Browsing: Privacy
Stories about who is collecting your data, what they do with it, and the tools, laws and settings that help you take some of that control back.
Georgetown and University of Washington researchers had 331 people watch a car accident, then read an AI summary of it a day or two later. One altered detail dropped accurate recall from 83.6% to 44.8%, and being told the summary was AI written made no difference at all.
Noise cameras pair an array of microphones with an automated plate reader, and at least ten US jurisdictions have deployed or piloted one. New York alone logged 15,994 noise events in a single year. The minimum fine there is $800.
A Shortcuts automation doing the rounds on X photographs whoever plugs in your stolen iPhone and emails you their location. The setup genuinely works. The part nobody mentions is what it does to your camera roll the other 364 days of the year.
Instagram’s new Pixel effect uses Meta AI to blur anyone you describe in a text prompt. Instagram pitched it at relationship soft launches, and that framing is exactly what set the backlash off.
Buried in Privacy and Security is the Apple Intelligence Report, a log of every request your iPhone sent to Private Cloud Compute. Here is how to export it, how to read it, and the two kinds of AI activity it deliberately leaves out.
Office Wi-Fi hands your employer the domains you visit, the timings and the data volumes, but not the pages, searches or messages. Here is exactly where the line falls, and the one thing on your device that moves it.
A Reddit user uploaded a screenshot of an Excel sheet and ChatGPT described a shirtless man in photographic detail, then defended the claim when challenged. Here is why vision models do this, and how to tell a hallucination from an actual data leak.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google 403 million euros over how it handled location data through Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy. Here is what the regulator found, and the three settings that actually control it.
Meta’s Muse agent rolled out nationwide this month with access to email, calendars, payments and smart home devices, and Zuckerberg just doubled down on it at Connect 2026 with a holiday hardware launch. The catch is convincing people to hand that much control to a company with an $18 billion privacy settlement still fresh on the books.
GrapheneOS, the hardened privacy build of Android, is leaving Pixel exclusivity behind. The Motorola Signature 27 is its first supported non-Pixel device, and some units will ship with it preinstalled. Here is the specific hardware and update commitment that made the phone eligible, and what the operating system actually changes once it is running.