30 September
What happened on this date in privacy, anonymity networks and censorship. Every year on the same date we add a new look back and keep the earlier ones as they were.
2026
HTTPS certificate warnings on old phones
If your phone, or a family member's, is stuck on Android 7.0 or earlier, websites that use Let's Encrypt certificates show certificate warnings. Let's Encrypt is a free service that issues HTTPS certificates, and a phone accepts them only if its built-in list includes the Let's Encrypt root certificate, the top-level certificate used to check the others. On 30 September 2021, the trust Let's Encrypt had borrowed from another certificate authority expired, and older Android versions kept working for three more years through a special certificate valid until 30 September 2024. In 2023 Let's Encrypt advised owners of those phones to switch to Firefox, and in September 2025 Mozilla announced that they would be left on a version that no longer receives security updates. To check whether your phone is affected, look up its Android version in Settings. If it is 7.0 or earlier, the last Firefox version for these phones can still open these sites, but it no longer receives security updates.
Also on this day
- A US defence appropriations act was signed into law, barring funds for the Terrorism Information Awareness programme, with an exception for analysis tools used for counterterrorism foreign intelligence. Source: GovInfo
- The European Commission decided to take the UK to the EU Court of Justice for not fully implementing EU rules on the confidentiality of electronic communications, after complaints about how UK authorities had handled internet providers analysing users' traffic to target adverts. Source: European Commission
- South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act took effect. Source: Korea Ministry of Government Legislation