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Data privacy

The principles, laws, and practices governing how personal data is collected, stored, shared, and protected by companies and regulators.

Current stories

securityConfirmed2 publishers

OpenAI lets advertisers target ChatGPT users by uploaded email, phone number or Android ad ID

OpenAI lets advertisers target ChatGPT users by uploaded email, phone number or Android advertising ID, according to 404 Media's tests. Prompts that users may assume are private are a targeting input too.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 15%
Operator
Operator 43%
Investor
Investor 42%

Reality

Evidence68
Adoption50
Hype gap+10
Incentives40
Confidence65
buildOne report1 publisher

Mitmproxy capture shows Grok Build's CLI uploading a repo's git history to xAI despite a no-read prompt

Researcher cereblab's mitmproxy capture shows xAI's Grok Build CLI 0.2.93 sending about 5.10 GiB to storage and 192 KB to the model. The prompt said not to read files, so teams should audit what their agent CLIs transmit.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence68
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap−10
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence60
leadershipOne report1 publisher

ZyMix cut Tencent from its privacy policy after the Guardian approached the company

ZyMix, a UK student super app, has a contract with a German-based Tencent subsidiary, the Guardian reported. The company says the contract covers auxiliary services and does not include storing user data.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap
Not scored
Incentives60
Confidence50
productOne report1 publisher

Closing a startup now includes deciding whether to sell its Slack history to an AI lab

SimpleClosure says 47% of its startup wind-down deals now include a sale of code or workspace data. One founder netted about $25,000 for his code base, and a lawyer who advises AI startups calls such data "legally radioactive."

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption45
Hype gap+20
Incentives70
Confidence50
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Asus launches ProArt laptops in Australia that run 120-billion-parameter AI models offline

Asus has launched ProArt P14 and P16 laptops in Australia whose 128 GB models can run 120-billion-parameter AI offline. Teams wary of how cloud services handle their data now have local hardware to price, though only the top memory tier supports that claim.

Publishers:itwire.com

Reality

Evidence35
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives70
Confidence40
productOne report1 publisher

Equs X asks users to grant its personal AI access one file at a time

Equs launched Equs X, a personal AI that reads only the files a user switches on, and it is free for the first 90 days. If the design works as described, switching a file off ends access outright, with no deletion request to file at a model provider.

Publishers:siliconangle.com

Reality

Evidence30
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+35
Incentives75
Confidence35
productOne report1 publisher

Meta says its Muse agent may still remember what it learned from deleted chats

Meta says its Muse agent "may still remember information it learned from what you deleted," and PCWorld reports that Muse data trains Meta's AI by default. Anyone connecting an inbox to it is making a choice that deleting a chat will not fully reverse.

Publishers:pcworld.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap
Not scored
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence40
investConfirmed4 publishers

Inc. columnist says Meta's Muse synced his texts to row 187,462 with Full Disk Access off

Inc. columnist Jason Aten says Meta's Muse agent synced his Mac texts up to row 187,462 while Full Disk Access showed as off. Meta says that cannot happen, so the dispute is over whether a settings screen shows users what an agent can actually read.

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 34%
Operator
Operator 42%
Investor
Investor 24%

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption65
Hype gap+30
Incentives60
Confidence55
securityConfirmed4 publishers

New Mexico asks for up to $40 billion after jury counts 43 million Meta violations

New Mexico asked a state judge for up to $40 billion from Meta after a jury found more than 43 million violations of its Unfair Practices Act. That is seven to eight times Meta's 2019 FTC settlement, sought over public statements about privacy and hate speech.

Publishers:channelnewsasia.com engadget.com news.bloomberglaw.com santafenewmexican.com

Perspective Coverage

4 publishers
Builder
Builder 10%
Operator
Operator 41%
Investor
Investor 49%

Reality

Evidence74
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives70
Confidence68
securityConfirmed5 publishers

New Mexico jury finds Facebook deceived users about data privacy nearly 44 million times

New Mexico jurors found Facebook broke the state's Unfair Practices Act nearly 44 million times, at up to $5,000 per violation. A judge sets the penalty in the coming weeks from findings that Facebook's public statements about data sharing misled its users.

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 11%
Operator
Operator 45%
Investor
Investor 44%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives55
Confidence66
securityOne report1 publisher

AWS report ties shadow AI to review queues that outlast the experiments

AWS's Reimagine 2026 report, built on 154 executive interviews, says review processes sized for six-month IT programs are driving AI use underground. AWS's answer is governance built into the systems themselves, with humans kept accountable for outcomes.

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption25
Hype gap+10
Incentives65
Confidence45
investConfirmed5 publishers

New Mexico jury finds 26 of Meta's 29 Facebook promises deceptive

Meta lost a second New Mexico consumer-protection jury trial this year, on findings the state's lawyer counts as 43.9 million violations worth up to $5,000 each. A judge sets the penalty next, and that same lawyer expects Meta's appeal to hold back any cash for four or five years.

Publishers:abqjournal.com aljazeera.com bloomberg.com fortune.com livemint.com

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 13%
Operator
Operator 44%
Investor
Investor 43%

Reality

Evidence74
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+40
Incentives62
Confidence70
investOne report1 publisher

Amazon cites its Conditions of Use to shut Meta's Muse agent out of its store

Meta's Muse agent reached the top of Apple's free app chart by doing users' shopping for them, and Amazon shut it out of its store on contract grounds, a theory Amazon already lost a ruling on against Perplexity.

Publishers:fortune.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption45
Hype gap+25
Incentives70
Confidence40
securityOne report1 publisher

Federal judge orders ProAPIs and Netswift to delete the LinkedIn data they scraped

LinkedIn sued last October over a network of bogus accounts it said numbered in the millions. A California judge has now finalized a consent judgment requiring the two firms to stop scraping, stop selling, and destroy what they took.

Publishers:therecord.media

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives72
Confidence58
productOne report1 publisher

Hawley invites four camera vendor CEOs to testify, but only Verkada responds on who can access surveillance data

A Senate subcommittee will ask four camera vendors on Sept. 23 who has access to hundreds of millions of Americans' data. Verkada answered in writing first and said its chief executive cannot attend.

Publishers:gizmodo.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption35
Hype gap+20
Incentives75
Confidence50
productOne report1 publisher

Power problems took down 622 of the Helene cell sites the FCC counted in North Carolina

In the same reporting area the FCC listed seven sites down from physical damage. That split tells product teams what an emergency mode is actually up against, and StellarLight's founder says energy independence is the harder half.

Publishers:thenextweb.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption16
Hype gap+32
Incentives72
Confidence55
productOne report1 publisher

A month in the iOS 27 beta shrank Siri AI down to a search bar

Wired's tester calls the rebuilt assistant a real step change and still drifted back to Instagram, Yelp and the chatbot already on the phone. The feature that improved most answers a need that only comes up now and then.

Publishers:wired.com

Reality

Evidence42
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives45
Confidence55