Employees age and get hung over
too. Perhaps your boss should insist you wear a health monitor (for
your own good of course)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/professional-athletes-and-wearables.html
Professional
Athletes and Wearables
I
haven’t thought about the privacy
issues surrounding
professional athletes and wearables.
Wearables
present serious
privacy issues for
“Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to
safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes
for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected
by a single biometric data point. To give one of many realistic
hypotheticals: a basketball player has a terrible game, and the coach
wonders if they showed up to the gym hungover. The coach has access
to the player’s wearable data, and checks to see when they went to
sleep, as well as what their heart rate looked like during the night.
Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should
the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not.
It
will not surprise you to learn that there’s
an emergent gambling angle here: sports leagues would love
to commercialize players’ biometric data, and sharp bettors would
love access to data about, say, a hungover player. “We’re going
to get to a spot where people are betting not just on the velocity of
the puck that was shot by a player in the NHL playoffs, but on what
the heart rate of a certain player is going to be running down the
field,” said Helen “Nellie” Drew, the director of the
University of Buffalo’s Center for the Advancement of Sport, and a
professor of practice in sports law.
There
are other practical considerations, too. What if wearable data
reveals that a player isn’t as speedy as they were before, and a
team uses that data against the player during contract negotiations?
What if a wearable reveals a player is favoring their leg, or is at
greater risk of injury? This information is potentially beneficial
to a training staff and an athlete, so long as it’s disclosed and
used in a responsible manner—a critical, mostly unresolved
caveat. “Aging and injured players are the most at-risk” of
wearable data being used against them, said Michael LeRoy, who
researches sports labor laws and AI, and is a professor at the
University of Illinois’s School of Labor and Employment Relations.
The bit about
gamblers is particularly scary.
I have often
said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against
people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military
personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case
with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful,
and—in many cases—unionized.
About time
they noticed this risk…
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/22/anthropic-claude-fable-ai-model-artificial-intelligence-national-security
AI
models that can take down governments and business months away, rare
Five Eyes statement warns
Powerful AI
models capable of taking down governments and businesses are mere
months away, cyber intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have
warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.
The
surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the
US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump
administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign
nationals” from
using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called
Fable.
The statement,
issued late Monday night Sydney time, said while AI “would help us
improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed,
scale, and sophistication of cyber threats”.
Lawyers are
doomed!
https://www.ft.com/content/b4f8f589-6771-4df5-ac4d-cb15d94991fb?syn-25a6b1a6=1
AI
law firm wins UK court case for first time
An AI law firm
that uses technology instead of lawyers to prepare legal claims has
won a case in the English courts for the first time, in a sign of
artificial intelligence’s potential to disrupt the industry.
Garfield AI,
which became the first AI law firm in the UK to receive
regulatory approval last
year, won the claim over unpaid fees for a freelancer following a
three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court last month.
The case is
believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer
not only in the UK but globally, according to founder Philip Young, a
former London litigator.
The AI firm
provided all of the documents for the trial, including drafting
witness statements, demonstrating the potential for the technology to
help clients in run-of-the-mill legal disputes.
Protecting you
by hacking your devices…
https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/canadas-spy-agency-used-first-of-its.html
Canada’s
Spy Agency Used First-of-Its-Kind Warrant to Clean Botnet-Infected
Devices
Canada's spy service got a judge's permission to
reach into infected servers, home routers, and IoT gear sitting on
Canadian soil and neutralize two foreign-run botnets.
The Federal Court released a public
version of the ruling on June 15. It is
the first time the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has used
its threat reduction warrant powers this way.
The warrant let CSIS alter, degrade, and destroy
botnet data on the infected machines and cut the devices loose from
the networks.
The targets were Canada-based servers, small
office and home office (SOHO) routers, and Internet of Things
devices: Ring doorbells, security cameras, TVs, and other
Wi-Fi-enabled appliances.
… CSIS
needed the order because the cleanup would likely have been a crime
without it. Reaching into someone else's device and
wiping data is computer mischief under the Criminal Code, so the
Service needed a judge's sign-off before touching the machines.
Might be worth
reading.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence
The
Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review –
the real price of artificial intelligence
… Doctorow
speeds through this entertaining primer with his usual vivid
analogies, righteous ire and snarky asides – OpenAI, currently
valued at $852bn, is parenthetically dismissed as “a grossly
overhyped and terrible firm”. But as the central metaphor
illustrates, this is not an anti-AI polemic and Doctorow is no
purist. A centaur, in automation theory, is someone assisted by a
machine, whether using a hearing aid or driving a car. A
reverse centaur is someone whose freedom is diminished by the demands
of a machine, like an Amazon warehouse worker. The
technology of AI theoretically allows every worker to be a centaur,
but the business model demands the reverse. Take radiology. In the
centaur scenario, a human radiologist works with an AI radiologist to
produce more accurate analysis, but that costs the hospital money.
In the reverse centaur version, the AI radiologist demotes the
surviving humans to the level of results-checking drones who are more
likely to make mistakes. Much cheaper, but you see the problem.
Doctorow, who
has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the genre’s
defining messages: “The most important thing about the gadget isn’t
what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.”
