A Court Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand & France Bans Social Media for Under-15s (07/22/2026)

The through-line today is who gets to look, and under what rules. A federal appeals court decided that the device in your pocket carries fewer protections at the border than it does anywhere else in the country. A government stood up a new pipeline for sharing machine-found vulnerabilities. A parliament decided that children should not have accounts at all. Each of these is a decision about where the boundary of observation sits, and each one moves it.

Top 5 Critical Privacy Alerts

1. A Court Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand Without Suspicion

The Fourth Circuit ruled that Customs and Border Protection can conduct a manual search of a traveler’s phone with no individualized suspicion, in United States v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case where the EFF and ACLU had filed an amicus brief (EFF). A manual search means an agent scrolling through your device by hand, and the ruling treats that as routine, which leaves the most detailed record most of us carry, our messages, photos, and accounts, open to inspection the moment we cross back in.

Operator Note: If your staff travel internationally with company data, the border is now a place where that data can be read without cause. Give traveling employees a clean-device profile and a policy on what stays home, because the cheapest data to protect at a checkpoint is the data that never boards the plane.

2. The White House Launches the “Gold Eagle” AI Vulnerability Clearinghouse

The administration announced Gold Eagle, a federal clearinghouse designed to share AI-derived cybersecurity vulnerability information between government agencies, critical infrastructure companies, and open-source maintainers (Inside Privacy). Pooling machine-found flaws is a reasonable defensive idea, and the open question is governance, because a channel built to move vulnerability data quickly is also a channel worth watching for how that data is handled once it arrives.

3. France Bans Social Media for Children Under 15

Both houses of the French Parliament voted to block social media access for children under 15, making France the first European country to enact such a ban amid a widening global crackdown (The Record). Age limits on social platforms tend to require age verification to enforce, and the practical tension worth watching is that proving every user’s age can mean collecting more identity data from everyone, adults included, to keep a smaller group out.

4. An EU Court Ruling on Platform Liability Draws a Free-Expression Warning

The EU Court of Justice issued a platform-liability ruling that the EFF warns could cause collateral damage to freedom of expression online (EFF). When platforms face liability for what users post, the rational response is to over-remove, and the lawful speech that gets swept up in that caution is the quiet cost that rarely makes the headline.

5. The FTC Returns $672,000 to Deceived Consumers

The Federal Trade Commission is mailing more than $672,000 in refunds to 9,419 consumers deceived by the operator of Trend Deploy over deceptive marketing (FTC). Refunds after the fact are the visible end of an enforcement action, and they are a useful reminder that deceptive marketing is treated as a real harm that carries a real bill.

Additional Privacy Alerts

Platforms & Accountability

• Meta Avoids the Next Social Media Addiction Trial: Less than a week before trial, the plaintiff in a closely watched social media addiction case against Meta dropped the suit, sparing the company a Los Angeles courtroom fight. The Verge

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