The Cookie Banner Is a Monument to a Law That Worked
The most hated interface on the web isn’t the GDPR’s fault. It’s the industry’s counter-offer — and the fact that it exists at all is proof the law landed.
Nobody Knows How Old You Are
A wave of laws now requires websites to know whether you’re a child. The awkward truth is that the internet has no good way to find out — and every bad way costs someone something.
Your Résumé Was Read by a Machine
Applying for work now means writing for a parser first and a person second. The strange part isn’t that machines rank candidates — it’s that they decide who is ever seen, and owe no one an explanation.
The Productivity Score on Your Back
Bossware's defenders say it's just a manager walking the floor. But a manager can't record everything, can't store it forever, and can be embarrassed. The analogy is the lie.
The Gig That Scores You
Gig platforms insist they are marketplaces, not managers. The five-star rating is where that story falls apart — a customer’s bad mood, converted into an employment record nobody wrote and nobody can appeal.
Domino's Fought a Blind Man All the Way to the Supreme Court. Over a Pizza.
Guillermo Robles just wanted dinner. The website wouldn't let him order it. The lawsuit that followed decided whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the internet at all.
The Price You See Is Not the Price
Governments are finally cracking down on junk fees. But every new rule assumes one thing: that everyone sees the same number. That assumption is the next thing to go.
Buy Now, Regret Later
Four instalments is an old idea. Putting the loan inside the checkout button, at the exact moment desire peaks, is the new one — and for years, whether any of it legally counted as credit was genuinely unsettled.
The School-Issued Laptop Is Watching
One-to-one device programs solved a real access problem — and quietly made round-the-clock surveillance a condition of doing homework. Children are the one population that can’t consent and can’t opt out.
The Form That Decides If You Eat
Session timeouts, missed calls, forms that reset: the safety net’s real eligibility test lives in its interfaces, and it filters for stamina, not need.
The Internet Forgot How to Forget
Spent convictions, credit reports that purge themselves, gossip that died with its generation — forgetting used to be engineered into our institutions on purpose. Nobody abolished it. The internet just never built it.
The Machine That Cannot Be Appealed
Losing an account can mean losing a business, an archive, an identity — and the appeal button sends you back to the same machine that banned you. On ceremonial redress, and the laws now trying to make it real.
The Moderator Who Saw Everything
They decide what you never see, in seconds, at 98 percent accuracy, for a company that doesn’t employ them. A composite portrait of the outsourced moderation workforce, built from court filings and public testimony.
Why Thousands of American Businesses Keep Getting Sued Over Their Websites
Web accessibility lawsuits keep climbing, and both sides agree the system is broken. The real story is a right America decided to enforce almost entirely through private litigation — and the strange economy that grew up around it.
The Warehouse Runs at the Speed of Software
The delivery estimate and the warehouse quota are the same number read from opposite ends. States are now forcing companies to say it out loud — because the legal defense was that an algorithmic quota isn’t a quota.
The Data Centre in the Cornfield
The cloud was named so no one would picture a building. Now one of the largest industrial build-outs in memory is arriving in farm counties under codenames and NDAs — and the public meeting is where the decision gets announced, not made.
The ADA Was Written Before the Web. Courts Are Improvising.
Is a website a “place”? Thirty-five years after the ADA was signed, the answer depends on which federal circuit you get sued in — and judges have been building the rules Congress never wrote.
Terms of Service: The Contract Nobody Reads and Everybody Signs
You have agreed to more binding contracts this month than your grandparents signed in a lifetime. The strangest part isn't that you didn't read them — it's that nobody, including the courts, expected you to.
Everything Sounds Like an Ad Now
Influencer marketing didn’t just blur the line between advertising and enthusiasm — it made the blur the product. Now the FTC is trying to draw the line back, one hashtag at a time.
Who Owns Your Face? Inside the Biometric Gold Rush
Illinois didn’t write a wiser biometric law than anyone else. It wrote an enforceable one — and that single design choice is why your face is a protected asset in Chicago and free for the taking in St. Louis.
The App That Counts Your Steps and Your Premium
Insurers call it a reward: share your steps, pay less. But a discount for some is a surcharge for everyone else — and the wellness loophole is quietly dissolving the pool that makes insurance work.
The House That Locks You Out
Smart locks insert an administrator between tenants and their own front doors. Tenancy law has always assumed possession is something you can hold in your hand — and it is only starting to notice the difference.
The Model That Learned From Your Work
The lawsuits over AI training data are nominally about copying. The anger underneath them is about something copyright law was never designed to reach — and the market is quietly settling it anyway, for those who can afford a seat at the table.
The Help Desk Is a Hallucination
Air Canada’s chatbot promised a bereavement refund that didn’t exist. The airline’s defence was bolder: the bot, it argued, was a separate legal entity responsible for its own words.
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