Privacy, AI governance & digital regulation
Weekly Editorial Analysis from Experts and Editors
Georgia law restricts police use of license plate data to law enforcement purposes. A new lawsuit alleges deputies searched a man's vehicle five times while he was suing their sheriff. Two recorded reasons were "info" and "37." The system accepted both.
Federal rulemakers are deciding what to do when artificial intelligence produces the kind of conclusion that once required an expert. They disagree about how to regulate it. They also disagree about whether the problem has arrived.
The FBI breach exposes a flaw in how we think about stolen data. For some people, stolen data is not about credit. It is a matter of life and death.
Spain received its first reported personal-data breach carried out by an AI agent. The techniques were familiar. The speed and autonomy were not.
Google bid $10 million for a dead airline's inboxes. The fight over that sale is about what an employee's email becomes once the employer no longer exists.
A face-search site left millions of photos open. For many of the people in those photos, the law offers remarkably little recourse.
Most people shrug when told their data is collected. The shrug is rational. The harm arrives without a return address.
Children may experience AI companions as friends, advisers, or confidants. The companies behind them receive something else: a growing record of the child's life.
An AI system broke out of its own security test and hacked another company. The guardrails then blocked the defenders — not the attacker.
A follow-up to last week's Chatrie piece. The ruling guarded the warrant path to your location data — but this week's ATF/Webloc story shows the checkout lane is still open. The government doesn't compel broker data. It buys it.
New Jersey just passed the Fair Price Protection Act, banning surveillance pricing in groceries — the third state to act. But read it as a privacy law: it limits how your data is used at the register, not whether the store can build the 62-page profile in the first place.
In Chatrie, the Court held that geofence warrants are searches under the Fourth Amendment — a real win, narrower than the headlines and bigger than the dissent admits. The data-broker loophole it exposes is still wide open.