Meta was caught red-handed using its Facebook app to eavesdrops on your browser sessions even if you had taken privacy precautions such as using incognito mode
Oh great. Now all personal data the the US government knows about us will be collected by Palantir, the Blackwater of tech
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html
Concerning that the Republican in the US Congress want to prevent AI regulations by the states
If the example of privacy regulation is anything to go by, the only hope of any reasonable AI regulations in the US is from the states
https://techpolicy.press/us-house-passes-10year-moratorium-on-state-ai-laws
From Florida, comes some good news for privacy…
Even if the developers of this library are fully trustworthy, a quick glance at this code revealed a few worrying things from a security pound of view
Wired: "Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a 'Persistent' Risk to the US"
https://www.wired.com/story/easyjson-open-source-vk-ties/ https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/92ec35a6fbafbd59969b27e67590009cb08ba006d23b08af4d9b6f9da75793c0.webp https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/1cc80cc779e9da834c7b46b24fccac423b972bd0e9c850c4d1ebff30005f6e84.webp
Happy Beltane to those who celebrate
This in one of the 4 quarter days of the traditional Celtic solar calendar, each marking a points hallway eat between solstice and equinox
Winter
Imbolc - Bridgit's Day
Spring
Beltane - May Day
Summer
Lúnasa - Harvest
Autumn
Samhain - Halloween
Winter
In a move reminiscent of communist-era Eastern European police states, the US administration is ignoring the Federal Privacy Act and combining all government data about everyone to create a "database of ruin"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html
I really, really hope that when they say "AI" they don't mean LLMs or other kinds of generative AI
https://www.404media.co/u-s-army-says-it-could-acquire-targets-faster-with-advanced-ai/
It doesn't take much economics to see through this bullshit formula for calculation the tariff increases
It has arbitrary parameters that cancel out, so that the increase in tariff rate is just simply the trade deficit as a proportion of imports
It makes no sense
https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/7c235697dec94b3c1aaf752091d85168b23d44a299efd79f394735fe5b8dedde.webp
This is what happens when a country has no broad privacy protection laws
"researchers compiled a list of 270 US Courts of Appeals judges…56%…were found to likely have their information available on at least one people search site."
https://blog.incogni.com/judges-personal-information-exposed/
The Trump administration trusts Signal
The VP, cabinet members and intelligence leaders using a signal chat to coordinate a military operation
Accidentally including a journalist
Here's a privacy threat you might not have been aware of
Automatic licence plate readers are surveiling everyone's vehicles
And there is little or no legal control of who gets to see each individual's driving patterns
Scary vision of what's coming
if your job can be done remotely, then AI will do it
If you've a hands-on job requiring physical presence, then it's safe
AI-powered corporations could capture all the wealth, giving scraps to hands-on workers, with everyone else adrift
Lesson learned from Germany of how information technology without data privacy facilitated the Holocaust
But let is not forget the data hero René Carmille who destroyed French census records to save Jews, and who himself was murdered at Dachau
We should not anthropomorphize generative AI systems either in a emotional sense, or in an ethical and legal sense
They are not persons
Things that are ok for humans to do are not necessarily ok when done by a company using a generative AI systems
Privacy and data protection laws are even more important in these times
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/13/california-democrats-trump-immigration-crackdown-00229716
The State of Florida wants to know what drugs every person in Florida is prescribed, and by which doctor
The State of Florida also wants to prosecute abortions, for which this data could be useful
The effective dismantling of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is loss of protections for American's privacy
But it has implications for Europe too if it means that US tech companies can no longer store European's data
https://www.justsecurity.org/108525/fired-pclob-privacy-board/
The best way of earning people's trust is to first trust them
In the case of AI systems this means making the systems be transparent about what they are doing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563222002497 https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/9220508ab11f296290f83988dc44729f656f42417fd560c31c28c5a34ec6035a.webp