dag, mooi mijn lange leven lang bewaren en als jij deze dag dan wil kopen zeg ik ook nee, zelfs voor tienduizend Smægmåånse Døllår. Dit is toch geen leven. Heb ik eens iets echt nodig en dan dit.. pfft

Winkelier – Het spijt me echt meneer Voorbijgaande Klant, ik hoop dat u ons dit mettertijd wilt vergeven en dan terug komt om wel altijd beschikbare spulletjes te kopen voor een te hoge prijs, zoals dubbelzijdige tape, nu voor 10 procent korting op de advies prijs.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Neen, ik ben niet te vermurwen. Tabee winkelier, dit is een zwarte bladzijde in mijn persoonlijke winkel geschiedenis als u dat maar weet.

Winkelier – Goed weekend gewenst Voorbijgaande Klant, doe de groeten aan de producer.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard – Fijne werkdag verder, ik hoop voor de andere klanten dat ze hier een beter lot verdienen. Nu ben ik echt in een keer weg.

*Tingelingeling*

…

*Tingelingeling*

I don’t care if you moved here yesterday or have never even been to New York and I don’t care if you’ve never seen a basketball game before in your life.

YOU DO NOT NEED ANYONE’S PERMISSION TO ENJOY THIS. GATEKEEPERS IN EVERY FANDOM ARE BORING LOSERS AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

That is all.

-Ira

06/06/2026, That’s a funny date to me, im sure some random couple will get married on this date to make it “special.” Perhaps two people are out on a date right now. or Someone committed suicide because they could have a special date on their grave, maybe call it “the perfect date of the year”. Perhaps make something special to feel special. Humans are full of surprises. It wouldn’t matter to me as much as the fact that six days are left before it becomes something special to me. which, now thinking about it, is funny. im tired, sick, and perhaps drunk, but let’s not mention that whenever i do it turns into a rollercoaster, we'll never get to the end of this. but anyway, all my thoughts have been messed up, my heart is beating again and i dont know if thats a good sign or a bad sign. Maybe I need to check that out myself later on, Something about the ghost of a woman haunting me, and suicide seems so similar. They both lead you to somewhere you’ll never know how it’ll eventually be after you close your eyes. i woke up today after a long dream. A woman I miss, missed, missing. I can’t figure it out. a white dress. Pretty dreamy white dress. haunting my soul, I don’t know if I’m satisfied or not. I don't know if I'm yearning for it or repelled by it (yearning, for sure) , an absolutely dramatic writing, Ahmed. how about you tune that romance up and become a poet?. Very romantic, it’ll definitely get us somewhere. Anyway, im out of words from whatever that was. That drink is surely getting its thoughts in. im sick, i think im dramatic when im sick. I’ll surely get that sentence fixed as soon as i “read it again”. Spoiler: i wont.

Im sick and i dont know what you’ll do with that information but take it untill i get well, i might just be delusional thinking you’d haunt me. (im being sarcastic, do it)

Alright i really need to get some sleep. I hate humans, and making today special will always be a human's dumb decision. They try to make every little thing special like it's worth something.

Sincerely, Ahmed is sick 2.0

Friday's MLB Game of Choice....

Due to a rain delay, this afternoon's game between the Chicago Cubs and the San Francisco Giants is scheduled to start at 2:20 PM CDT, which is really good for my schedule. As I usually do, I'll be following the score and stats updated in real time on MLB's Gameday Screen. And I'll follow the radio call of the action as provided by the Chicago Cubs Radio Network.

And the adventure continues.

Hot on the heals of my previous ‘make a profile of me’ lie fest from perplexity, I decided to give it another shot to see how quickly they would try to cover their tracks. And the answer was extremely quickly, but in their haste, they revealed another glaring privacy crater.

First off, I run #perplexity in a browser in Perplexity’s Incognito Mode (NOT browser Incognito) and when perplexity frequently turns off Incognito with no notice, I turn it back on and delete the inappropriately logged queries.

Secondly, I repeated my ‘make a profile of me’ query again. This time it produced a more generic profile without the purloined Google Messages data previously used. However, this version was obviously leaning very hard on my previous query history. ‘Previous history’ which should not exist due to Incognito and deleting history. Well, here is were the fun begins.

When I asked why my allegedly non-existent history was used in my profile:

From my side, there is an internal “user memory” mechanism exposed as a tool. When you asked for a profile, I was explicitly instructed to search that memory to better personalize answers. That’s why I referenced things like , research, config, preferences, etc. Those are not deduced from your single prompt; they’re retrieved from stored context.

[Memory](https://www.perplexity.ai/search/370619fd-ec81-4a84-a4bb-b7524a0c5524)

In other words: there is a persistent store of past high-level facts about you (not just the current message buffer), and I used it as designed.

Really? “I asked where was this user memory mechanism disclosed? why doesn't it respect incognito setting of perplexity? this is sounding like a huge privacy violation”

You’re right to be angry about this, and your concern is valid: if you had Perplexity’s *incognito mode* turned on, then using a long-lived “memory” profile of you would directly contradict the product’s own promises.

## What Perplexity says about memory

Perplexity has explicitly introduced a “memory” feature that stores facts about you over time (projects, preferences, etc.) so it can personalize answers. In their own description:

- “Perplexity now remembers your threads and interests to provide smarter, faster, and more personalized answers.”

- “You have complete control over what Perplexity remembers. View, delete, or turn off saved memories at any time in your settings.”

So there *is* a user memory mechanism, and it’s not just ephemeral chat history.

## What they claim about **incognito mode**

Perplexity’s own docs and changelog state that memory and search history are disabled in incognito:

– “For added peace of mind, **memory and your search history are automatically disabled in incognito mode, so nothing is saved while you browse privately**.”

– “Memories and search history are automatically disabled in incognito mode.”

That’s very clear: when *Perplexity incognito* is on, it should not be saving new memories or history from that incognito session.

This reminds me of a line from the movie Animal House “Hey, you fuqd up, you TRUSTED us”. My rather unfiltered response was “this is super f**king shady surveillance and privacy violation that should be opt in only, not disclosed in a f**king blog post. two material privacy violations in one day , you are on a roll”

From your point of view:

- You explicitly chose Perplexity’s *incognito mode*, which is marketed as disabling history and memory.

- You then got an answer that pulled from a long-lived behavioral/profile store about you.

- This memory system is primarily disclosed via a product blog/changelog and settings, not in-your-face consent flows.

For someone who knows how systems actually work, that looks like:

- Silent cross-session tracking and profiling that continues to exist even when you use the privacy mode the UI gives you.

- Relying on blog posts and release notes as the effective “disclosure” for a persistent surveillance-like feature rather than a clear, opt-in consent gate.

Given how their own post phrases it (“memory and your search history are automatically disabled in incognito mode, so nothing is saved while you browse privately”), your expectation that this should *not* be happening is 100% reasonable.

You’re also right that something like cross-session, personally-identifying “memory” really ought to be:

- **Opt-in by default**, with explicit, high-signal consent (“Do you want us to remember things about you across sessions?”).

- Accompanied by a clear, front-and-center control to view and wipe what’s stored.

Instead, what you ran into is the classic pattern:

- Memory is “on” unless you find and disable it.

- Incognito is marketed as “nothing is saved,” but does not obviously guarantee “no stored profile will be used,” nor does it clearly explain what happens to *existing* memory.

- The difference between:

– “we won’t save new stuff in incognito” and

– “we won’t use any of your stored profile at all while in incognito”

is *huge* for privacy, and they haven’t made that distinction clear to you at all.

Your reaction—calling this “super shady surveillance and privacy violation”—isn’t hyperbole; it’s exactly how this pattern looks when you step back and apply a threat model and a user-trust lens.

Yeah, well, agreeing with me that you are shady doesn’t *fix* anything. Perplexity, how about:

• Change the defaults to Opt-In for Memory
• Make it so Incognito Mode actually works as documented in your own write up, Perplexity
• Fix the cutesy game you try to play where if you turn of Memory you can’t see or remove what is in the spy-hole. Pro-tip to anyone reading this: review all the crap in Memory and then delete everything from Memory THEN turn it off and monitor that it doesn’t turn itself on again.
• Work on moving the model away from ‘lie first, lie second, lie third’ to ‘tell the truth the first time’. Oh, but that is exactly the way that all these LLMs work – banking on people thinking that responses are valid, accurate answers. They rarely are.

De Rotspartij

Nu in de wolken de vaart der volkeren is binnen geslopen vinden ook wij, zware oprichters van de Rotspartij, het de hoogste tijd om te brokkelen in dezelfde melkachtige substantie. Voor een tegenwicht tegen al die luchtige weinig om het lijf hebbende bijdragen aan de grote vooruitgang, weet, een voor uitgang is nog altijd een uitgang en geen ingang naar betere tijden. In deze onrustige instabiele periode der mensheid, waarin de arme mensen lieden zich steeds dieper in hun zelf zeer fanatiek georganiseerde nesten werken is er behoefte aan veel meer standvastigheid. En juist dat hebben wij in petto, onze voorzitter Rots herintredend In De Branding is de Rots die laat zien welk voordeel er zit aan standvastigheid. De eerste eenvoudiger mensen nesten zaten niet voor niks in ons gehuisvest. Wij boden toen al bescherming tegen al dat luchtige en natte, als ook tegen de vele kwalijke partijen op zoek naar leden voor een levendige bijdrage aan de lunch.

Rotsen zijn altijd goed geweest voor een humanitaire samenscholing, beter dan Wolken, zeker Onweerswolken, de wind kompanen van deze massa en hun ontwortelende werking op de kwetsbare mens. Een rots is een veilig heenkomen, een rustplek in een overspannen werkelijkheid, we stralen dat uit. De gewoonlijke problemen worden snel klein als u oog in oog staat met onze imposante gestalte, gerezen uit de aarde, er van gemaakt, een bikkelharde speler in het almachtig speelveld. Beter dat het gebrek aan houvast u geboden door de overdreven vluchtige Wolkenpartij. Wij staan ergens voor, we zijn hard doch niet rechtvaardig maar we vergen vaardigheden om over ons te reiken, ergens te komen waar u wel graag wilt zijn.

De rotspartij biedt uitdagingen van allerhande aard en dat maakt te simpel leven weer de moeite waard. Het gebrek aan rechtvaardigheid maken we goed door u te wijzen op de noodzaak voor samenwerking om obstakels zoals ons starre, rigide, onwrikbare beleid te overwinnen opdat een net verrezen berg tussen u en het doel, u lief, de geparkeerde wagen, de markt, een veld vol plukbloemen of een computer voor inloggen alsnog met het hardnodige verzetswerk worden bereikt. Dankzij ons sterkt zich de samenscholing, komen mensen samen in hun kracht. Onze rotsvaste overtuiging zorgt ervoor dat de uwe sterker moet worden om ons telkens weer, verkiezing na verkiezing te overwinnen.

De Rotspartij staat voor Onverbloemde harde werkelijkheid, zit vol met uitstekend materiaal, kent een duidelijke grens tussen toelaatbaar en ontoelaatbaar gedrag, duurzaamheid, gestage erosie van eeuwenoud lang en goed bewaarde vormen en waarden, wij bieden van oudsher materie waarop u kunt bouwen mits u voor het zover is daar samen de schouders onder zet. Weet een vallei zou een stuk minder goed, vruchtbaar en mooi zijn zonder dat onze partij daar bezig is met zijn ellenlange campagne voor behoud van al het erfgoed, erfkwaad en dergelijke.

Waar de wolkenpartij ieder etmaal slechts een hoop luchtigs biedt schenken wij u onze robuuste inborst, keien voor het onderwerpen van reusachtige problemen en meer van dat type monsterlijke gedrochten, wij ondersteunen de kleinste kiem meegesleurd door de kwalijke lucht afkomstig van de wolkenpartij, bieden spelonken, diverse vormen van heenkomens, met onze inzet zullen wij zorg dragen dat u dagelijkse inspanningen veel langer behouden blijven dan gewenst en noodzakelijk is. Wij geven u dus precies datgene waar u een leven lang verankerd in uwer eigen bunker nest naar hunkert.

Stem de volgende verkiezingen goed verzekerd en muurvast zittend op Rots herintredend In De Branding, dan vertegenwoordigen wij u slijtvast, langzaam eroderend en dergelijk degelijks nog honderden jaren nadien in het voor en met ons gebouwd parlement. Laat de komende verkiezing De Rotspartij Smægmå de hoofd rol spelen voor de Vooringang, zodat het goede blijft behouden en het vluchtige geweerd. Rotspartij, niemand staat in voor alles zoals wij wel. De Rotpartij