Author: Frank Salvato
European privacy regulators have imposed a €403 million penalty—roughly $463 million—on Google after concluding that its handling of users’ location information violated the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which serves as Google’s lead EU privacy regulator because the company’s European headquarters are in Ireland, examined practices involving Web & App Activity, Location History, and Android’s Location Accuracy feature between May 25, 2018, and February 4, 2020. Regulators found problems involving lawfulness, fairness, transparency, accountability, and how long some location information was retained. The DPC said users could have been unaware that location information was being…
President Donald Trump’s September 24 state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping will bring some of America’s most influential technology executives directly into the orbit of high-level U.S.-China diplomacy. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Apple executive Tim Cook and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon are expected to attend as Washington and Beijing wrestle with artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductor exports, technology security and market access. Their presence underscores how closely American economic power is now tied to national-security policy: the companies developing AI models and the chips powering them increasingly sit at the center of strategic competition between the…
A Florida woman spent 13 days behind bars facing eight felony charges after investigators focused on automated license-plate-reader data that placed her black Dodge Durango near a deadly Interstate 4 crash. Lindsey Brooke Isaacs was ultimately cleared after a reinvestigation found her vehicle lacked crash damage and other evidence pointed toward a maroon Durango with a different partial plate. Prosecutors dropped every charge against Isaacs and authorities arrested another woman, who has pleaded not guilty. Flock Safety says its technology provided an investigative lead rather than identifying a perpetrator and argues that its data actually helped establish Isaacs’ innocence. The…
Newly unsealed material in a major copyright lawsuit alleges that employees and executives at OpenAI and Microsoft recognized that generative AI could pose an “existential threat” to publishers even as the companies continued developing systems trained on enormous quantities of news content. Internal communications cited in the litigation describe AI products as increasingly substituting for publishers and warn of a “doom loop” in which AI reduces traffic and revenue to the very organizations producing the information AI systems depend upon. The filings also allege large-scale copying of copyrighted and paywalled material, while Microsoft’s own data reportedly showed steep reductions in…
A $40 million arbitration award against Uber is raising consequential questions about the responsibilities rideshare companies bear for passenger safety and the conduct of drivers operating through their platforms. Retired California Judge Richard A. Stone found Uber and driver Vu Tran jointly liable for the death of 23-year-old Emily Normandin-Parker, who was struck and killed on State Route 73 in Orange County in August 2023 after Tran stopped at a freeway gore point and left Normandin-Parker and her friend, Luna Moore, there following a dispute involving a cleaning fee. Stone rejected Uber’s contention that its status as a technology platform…
Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall from celebrated philanthropist to convicted fraudster is casting renewed attention on the Effective Altruism network that helped shape today’s artificial-intelligence safety movement. Before FTX collapsed, Bankman-Fried participated in Anthropic’s $580 million 2022 financing round, while other Effective Altruism-aligned donors financed AI-safety research, nonprofit organizations and journalism initiatives. The resulting web of overlapping relationships has prompted critics to question whether a relatively concentrated group of donors and institutions has gained outsized influence over how AI risks are researched, reported and ultimately regulated. Those financial connections are documented, although allegations that the network deliberately manipulates public opinion remain contested…
Crusoe, the AI infrastructure company behind the massive Abilene, Texas, data-center complex serving OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, is expanding in the opposite direction with factory-built modular data centers that can be transported by truck and deployed wherever sufficient power is available. Its new Spark units are designed to bring AI computing online faster and potentially more cheaply than conventional construction, particularly as utilities, labor shortages, permitting, and rising costs constrain large projects. The strategy comes as Crusoe raises $3.9 billion at a $30.9 billion valuation and positions itself to capitalize on growing demand for AI inference—the everyday running of trained models—while…
Uber is eliminating 390 jobs across four Bay Area offices, including 253 positions at its San Francisco headquarters and another 137 in Sunnyvale, providing the clearest local picture yet of the company’s previously announced 3,300-job global restructuring. The layoffs, scheduled to take effect November 2, are part of an effort to strip away management layers, consolidate teams and redirect resources toward growth, technology and autonomous vehicles. The company is simultaneously tightening its remote-work policy, concentrating employees in major hubs such as San Francisco and New York and allowing only about 1% of its workforce to remain fully remote. The cuts…
A small group of artificial-intelligence critics gathered outside the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, warning that increasingly capable AI systems are being deployed faster than society can establish meaningful safeguards. The demonstration unfolded as some of the technology industry’s most influential executives debated AI safety inside the conference, exposing a widening disagreement over whether advanced systems require stronger outside oversight or whether technical safeguards developed by companies themselves are sufficient. Protesters raised concerns about autonomous AI agents, privacy, employment disruption and the possibility that increasingly independent systems could behave in unintended ways. Those concerns have gained additional attention as AI…
Artificial intelligence may exist in the digital world, but the infrastructure powering it is decidedly physical. AI requires enormous data centers filled with high-performance processors, electrical equipment, cooling systems, backup generators, and miles of supporting infrastructure. And as communities across America are discovering, those facilities can require substantial amounts of water. That raises a straightforward question: Why should we use drinking-quality water to cool computers when reclaimed wastewater can potentially do the job? If America intends to lead the world in artificial intelligence—and it should—we need to confront the infrastructure requirements that come with that ambition. The answer should not…