Privacy

Join experts at MediaNama event to discuss age verification, social media restrictions for children, platform design, privacy, online safety, and practical regulatory approaches. The post Final Call: Age Verification and Restricting Social Media for Children, Delhi, 31 July #NAMA appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. And more Americans than ever now own at least one wearable health device. But what are the companies that make fitness trackers doing to protect our sensitive data from prying eyes? A lot less than they could be, it turns out. We're explaining what companies can do to protect your health data, and more, with our EFFector newsletter . JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 year

As LLM agents increasingly depend on diverse external services such as search engines, databases, and connectors, agent harnesses face a fundamental tool-selection challenge: acquiring too few tools leaves the task under-informed, while too many adds cost, context load, and privacy exposure. Routers and retrievers can rank candidate tools by relevance, but a ranking alone does not determine how many are worth selecting. Existing approaches leave acquisition under heterogeneous costs unaddressed.

Memory systems allow agents to retain and reuse information from past interactions, but they can also let malicious content persist. A malicious instruction crafted by an attacker may be stored in long-term memory, recalled much later, and quietly shape a real action. Recent benchmarks increasingly examine agent memory security, yet few trace the same malicious semantics across persistence, downstream consequences, and selective repair under diverse memory-backend comparisons. To address this ga

Claim was launched with 'blaze of publicity' and 'monstrous all-out attack' on Mail. The post Mail spent £35m fighting Harry’s ‘campaign for Leveson 2’ privacy claim appeared first on Press Gazette .

Some companies reportedly using leaderboards for employees who used the most AI in their work Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Software firm Atlassian has sought to tighten tracking of its staff’s AI spending by introducing “wallets” with monthly caps of up $2,000 for each employee, amid an explosion in costs at other tech companies. The move by Atlassian, which recently cited AI as part of the reason behind cutti

Complaint alleges telehealth provider shared consumers’ sensitive health information with third-party advertising platforms despite promising patient privacy The Federal Trade Commission, joined by Utah and California, by and through Los Angeles County Counsel, today sued Hims & Hers alleging that the telehealth provider shared consumers’ sensitive health information about medical conditions with third-party advertising platforms despite claiming its services maintain consumers’ privacy and dece

Comme chaque année, l’Agence nationale des fréquences publie son bilan de surveillance des terminaux mobiles, portant notamment sur les niveaux d’exposition aux ondes. En 2025, 12 % des smartphones dépassaient les limites réglementaires. Au total, pas moins de 23 % des téléphones portables n’étaient pas conformes, tous griefs confondus. Chaque année, l’ANFR prélève des terminaux dans […]

Identity document (ID) authentication relies on the structural integrity of complex, high-frequency security patterns. However, advanced Generative AI models can now inject localized, high-fidelity manipulations, creating deceptive attacks that bypass standard verification. Training robust image forensic models to detect these anomalies is hindered by privacy regulations, forcing reliance on synthetic templates lacking the intricate visual patterns of real IDs. To bridge this domain gap, we intr

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from wearable sensors supports applications in healthcare, rehabilitation, fitness tracking, and smart environments. Yet, existing deep learning approaches require dataset-specific training, large labeled corpora, and repeated adaptation to new sensor settings or activity taxonomies. Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Human Activity Recognition (RAG-HAR) addresses this by framing HAR as a training-free, retrieval-augmented task, in which statistical descriptions

Today's links Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global: The good globalism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Fonz thumps x Linux; CBC v DRM; Aussie mall v photos; English town x CCTVs; Pay no taxes x Big Tech; Games Workshop v gamers; Delta x surveillance pricing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I s

Popular telehealth provider Hims & Hers "shared consumers’ sensitive health information with third-party advertising platforms such as Meta and Snap despite promising to protect patient privacy," the federal government alleges.

China is widening its lead over the United States in the race to develop humanoid robots, with Chinese firms accounting for six of the world’s 10 most innovative start-ups in the sector, according to a new report tracking global patent data, as Washington moves to restrict imports of robots, including those made in China. Firms from China dominated the ranking released by legal research platform LexisNexis on Tuesday, claiming a clean sweep of the top five. The top five places went to...

Sonomyography (SMG) enables continuous device control via ultrasound-measured muscle deformation signals, but existing SMG interfaces generally require substantial user- and sensor-location-specific training data and provide only one proportional signal or task-specific classification. We present a real-time, sensor-placement-agnostic SMG control system based on sparse optical flow tracking that enables continuous 1-DOF control after minimal calibration (3 pose definitions). We also present a pr

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) supports essential intelligent transportation applications but encounters challenges in federated learning (FL) due to non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data, vehicle mobility, resource heterogeneity, and strict privacy requirements in latency-sensitive scenarios such as misbehavior detection and accident response. Traditional FL methods, such as random client selection and standard FedAvg, often experience slow convergence and reduced performan

The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations offering the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on harvested persona

National security agencies said the devices could create supply-chain vulnerabilities, threaten critical infrastructure and enable surveillance or remote manipulation.

Repurposing data for other means is risky, and governments should evaluate when consolidation is more harmful than good, a recent report said.

The rulings expanded FCC data privacy rules and made it easier for the agency to issue huge fines, the group said

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a governance entity that allows its stakeholders to manage blockchain-based protocols through smart contracts. The DAO explicitly specifies how stakeholders make and enforce decisions concerning a protocol's operation in a smart contract, aptly referred to as its governance contract. The design of this governance contract, therefore, has far-reaching implications for the security (trust) and privacy (transparency) of the smart contracts managed by

EEG-based community sensing programs are emerging globally as a tool to leverage aggregated brain data to gain insights into attentiveness of students and employees. But these programs raise privacy concerns because EEG signals contain sensitive personal information. Differential Privacy (DP) can protect individuals while preserving aggregate statistics yet applying DP to EEG data is challenging as it requires user-level noise generation, which increases power and latency. Besides, most commerci

CapuchinAI, a portable testing station equipped with a touch screen and facial recognition software, could help scientists study primate intelligence in the wild.

Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For years, PatronScan has marketed itself not just as an ID-verification tool, but as a system that allows

Face de-identification (De-ID) aims to remove or conceal personally identifiable facial features in images or videos to prevent identity recognition while preserving utility for downstream tasks. With the rising emphasis on data privacy and responsible AI, face De-ID has emerged as an active research area spanning computer vision and privacy-preserving communities. Early approaches, and many contemporary ones, operate in the digital domain by modifying pixel-level or appearance-level features th

Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference : …some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they’re only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it’s like a gambling addict trying to kick the habit by switching from FanDuel to DraftKings. […] Despite what you may read on the Flock website, Axon cameras are pretty effective when it comes to hoovering up personal details that can

The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step closer to a surveillance state? How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn’t mind, given how long we’ve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV. What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any ex

Statistical analysis on sensitive datasets like medical records and financial transactions is essential for decision-making, but raises significant privacy concerns. While existing secure Two-Party Computation (2PC) makes extensive efforts in designing the common secure primitives (e.g., addition and multiplication) or machine learning-related functions, few pay attention to the statistical functions. In this paper, we propose SafeStats, a secure toolkit tailored for 2PC secure statistical analy

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is urging Washington to tighten chip export bans and clamp down on Chinese “distillation”, framing it as critical for preserving the US lead in artificial intelligence. In a blog post on Monday, Amodei called a chip ban “the most efficient and direct way” of preventing Beijing from building frontier AI models for military use and domestic surveillance, which he said was his primary concern. The US “should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment..

Smart IT asset tracking helps businesses maximise the value of their IT investments while reducing risk, says Valene Nagiah, head of V-Track.

arXiv:2607.23207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emerging infrastructure for AI-agent identity has converged, in industry practice and research proposals alike, on a single resolution of the tension between accountability and privacy: make every agent identifiable. We document a national system in China -- built as national infrastructure and scheduled for public launch in Q3 2026 -- that occupies a different and underexplored point in the same design space: an agent is associated with a veri

arXiv:2607.22953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI systems bring societal risks such as mass surveillance, extreme concentrations of power, and loss of user autonomy---calling into question a model where third-parties collect and control massive amounts of user data. Users require a sovereign system to securely own, govern, and disclose their context while remaining compliant across regulated domains with strict provenance, interpretability, and policy adherence. Perspective-aware AI ap

arXiv:2607.24275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ethical governance of AI-driven systems is often expressed through high-level principles and static documentation, creating a gap between regulatory requirements and system-level verification. This challenge is particularly acute in digital phenotyping, where continuous behavioural data raises concerns around consent, privacy, and fairness. In this paper, we propose a computational ethical framework for AI-driven digital phenotyping system in whi

The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General warned that manning the IUSS has proven to be an "enduring challenge" for the Navy. The post Redacted watchdog report spotlights Navy staffing strains impacting undersea surveillance appeared first on DefenseScoop .

A growing number of applications, such as biometrics and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), rely on cosine similarity scores computed between vector embeddings of text, images, or audio. These systems return similarity scores through their APIs for ranking and verification. However, such releases can leak information about individual records and enable membership inference attacks. While differential privacy (DP) provides a principled metric for quantifying attack risks, naïve application of

Multi-modal classification leverages complementary information across diverse data sources to enhance predictive performance. However, real-world scenarios subject to operational constraints, such as sensor failures or privacy restrictions, lead to inconsistent modality availability between training and inference times. To handle missing modalities, prior studies have mainly covered bimodal data setups and focused on designing robust fusion processes. Instead, we adopt a multi-modal co-learning

Autonomous LLM agents processing mixed-confidentiality data face severe security risks from prompt injection attacks and reasoning errors. While dynamic Information Flow Control (IFC) provides structural security guarantees, traditional taint tracking permanently taints an agent's context upon reading unvetted data, severely restricting downstream utility. We present APPA (Agentic Permissions Policy Algebra), an IFC framework that resolves this usability bottleneck through engine-managed context

Split learning enables collaborative model training by partitioning neural networks across clients and servers. However, improper split placement can lead to severe privacy leakage through intermediate representations. In this work, we propose a topology-guided framework for privacy-aware split learning based on the persistent Betti complexity of smashed activations. Through comprehensive layer-wise analysis, we show that privacy risk in split learning is highly non-uniform across layers and exh

Every time you use a privacy service like Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, you’re trusting a system designed so that no The post Cloudflare open-sources a debugger for privacy protocols used by Apple and Microsoft, with AI agents in mind appeared first on The New Stack .

The acquisition is slated to see up to 24 aircraft delivered to the British Army by 2029.

Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company : Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity ­ whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not. Cognyte’s contract with the state of Texas reveals that the simulator, called FalcoNet, can be concealed within the vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter. It’s th