Tag: privacy

When a Child’s Life Becomes the Family Business

Evan Lee was in elementary school when he became the linchpin of his family’s business. With his neatly combed hair and dimpled smile, he was a charm bomb, conveying on camera both the cheerful sincerity of a boy scout and the precocious charisma of a whiz kid. Evan, eventually known to seven million YouTube subscribers […]

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The Trump Administration’s Data Purges Weaken America

Researchers logging onto the website Data.gov in January discovered a digital void where roughly 2,000 data sets were once cataloged. No warning, no explanation — just the quiet deletion of knowledge. Not long after that, historical pages focused on Black soldiers vanished, as did a website about Jackie Robinson and, bizarrely, one about a plane […]

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New method efficiently safeguards sensitive AI training data

Data privacy comes with a cost. There are security techniques that protect sensitive user data, like customer addresses, from attackers who may attempt to extract them from AI models — but they often make those models less accurate. MIT researchers recently developed a framework, based on a new privacy metric called PAC Privacy, that could […]

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How Musk and Trump Are Working to Consolidate Government Data About You

The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start. These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in […]

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How Musk and Trump Are Working to Consolidate Government Data About You

The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start. These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in […]

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Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots

On a recent morning, I knocked on the front door of a handsome two-story home in Redwood City, Calif. Within seconds, the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit that clung tight to its trim waist and long legs. This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a […]

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Top Trump Security Advisers’ Private Info Now Available Online

Crucially, family members and attorneys were not made aware of the removal of their loved ones and clients, making it impossible to challenge their removal. John Dutton, an attorney for one of the Venezuelan nationals, told TPM that it seemed to him that every move had been purposefully orchestrated. “They knew that what they were […]

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In Rush to Release Kennedy Files, Personal Information Went Public, Too

In the 64,000 pages of documents released this week regarding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there appeared to be no redactions, those blacked-out sections that typically dot sensitive material, even once it is declassified, to mask confidential or compromising data. Critics said that failure was evidence of an F.B.I. rush to vet […]

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Florida Seeks Drug Prescription Data With Names of Patients and Doctors

Florida’s insurance regulator has demanded an unusually intrusive trove of data on millions of prescription drugs filled in the state last year, including the names of patients taking the medications, their dates of birth and doctors they’ve seen. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation in January sought this information from pharmacy benefit managers like UnitedHealth’s […]

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Letterlocking: A new look at a centuries-old practice

For as long as people have been communicating through writing, they have found ways to keep their messages private. Before the invention of the gummed envelope in 1830, securing correspondence involved letterlocking, an ingenious process of folding a flat sheet of paper to become its own envelope, often using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, […]

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Gene Hackman’s Santa Fe Neighbors Recall Actor’s Quiet Life in Gated Community

He had two Oscars, adoring fans and four decades of acting to his credit. He won over critics, befriended celebrities and starred in scores of films watched by millions of moviegoers. But for the past two decades, Gene Hackman found solace at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac where few neighbors ever even saw him. […]

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Firefox Users Outraged Over Mozilla’s New Data-Sharing Policy

Mozilla’s recent changes to Firefox’s privacy policy have sparked backlash among users, particularly regarding data-sharing practices. A new FAQ update has raised concerns, as it no longer explicitly states that Mozilla does not sell or buy user data. Instead, it confirms that Firefox may share data with partners. The controversy began when Android users received […]

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Apple Disables Advanced Data Protection In The UK Amid Government Demands

Apple has discontinued its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature for new users in the UK, and will soon require existing users to disable it. This decision follows reports that UK security services requested backdoor access to encrypted iCloud files globally. ADP, launched in 2022, provides end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups, meaning only the account owner […]

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Top Social Security Official Leaves After Musk Team Seeks Data Access

The top official at the Social Security Administration stepped down this weekend after members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency sought access to sensitive personal data about millions of Americans held by the agency, according to people familiar with the matter. The resignation of Michelle King, the acting commissioner, is the latest abrupt […]

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Judge Lets Musk’s Team Keep Access to Records at Some Agencies, for Now

A federal judge declined on Friday to block the access of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to records systems containing personal information at the Health and Human Services Department, the Labor Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a setback for unions and nonprofits trying to fight Elon Musk’s effort to cut and reshape […]

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PIN AI launches mobile app letting you make your own personalized, private DeepSeek or Llama-powered AI model on your phone

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Thanks to Her and numerous other works of science fiction, it’s pretty easy to imagine a world in which everyone has their own personalized AI assistant — a helper who knows who we are, our occupations, […]

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Bridging philosophy and AI to explore computing ethics

During a meeting of class 6.C40/24.C40 (Ethics of Computing), Professor Armando Solar-Lezama poses the same impossible question to his students that he often asks himself in the research he leads with the Computer Assisted Programming Group at MIT: “How do we make sure that a machine does what we want, and only what we want?” At […]

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To keep hardware safe, cut out the code’s clues

Imagine you’re a chef with a highly sought-after recipe. You write your top-secret instructions in a journal to ensure you remember them, but its location within the book is evident from the folds and tears on the edges of that often-referenced page. Much like recipes in a cookbook, the instructions to execute programs are stored […]

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What’s Next on Trump’s Chopping Block? Look at Pete Hegseth’s Venmo

Hegseth has more ties to Big Tech in the form of former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who leads the anti-antitrust Competitiveness Coalition, as well as Google’s former director of law enforcement and information security Richard Salgado, ​​and Evan Bahr, who served as an adviser to Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, according to TAP’s report. Hegseth’s ties […]

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Does Elon Musk Even Have Security Clearance to Access Sensitive Data?

Many of these Musk staffers are young people between 19 and 24, such as software engineer Akash Bobba, an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley, and 2022 high school graduate Edward Coristine. At Musk’s direction, these inexperienced underlings now have access to the private information of every federal employee, and even people who have […]

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Introducing the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium

From crafting complex code to revolutionizing the hiring process, generative artificial intelligence is reshaping industries faster than ever before — pushing the boundaries of creativity, productivity, and collaboration across countless domains. Enter the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium, a collaboration between industry leaders and MIT’s top minds. As MIT President Sally Kornbluth highlighted last year, the […]

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What Prince Harry’s Settlement Means for Him and for Britain’s Royal Family

Prince Harry’s last-minute settlement of a long-running suit with Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids was on the front page of a handful of London papers on Thursday, though conspicuously, not on any owned by Mr. Murdoch. The Sun, which admitted illegal activity by private investigators it hired more than a decade ago to dig up personal information […]

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Trump Seeks to Paralyze Independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Watchdog

The Trump White House is moving to paralyze a bipartisan and independent watchdog agency that investigates national security activities that can intrude upon individual rights. The move comes as the new administration is vowing to put its own stamp on federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It also comes ahead of a new conflict over […]

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Prince Harry’s Suit Against Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. Tabloids Set to Start

Prince Harry will get his long-awaited day in court against Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids on Monday, as his lawsuit against News Group Newspapers for unlawful gathering of private information finally goes on trial in London. Harry himself is not expected to take the stand for at least the first two weeks of the trial, which […]

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Trump Has Frightening Reaction to Supreme Court’s TikTok Ruling

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality. Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time […]

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Supreme Court Guts Free Speech and Upholds TikTok Ban

But a 2024 study published in the Internet Policy Review found that, by and large, companies were “only partly compliant” with the EU code, with reports data lacking detail and offering “missing, incomplete, or not robust” data. The EU has since urged companies to convert the voluntary guidelines into an official policy under the union’s […]

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Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to Free Speech With TikTok Ruling

But a 2024 study published in the Internet Policy Review found that, by and large, companies were “only partly compliant” with the EU code, with reports data lacking detail and offering “missing, incomplete, or not robust” data. The EU has since urged companies to convert the voluntary guidelines into an official policy under the union’s […]

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Biden Suddenly Pulls a Bamboozling About-Face on TikTok

“In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho […]

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Biden Suddenly Scrambles to Save TikTok

“In order to save time, money, and effort, it would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho […]

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Google Updates Android Privacy Dashboard With 7-Day View

Google has introduced an updated Privacy dashboard ahead of its planned inclusion in Android 16. This enhancement, revealed in the first Android 16 developer preview, allows users to view up to seven days of permissions-related activity, in addition to the existing 24-hour view. However, the feature has already been made available to eligible Pixel devices […]

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aiOla unveils open source AI audio transcription model that obscures sensitive info in realtime

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Businesses looking to use AI models to transcribe audio, specifically human speech, from executives, employees, and customers, may be wary of the idea of an AI program listening to and recording sensitive information. However, the Israeli […]

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