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Privacy
Facial recognition, biometric ID, data protection and AI surveillance — tracked daily across news, courts and regulators.
France: Email Tracking Pixels — What the CNIL’s Recommendation Changes in Practice
The CNIL’s recommendation of 12 March 2026, which was published on 14 April 2026 and applicable from that date, provides detailed guidance on the legal framework applicable to email tracking pixels. While the applicability of ePrivacy rules to tracking pixels had already been recognised at European level, notably through the EDPB’s interpretation of Article 5(3) [...] The post France: Email Tracking Pixels — What the CNIL’s Recommendation Changes in Practice appeared first on Connect On Tech .
O-VAD: Industrial Video Anomaly Detection through Object-Centric Tracking and Reasoning
Industrial Video Anomaly Detection (IVAD) aims to identify anomalous objects and events in an industrial process, which is crucial for modern manufacturing and quality control systems. Existing VLM-based anomaly reasoning methods are capable of detecting open-ended anomalies in general domains. However, their performance declines in industrial settings characterized by intricate object transformations, strict physics, and procedural constraints. To tackle the complexity of such interaction-inten
(g+) House & Home: How smart tech is being weaponised in the home
Remote access to domestic devices is increasingly being used to manipulate, intimidate and disturb. Policymakers and tech companies are grappling with safeguards. Von Emma Jacobs ( Security , Tracking )
AdaHome: An Adaptive Smart Home Assistant using Local Small Language Models
Smart home assistants interpret a wide range of user commands, from explicit device control to underspecified and preference dependent requests. While recent systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) improve this capability, they often rely on heavyweight reasoning pipelines and cloud-based deployment, limiting their efficiency and suitability for resource-constrained environments, and raising privacy concerns. In addition, existing approaches provide limited support for stable long-term per
Morning Docket: 07.20.26
* After the Trump family and his administration prevailed upon Romanian officials to release suspected international sex traffickers, the Tate brothers are now set to be extradited to the UK. [ Forbes ] * Litigation funders getting squeezed on both sides. Some states have attempted to ban their work, and elsewhere investors are putting money behind law firms directly rather than work with a funder. [ Bloomberg Law News ] * ACLU gearing up to take on state surveillance tactics, which are much mor
Three InfoQ Certification Cohorts Start This August: Meet the Facilitators
InfoQ has opened enrollment for three five-week online certification cohorts starting in August, each led by a senior practitioner applying QCon talk frameworks to participants' own work: architecture with Luca Mezzalira, engineering leadership with Michelle Brush, and AI security and privacy with Katharine Jarmul. By Artenisa Chatziou
How Livestreamed Child Abuse Is Challenging How We Think About Online Privacy
Millions of children are exploited in private video calls, exposing gaps in how platforms detect abuse and protect their youngest users.
How would Airtel detect hotspot use amid questions over its Unlimited 5G policy?
Airtel allows hotspot use under its Unlimited 5G Data plan, with a 300GB fair-use limit. Detecting tethering may raise questions under India’s net-neutrality rules and about user privacy. The post How would Airtel detect hotspot use amid questions over its Unlimited 5G policy? appeared first on MEDIANAMA .
New Survey: Privacy Concerns Are A Top Barrier to AgeTech Adoption Among Older Adults
Rapidly growing agetech industry has a significant opportunity to close trust gap, increase product adoption with increased transparency WASHINGTON, D.C. — (July 20, 2026) — The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) — a global non-profit focused on data protection, AI, and emerging technologies — today released findings from a comprehensive March 2026 survey about how […]
On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras
A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral. The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM , not 34 10 DTM . But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM . Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picki
Publisher investigating peer reviewer for alleged bribery scheme
Earlier this year, Tushar Sen, an independent researcher based in New Delhi, submitted a manuscript to Security and Privacy about the modeling of polymorphic malware. On May 15, a purported reviewer for the journal wrote Sen indicating he received the article, but that it was not ready for publication. “i may revise it with you … Continue reading Publisher investigating peer reviewer for alleged bribery scheme
Law and Media Round Up – 20 July 2026 [Updated]
On Wednesday 15 July 2026, the Court of Appeal (Vos MR, Warby LJ and Whipple LJ) handed down judgement in the appeal of Vince v ANL [2026] EWCA Civ 899. Eco entrepreneur, Dale Vince brought a defamation and subsequent data protection claim against Associated Newspapers in relation to the publication of an article which juxtaposed […]
Vic Labor moots workplace AI and biometrics surveillance curbs
Could also impact HR's use of AI.
Request for Nominations for Members To Serve on National Institute of Standards and Technology Federal Advisory Committees
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST or Institute) invites and requests nomination of individuals for appointment to seven existing Federal Advisory Committees (Committees): Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction; Board of Overseers of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award; Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board; Manufacturing Extension Partnership Advisory Board; National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, including the National Artificial
O-VAD: Industrial Video Anomaly Detection through Object-Centric Tracking and Reasoning
Industrial Video Anomaly Detection (IVAD) aims to identify anomalous objects and events in an industrial process, which is crucial for modern manufacturing and quality control systems. Existing VLM-based anomaly reasoning methods are capable of detecting open-ended anomalies in general domains. However, their performance declines in industrial settings characterized by intricate object transformations, strict physics, and procedural constraints. To tackle the complexity of such interaction-inten
STAR: Skeletal Token Alignment and Rearrangement for Interaction Recognition
Understanding physical human-robot and human-human interactions is a challenging yet emerging topic in 3D vision. While most existing methods rely on skeleton sequences--effective in low-light and privacy-sensitive environment--they face two major challenges: 1) learning and effectively exploiting interaction cues from skeletal data, and 2) compensating for the lack of visual information absent in skeletons alone. To address these challenges, we propose skeletal token alignment and rearrangement
Seoul AI ETF howler morphs into zombie volatility
Wild price swings already have watchdogs rueing their May approval of leveraged funds tracking mega-cap stocks SK Hynix and Samsung. But the limits they’re now imposing don’t address the root of ...
SAGA: Synthetic Agentic Graph Architecture for Temporal Benchmark Generation
High quality temporal graph benchmarks with rich semantics and ground-truth anomaly labels are essential for training graph neural networks, yet remain scarce due to privacy constraints and annotation costs. We present SAGA (Synthetic Agentic Graph Architecture), a system for generating large-scale, semantically rich temporal graphs via a four-phase pipeline. Our Skeleton-First, Semantics-Second architecture decouples structure from semantics: (S) an O(1)-per-edge skeleton generator produces pow
The World Cup Ends Today. The Surveillance Will Continue.
Government use of automated AI decision-making to be curbed under new Australian rules
New national plan is accompanied by Labor push for digital duty of care legislation Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast The use of AI in automated decision-making by government departments and agencies will be subject to tough rules under a new national plan, expected to extend to consumer protections, workplace safety and privacy. As the Albanese government grapples with the rapid growth in the use of artificial int
The Silent World Cup Winners are the Companies Normalizing Surveillance
Strategic Gaze: Attention Allocation and Transition Patterns Across Functional Areas of Interest by Gameplay Outcome
Video games present players with complex, spatially distributed information across interface elements, with attention shaped by visual features and task goals. Eye tracking provides a useful method for examining player attention through gaze behaviour during gameplay. Yet empirical game research has relied on accumulated fixation measures that capture where attention is directed and how long it is maintained within regions, leaving less known about how gaze moves between regions to coordinate di
Federated Lightweight Intrusion Detection in Drone Swarms with Knowledge Distillation
Drone swarms are increasingly deployed in critical applications such as surveillance, disaster response, and infrastructure monitoring. However, their reliance on open communication channels and their limited computational resources make them vulnerable to a wide range of cyber-threats. There is a growing interest in intrusion detection systems (IDS) specifically designed for drone environments and operations. However, the conventional solutions including Machine Learning (ML)-based approaches r
Making privacy usable: Bridging privacy research and practice through guidelines
Publication date: Available online 16 July 2026 Source: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies Author(s): Shirlei Aparecida de Chaves, Fabiane Barreto Vavassori Benitti
Privacy Cost as Equity Input: A Group Fairness Criterion for Differentially Private Machine Learning
Differential privacy (DP) is increasingly deployed to limit membership inference risk in machine-learning systems. Prior work has shown that DP-SGD can widen accuracy disparities across demographic groups, but this framing treats fairness as a purely outcome-side concern. We argue that privacy cost, the information leakage borne by each group, is itself a form of harm, and adopt a compensatory-fairness framework in which a group that involuntarily bears greater privacy exposure is owed proportio
How Formerly Incarcerated People Envision Technologies for Prison Parole
AI-driven algorithms and automated tools are increasingly embedded in the correctional landscape, shaping parole eligibility,release decisions, and surveillance. These tools are also often framed as objective, inevitable solutions to inefficiency andbias. Yet, these computational systems are rarely designed with input from justice-impacted individuals, which means theymight fail to address the real needs of incarcerated people. To address this gap, we surveyed 31 formerly incarcerated peopleabou
How Pandemics Have Reshaped the Respiratory Virus Data Landscape in Europe: Scoping Review
Background: Acute respiratory infections caused by influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and SARS-CoV-2 remain a major public health challenge in Europe. Although surveillance systems for these pathogens are well established, the past 2 decades have seen a rapid diversification of data streams supporting surveillance and research. This expanding data landscape, combined with fragmentation across institutions, sectors, and countries, may limit timely evidence synthesis and effective publi
Victory! Flock Ends Rollout of Audio “Distress Detection” of Human Voices
Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers — has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.” In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection)
How the Watch Dogs Video Game Series Mirrored and Predicted Real-World Digital Rights Issues
When Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 was released in 2016, it was a headtrip for those of us working on digital-rights issues in the Bay Area. During the day, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism from EFF's San Francisco offices and then, at night, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism in an uncanny simulation of San Francisco from my home gaming console. Watch Dogs 2 is an open-world video game that follows a hacktivist collective called Dedsec as they take on surveillance tech and discriminatory AI systems that a
Candidate Attended Dialogue State Tracking Using BERT
Dialogue state tracking (DST) is one of the core components in task-oriented dialogue systems. At each turn in a conversation, DST estimates the user belief or dialogue state, which is used as input for downstream modules to predict system actions and generate responses. The increasingly popular dialogue system applications like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa need to support a large number of services and APIs, resulting in growing attention to the scalability of such systems. Especially for s
Code-Poisoning Property Inference Attacks
The flourishing code hosting platforms and coding agents enable even beginners with private data to build tailored Machine Learning (ML) models using available code quickly. The training data for ML models, often regarded as private property (e.g., clinical records, transaction information), is at significant risk of information leakage. Property Inference Attacks (PIAs), as a significant type of privacy attack, aim to expose global property information of the training set. In this paper, we pre
Morning Docket: 07.17.26
* Last night, Trump delivered a speech ostensibly about election security, but it was mostly a commercial for the 25th Amendment. [ Election Law Blog ] * Madison Square Garden sues WIRED over article claiming the stadium "used surveillance to track celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation." Can you believe a despicable owner who already admits to routinely using face recognition to ban lawyers from events could do such a thing? [ USA Today ] * Trump selling financial firms earl
Google now lets users connect apps to AI Mode in Search
Google is adding Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music integrations to AI Mode, letting users complete tasks across apps while raising questions about privacy, control and liability. The post Google now lets users connect apps to AI Mode in Search appeared first on MEDIANAMA .
EgoExoMoCap: Distributed Ego-Exo Human Motion Capture
Human motion capture from head-mounted devices (HMDs) offers a scalable way to acquire real-world human motion and interaction data, which is crucial for applications in embodied AI and VR/AR. Existing approaches focus on either egocentric body tracking, estimating the motion of the subject wearing the device, or exocentric tracking, capturing the movements of people in the wearer's surroundings. So far, these two paradigms have largely been explored in isolation. In this paper, we propose a nov
Privacy-preserving age verification is contradictory by design, says EDRi advisor at SFLC discussion
Experts from across the world debated whether age verification can protect children without undermining privacy, anonymity and free expression. The post Privacy-preserving age verification is contradictory by design, says EDRi advisor at SFLC discussion appeared first on MEDIANAMA .
‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?
Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend. Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in
8 ways you definitely shouldn’t use AI
If you’ve spent any amount of time using ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI assistants, you’ve witnessed some of the ways it can go wrong. LLM accuracy remains an issue, and there are plenty of social situations in which your outputs can be unwelcome. AI also presents privacy pitfalls, given how personal some conversations can get. The AI assistants themselves won’t give you much guidance on what to avoid, which means you might be on your own to figure this stuff out. Here are some pointers I’ve gathe
Case Law: Vince v Associated Newspapers, Court of Appeal upholds claim for “unfair” data processing by newspaper –
On 15 July 2026, the Court of Appeal handed down an important judgment in Vince v Associated Newspapers ([2026] EWCA Civ 899). This decision establishes, for the first time, that a person can sue a newspaper under data protection law for an “unfair” article even if, under the law of defamation, there is no claim. […]
Privacy and human rights award 2026
The post Privacy and human rights award 2026 appeared first on Access Now .
Toward Federated Multimodal Graph Foundation Models: A Topology-Aware Multimodal Alignment Framework
Multimodal-attributed graphs (MAGs), whose nodes carry modalities such as images and text alongside topological structure, now pervade applications including social platforms, e-commerce, and biomedical networks, offering richer semantic signals than single-modality graphs. In practice, such graphs are fragmented across privacy-restricted silos owned by different platforms and institutions, so learning a broadly transferable model over them demands collaborative training that never exposes raw d