Yeah, but did they hit them hard enough?

https://pogowasright.org/california-fines-data-broker-for-first-time-under-privacy-law/

California Fines Data Broker for First Time Under Privacy Law

Cassandre Coyer reports:

California’s privacy agency hit data broker LocateSmarter LLC with a $116,490 penalty for making it difficult for online users to opt out of the sale of their personal information.

Tuesday’s fine marks the agency’s first action for violations of both the state’s privacy and data broker laws: the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Delete Act.

The Iowa-based company didn’t register as a data broker despite operating as such, according to CalPrivacy. It also required consumers to hand over the last four digits of their Social Security numbers before being able to stop the sale of their personal data, the agency said.

LocateSmarter collected individuals’ names, driver’s licenses, and dates of birth, as well as information about employment, bankruptcy, and litigation, the agency said.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Factual or farcical?

https://www.bespacific.com/authentication-verification-and-the-fight-for-facts-in-the-ai-age/

Holding the Line – Authentication, Verification, and the Fight for Facts in the AI Age

Report by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP): “Almost anything can now be generated with artificial intelligence: photographs, audio, video, documents, entire websites. As synthetic content becomes cheaper and more convincing, and as verifying what we see online grows harder, how do we sustain an information ecosystem in which facts can still be established and trusted? In this report, we identify the challenges brought to the information ecosystem by the increased accessibility of generative AI. We start from the premise that verification, authentication, and transparency are key pillars of online information integrity. We then describe how this emerging ecosystem challenges the trustworthiness of facts from the perspective of information producers, consumers, and intermediaries. Next, we turn to a discussion of potential interventions that can address the challenge of AI-mediated information integrity. These interventions are not exhaustive, but they represent the issues raised by participants drawn from a cross-section of journalists, researchers, and technologists who participated in an in-person workshop held at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in early June 2026. This report is intended to serve as a bridge across different actors in this complex information ecosystem: newsroom engineers, investigative and open-source reporters and editors, verification tool builders, independent journalists, policy makers, researchers, and media platforms. We aim to surface the primary challenges — and imagined interventions — to work towards a more resilient information future together”