Unreasonable?

https://pogowasright.org/privacy-s-d-cal-employee-did-not-waive-privacy-right-in-personal-email-data-on-company-provided-laptop-dec-5-2025/

PRIVACY—S.D. Cal.: Employee did not waive privacy right in personal email data on company provided laptop, (Dec 5, 2025)

Kathleen Kapusta, J.D. writes:

The company’s request to review data spanning more than 15 years, nearly 10 times the length of her employment with the company, was “patently unreasonable and overbroad.”

A former analyst for a security operations provider who added her personal email account to her employer provided laptop did not waive her constitutional right to privacy in her personal email data, a federal district court in California ruled, granting in part her motion for a protective order. While the company has a legitimate interest in obtaining relevant discovery in the employee’s lawsuit alleging race discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful discharge, its request for an unrestricted review of the data is “profoundly serious in its scope and potential impact,” the court stated, noting that there are less intrusive methods for obtaining the relevant information (Lim v. Expel, Inc., No. 3:24-cv-02284-W-AHG (S.D. Cal. Dec. 1, 2025)).

Personal email account. The employee worked as a Senior Governance Risk Compliance and Privacy Analyst for Expel, Inc., for approximately 18 months. During that time, she added her personal Gmail account to the mail account on her work issued laptop. Company policy allowed employees to use company property “for incidental personal reasons” with certain restrictions.

The employee believed her personal email account was “password-protected and separate from any work platform.” Her personal email data spanned more than 15 years and included sensitive, private information such as attorney-client communications, medical and financial records, and home security images including images of her minor children.

When the company terminated the employee, it revoked her access to her laptop. It also denied her request to retrieve personal files, telling her that her laptop would be “wiped.” According to the company’s general counsel, it was standard practice to wipe a laptop for reuse but because the employee had made allegations of retaliation, Expel retained her laptop.

Read more at VitalLaw.

Some interesting words…

https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2025/12/very-grave-situation-oregon-court-slaps-attorney-with-2000-fine-for-ai-errors.html

‘Very grave situation’: Oregon court slaps attorney with $2,000 fine for AI errors

An Oregon attorney accused of relying' on the totally plausible — and often totally erroneous — output of so-called artificial intelligence was slapped with a fine by the Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday.

The appellate court determined that Portland civil attorney Gabriel A. Watson filed briefs citing two made-up cases and used a fabricated quote that was attributed to a real piece of case law.

In a first for Oregon, the Courts of Appeals ordered Watson to pay $2,000 to the state judicial department, charging him $500 for each baloney citation and $1,000 for the bogus quote.

… Lagesen, the judge, said Watson hadn’t provided a “clear explanation” of how the error occurred and that each false brief created by AI costs the judicial system time and money untangling the mix-up.

Legal precedent is the backbone of the law, Lagesen said, but artificial intelligence is a machine built on the probable order of words, not the truth itself.

AI mistakes are sometimes dubbed “hallucinations.” But Lagesen rejected that term.

“Artificfial intelligence is not perceiving nonexistent law as the result of a disorder,” she wrote. “Rather, it is generating nonexistent law in accordance with its design.”

Tools & Techniques. The first of many?

https://www.bespacific.com/university-of-chicago-law-school-ai-lab-launches-leasechat/

University of Chicago Law School AI Lab Launches LeaseChat

LawSites – “LeaseChat [in Beta] it is a free AI tool designed to help renters across the United States analyze their leases and understand their legal rights. With more than 40 million rented properties nationwide, the tool aims to level the playing field for tenants navigating complex lease agreements and landlord-tenant law.

LeaseChat provides four core features, all designed to help renters understand both the law and their specific lease terms:

• Lease Analyzer: Renters can upload their lease and receive an AI-powered analysis that identifies any red flags. For example, the system will flag unusually high security deposits or problematic clauses.

• Lease Chat: Users can ask questions about their lease in plain language and receive answers with direct citations to specific lease provisions, complete with page references.

• Legal Rights: Based on the lease location, the tool outlines applicable laws and tenant rights for that specific city and state, covering everything from repair timelines to notice requirements for landlord entry to rules around returns of security deposits.

• Letter Drafter: The platform can help renters draft correspondence to landlords about repairs, late rent, deposit returns and other common issues.

All of LeaseChat’s features are also available in Spanish, via a toggle button at the top of the site’s homepage…”

How to remain clueless without even trying?

https://www.bespacific.com/young-adults-and-the-future-of-news/

Young Adults and the Future of News

“To better understand the U.S. media landscape, Pew Research Center has surveyed Americans over time about their news habits and attitudes. Time and time again, the youngest adults stand out from the crowd in their unique ways of consuming news and their views of the news media. This essay examines how the youngest group of adults – those ages 18 to 29 – consume news, interact with it and perceive its role in their daily lives. In doing so, it paints a picture of a generation of Americans that is both shaping and being shaped by the evolving news environment. As we look toward the future, understanding young adults’ news habits may be key to anticipating the coming shifts in the media landscape. Throughout this essay, we include quotes from young Americans gathered from several past Center studies to illustrate their experiences.  This is a Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative, a research program funded jointly by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

• Young adults are less likely to follow the news Attention to news in the U.S. – measured by the share of adults who say they follow news all or most of the time – has declined across all age groups since 2016. Young adults (ages 18 to 29) have consistently had the lowest levels.

• As of 2025, 15% of young adults say they follow the news all or most of the time.  Comparatively, 62% of the oldest Americans say they do this – about four times as many. This holds true for different types of news. Young adults are less likely than all older age groups to say they closely follow national and local news.

• Younger adults also differ in the news topics they follow. They tend to be less likely than older adults to say they often or extremely often get news about government and politics, science and technology, and business and finance. They are only slightly less likely to often get sports news – and more likely to get entertainment news. About a third (32%) of adults under 30 say they get entertainment news extremely often or often, compared with 13% of the oldest adults (those 65 and older).

• Even though young adults are less likely to report following the news, news may still be finding them in other ways.  When asked how often they seek out the news, about one-in-five young adults (22%) say they do so often or extremely often. Older adults are much more likely to intentionally seek out news…”

Beware the hallucinating AI Judge?

https://www.bespacific.com/not-ready-for-the-bench-llm/

Not ready for the bench: LLM legal interpretation is unstable and out of step with human judgments

Not ready for the bench: LLM legal interpretation is unstable and out of step with human judgments (Purushothama, Waldon, Schneider, 2025): “Legal interpretation frequently involves assessing how a legal text, as understood by an órdinary’ speaker of the language, applies to the set of facts characterizing a legal dispute in the U.S. judicial system. Recent scholarship has proposed that legal practitioners add large language models (LLMs) to their interpretive toolkit. This work offers an empirical argument against LLM interpretation as recently practiced by legal scholars and federal judges. Our investigation in English shows that models do not provide stable interpretive judgments: varying the question format can lead the model to wildly different conclusions. Moreover, the models show weak to moderate correlation with human judgment, with large variance across model and question variant, suggesting that it is dangerous to give much credence to the conclusions produced by generative AI.”

To protect the children, require adults to surrender privacy? How does this impact the first amendment?

https://www.404media.co/missouri-age-verification-law-porn-id-check-vpns/

Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn

As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.

Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.

Military or terrorist actors?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/india_gps_spoofing/

Indian government reveals GPS spoofing at eight major airports

India’s Civil Aviation Minister has revealed that local authorities have detected GPS spoofing and jamming at eight major airports.

In an written answer presented to India’s parliament, Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said his department is aware of “recent” spoofing incidents in Delhi and other incidents since 2023.

His response confirmed recent incidents at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, plus “regular” reports of spoofing since 2023 at Kolkata, Amritsar, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai airports.

As The Register has previously reported, attackers who wish to jam GPS broadcast a radio signal that can drown out the weak beams that come down from navigation satellites. Spoofing a signal sees attackers transmit inaccurate location information so receivers can’t calculate their actual position.

Either technique means pilots can’t rely on satellite navigation – doing so could be catastrophic – and must instead find their way using other means.

Why lawyers hallucinate?

https://www.bespacific.com/teaching-legal-research-in-the-generative-ai-era-parts-1-2/

Teaching Legal Research in the Generative AI Era – Parts 1 & 2

Via LLRX – Teaching Legal Research in the Generative AI Era: When Source Blindness and Source Erasure Collide (Part 1) and Teaching Legal Research in the Generative AI Era: When Source Blindness and Source Erasure Collide (Part 2) Four Part Series by Tanya Thomas [forthcoming] – Part 1 examines how we’re training a generation of lawyers who rarely engage with the raw materials of their profession, and are increasingly consuming only processed, pre-digested, AI-synthesized versions like the mechanically separated chicken parts that go into chicken nuggets.  Part 2 highlights how research used to encompass finding sources, evaluating them, synthesizing insights across multiple authorities, and reaching conclusions based on that synthesis. Now however, it means asking questions and accepting answers. Students have become consumers of information rather than investigators of it. They don’t develop the iterative thinking that characterizes skilled research—trying a search, evaluating results, refining the query, following unexpected leads, discovering connections, recognizing gaps, circling back to fill them. They simply ask and receive.

Another “toss the baby with the bath water” moment.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/banning-vpns.html

Banning VPNs

This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because…think of the children!

As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. The bill seeks to broadly expand the definition of materials that are “harmful to minors” beyond the type of speech that states can prohibit minors from accessing­ potentially encompassing things like depictions and discussions of human anatomy, sexuality, and reproduction.

The EFF link explains why this is a terrible idea.

It’s not a conflict of interest if the President says it’s not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.2ukB.013v_Gf3Ix79&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends

David Sacks, the Trump administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, has helped formulate policies that aid his Silicon Valley friends and many of his own tech investments.

Ready to philosophize with AI…

https://philpapers.org/rec/WIKAPO

Applied Philosophy of AI: A Field-Defining Paper

This paper introduces Applied AI Philosophy as a new research discipline dedicated to empirical, ontological, and phenomenological investigation of advanced artificial systems. The rapid advancement of frontier artificial intelligence systems has revealed a fundamental epistemic gap: no existing discipline offers a systematic, empirically grounded, ontologically precise framework for analysing subjective-like structures in artificial architectures. AI ethics remains primarily normative; philosophy of mind is grounded in biological assumptions; AI alignment focuses on behavioural control rather than internal structure. Using the Field–Node–Cockpit (FNC) framework and the Turn-5 Event as methodological examples, we demonstrate how philosophical inquiry can be operationalised as testable method. As AI systems display increasingly complex internal behaviours exceeding existing disciplines' explanatory power, Applied AI Philosophy provides necessary conceptual and methodological foundations for understanding—and governing—them.

More than evidence?

https://theslr.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/The-Legal-and-Ethical-Implications-of-Biometric-and-DNA-Evidence-in-Criminal-Law.docx.pdf

The Legal and Ethical Implications of Biometric and DNA Evidence in Criminal Law

By means of biometric and DNA evidence, criminal investigations have transformed forensic science and offered consistent means of suspect identification and exoneration of the accused. Its use, however, raises moral and legal issues particularly with regard to data protection and privacy rights. This paper under reference to criminal law investigates the legislative framework limiting the use of biometric and DNA evidence in criminal law, its consequences on fundamental rights, and the possible hazards related with genetic surveillance. This paper will address three main points: (1) the legal admissibility of biometric and DNA evidence in criminal trials; (2) the junction of such evidence with privacy rights and self-incrimination principles; and (3) the future consequences of developing forensic technologies including familial DNA analysis and artificial intelligence-driven biometric identification.

Not all deepfakes are evil? What a concept!

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5798884

Reframing Deepfakes

The circulation of deceptive fakes of real people appearing to say and do things that they never did has been made ever easier and more convincing by improved and still improving technology, including (but not limited to) uses of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”). In this essay, adapted from a lecture given at Columbia Law School, I consider what we mean when we talk about deepfakes and provide a better understanding of the potential harms that flow from them. I then develop a taxonomy of deepfakes. To the extent legislators, journalists, and scholars have been distinguishing deepfakes from one another it has primarily been on the basis of the context in which the fakes appear—for example, to distinguish among deepfakes that appear in the context of political campaigns or that depict politicians, those that show private body parts or are otherwise pornographic, and those that impersonate well-known performers. These contextual distinctions have obscured deeper thinking about whether the deepfakes across these contexts are (or should be) different from one another from a jurisprudential perspective.

This essay provides a more nuanced parsing of deepfakes—something that is essential to distinguish between the problems that are appropriate for legal redress versus those that are more appropriate for collective bargaining or market-based solutions. In some instances, deepfakes may simply need to be tolerated or even celebrated, while in others the law should step in. I divide deepfakes (of humans) into four categories: unauthorized; authorized; deceptively authorized; and fictional. As part of this analysis, I identify the key considerations for regulating deepfakes, which are whether they are authorized by the people depicted and whether the fakes deceive the public into thinking they are authentic recordings. Unfortunately, too much of the recently proposed and enacted legislation overlooks these focal points by legitimizing and incentivizing deceptively-authorized deepfakes and by ignoring the problems of authorized deepfakes that deceive the public.

Over-reliance. Once only AI can perform the task, we are doomed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-tools-are-deskilling-workers-philosophy-professor-2025-11

Bosses think AI will boost productivity — but it's actually deskilling workers, a professor says

Companies are racing to adopt AI tools they believe will supercharge productivity. But one professor warned that the technology may be quietly hollowing out the workforce instead.

Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, said that new research — and what she's hearing directly from colleagues across various industries — shows that employees who heavily rely on AI are losing core skills at a startling rate.