I hope they are amused.

https://www.bespacific.com/one-company-may-know-everything-about-you/

One company may know everything about you

The American Prospect: “The world’s largest advertising conglomerate has proposed merging with the company that has built detailed profiles on every American. A disturbing story at the intersection of innovations in war and our surveillance economy broke last week. Reuters reported on a letter sent by U.S. Central Command to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) back in April, revealing that U.S. military troop locations had been tracked using commercial location data. Such information collected from phones and other connected devices can uncover patterns and movements to inform attacks on military targets. Wyden told Reuters that we need to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.” I can’t say that this danger was top of mind for us when we opted out of spying on our readers and eliminated programmatic advertising on prospect.org. But it’s indisputable that carrying around a tracking device in your pocket can lead to a myriad of potential dangers beyond getting a geolocated ad for a nearby restaurant. That this information can be sold to third-party data brokers heightens those threats. There are ways for the military to anonymize data on the devices it requisitions, and discourage use of browsers like Chrome that have surveillance embedded inside them. But endless tracking leads to more quotidian outcomes than deciphering troop movements. And soon, the architecture that makes the tracking work could fall into the hands of a foreign acquirer. Publicis Groupe is the largest of the Big Three global advertising conglomerates (the others are WPP and Omnicom), and by itself it captured almost one-third of all global billings last year. A couple of weeks ago, Publicis announced its intention to buy LiveRamp in a $2.5 billion deal. This is the company that combines multiple inputs of an individual’s personal data (web activity, subscriptions, apps, travel, retail, financial, and even medical history) to generate an “identity graph,” a precise profile of our lives and actions.

LiveRamp is said to have built identity graphs on 245 million Americans, virtually every U.S. adult. These can be used in any context, from web to apps to smart TVs. “LiveRamp makes possible the data integration empowering cross-platform tracking,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. And in the past, it has reportedly sold identity graph information segmented by military or pregnancy status, among others. Publicis, a French multinational, has been gradually acquiring data firms, from data broker Epsilon to “end-to-end data solution” Lotame. Publicis represents global juggernauts like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, and its global reach could expand the identity graph everywhere. It is even the largest Western advertiser in China, with about 20 percent of the Chinese media agency market and partnerships with Tencent and Alibaba. Its clients hold massive troves of personal information which LiveRamp can make more valuable through targeting at the individual level. Regardless of any international ties, the leading ad conglomerate controlling personal data on hundreds of millions of people courts risk on multiple levels.

Repeat?

https://pogowasright.org/connecticut-enacts-omnibus-privacy-law/

Connecticut Enacts Omnibus Privacy Law

Lindsey Tonsager, Laura Kim, Bryan Ramirez & Clare Mathias of Covington and Burling write:

On May 27, 2026, the Connecticut governor signed SB 4, an omnibus privacy law, which among other things, amends the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (“CTDPA”), establishes a data broker registry and accessible deletion mechanism, imposes restrictions on the use of price setting devices and surveillance pricing, and creates requirements for direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies.

The CTDPA amendments, data-driven pricing provisions, and genetic testing provisions take effect on October 1, 2026, while the data broker registration requirements take effect on January 1, 2027. Certain other data broker requirements would phase in between 2027 and 2031.

Read more about the amendments and provisions at Inside Privacy.

It’s not that they left, it’s where they might be going…

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-administration-sees-striking-exodus-of-legal-talent/

Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent

The New York Times Gift Article: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data. Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles. Instead, many of those looking for such work are flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers. “There’s all this awareness that people in the federal government are dissatisfied, are angry, are frustrated, and want no part of it,” said Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, who has hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the last year. “That’s translating directly to people saying, ‘I want to be part of organizations that actually operate with integrity, that people want to be a part of, that people feel good about doing the right thing.’” Wariness of the Trump administration is also palpable inside law schools, where many aspiring lawyers who would have once jumped at the chance to hold a federal government job are seeking alternative paths, according to faculty members and students. “A lot of people my age are asking, ‘Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career wise — having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?’” said Matthew Duray, who described himself as a conservative Republican and just finished his first year at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “Or will that hurt? And that’s the question I guess everyone’s asking, and that’s the bet you have to make ahead of time. But it’s hard to know long term.”

AI does not control nuclear weapons yet, right?

https://thenextweb.com/news/shangri-la-dialogue-ai-dangers-nuclear-weapons-defense

AI eclipsed nuclear weapons as the dominant threat at Asia’s premier defense summit

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, senior military officials warned that AI is compressing battlefield decision-making faster than humans can process, eclipsing nuclear weapons as the dominant strategic concern. Ukraine and the US-Iran conflict were cited as live examples of AI already shaping combat operations.

No doubt this bandwagon just got larger…

https://thenextweb.com/news/social-media-27-million-settlement-breathitt-county-details

Social media companies paid a school district more than its annual budget to avoid trial

… The combined $27 million is 8% more than the Kentucky school district’s $25 million annual budget.  The figures were released under Kentucky’s open records laws. The settlements were announced earlier this month but without financial details.

… The settlements allowed the companies to avert the first trial in the nation over a school district’s addiction complaint. The trial had been scheduled for 12 June in Oakland. The reprieve will be short-lived. More than 1,300 other school districts have filed similar suits. The next bellwether trial is scheduled for February 2027 in Tucson, Arizona.

The Breathitt County terms could signal openness to a mass settlement.  Bloomberg Intelligence has estimated the total potential liability at $400 billion. A $27 million payout per district across 1,300 districts would total $35 billion, a fraction of the theoretical maximum but still a transformative expense for companies accustomed to treating litigation as a cost of doing business.

The precedents are building.  In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a 20-year-old woman with addictive product design. The $6 million damages award was symbolic.  A New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in a separate case about failing to protect children from online predators.

Unintended consequences?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/hbe2/9550261

The Critical Role of Ethical Behavior in Digitized Markets: Lessons From Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic

This paper explores the critical role of ethical behavior by human participants in digitized markets, with a focus on autonomous vehicle (AV) ethics in mixed-traffic scenarios involving pedestrians and driverless cars. As AI systems, including AVs, become integral to urban mobility, their predictable, rule-abiding behavior introduces unique challenges. Using a static game model, this study demonstrates how pedestrians can exploit the predictable stopping behavior of defensive AVs (DAVs), resulting in a phenomenon termed “pedestrian supremacy.” This phenomenon reflects broader concerns, where the safe and cautious design of AVs inadvertently incentivizes reckless behavior among human road users. The findings reveal that ethical challenges in AV interactions stem not only from technical flaws or system malfunctions but also from the (un)ethical behaviors of human participants. To address these issues, this paper advocates for a dual approach: designing AVs with robust ethical frameworks while promoting ethical and responsible behavior among users. Insights from this study contribute to the ongoing discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics, emphasizing the necessity of shared responsibility in human–AI interactions. The implications extend beyond transportation, offering valuable lessons for other digitized market environments, where the predictability of algorithmic decisions may similarly be exploited by human actors.

Another frightening thought…

https://philpapers.org/rec/YAHATU

After the University: A Manifesto on the End of the Old Educational Contract

This manifesto records the structural crisis of the university in the age of widespread artificial intelligence deployment. The author argues that the debate on the ethics of AI in education ended before it began: once the cost of an "artificial" lecturer falls below two to three annual professorial salaries, the decision to deploy it will be taken neither by educators nor by ministries, but by those who sign the budgets. The text traces the disappearance of the diploma as a social document, the collapse of accreditation structures, the splitting of the university into two incompatible systems — mass-automated and tiny-elite — and the devaluation of intellectual labour as a market category. The central thesis: the new class boundary will run not through access to knowledge, but through the capacity to hold one's consciousness apart from the machine. This is not a call to resistance, but a stocktaking of the horizon and a positioning of professorial dignity once the old contract between the individual, the university, and the market has been broken.

Something worth considering?

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol128/iss3/4/

The Last Human Question: Generative AI's Existential Threat to Consensus and Law

The true risk of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is not that the toasters will rise up. It is that AI will be competent to perform human tasks and indifferent to human welfare. The risk is that we will be outcompeted by generative automated processes that create output similar to ours (although never the same, as this Article explains), but which need none of the outputs of the economy for food, shelter, or human flourishing. Further, a more precise and existential description of the threat is that generative AI will disrupt and crowd out humanity’s evolutionary superpower, our ability to generate agreement on how to live together—law. Generative AI disrupts our ability to generate consensus through the medium of meaning, culture, and language. As generative AI spams the channel, it drowns out human voices and human-constructed meaning. This Article describes how AI threatens our ability to create legal consensus, and proposes specific interventions to keep the question of how we live together—the last human question—one that permits human thriving.

Better snooping the AI way!

https://aisel.aisnet.org/asac2026/4/

Online Privacy in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence systems are fundamentally transforming online privacy. Unlike earlier digital technologies that collected and processed data in relatively predictable ways, AI can infer sensitive personal attributes from seemingly innocuous information, reconfigure data across contexts, and generate new personal data without direct user disclosure. This paper investigates how these capabilities reshape established privacy challenges and whether existing protective frameworks remain viable. Drawing on systematic review of literature spanning behavioural economics, computer science, and management research published from 2015 onward, we examine the evolution of online privacy from the post Web 2.0 era through the emergence of LLMs. Part I synthesizes what is known about online privacy prior to AI, examining behavioural gaps between stated preferences and actual disclosure, interface level manipulation through dark patterns and market constraints that limit choice. Part II examines how AI reshapes this baseline, analysing new and amplified risks, user perception and behavioural impacts, and governance limits in both legal and market contexts. Our analysis yields several significant findings. AI does not create entirely new privacy problems but recombines and amplifies existing ones, with approximately 93% of documented AI privacy incidents involving harms uniquely enabled or magnified by AI capabilities. User behaviour is shaped by anthropomorphism, personalization, and cross cultural factors that challenge assumptions of universal privacy preferences. Privacy research remains fragmented. We conclude that market mechanisms or existing regulatory frameworks fail to provide adequate protection against potential AI harms. Moving forward requires integrated approaches combining technical standards, regulatory constraints, market interventions, and recognition of privacy as a collective good rather than merely an individual preference]

I wonder how their database got loaded…

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/05/29/ice-awards-bi2-25m-contract-for-1570-biometric-scanners/5248733

ICE to keep an eye on your eyes under $25M biometric scanner deal

If you thought US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s widespread use of face recognition apps was a privacy violation, you’re about to get eye-rate over a new $25 million contract.

According to a largely unreported contract summary published last week by ICE parent agency the Department of Homeland Security, US immigration cops have doled out about $25.1 million to a company called Bi2 Technologies for 1,570 biometric recognition devices able to identify people through fingerprints, iris scans, and facial recognition.

Additional procurement data indicates that the devices can be used in the field in both mobile and stationary configurations, and they provide ICE agents with access to Bi2’s Inmate Recognition and Identification System (IRIS), which matches biometrics to a database of more than five million booking, arrest, and incarceration records from 47 US states. The Bi2 system is also able to access driver’s license and vehicle plate info.

The deal was made without seeking any competing bids, and ICE justified the sole-source acquisition by pointing not only to Bi2’s capabilities being “unmatched by any competitor,” but also to a contract from last year in which it paid the company $4.6 million for what now appears to have been a one-year trial run of its technology on a much smaller scale.

Sounds like a programming error to me.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/llms-believe-false-statements-even-after-explicit-warnings-that-theyre-false/

LLMs believe false statements even after explicit warnings that they’re false

Imagine a kid who grows up reading history books where every page is stamped “WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LYING.” You’d expect them to come away skeptical, or at least uncertain. New research on so-called “negation neglect” finds that LLMs in a roughly analogous situation don’t behave that way. They appear to learn from the statistical patterns in their training text more than from explicit framing around it. Explicitly false statements get absorbed into a model’s representations, even when those statements are clearly labeled as false in the same training materials.

Still ahead of the Feds.

https://fpf.org/blog/sb-5-in-five-what-to-know-about-connecticuts-new-ai-law/

SB 5 in Five: What to Know About Connecticut’s New AI Law

Connecticut’s SB 5 fits a lot of AI obligations into a small bill number. This week, Governor Lamont (D) signed the 39-section bill into law, creating new requirements across several fast-moving areas of AI policy, including companion chatbots, automated employment decision tools (AEDTs), social media, and provenance data. The law also includes provisions related to frontier AI whistleblower protections, AI-related layoff notices, and planning for a state AI regulatory sandbox, making it one of the broader state AI packages enacted this year. The law’s provisions phase in over time, with effective dates ranging from October 2026 to January 2028.

Already out of date…

https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf

2025 Internet Crime Report

I do it because they do it. (Everyone must disarm or no one will disarm)

https://thenextweb.com/news/mistral-mensch-defends-ai-warfare-pope-rebuttal

Mistral’s Arthur Mensch directly rebuts Pope Leo on AI in warfare

Arthur Mensch, the chief executive of French AI startup Mistral, pushed back directly on Thursday against Pope Leo XIV’s call to “disarm AI,” arguing that European companies cannot afford to step back from defence-AI work when adversaries are actively deploying the technology.

The remarks, made three days after the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s first encyclical, mark one of the most direct corporate responses yet to what has rapidly become the Catholic Church’s most consequential intervention on AI.

“We’re all for peace,” Mensch said, “but if you look at our rivals and adversaries in the world, they’re using artificial intelligence. As long as we have adversaries that are threatening, and they are threatening, we do need to have our own capabilities.”

Boiling frogs… (We can, therefore we must!)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/more-license-plate-reader-mission-creep-school-residency-verification-background

More License Plate Reader Mission Creep: School Residency Verification, Background Checks, and Noise Complaints

… Law enforcement's talking points—often scripted by the company itself trumpet their role in solving high-stakes crimes. But the data reveals a different story. What they're not saying is that ALPRs are also frequently used for extremely low-level investigations, such as verifying whether a student lives within a particular school zone. In some cases, police have even used this tech to conduct employment background checks and investigations into loud music complaints. Recently, a motorcyclist was even targeted  for simply holding a cell phone while riding.

The reach of this ALPR surveillance is amplified by the nature of the indiscriminate sharing these technologies encourage. Most agencies choose to share broadly, often as part of a nationwide pool, making it common for a single city's system to be searched hundreds of thousands of times each month. By analyzing these "network audit logs," privacy advocates and journalists have uncovered evidence of the technology being used to surveil protesters, abortion-seekers, immigrants, and even ethnic Roma populations. 

Isn’t it obvious?

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937028/military-ai-warfare-red-lines?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6ImpLWjdveFNldTIiLCJwIjoiL2FpLWFydGlmaWNpYWwtaW50ZWxsaWdlbmNlLzkzNzAyOC9taWxpdGFyeS1haS13YXJmYXJlLXJlZC1saW5lcyIsImV4cCI6MTc4MDIzMDU2OSwiaWF0IjoxNzc5Nzk4NTY5fQ.P9eUlF5lyJf3vyQeS1RDtAe2S6jPLgtexCBJV_W9bdw&utm_medium=gift-link

AI warfare is already here

Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon highlights the risks of autonomous warfare — but obscures just how close it is.

Making fake seem real. (Who do you sue?)

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/fake-journals-using-real-professors-names-ai-generated-papers-rcna265479

Fake academic journals are publishing AI-generated papers under real professors’ names

Online academic journals falsely attributed articles, likely written by AI, to several professors, who say the fiasco is a warning about the future of scientific knowledge.