Andrew R. Randall Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Author of "Privacy's Blueprint" (2018) and co-author of "Breached!" (2022). Posting mainly about privacy, tech and the law.
Listen, if you can't trust the People of the Internet with your tool that was seemingly hand-tailored to cause chaos and harm, who can you trust?
Joseph CoxNew from 404 Media: Google Earth has introduced an AI feature that lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images. In our own tests, we added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. This is a misinformation time bomb, will 100% be abused www.404media.co/google-earth...
Friends don't let friends create friends.
Maggie Harrison DupréNEW: A PR firm used at least 15 fake personas — equipped with fake emails, fake websites, and in some cases, fake AI-generated faces — to send me dozens of pitch emails about its (very real) clients. Those clients told me they had no idea this was happening. futurism.com/artificial-i...
Dream job alert!
Jake SnowCOME WORK at the ACLU! @aclu-norcal.bsky.social is hiring attorneys to work on tech and civil rights (my team) and the criminal legal/immigration system. These folks will work at the cutting edge of legal and policy efforts in California and beyond. Apply here: www.aclunorcal.org/jobs/staff-a...
I'm guessing this is not headed anywhere good.
Andy GreenbergScam researchers told a Claude agent and human "scammers" to text test subjects and build a relationship. After a week, subjects said they trusted the AI more than the human and almost half were willing to install an app at its request. Almost none detected it was AI. www.wired.com/story/ai-sca...
All watched over by machines of loving grace.
Futurism"Tired after a long day but want to give your kids a special bedtime story?"
It was sort of amazing that the robot.txt approach worked as well as it did for as long as it did. Thanks to AI, now it's just Exhibit #8,742 on why we can't have nice things.
TechCrunchPatreon is strengthening its defenses against AI scraping by working with Cloudflare to block bots that train AI models on creators’ content without permission. The move marks a shift away from relying on websites using robots.txt alone to actively block unauthorized AI training.
Wild story from @kashhill.bsky.social depicting how the AI Slop phenomenon is getting worse & how platforms encourage it. AI Slop is not harmless. It exploits attention, degrades labor & expertise, distorts our discourse & collective knowledge, & eviscerates trust. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/t...
Someone Used A.I. to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me. I Don’t Recommend Reading It. (Gift Article)Someone used A.I. to write my biography. Thousands more of those books are polluting Amazon. Who is behind all this drivel?www.nytimes.comIf you build a surveillance infrastructure, people will use it to surveil.
Joseph CoxNew: cops are using Flock to track people, not cars. We reviewed Flock search data and found many, many cases of cops searching for people based on their appearance, race, tattoos, etc. Some searches are so vague like "tall man" that innocent people likely swept up www.404media.co/how-cops-use...
Seems like a whole submarket dedicated to hiding the fact you're using a technology would be a big sign to quit making this technology.
GizmodoSmart Glasses Now Have 'Privacy Kits' to Protect You From Getting Punched in the Face https://gizmodo.com/smart-glasses-now-have-privacy-kits-to-protect-you-from-getting-punched-in-the-face-2000781837
If you do this to me after I die, I am going to haunt you.
Hypervisible"The same way you might prompt it to say, 'Talk to me like Shakespeare,' you can say, 'Talk to me like my grandfather — here are some details about how he acted.'"
How AI destroys institutions.
Anna Kornbluh"By shortening the time between asking a question+getting an answer these tools are actually undermining curiosity — + paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world. Curiosity requires a gap between what you want to know+what you find out." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/o...