me trying to use normal fucking email without divulging confidential information to copilot

Sam says a lack of compute means he must make an impossible choice: Whether to use his LLM to i) cure cancer or ii) give free education to everyone. Similarly, I can't achieve BOTH an Olympic gold AND a platinum album. Don't ask me whether I can achieve either. www.linkedin.com/posts/axelco...

Even OpenAI's best models still suck at quoting their training data or external sources. GPT 4o can be useful to help interpret legal provisions pasted into the chat Ask it to draw upon anything outside of the chat and it breaks down. The first quote is wrong and the latter two are just made up.

Any bets on whose companies are up next for a major three-letter-agency audit? The fact that this seems not just plausible but inevitable is both terrifying and kind of funny.

Google plans to offer Gemini to US children under 13 without verifiable parental consent (parents can opt out if they use Family Link). As @epicprivacy.bsky.social notes, this seems like a blatant COPPA violation. I don't think Google would have had the gall to do this when Khan headed the FTC.

Signal’s new Windows update prevents the system from capturing screenshots of chats

I guess basically all US regulation relates to China now. Or "woke" stuff. Don't get me wrong—doing business with Chinese companies can present real risks to human rights and security But for a few years we had tech enforcement (from the DoJ and FTC at least) that wasn't quite so nakedly political

This is beyond terrible. A speculative fiction novel with this plot would be so cartoonish and trite as to be unreadable. And I've enjoyed some pretty hackneyed novels.

This is what happens when lobbyists ask for “clarity” in a regulation.

California's once pithy (and strict) definition of "automated decisionmaking technology" is on its way to becoming War and Peace. "Replace or substantially facilitate [humans]" becomes "replace or substantially replace" (?)—and the billable hours will rack up when figuring out all those exemptions.

Which one?

Here's a post I wrote back when GPT could barely strong a limerick together. Note that it is positively *littered* with em-dashes. Have people forgotten that Large Language Models are trained on stuff *we wrote*?

This is not what I would call a "tightening"... www.theverge.com/news/658602/...

Surely these functions should be nowhere near each other, rather than combined into a single field...

The UK government has more plans for the ICO. From its recent paper "New approach to ensure regulators and regulation support growth" www.gov.uk/government/p...

Microsoft's "Copilot Gaming Experience" is a generative AI version of Quake 2, trained on gameplay data, that generates as you "play" it. Let's just say there is a LONG way to go before this is anything other than research a project. copilot.microsoft.com/wham?feature...

Help me Bluesky Quite recently (NOT years ago) Max Schrems suggested that bringing a "Schrems III" against the EU-US DPF would be too expensive. It was in an interview or panel or something and has not been widely reported. WHERE DID I SEE THIS I need it.

Genuine question—if Ghibli style 4o images violate copyright law, could these people asserting this while sharing such images for commercial purposes be liable under copyright law? I expect either "no", "it depends", or my preferred answer on AI and copyright—we'll see what the courts say.

A bad idea in the worst possible circumstances. How can ANY Democrat think it's a good idea to team up with Trump on free expression?

The AI Act should not distract us from the powerful and firmly established human rights protections that are already in place.

FTC removes posts critical of Big Tech from its website

It's painfully obvious when someone has only ever used generative AI to write little poems and answer simple questions. They usually think AI will save the world. Doing anything decent with it requires tight parameters, close supervision, and enough domain knowledge to know when it's bullshitting.

It's hard hard to overstate the significance of Bedoya's enforcement of consumer rights law against privacy violations. The FTC did an astonishing amount of work during Khan's term. It's not surprising that Trump is forcing him out. Tech firms can now go back to doing whatever they want.

Well it looks like the Washington Post's new editorial policy is working out just fine. America's pain is "brief". It will usher in a new "Golden Age". But the government isn't explaining these two entirely true things "very well". See? They criticised Trump.

The GPAI stuff is a weak spot for me. My AI Act training focuses on deployers and smaller providers Is the CoP really voluntary as the article says? If technically "yes"—is it de facto mandatory? Obviously lobbyists will lobby, but can anyone get me up to speed on Meta etc's specific complaints?

Anyone remember the price of a "kitchen supper" with Cameron?

EVERY ICO press release says something like, "My message is simple: Comply with the law" You can ALWAYS extract a simple message from a complex one. "Comply with the law" means nothing HOW you comply with the law—eg verifying people's ages, segregating children's data—is very fucking complicated.

Microsoft forms (i.e. customervoice.microsoft .com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx...) are being used for phishing. It redirects to a fake Gmail login. Beware.

How surprising—a perfunctory, box-ticking PIA with mitigations that would have been ineffective even if they had been implemented (but which were predictably ignored).

We continue to play Chinese tech whackamole across Europe and the US: Hikvision, Huawei, TikTok, DeepSeek, etc

Apple pulls end-to-end encryption from UK users following the government's order under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. I have seen some bragging about how Meta launched threads here earlier than in the EU (etc) due to our less rigourous regulatory environment. Here's the other side of the coin

If someone told me this was a failed VR project from 2006, I'd believe them. Especially the "failed" part.

Worst thing about Bluesky vs X is the lack of music. Two gigs in two nights and not only don't the artists have profiles, their names barely appear in the search results. Data protection is but one of my many interests, the rest of which I rarely discuss on socials. We've got a long way to go.

Oh my god this is embarrassing.

Is tech news just "news" now or am I in a bubble? Thank you to these outlets for doing the deep work necessary

Writing about the state privacy laws that take/took effect JUST THIS YEAR I realised there's really no need for a federal US privacy law. Don't worry about it.

Should really be a ✖️ on that third point...

Delaware District Court says AI training is not "fair use".

I'm fascinated by this story about the UK government demanding access to Apple e2ee iCloud accounts. This was reportedly a warrant under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Neither the content nor the *existence* of such warrants can be made public. I wonder how many such warrants go unreported.

Interim US Attorney for DC threatens—via a letter published exclusively on X—to "chase" people referred to him by Elon Musk "to the end of the Earth" if they have "simply acted unethically"—and not even illegally. Whether careless phrasing or not, this is flagrant contempt for the rule of law.

Generating CSAM is apparently a "common legitimate practice" according to the Commission If it is indeed legitimate in some contexts, I still think it's a stretch to call it "common". It is also a crime in some countries, and I can't see that the AI Act makes it lawful.

Tech firms honestly expect governments to treat AI development like the Manhattan Project—ploughing in public money, pulling up drawbridges and protecting their trade secrets for them. It appears to be working. darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-...

A new proposed amendment to the UK Data (Use and Access) Bill that I cleaned up. Baroness Kidron proposes "sovereign data assets"—a licensing system for data held by public bodies (I guess primarily the NHS), with preferential access for UK organisations.

The EDPB did not overstep its powers when directing the DPC to investigate Meta's use of special category data across its business So I guess the DPC will have to do implement part of the Binding Decision now In my view this challenge probably would not have occurred under the DPC's new leadership

It's Data Protection Boxing Day and the UK's ICO registration fees have officially gone up. Not likely to break the bank but I doubt there is much support for this among businesses.

Last week's deep and nuanced judgment RTM v Bonne Terre is a fantastic read. A gambling firm used data about a person's vulnerabilities to target them with marketing—with his "consent". Here the judge explains how to balance respect for individual autonomy with the commercial benefits of data use.

Someone did a thing, some currency went up or down, yada yada who cares Trillions of dollars riding on this stuff.

So who's doing the Deepseek complaint?

The General Court has an individual €400 after he used the "Log In With Facebook" button on the Commission's website The court was satisfied that the claimant experienced non-material damages because "he found himself in a position of some uncertainty as regards the processing of his... IP address"