#privacy

#privacy

Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company's goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything - human, pet, and otherwise.

The "Results about you" tool already allows users to remove Search results containing their phone number, email address, or home address, and it can now also be used to request the removal of results that include information such as a driver's license, passport, or Social Security number, the company said in the update Tuesday. You can access the tool in the Google app by tapping your Google account photo and selecting "Results about you."

BrowserCoPilot is designed to make your workflows easier and faster - and completely customized to you, your prompts, and your writing style. One useful example? Integrate the program directly to your inbox, and let it create one-click emails that use your phrasing and tone, and that gather context from your conversations. Or, write directly in the browser to revise or analyze documents using your saved prompts - or upload images and PDFs to interact with directly.

You may have noticed that many European Union (EU) governments and agencies, worried about ceding control to untrustworthy US companies, have been embracing digital sovereignty. Those bodies are turning to running their own cloud and services instead of relying on, say, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. If you prize your privacy and want to control your own services, you can take that approach as well.

It seems that Amy is no fan of (or incapable of accessing) Occam's razor. Your story-the ostensible truth-makes at least a little more sense than the one Amy concocted, in which her husband cheated carelessly), but it is frustrating that when presented a wholly plausible story by multiple sources, Amy is opting for the one she wrote. You should consider that this might be above your pay grade.

Are people turning away from social media? But that tide might be finally, yet slowly, turning. My Gen Z students have recently been the ones telling me about social media "cleanses", whereby they take a break from it all for a prescribed duration, and "grayscaling" their socials (whereby color images turn to black and white, making them less eye-candy-esque-and all around having better cellphone etiquette such as putting it away during class and turning it off at night.

Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show.

He said supermarket staff were unable to explain why he was being told to leave, and would only direct him to a QR code leading to the website of the firm Facewatch, which the retailer has hired to run facial recognition in some of its stores. He said when he contacted Facewatch, he was told to send in a picture of himself and a photograph of his passport before the firm confirmed it had no record of him on its database.

Microsoft has made OneDrive agents generally available, allowing users to query multiple documents simultaneously through Copilot instead of just one at a time. Users can select up to 20 files and create an agent, saved as a .agent file in OneDrive. Rather than teasing information out of individual documents, Microsoft says users can make cross-document queries, including "What decisions have we made so far?" and "What risks keep coming up?" The agent then generates a response based on the documents' content.

Transphobic billionaire author J.K. Rowling has encouraged random people in the United Kingdom to photograph people in women's restrooms just in case they are transgender. Her advice is likely to result in the public harassment of cisgender women who don't fit people's preconceived notions of how a cis woman "should" look - such harassment has occurred many times in the past.

France may take additional steps to prevent minors from accessing social media platforms. As its government advances a proposed ban on social media use for anyone under age 15, some leaders are already looking to add further restrictions. During an appearance on public broadcast service Franceinfo, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff said VPNs might be the next target.

For months, the federal government has faltered in its attempt to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the bipartisan bill signed by President Donald Trump that mandated the full release of the Justice Department's enormous trove of documents and media related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump administration blew past the congressionally mandated deadline and is staggering its Epstein releases, dropping millions of pages in batches that have included some problematic redactions along with the expected disturbing revelations.

No doubt a response to the extreme digital connectivity of the world, but small and secret hotels have never felt more appealing than right now. The ultimate antidote to the 'see and be seen' scene. Extreme exclusivity is the name of the game here - where there's no waiting times for check-in, no scrounging around for a sun lounger, and staff greet you like family.

In this new season, I'm asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today's episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I've seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services.

On a recent two-week trip to Japan with my fiancé - six cities, six hotels - every stay was gorgeous and perfectly appointed. We wanted for nothing. Except, in most cases, a proper bathroom door. Instead, we spent the better part of two weeks making accidental eye contact through frosted glass and translucent panels while one of us was otherwise occupied. A design choice, apparently. A test of intimacy, definitely.

AI in search is hard to avoid these days. Google's AI Overviews are everywhere (even in your inbox), and Microsoft has incorporated a Copilot chat option on Bing.com. Results are mixed, and hallucinations are still a problem. Large language models can help you dig deeper into a topic by asking follow-up questions, but on DuckDuckGo, it's clear that web users aren't interested.

can conceal online activity that local or national governments deem illegal - up to and including, say, circumventing ID checks for age verification. Consumers aren't helped by the sheer amount of duds sold in app stores right next to the best VPNs, especially when they're purposefully exploiting moments that have people rushing to shore up their online anonymity. If you've almost decided to start using a VPN, you may be wondering if the services you're looking at are actually safe.

While we are waiting for the final decision from Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, I want to present some thoughts on the least resolved of the case's many issues, the hard parts the judge will be pondering. Actually, one hard part: trust. But I need to tell you a little about the case to make the trust issue clear.