Privacy technologies

Privacy technologies

A coalition of high-profile civil-liberties groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU are suing San Jose over what it characterizes as millions of warrantless searches of automated license plate reader data, which it says has put the city in an unprecedented state of surveillance with no meaningful gatekeeping. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims that local authorities as well as outside law enforcement are violating the California Constitution by continuously combing, without a search warrant, the hundreds of millions

Are you a red wine drinker? A high spender? Or perhaps you're a slow eater, the sort who takes up a restaurant's table for longer than they'd like. You might not even know - but OpenTable does. Those are just a few of the notes that the reservation platform has started serving up to some restaurant staff when you make a booking, all based on the orders you've made and money you've spent at other restaurants in the past.

A swarm of AI "crawlers" is running rampant on the internet, scouring billions of websites for data to feed algorithms at leading tech companies -- all without permission or payment, upending the online economy. Before the rise of AI chatbots, websites allowed search engines to access their content in return for increased visibility, a system that rewarded them with traffic and advertising revenues.

A medical transcriptionist in Atlantic Canada, Tessa (who has been granted a pseudonym to avoid any conflict with her employer) works remotely, spending her days alone with doctors' voices and diagnostic codes. Fusion, the platform she uses, logged her inactivity in detail, and Microsoft Teams displayed an "Away" status just five minutes after her last keystroke. Her employer had set a target: transcribe at least eighty minutes of audio dictation per shift. Falling short could raise questions-especially if the inactivity logs suggested too much downtime.

Setting aside Mozilla's branding exercises for one moment, we thought we'd start with the modest new features in the release notes. The top feature here is the ability to add and read comments in PDF files. In a previous life, the Reg FOSS desk was a technical writer, and this feature will be very welcome for people collaboratively writing and editing.

Prediction and detection algorithms are at the core of the Bytek Prediction Platform, the prediction platform that unlocks the power of secure, privacy-compliant first-party data for enterprise advertisers. These models enable the creation of audiences based on product and thematic interests, as well as predictive segments built on customer lifetime value (Predictive LTV) and conversion probability (Action Prediction). These audiences are then activated through Anonymised's technology, which ensures the secure processing of Bytek's raw analytics and eliminates the risks traditionally associated with sharing first-party data in digital advertising.

By early November 2025, the sector's combined market capitalization surged nearly 80%, briefly topping the $24 billion to $25 billion range. Zcash ( ZEC) rallied to its highest level in seven years, while Dash ( DASH) notched a three-year high as trading activity accelerated across major exchanges. The move reflects a textbook rotation. Prolonged downtrends finally gave way, short positions were forced to cover, and anticipation around Zcash's upcoming halving provided traders with a renewed catalyst amid a largely stagnant broader market.

Atlas comes with ChatGPT baked in, and while it can navigate the web like traditional browsers, the company says it can do much more. A feature that OpenAI calls "agentic mode" can take action, like an agent who can shop for you, make reservations, or buy plane tickets. On that livestream, Altman's colleague demonstrated how it can read an online recipe, figure out how many ingredients are needed for a set of diners, then buy the ingredients online.

Discord is expanding the safety controls parents and guardians have access to in its Family Center, including increased visibility of their teens' activity, allowing guardians to control sensitive content filtering and data privacy settings, and giving them more control over who can DM their teens. New Social Permissions toggles will allow guardians to choose whether their teens can receive direct messages only from friends or from anyone who's a member of the same servers as them. However, Discord is still promising teens that, "As always, guardians can't see the content of the messages you send."

When I was a teenager, I arrived at a friend's house and she accidentally texted me instead of her then boyfriend. "Saoirse is here," she wrote, "we're heading to the shop, OK?" You can imagine my bewilderment when I received the text, and again when I asked if she had meant to send it to her dad or something, and was told that no, her boyfriend just likes to know where she is to make sure she's safe.

"R unpacking items from a box," read one notification from the Nest camera on a shelf in the kitchen. "Jenni cuts a pie / B walks into the kitchen, washes dishes in the sink / Jenni gets a drink from the refrigerator," it continued. Sometimes, the alerts sounded like the start of a joke, "A dog, a person, and two cats walk into the room / Two chickens walk across the patio."

By announcing the elimination of IP address logging on Google Analytics, the tech titan is doubling down on its focus on consumer data privacy. While some applaud the move, other see it as a headache for advertisers and another nail in the coffin of digital marketing as we know it. Google is axing Internet Protocol (IP) address logging on its analytics platform.

Meta on Monday announced an update to Facebook Groups that will allow admins to make their previously private groups public, without compromising the privacy of their existing members. The company said that past content will remain private after the conversion, and member lists will remain protected. Often, admins start their groups as private, thinking they will remain small, but then realize they could reach a much broader audience if they were easier to find.

Several months after AI-powered age verification rolled out to YouTube, age checks are hitting another Google service. Over the past several days, users have spotted a new age verification system appearing on the Google Play Store. When attempting to download certain apps, users are greeted with a verification pop-up asking to confirm their age. According to reports from people who have already seen this pop-up, you aren't able to download many apps until this is done.

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.