Mom Calls Out School for Making an AI-Generated Photo of 6-Year-Old Daughter as an Adult (Exclusive); People,October 20, 2026

 Georgia Slater, People; Mom Calls Out School for Making an AI-Generated Photo of 6-Year-Old Daughter as an Adult (Exclusive)

"Anderson also raised concerns about how schools are using AI and whether parents are consenting to using these systems.

“I think the initial concern was ultimately the privacy implications. What software was used? Was it an outside platform? What happens to those pictures after? Did any of us actually consent to that?” she says. “Those are questions I think every parent deserves answers to.”

“Children cannot meaningfully consent to this sort of use; I think our children deserve protection, not only of their image, but of their minds,” Anderson adds."

AI agents are only as good as the personal information you share. That raises privacy concerns; WRAL News, October 19, 2026

 WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS , WRAL News; AI agents are only as good as the personal information you share. That raises privacy concerns

"Many have welcomed AI agents into their online lives, and raved about how personalized assistants like Muse can handle everyday tasks with ease — from snagging a dinner reservation or planning a trip, to organizing email inboxes. But like other AI bots, the agents are only as good as the information they have access to. They perform better the more they know about a user — and perhaps also that person’s friends, family and even colleagues. That raises privacy concerns."

Always on, always listening: New AI devices are pushing legal limits and could put users in jeopardy; CNBC, October 18, 2026

 MacKenzie, Sigalos, Annie Palmer , CNBC; Always on, always listening: New AI devices are pushing legal limits and could put users in jeopardy

"Many state wiretap and eavesdropping laws are written around whether a private communication was intercepted or its contents were acquired — not simply whether a conventional audio recording was created. 

Colin Zick, a privacy and data security attorney at Foley Hoag, said Apple appears to have learned from the first wave of litigation over voice assistants. But the new technology raises questions those earlier cases never had to answer: Can a system that is continuously listening, interpreting speech and turning it into a summary still amount to an interception if it never saves the underlying audio?

Some state laws define interception broadly. Massachusetts, for example, defines an intercepting device to include equipment capable of “transmitting, receiving, amplifying, or recording” a communication, while the “contents” of a communication can include its substance and meaning. 

In Zick’s view, a device that continuously receives speech and produces a written summary could potentially fall within that language even without retaining an audio file.

And in some states, the bigger legal risk may fall not on Apple, Amazon or other AI gadget makers but on the person wearing the device."

Saudi OpenAI employee arrested after recording device found in headquarters; The Guardian, October 13, 2026

 Maya Yang, The Guardian; Saudi OpenAI employee arrested after recording device found in headquarters

"OpenAI said it has found a hidden recording device in one of its offices and has referred the matter to the FBI. One of its employees has been arrested.

In a statement on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based AI company said it discovered the “sophisticated recording device” and used one of its “models to understand the device and where it had come from”...

Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested on 9 October, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice.

Alfozan allegedly plugged an encrypted recording device, concealed within toilet paper, into a TV in an executive conference room in OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters on 28 September. Meetings in the room regularly covered confidential information, the FBI’s press release said. A security sweep conducted two days later revealed the device, according to the justice department. Surveillance footage allegedly documented him walking around the meeting room in the days leading up to its discovery."

Supreme Court Weighs Privacy Law From the Videotape Era of ‘Be Kind, Rewind’; The New York Times, October 14, 2026

 Ann E. Marimow , The New York Times; Supreme Court Weighs Privacy Law From the Videotape Era of ‘Be Kind, Rewind’

The justices will consider how the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 applies in the digital age of streaming videos, email newsletters and targeted advertisements.

"When the Senate considered President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork for a Supreme Court vacancy in 1987, a journalist in Washington obtained and published a list of nearly 150 movies the federal judge and his family had rented from a local video store.

Judge Bork’s nomination was scuttled by the Senate for reasons unrelated to his family’s decision to rent “The Shining” and “Sixteen Candles.” But lawmakers were so upset about the “Bork Tapes” becoming public that they passed legislation the following year to prohibit video stores from disclosing the private information of customers.

Forty years later, the Supreme Court on Wednesday will examine how that privacy law, adopted in the VHS era, applies in the age of streaming, email newsletters and targeted online advertisements.

At the heart of the case is the question of who can sue under the Video Privacy Protection Act, or what it means to be a consumer whose privacy interests are protected by the law. The issue has divided lower courts and has implications for a broad swath of Americans and companies doing business online."

Own a gun? Go to church? Do yoga? AI can find out in seconds.; Politico, September 1, 2026

 ALFRED NG, Politico; Own a gun? Go to church? Do yoga? AI can find out in seconds.

A series of demos on the Hill has both Democrats and Republicans alarmed about artificial intelligence’s ability to plumb commercial databases for information on Americans.

"Lawmakers and staffers from dozens of congressional offices have seen AI’s privacy-busting prowess in demos arranged in recent months by CivAI, a nonprofit that says its aim is to educate the public about AI’s dangers and capabilities.

Besides building troves of personal information gleaned from commercial databases, the dossiers offer advice on potential ways to blackmail, coerce or stalk the individual in question, according to four Republican and eight Democratic staffers who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The demos started landing amid the debate over whether to renew a set of government spying powers that expired in June — legislation that offers the most realistic chance for addressing the issue during this Congress, a Democratic House aide who witnessed one of the briefings said."

OpenAI Must Turn Over 20 Million ChatGPT Logs, Judge Affirms; Bloomberg Law, January 5, 2026

Kyle Jahner

 , Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Must Turn Over 20 Million ChatGPT Logs, Judge Affirms

"OpenAI Inc. will have to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs in a consolidated AI copyright case after it failed to convince a federal judge to throw out a magistrate judge’s order the company said insufficiently weighed privacy concerns.

Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang sufficiently considered privacy concerns against the material’s relevance to the ongoing litigation in her discovery ruling in favor of news organization plaintiffs in five lawsuits, District Judge Sidney H. Stein said in an order Monday. She rejected OpenAI’s arguments it should be allowed to run a search of the 20 million-log sample and produce conversations implicating the plaintiffs’ works, saying no case law requires the court to order the least burdensome discovery possible."

Trump celebrates TikTok deal as Beijing suggests US app would use China’s algorithm; The Guardian, September 16, 2025

Guardian staff and agencies , The Guardian; Trump celebrates TikTok deal as Beijing suggests US app would use China’s algorithm

[Kip Currier: Wasn't fears about the Chinese government's potential ability to manipulate U.S. TikTok users via the TikTok algorithm one of the chief rationales for the past Congress and Biden administration's banning of TikTok? How does this Trump 2.0 deal materially change any of that?

Another rationale for the ban was concerns about China's potential to access and leverage the personal data and impinge the privacy interests of TikTok users in the U.S. How does this proposed arrangement substantively address these concerns, particularly without comprehensive federal data and privacy legislation to give Americans agency over their own data?

The American people need maximal transparency and oversight of any kind of financial deal like this.]

[Excerpt]

"One of the major questions is the fate of TikTok’s powerful algorithm that helped the app become one of the world’s most popular sources of online entertainment.

At a press conference in Madrid, the deputy head of China’s cyber security regulator said the framework of the deal included “licensing the algorithm and other intellectual property rights”.

Wang Jingtao said ByteDance would “entrust the operation of TikTok’s US user data and content security.”

Some commentators have inferred from these comments that TikTok’s US spinoff will retain the Chinese algorithm."

Adobe Responds to AI Fears With Plans for Updated Legal Terms; Bloomberg Law, June 12, 2024

Cassandre Coyer and Aruni Soni, Bloomberg Law; Adobe Responds to AI Fears With Plans for Updated Legal Terms

"“As technology evolves, we have to evolve,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, said in an interview with Bloomberg Law. “The legal terms have to evolve, too. And that’s really the lesson that we’re sort of internalizing here.”

Over the weekend, some Adobe customers revolted on social media, crying foul at updated terms of use they claimed allowed Adobe to seize their intellectual property and use their data to feed AI models. 

The Photoshop and Illustrator maker responded with multiple blog posts over several days seeking to reassure users it wasn’t stealing their content, including a pledge to quickly rewrite its user agreement in clearer language. Rao said Tuesday that Adobe will be issuing updated terms of use on June 18 in which it will specifically state the company doesn’t train its Firefly AI models on its cloud content.

The unexpected online storm around the updates is the latest example of how sweeping technological changes—such as the rise of generative AI—have bolstered users’ fears of copyright violations and privacy invasions. That sentiment is part of the landscape the tech industry must navigate to serve a creator community increasingly on edge.

What happened is “more of a lesson in terms of how to present terms of use and roll out updates in a way that can address or alleviate customer concerns, especially in the era of AI and increased concern over privacy,” said Los Angeles-based advertising attorney Robert Freund."

New privacy rules could spell the end of legalese — or create a lot more fine print; The Washington Post, May 24, 2018

Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post; New privacy rules could spell the end of legalese — or create a lot more fine print

"“The companies are realizing that it is not enough to get people to just click through,” said Lorrie Cranor, director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s former chief technologist. “That they need to communicate so that people are not surprised when they find out what they consented to.”

That has become more apparent in the past two months since revelations that a Trump-connected consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, made off with the Facebook profiles of up to 87 million Americans. Cranor said that consumer outrage over Cambridge was directly related to concerns that companies were engaging in opaque practices behind the scenes, and that consumers had unknowingly allowed it to happen by signing away their rights.

Irrespective of simpler explanations, the impact and success of the GDPR will hinge upon whether companies will try to force users to consent to their tracking or targeting as condition for access to their services, said Alessandro Acquisti, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and privacy researcher. "This will tell us a lot regarding whether the recent flurry of privacy policy modifications demonstrates a sincere change in the privacy stance of those companies or is more about paying lip service to the new regulation. The early signs are not auspicious.""

Facebook patent tries to guess users' socioeconomic status; Axios, February 2, 2018

Kim Hart, Axios; Facebook patent tries to guess users' socioeconomic status

"A new patent from Facebook describes a system that would use data points it collects on the user — like education, travel history, the number of devices owned, and homeownership — to predict their socioeconomic status. The patent was spotted by CBInsights.

Why it matters: The social network, which is already coming under fire for knowing too much about its users, could use such a system to better target ads and content to specific audiences."

Tech Giants Brace for Europe’s New Data Privacy Rules; New York Times, January 28, 2018

Sheera Frenkel, New York Times; Tech Giants Brace for Europe’s New Data Privacy Rules

"Ms. Jourová said as the new rules take effect, countries outside Europe could begin demanding similar data protection measures for their citizens.

“There will be a moment, especially as more and more people in the U.S. find themselves uncomfortable with the channels monitoring their private lives,” she said."

WTF is GDPR?; TechCrunch, January 20, 2018

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch; WTF is GDPR?

"The EC’s theory is that consumer trust is essential to fostering growth in the digital economy. And it thinks trust can be won by giving users of digital services more information and greater control over how their data is used. Which is — frankly speaking — a pretty refreshing idea when you consider the clandestine data brokering that pervades the tech industry. Mass surveillance isn’t just something governments do.

The General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR) was agreed after more than three years of negotiations between the EU’s various institutions.

It’s set to apply across the 28-Member State bloc as of May 25, 2018. That means EU countries are busy transposing it into national law via their own legislative updates (such as the UK’s new Data Protection Bill — yes, despite the fact the country is currently in the process of (br)exiting the EU, the government has nonetheless committed to implementing the regulation because it needs to keep EU-UK data flowing freely in the post-brexit future. Which gives an early indication of the pulling power of GDPR.

Meanwhile businesses operating in the EU are being bombarded with ads from a freshly energized cottage industry of ‘privacy consultants’ offering to help them get ready for the new regs — in exchange for a service fee. It’s definitely a good time to be a law firm specializing in data protection."

Amazon has a patent to keep you from comparison shopping while you’re in its stores; Washington Post, June 16, 2017

Brian Fung, Washington Post; Amazon has a patent to keep you from comparison shopping while you’re in its stores

"Amazon was awarded a patent May 30 that could help it choke off a common issue faced by many physical stores: Customers’ use of smartphones to compare prices even as they walk around a shop. The phenomenon, often known as mobile “window shopping,” has contributed to a worrisome decline for traditional retailers.

But Amazon now has the technology to prevent that type of behavior when customers enter any of its physical stores and log onto the WiFi networks there. Titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” Amazon’s patent describes a system that can identify a customer’s Internet traffic and sense when the smartphone user is trying to access a competitor’s website. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post.)...

Just because a company wins a patent doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll use it. Sometimes companies file for patents to ensure they have the option to put the idea into practice later, or to keep other companies from implementing the concept. So, a system such as the kind Amazon’s envisioning might never be rolled out. And even if it is, chances are shoppers could still get around the system by staying off the in-store WiFi."

When a Public Family Is Publicly Attacked; New York Times, 2/5/16

KJ Dell'Antonia, New York Times; When a Public Family Is Publicly Attacked:

"While Ms. Howerton and her supporters report Twitter accounts for abuse, she is also asking YouTube to take down the video commentary that makes use of her video and other family images. She has filed a privacy complaint, which YouTube rejected, and is waiting for it to respond to her new complaint, alleging copyright violation. Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University and author of “Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age,” said he thinks Ms. Howerton’s belief that she can regain control of the footage may be overly optimistic.

“The use of home video and family images for political debate is something that has real consequences,” he said. “She has made her life choices, her experiences, her children’ experiences, a matter for public debate. When people do this they do expose themselves to criticism and attacks and some of them are quite unpleasant.”

Eric Goldman, a professor of law and director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law, agreed that because Ms. Howerton herself used family video as part of a political discussion, she may have little legal recourse when that video is used as part of a larger video engaged in social commentary on the same topic. In many situations, videos or pictures posted online can become “fair game” for critics to use in online attacks against the poster’s position or for other undesirable political or social statements, Mr. Goldman said in an email."

The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’; Washington Post, 1/10/16

Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post; The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’ :

"Police officials say such tools can provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases. They say that last year’s attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have only underscored the need for such measures.

But the powerful systems also have become flash points for civil libertarians and activists, who say they represent a troubling intrusion on privacy, have been deployed with little public oversight and have potential for abuse or error. Some say laws are needed to protect the public."

Pearls Before Swine; GoComics.com, 12/20/15

GoComics.com; Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine: [Never Read the Terms and Conditions]

Why Facebook Is Monitoring Your Private Videos; Huffington Post, 11/18/15

Huffington Post; Why Facebook Is Monitoring Your Private Videos:

"Parker Higgins, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains how Facebook's hunt for copyrighted material is playing out in users' private posts."

Ashley Madison, a Dating Website, Says Hackers May Have Data on Millions; New York Times, 7/20/15

Dino Grandoni, New York Times; Ashley Madison, a Dating Website, Says Hackers May Have Data on Millions:

"Under American copyright law, Ashley Madison has the power to scrub away private user information leaked in the breach and posted to other websites. On Monday, the company said that it had been doing just that to protect the identities of those who have used Ashley Madison.

But that may be a race that it cannot win. Paul Ferguson, senior adviser for Trend Micro, a security software provider, said that information on Ashley Madison, deleted in one online forum, is beginning to bubble up in others.

“Once something is published on the Internet,” he said, “it’s there forever.”"

Online Test-Takers Feel Anti-Cheating Software’s Uneasy Glare; New York Times, 4/5/15

Natasha Singer, New York Times; Online Test-Takers Feel Anti-Cheating Software’s Uneasy Glare:

"In hopes of alleviating students’ concerns, Verificient recently posted a pledge on its blog saying that Proctortrack did not share students’ data with third parties; that it typically deleted students’ data after 30 to 60 days; and that students could remove the software from their computers once they had uploaded their test data.

But the company has not changed its privacy policy — which states that it may unilaterally amend its policies at any time and that it may disclose users’ personal information to third-party service providers or in the event of a company merger, sale or bankruptcy.

Students like Ms. Chao say they hope university administrators will consider the civil liberties implications of emergent tracking technologies, not just the expediency.

“They are trying to make recording students a regular part of online courses,” Ms. Chao said. “You don’t know what new norms are going to be established for what privacy is.”"