privacy

facial recognition

The UK's Home Office is building a "national facial matching service"

The Home Office wants to expand mobile biometric services "into the modality of face” by “exploiting the ubiquitous imaging capability now omnipresent in smartphones.” 

News

Adobe privacy crisis deepens as users threaten “Nightshade” attacks

"They think they can use anything you upload for AI training purposes? I'm filling up my entire 20 GB storage with poisoned images..."

News

Microsoft backs up after Recall default opt-in "privacy nightmare"

"I genuinely can not understand how that product was ever shipped. It’s terrifying from every conceivable angle..."

News

Adobe joins Microsoft in admitting it's now basically spyware

Updated terms give Adobe the right to “access your content through both automated and manual methods”.  

slack

Slack privacy furore: Company updates legals, says no customer data used to train genAI.

Communicating RAG/ML is hard. Engineering, legal and communications need to sit down and thrash this out in a growing number of companies.

slack

Slack is scraping your messages and files to develop AI by default

"To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyse Customer Data (e.g. messages, content and files) submitted to Slack..."

Policy

Spying on MPs and breaking encryption: New UK legislation damned as “unprecedented” – and “deeply troubling”

Apple says new rules “significantly widen the powers and exacerbate the flaws inherent in the Investigatory Powers Act” 

Twitter

Musk falls short in bid to block mandatory reporting law

Elon Musk's X has been denied in its efforts to block a California law mandating regular reports into its moderation practices

News

Google praised for rollout of anti-tracking policy updates

Google has won praise from the Electronic Frontier Foundation after it issued a new set of policies and default settings for its Location History feature that could limit police overreach in surveillance and search

AI

Dropbox’s AI integration with OpenAI turns into a messaging mess – as Amazon’s CTO apologises over data protection post

"To data scientists and developers in the domain, the answers to these questions may be laughably obvious and the questions naive, but to most end-users they will not be."

privacy

Apple warns that scanning encrypted photos leads to a “dystopian dragnet”

"Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance" says Apple's user privacy chief.

encryption

RFC 9420 aka Messaging Layer Security (MLS) – An Overview

MLS achieves its low complexity through the use of a binary tree. This means that the number of required operations and the payload size do not increase linearly with the group size but rather only logarithmically after a short warm-up period...