Asked by investors about his biggest worries, CEO Rick Smith said: A misstep around privacy and data handling. Without elaborating on specific examples, he said: We are seeing that those are concerns right now out in the public. I think that would be one where we could make a mistake that would have outsized negative consequences.
As the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics enter their final weekend, we would like to hear about the moment will stay with you. Wherever you are, what was your favourite moment and why? Share your favourite You can tell us your highlight from the Winter Olympics 2026 using this form. Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted
The change stems from the 2025 amendment to the Federal Tax Code, which has sparked controversy in the sector following the reform of Article 30-B. This provision stipulates that taxpayers providing digital services must grant tax authorities permanent, real-time online access only to the information necessary to verify compliance with tax obligations, as recorded in their systems or records. When asked about the reform, the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency referred EL PAIS to the SAT.
AI's next target? Helping you kick your phone addiction. AI devices are a top priority for Big Tech companies that view it as the future of how humans and AI interact, writes BI's Amanda Hoover. You've likely heard of this hardware before, which acts as a sort of AI sidekick for your life. From the Rabbit R1 and Humane to Friend, the names are different, but the stories are the same: big expectations, difficult execution.
TCL is known for its budget TVs, but in recent years, it has delivered some jaw-dropping models and consistently rolled out excellent hardware that often rivals far more expensive sets. My issue, however, is that most TCL TVs ship with default settings that do not give you the best picture, performance, or privacy protections at home. Luckily, the fix is simple.
It is the view of the BMA that doctors working in the NHS can no longer provide the tacit endorsement that using a product implies and must immediately take steps to explore refusing any non-direct care usage of Palantir's Federated Data Platform, with a view to moving away from the platform entirely in time, when a suitable alternative can be put in place.
You've long been able to ask Google to remove certain personal information from its search results, such as your name, home address, phone number, and email address. But now the search giant has expanded the types of details it will delete in response to your request. First up, you'll soon be able to give the heave-ho to any of your government-issued IDs that pop up in a search result. That includes your passport, driver's license, and Social Security number. Right now, this option is just rolling out in the US and should hit other countries down the road.
Grok's placement on the government website realfood.gov follows uproar over the chatbot's creation of millions of sexualized deepfakes of women and children in late December and its spouting of racist and antisemitic content last summer. Other government agencies are also using the chatbot made by xAI, Musk's AI company, but the prominent placement of Grok on realfood.gov over the weekend appears to be one of the first instances of the federal government pointing online visitors to Musk's chatbot.
Within months of its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT had started making its mark as a formidable tool for writing and optimizing code. Invariably, some engineers at Samsung thought it was a good idea to use AI to optimize a specific piece of code that they had been struggling with for a while. However, they forgot to note the nature of the beast. AI simply does not forget; it learns from the data it works on, quietly making it a part of its knowledge base.
OpenClaw and Moltbot are the talk of the tech town right now, but cybersecurity researchers have flagged some concerns that you might want to think about. OpenClaw - first known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, all in the same week - has got the tech world buzzing thanks to its abilities to autonomously perform tasks like managing a user'sschedule. Meanwhile, Moltbook has gone viral for its Reddit-style social network, where AI agents post and interact with one another. No humans allowed - apart from observing.
Over the past three years, several Latin American countries have witnessed the arrival of the Orb, a futuristic-looking spherical device used to read irises and capture biometric data. This striking technology, developed by World Foundation and created by Sam Altman, a leading figure in artificial intelligence and CEO of OpenAI, along with its operational partner, Tools for Humanity, has been installed in shopping malls, gas stations, and other locations in Colombia, Chile, and Brazil.
US TikTok users are navigating a major ownership shift as TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC takes control of American operations, addressing longstanding national security concerns. Amid the transition, glitches, feed changes, and privacy policy scrutiny fuel uncertainty, prompting creators and casual users alike to reevaluate their engagement. Daily uninstall rates have spiked dramatically, while rival platforms gain traction, illustrating how trust, control, and technical reliability shape digital loyalty in real time.
The agency is flush with cash; it now has a larger budget than the FBI. To the point that ICE has, in fact, acquired two mobile data-capture companies, including Penlink, a longtime Department of Homeland Security vendor. The company tracks and maps purchasable or scrapable data from data brokers, pictures or videos posted on social media and geo-fencing, to name a few. Penlink's tech can even delve into or extract info from someone's phone, such as contacts, calendar events, chat messages and more.
Sensible businesses will be scrutinizing outgoings now more than ever. With clients looking to claw back profits eroded by spiralling inflation, marketing investment (not to mention your fees) will be up for debate, whether you like it or not. Frustratingly, validating the success of marketing investments is becoming more difficult. We're facing an attribution crisis, and many marketers are struggling to prove the value of each channel or campaign due to the numerous challenges brought about by increased privacy constraints,
O2-owned Weve has kicked off its Mobile World Congress activity by announcing a tie-up with Axonix that will gives advertisers further insight to its 31 million-strong audience base, and better enable programmatic trading. The deal is geared towards helping advertisers trade display advertising more effectively using Weve's audience data, with agencies, trading desks and brands the ideal target market, according to the outfit.
Ad fraud isn't just a marketing problem anymore - it's a full-scale threat to the trust that powers the digital economy. In 2024 alone, fraud in mobile advertising jumped 21%, while programmatic ad fraud drained nearly $50 billion from the industry. During data privacy week 2026, these numbers serve as a reminder that ad fraud is not only about wasted budgets - it's also about how consumer data moves, gets tracked, and sometimes misused across complex ecosystems.
Akido Labs, a Los Angeles-based health care technology company that runs clinics and street medicine teams in California, plans to start using its AI model on homeless and housing insecure patients in the Bay Area next month. The program generates questions for outreach workers to ask patients and then suggests diagnoses, medical tests and even medication, which a human doctor then signs off on remotely.
ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, recently established a separate American entity to run the app's U.S. operations. This restructuring aims to separate U.S. TikTok from its Chinese parent, addressing concerns about data privacy and foreign control. The move came after years of pressure from lawmakers, who feared the Chinese government's potential access to Americans' data. In 2024, Congress enacted a law, mandating that TikTok's U.S. operations be separated from ByteDance.
The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Finance Committee are asking the Social Security Administration to elaborate on a recent court filing which stated that SSA doesn't know the full extent of agency data accessed and shared by the Department of Government Efficiency. In a letter to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, Sens. Michael Crapo, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked for a briefing on the recent court disclosure, writing that "we take very seriously the SSA's stewardship of any personally identifiable information (PII) in its purview."
As demand grows for privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows. The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year.
Today, I'm talking with Alex Lintner, who is the CEO of technology and software solutions at Experian, the credit reporting company. Experian is one of those multinationals that's so big and convoluted that it has multiple CEOs all over the world, so Alex and I spent quite a lot of time talking through the Decoder questions just so I could understand how Experian is structured, how it functions, and how the kinds of decisions Alex makes actually work in practice.
