privacy

Democratic senators led by Markey and Merkley warn a $7.5M DHS smart glasses proposal would let ICE agents covertly identify people in public using facial recognition.

Eric Migicovsky's rePebble introduces the Index 01, a battery-free smart ring that captures voice notes with a button press, skipping health tracking and subscriptions entirely.

The FTC settled its 2022 lawsuit against Kochava and subsidiary Collective Data Solutions, barring the companies from selling precise location data without affirmative express consent in the most significant U.S. enforcement action against a location data broker.

Mozilla ships Firefox 151 on May 19, 2026, patching 25 security vulnerabilities and adding PDF merging, Document PiP, Web Serial API, and tighter fingerprinting controls.

Minnesota's HF 1606 cleared the state Senate 65-0 after a 132-1 House vote, sending an AI 'nudification' app ban to Gov. Tim Walz with $500,000 civil penalties and a private right of action.

Governor Wes Moore signed HB 895 on April 28, prohibiting large food retailers and delivery apps from using personal data to set individualized prices, but consumer advocates say loopholes and a 45-day cure period weaken the bill.

OpenAI open-sources a 1.5B-parameter PII detection model under Apache 2.0, enabling local redaction of names, emails, and secrets without sending data to external servers.

ICE's acting director confirmed in an April letter that the agency deploys Paragon's zero-click Graphite spyware against fentanyl suspects, months after the same tool was linked to attacks on European journalists and civil society members.

The Commission says its new age-verification app is ready for deployment, but researchers and privacy advocates are already flagging security and platform-dependence concerns.

The Federal Trade Commission's March 30 consent order would permanently prohibit OkCupid and Match Group from misrepresenting their data practices after sharing nearly 3 million user photos with facial recognition firm Clarifai in 2014, but levies no civil penalty and no privacy program obligations.

Booking.com confirmed hackers accessed customer names, contact details, and reservation data, forcing PIN resets across the platform while declining to disclose how many users were affected.

Hackers accessed names, addresses, bank details, and dates of birth of roughly one million Basic-Fit members before monitoring systems cut off the intrusion.