Privacy

When Intuit Dome opened last season, the arena staff assumed only a third of fans would opt-in to scanning, but close to 75 percent of venue attendees enrolled. The Clippers promise they are not using facial recognition — sorry, they call it “facial authentication” — for security purposes.

Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.

Who could have seen that coming? UK regulator Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report shows that major porn sites took a traffic hit following the introduction of mandatory age checks, while VPN use shot up — but has been steadily declining since, which may ease fears that a VPN ban is next on the agenda.

An exposed dataset from the license plate surveillance company Flock, which is known to work with the US Border Patrol and ICE via local police, showed that some of the AI annotators paid to classify American license plates are located in the Philippines.

This Associated Press report explains that after getting authorization for a domestic license plate reader in 2017, the readers “have become a major — and in some places permanent — fixture of the border region.”

European officials are reportedly planning to touch the “third rail” of EU policy later this month: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A draft proposal obtained by Politico would create carve outs for AI companies to train on specified categories of personal data, as Europe seeks to remain competitive globally.

The late vice president was a fierce champion of the Patriot Act and a powerful proponent of mass surveillance. In his obituary for Cheney, Spencer Ackerman recounts the many achievements of George W. Bush’s VP, including a legal justification for NSA bulk collection, which “established a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American.”

Under a proposed rule by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could demand biometric information including DNA from immigrants and associated US citizens, and even children under age 14. That would be a significant expansion of the information the agency currently collects.

The app that suffered multiple data breaches earlier this year and a replica for men called TeaOnHer were removed for “failing to meet the company’s terms of use around content moderation and user privacy,” according to 404 Media.

JPMorgan has told staff they’ll have to ditch ID badges in favor of eye or fingerprint scans to access the bank’s new HQ in New York, according to emails seen by the Financial Times. The biometric scheme was supposed to be voluntary, but shifted to required as employees moved in.

The privacy-focused browser surpassed the milestone on September 30th, and says it’s attracted an average of 2.5 million new users each month over the last two years. “Across the globe, users are choosing privacy and control over their online experience, instead of Big Tech’s tracking and abuse,” said Brave CEO Brendan Eich.

If you live in Europe then you know the routine: open a new website, click through a cookie consent banner designed to maximize data gathering, let out a frustrated sigh and get on with life. That might be changing:

The $9.99 / month subscription will also let you use Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Meta’s Llama Maverick through the privacy-focused Duck.ai interface, which doesn’t store your chats or use them for AI training. In addition to these perks, DuckDuckGo’s subscription comes with a VPN and an information removal tool.