#privacy

#privacy

Not all pens are created equal. Some just write, but MedPen listens, learns, and secures your conversations. This Kickstarter sensation is redefining what it means to take notes, offering a tool that's as concerned with your privacy as it is with your productivity. It proposes a future where our most basic analog tools are imbued with smart, discreet capabilities, yet it does so with a refreshing focus on user control.

We're laying low...We're enjoying our time, just relaxing.

"we all want to keep kids safe, but the answer is balance, not bans."

Samsung is actually doing it: The company is launching ads on its Family Hub smart refrigerators. The fridges have a large display that typically shows stuff like time, the weather, camera streams, and family photos. They are being updated with a new design, smarter AI, and a new widget for the Cover screen that will show news, weather forecasts, and - fanfare - "curated advertisements."

"[They] live under the constant gaze of DAS surveillance as the NYPD mounted a box with two cameras directly outside their home, aimed at their living room and bedroom windows," the lawsuit states. "The cameras' presence has transformed what should be their place of safety into a space of anxiety. They have covered their windows with foil to block the cameras' view, depriving themselves of sunlight and the simple enjoyment of looking outside."

Nearly two dozen Michigan House Republicans have signed on to a resolution calling for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to share the state's complete voter rolls with the Trump administration, without redactions of potentially sensitive identifying information. Michigan is one of several states being sued by the U.S. Justice Department over their refusal to share unredacted voter rolls in response to requests from the agency.

At its core, EmbeddingGemma serves as a text embedding model. It translates text, such as notes, emails, or documents, into specialized numerical codes called vectors. These vectors represent the meaning of the text in a high-dimensional space, allowing devices to grasp context rather than just matching keywords. This fundamental capability enables much more intelligent and helpful search, organization, and other AI functionalities, powering generative AI experiences directly on user hardware.

If you've been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and , you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating-they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences matter a lot when we're talking about your rights, your privacy, your data, and who gets to access information online.

In England's schools, children are not only pupils but also data subjects. From the moment they are born, a digital record begins to take shape - one that will follow them through nursery, primary school, secondary education, and in many cases well into adulthood. What was once a matter of paper registers and filing cabinets has become a complex infrastructure of digital systems, databases, and analytics tools, managed by both the state and private companies, for AI, surveillance, and more.

Kids watch a lot of YouTube. Google's keenly aware of that: It offers a version of the YouTube app that's explicitly made for children's content in YouTube Kids, and earlier this year, rolled out a controversial AI-based age estimation system to automatically flag accounts that may be used by minors. These measures are meant in part to help Google avoid legal trouble - like a 2019 class-action suit filed in California accusing Google and YouTube of violating privacy laws by collecting information about minors

You may be taking on too much responsibility for S and T's relationship dynamics. If a simple request about feeling secure in the place where you're sleeping hurts her or drives a wedge in her marriage, that's largely her responsibility. I don't write this to be callous. But think of what you're actually asking: You don't want to be filmed while you sleep. This is not unreasonable in the least.

Some grocery stores owned by Sobeys Inc. are the latest Toronto stores to test body-worn cameras. In a statement, the retailer confirmed it's piloting the project after the bodycams were spotted on FreshCo cashiers in a store located at Sherbourne and Isabella streets. The cameras are being used to combat harassment and assault directed toward employees and to prevent shoplifting and other crimes, Sobeys spokesperson Caitlin Gray said.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I occasionally enjoy having lunch at a restaurant with a group of longtime friends. All is well until the time comes when they want to take a group photo, which, of course, gets posted on Facebook. I do not post on social media. I do not want my life, in words nor photos, posted. So I quietly say I'll back out of camera range, as I don't want a picture of me posted online.

Anthropic is now making the memory feature in Claude available to all Pro and Max users. The feature remembers projects and preferences, so you don't have to explain the same context every time. Anthropic is also introducing an incognito mode. The rollout means that Claude can retain context between sessions. The memory function was initially only available to Team and Enterprise users since its announcement in early September. Now, all paid users have access.

Your data lives locally, you pay once for storage instead of renting it forever, and you get complete control over how everything works. The long-term economics make sense, the customization potential is massive, and you avoid the very real problem of your photos being scraped for AI training or handed over to government agencies or sold to data brokers.

on the unindexed internet.

During the sign-up process, new members complete a "liveness check" by taking a short video selfie within the app. The procedure collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the shape of the user's face. "We don't store a picture of your face, it's not photo recognition, it's data points about the shape of your face that are turned into a mathematical hash," says Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder. Tinder then uses that "hash" to check whether a new sign-up matches an account that already exists on Tinder.

Meet our new browserChatGPT Atlas, a tweet from the company read. The browser is designed to provide a more personalized web experience and includes a ChatGPT sidebar that enables users to asks questions about or engage with various aspects of each website they visit, as demonstrated in a video posted alongside the announcement. Atlas is now available globally on Apple's Mac operating system and will soon be made available on Windows, iOS and Android, according to OpenAI's announcement.

Smart glasses, like the newly revealed Meta Ray-Ban Displays, solve lots of problems. They can provide live translation and captions while chatting with a foreign friend, they can use provide turn-by-turn directions and a mini map so you don't get lost on the way to that new coffeeshop, they can take pictures so you're not fumbling with your phone while enjoying a sunset or nature walk.

Surveillance pricing has dominated headlines recently. Delta Air Lines' announcement that it will use artificial intelligence to set individualized ticket prices has led to widespread concerns about companies using personal data to charge different prices for identical products. As The New York Times reported, this practice involves companies tracking everything from your hotel bookings to your browsing history to determine what you're willing to pay.

Meta is rolling out a new Facebook feature that the company says will help users share more photos-but which could also be used to help train its AI. The opt-in feature allows Facebook's AI to access your phone's camera roll in order to find photos it finds "shareworthy," and to suggest edits using its AI tools. Users can then decide if they want to share the images or not.

According to Flock's announcement, its Ring partnership allows local law enforcement members to use Flock software "to send a direct post in the Ring Neighbors app with details about the investigation and request voluntary assistance." Requests must include "specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated," and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.

My laptop broke, so my wife and I have been sharing. I work from home so she made me a user on her laptop until I can get a new one. However, one day she forgot to close a document and I discovered this massive sci-fi/dark fantasy story she has been writing. I wasn't so surprised because I know she has submitted to magazines in the past and has an interest in sci-fi. What really surprised me was the explicit and highly varied sex scenes.

As I wrote last week, I'm rapidly running out of body parts to do my job. Part of being human is knowing when to ask for help, so a few months ago, I enlisted senior editor Sean Hollister - a fellow smart glasses nerd - to help me test Halo Glass, an always-listening AI companion that lives inside a pair of glasses.

The California Faculty Association has sued the California State University after the university system handed over the personal phone numbers and email addresses of 2,600 Los Angeles campus employees to the federal government in response to an antisemitism investigation. The lawsuit filed last week seeks a court order prohibiting CSU administrators from disclosing any faculty members' personal information in response to federal subpoenas without first providing notice to the impacted employees and giving them the opportunity to object.

👨‍💻 In contrast, on my own marketplace app - Sprocket (a peer-to-peer bicycle platform) - I've spent years doing the opposite: * Proactively blocking under-18 users ( its explicit in the TOS/PP ) * Working directly with Apple & to improve their developer systems * Advocating for real age-verification tools like Apple Wallet ID & AI-driven age-detecting/gating like what just shipped * Pushing for per-US-state distribution controls so developers can comply with new child-protection laws without being crushed by disabling all of the US market 💵