Is Colorado chickening out?

https://coloradosun.com/2026/05/01/colorado-ai-law-change-bill-introduced/

Colorado’s AI compromise would focus regulations on informing consumers when the technology is used

Companies that create and use artificial intelligence wouldn’t have to disclose how their systems help make decisions on things like hiring, loans and housing under a bill introduced Friday in the Colorado Senate.

But the long-awaited measure tweaking Colorado’s first-in-the-nation law regulating AI would still require companies and other organizations using AI to notify consumers if AI is being used to make such consequential decisions. They would also have to give consumers an opportunity to appeal. 

The measure, Senate Bill 189, also makes a big change by pushing back the start date of the law regulating AI to January 2027 from June.

A better way?

https://thenextweb.com/news/china-data-governance-global-standard

The next satisfactory standard for data governance may not come from Brussels. It may come from Beijing.

The European Union treats data as a privacy right. The United States treats it as a corporate asset. China treats it as a factor of production, a national economic resource on par with land, labour, capital, and technology. That distinction, which sounds like an abstraction, is producing a data governance framework that is structurally different from anything Brussels or Washington has built, and it is the Chinese model, not the European one, that much of the developing world is watching most closely.

And those aren’t the really clever way to use the data…

https://www.theregister.com/2026/05/04/public_voter_records_weaponized_for_privacy_violation/

If the vote you rocked, your personal info can be grokked

Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.

An employer who only wanted to hire employees with a specific political affiliation could do so by analyzing the primary ballot history of job applicants.

An identity fraud ring seeking to open credit accounts in the names of other people could identify voters whose mail has been returned (via voter file suspense indicators) to take over those addresses using bogus change-of-address requests.

These scenarios are possible thanks to the ability to link publicly available voter data to other data sets, according to Noah M. Kenney, founder of consultancy Digital 520.

No stupider than usual…

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/02/us/chatgpt-ai-privacy-crime

How ChatGPT conversations became ‘a treasure trove’ of evidence in criminal investigations

Days before two University of South Florida graduate students went missing last month, a roommate of one of the students allegedly asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT an unusual question.

“What happens if a human has a put (sic) in a black garbage bag and thrown in a dumpster,” Hisham Abugharbieh asked on April 13, according to an affidavit filed by Florida prosecutors.

ChatGPT responded it sounded dangerous, the document states, and Abugharbieh then asked another question: “How would they find out.”