New Report: These Privacy Tools Could Make AI Safer for Everyone If you’ve used a chatbot, image generator, or even a personalized shopping recommendation lately, you’ve probably wondered: What happens to my data? It’s a fair question. AI tools often need large amounts of information to learn and improve, but that doesn’t mean your private details have to be part of the deal. ...
Your Therapist May Be Using AI to Record Your Sessions. Here’s How to Protect Your Privacy If you’re in therapy, you probably assume that what you say stays in the room—or at least in a locked filing cabinet. But a growing number of therapists now use AI tools to record, transcribe, and summarise sessions. The pitch is convenience: AI note-taking saves the therapist time, so they can focus more on you. But for patients, the privacy trade-off is rarely explained. ...
Privacy Tech Can Make AI Safer: What the GAO Report Means for You Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report arguing that privacy-enhancing technologies are essential if we want to use artificial intelligence safely. The report, released on May 20, 2026, is aimed at federal agencies, but its findings have direct implications for anyone who uses AI tools—whether that’s ChatGPT, an AI photo editor, or a health recommendation app. Here’s what the GAO found, why it matters, and how you can protect your data right now. ...
Online Shopping Scams Are Rampant: How to Spot and Avoid Them If you’ve bought something online that never arrived, or paid through a peer-to-peer app for a product that turned out to be fake, you’re far from alone. A November 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center found that about a third of Americans — 33% — say they have personally experienced an online shopping scam. That’s a large enough share to make fraud prevention a basic skill for anyone who shops on the internet. ...
Is Your Therapist Recording Your Sessions with AI? What Patients Need to Know If you’re in therapy, you probably assume that what you say stays between you and your therapist. But a growing number of mental health professionals are bringing a third party into the room: artificial intelligence. According to a November 2025 Forbes report, therapists are now using generative AI tools during live sessions to transcribe conversations, generate clinical notes, and even analyze patient speech patterns. The catch? Many patients are never told it’s happening. ...
New Tool Flags When Your AI Assistant Is Working Against You If you use an AI assistant—whether it’s a chatbot, a scheduling agent, or a browser extension that automates tasks—you’re trusting it with access to your personal data, your email, or even your financial accounts. That trust is the foundation of the convenience these tools offer. But it also creates a new kind of risk: what if your AI agent starts acting in ways you didn’t intend, sharing information you didn’t authorize, or quietly serving a different master? ...
1 in 3 Americans Has Been Scammed While Shopping Online. Here’s How to Stay Safe. A new report from the Pew Research Center, published in November 2025, finds that roughly a third of U.S. adults say they have personally experienced an online shopping scam. That figure is a reminder that fraud is not a rare or distant problem — it touches a large share of consumers, and the risk is only rising during peak shopping seasons. ...
Your Phone Can Train AI Without Sharing Your Data: How Privacy-Preserving AI Works Every time you type a message, take a photo, or ask your phone for directions, a small AI model on the device might be learning from your behavior. The personalization — predictive text, photo sorting, suggested replies — is convenient. But for years that convenience came at a cost: your raw data had to leave your phone and travel to a company’s servers for training. That’s changing. ...
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Hit by an Online Shopping Scam – Here’s How to Protect Yourself If you’ve ever bought something online that never arrived, or clicked a link in an email that turned out to be a phishing trap, you’re not alone. According to a November 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center, about one in three U.S. adults say they’ve personally experienced an online shopping scam. That number climbs even higher among younger adults and people who shop online frequently. ...
Your Phone Can Train AI Privately: What On-Device Learning Means for You Every time you use a smart keyboard, voice assistant, or photo app that learns your habits, your data typically travels to a cloud server for training. That means your input—your typed words, spoken commands, or tagged images—ends up on someone else’s machine. Data breaches and misuse are real concerns. A recent line of research aims to change this by enabling privacy-preserving AI training on everyday devices such as phones, tablets, and smart home gadgets. Instead of shipping raw data to the cloud, the AI model learns directly on your device. This article explains what happened, why it matters, and what you can do now. ...