France’s plan to block children under 15 from social media has hit a constitutional roadblock.

The Constitutional Council on Friday blocked the measure, ruling that the restrictions placed an excessive burden on freedom of expression and communication while also raising concerns about how users’ ages would be verified.

The ruling does not end President Emmanuel Macron’s push for tougher social-media rules for children. Instead, it forces the government to rethink how an age ban could be enforced without creating disproportionate restrictions or new privacy risks.

France’s approved bill gets a stop sign

At the center of France’s proposal was a simple rule: children under 15 would not be allowed to access social media.

The measure was due to begin on September 1, 2026. New accounts for under-15s would have been prohibited from that date, while existing accounts would have received a four-month transition period.

For Macron, the restriction was part of a broader effort to reduce what he sees as the harms associated with early social-media use. He has argued that children can be exposed to harmful material, online harassment and social pressure before they are emotionally and psychologically prepared for it, while also losing time that could otherwise go toward sleep, education, reading, sport, and offline relationships.

Why France’s Constitutional Council said no

Parliament may have approved France’s under-15 social media ban, with a Senate vote of 243–2 and National Assembly vote of 279–81, but that was not the final word.

Per Reuters, France’s Constitutional Council concluded that this measure imposed an excessive burden on freedom of expression and communication.

The Council also objected to the safeguards around age verification. A system that prevents under-15s from accessing a service must verify users’ ages, but could create privacy concerns. The ruling therefore challenged the way Parliament designed the restriction rather than the government’s stated goal of protecting children online.

What Australia’s experience means for France and others

Australia’s experience with its own youth social-media restrictions has already illustrated some of the technical challenges France could face when rewriting its proposal. Platforms can identify and remove accounts believed to belong to underage users, but age-assurance systems are not foolproof and can potentially be circumvented.

That suggests that France may face the same basic problem when it tries again.

Macron has already indicated that France will rewrite the proposal rather than abandon the policy, and has instructed the French Prime Minister to draft a replacement with the aim of implementing the ban in the early months of 2027.

France’s ruling could also matter beyond its borders as governments elsewhere consider similar age restrictions. The challenge is increasingly not just whether lawmakers can set a minimum age for social media, but whether they can enforce it without requiring intrusive identity checks, restricting lawful access or creating new privacy risks for every user.

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The government’s spyware playbook has had one big problem for the public: there has been no reliable count of how often it is used.

That is set to change as U.S. federal courts prepare to track spyware and hacking-based communications interceptions in a new category of the annual Wiretap Report.

The development matters because spyware can put investigators much closer to the source of a person’s communications than conventional network interception can. Yet while the judiciary has published detailed statistics on court-authorized wiretaps for decades, those reports have not separately shown how many specifically involved government spyware techniques.

The figures to come will still leave some questions unanswered. But they will give lawmakers, researchers and the public something they have largely lacked: a number that can be tracked from one year to the next.

What the agreement introduces

According to TechCrunch, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will add a “spyware/hacking” category to the annual Wiretap Report. That will allow courts to separately count cases in which hacking techniques are authorized to intercept communications.

Spyware is a form of malware designed to secretly monitor or collect information from a device, and its capabilities can go far beyond simply reading messages.

Depending on the tool, it can give an attacker access to communications, files, location data, screenshots, and even a device’s camera or microphone. That makes spyware particularly powerful in the hands of threat actors.

The new report category, however, would not create a public record of individual spyware operations and will not necessarily capture every government use of hacking tools, such as a remote search for information already stored on a device. That leaves a significant portion of government hacking activity still outside the public view.

There are also timing and scope limits. The new category will start with 2028 data and will not disclose to the public how extensively government agencies have used spyware in previous years.

Privacy advocates welcome the change

Despite the apparent limitations, government surveillance and privacy advocates have lauded the effort.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Sen. Ron Wyden said he is “thankful that the federal courts agreed to collect and publish data about hacking.” Wyden also suggested that this is the starting point, citing the “Government Surveillance Transparency Act” he and others reintroduced earlier this year.

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the use of spyware surveillance a “problem,” while noting that the development will bring greater accountability on its use.

Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy, said it was a “long overdue” transparency step.

Why this development matters

The decision could give privacy advocates in other regions a stronger case for demanding similar transparency from their governments, particularly as spyware capabilities increasingly become advanced.

But transparency also has a security side: while these aggregate figures should not give hackers a playbook, the development would make government surveillance records — which are already highly targeted — even more valuable to threat actors.

For individuals, however, the more important consequence is what the data could eventually expose about the scale and reach of device surveillance — information that can be used to challenge excessive or unlawful monitoring and push for stronger safeguards.

The consequences of device surveillance can also extend beyond the person being targeted. Access to a compromised device may expose communications involving journalists’ sources, lawyers’ clients, colleagues, relatives and other contacts.

The value of the new reporting category is therefore less about revealing individual government operations and more about establishing a public baseline for how frequently one of the most intrusive forms of digital surveillance is being authorized.

Other News: The White House is pushing for greater scrutiny of AI model safety as the government weighs how advanced systems should be evaluated before deployment. 

For over a century, fire protection has been limited to water and chemicals. And while they can prevent catastrophic fires, the cleanup bills can be significant.

But maybe not for long. Sonic Fire Tech is testing a sound-powered fire protection system, which it says snuffs out fires within seconds while also sparing properties from messy water and chemical damage. The company announced Monday that it has raised a $15 million round led by the O.H.I.O. Fund with participation from Khosla Ventures. The startup previously raised a $3.5 million seed in October.

The fresh funding will help the Ohio-based startup hire more employees and run the battery of tests needed to earn approval from the National Fire Protection Association, which writes model codes adopted by fire departments around the country.

Approval typically takes about three years, but co-founder and CEO Geoff Bruder told TechCrunch he thinks that Sonic Fire Tech’s process will be “significantly shorter than that.”

Part of Bruder’s optimism stems from the fact that Sonic Fire Tech’s system doesn’t leave a mess after a fire suppression event, which should speed up the process. The tests are conducted in a lab and preparation can take hours. With Sonic Fire Tech’s system, “they don’t have to do cleanup,” he said.

That advantage in the lab could pay dividends in the real world. Commercial kitchens, for example, can face months of cleanup and restoration following a fire. Some 75% of them don’t reopen, Remington Bixby Hotchkis, Sonic Fire Tech’s COO, told TechCrunch.

Sonic Fire Tech’s acoustic fire suppression system uses a sound generator to pump inaudible sound through PVC pipes in the ceiling. When sensors in a room detect a fire, the generator kicks in and infrasonic waves, around 20 Hz, bombard the flames.

“We are the only technology that creates its own suppressant without collateral damage. False alarms are less of a concern for us,” Hotchkis said. “We deploy within seconds.” 

That speedy response could stop fires before they cause significant damage, which has the insurance industry interested. The startup is in talks with insurers about whether the system will qualify for premium discounts. The insurance industry’s acceptance could speed adoption of the company’s product.

The system also shows promise when applied to lithium-ion battery fires, which are among the most challenging to put out. In the few tests Sonic Fire Tech has run so far, “we don’t put out a lithium-ion fire, but we contain it,” Bruder said. “If we’re able to keep the outer casing from lighting fire, we can potentially stop cell-to-cell spread and limit the size of the fire.”

Sonic Fire Tech is working on systems to protect the interiors of commercial buildings, kitchens, and homes, both for new construction and retrofits. The company has also been working on a system to safeguard the exterior of homes in wildfire country, though development of that has progressed more slowly as the startup waits for time at a suitable testing lab.

In addition to quicker fire suppression, Sonic Fire Tech’s system promises to lower restoration costs, if any are needed.

Today, about 500 jurisdictions mandate interior fire protection systems. But Bruder points out that 50% of home fires start in the kitchen, whether they be grease or electrical fires. Even a small Sonic Fire Tech system, focused on the kitchen, could go a long way to minimizing the risk of catastrophic house fires, lowering premiums in the process. “Sprinklers that they’re putting in now can’t handle those fires,” Bruder said.