AI

Chrome’s On-Device AI Is Installing Without Your Consent — Here’s How to Stop It If you use Google Chrome, a quiet change may have already landed on your machine. Recent reports from Decrypt, Yahoo Tech, and other outlets reveal that Chrome is silently downloading a roughly 4GB AI model—likely Gemini Nano—onto users’ computers. The model is intended for on‑device AI features, but the installation happens without a clear consent prompt. Even worse, if you delete the model, Chrome quietly puts it back. ...

LegalZoom’s New AI-Powered Virtual Mail: A Privacy Boost for Small Businesses If you run a small business, you know the drill: paper mail piles up, important documents get lost in the stack, and sorting through it all eats into time you’d rather spend on actual work. For remote entrepreneurs and freelancers, the problem is worse – you might not even have a physical office to receive mail at all. ...

Privacy Groups Warn: HUD’s AI Tool Could Expose Your Sensitive Data – What to Know If you receive housing assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), an experimental AI system could soon analyze your personal information – without clear privacy safeguards. That’s why two leading digital rights organizations, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), are urging HUD to abandon the tool before it goes live. ...

AI Is Outpacing Privacy Protections: What the Latest Survey Means for You A new annual global survey from TrustArc, a well-known privacy compliance firm, has drawn attention to a growing imbalance. The survey’s central finding is straightforward: the speed at which consumers and businesses are adopting AI tools is outstripping the privacy protections meant to safeguard personal data. For everyday users — anyone who has typed a question into a chatbot, generated an image online, or used an AI assistant — this gap creates real, practical risks. ...

Privacy Groups Urge HUD to Drop AI Tool That Would Use Your Sensitive Data On May 6, 2026, two prominent digital rights organizations—the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)—sent a letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) asking the agency to abandon a proposed artificial intelligence tool. The tool would rely on sensitive personal data, including financial and medical records, to make decisions about housing assistance. The groups argue it poses serious privacy risks, lacks transparency, and could lead to discrimination. ...

Privacy Groups Warn HUD’s AI Tool Would Put Your Sensitive Data at Risk The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering an artificial-intelligence tool that would analyze sensitive personal data—including income, rental history, and benefit records—to detect fraud and determine program eligibility. Two leading digital-rights organizations, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), have jointly urged HUD to abandon the project, warning that it lacks basic transparency and accountability measures. If you receive housing assistance or rent in federally subsidized housing, this matters to you. ...

MIT’s new method lets you train AI on your phone without sharing your data We’ve gotten used to a trade-off: smarter apps in exchange for shipping personal data to company servers. Your photos help organize your gallery, your typing improves autocorrect—but that data leaves your device, sometimes in ways you might not expect. A team at MIT has published a technique that could tip the balance back toward privacy, making it feasible to train AI models directly on your phone or smart speaker without ever sending raw data to the cloud. ...

Your phone could soon train AI models without sending your personal data anywhere Most people who use a smartphone today have experienced the trade-off: the more you let an app learn from your activity, the better it works—but that often means uploading your photos, messages, or location history to a company’s server. That data can be stored, analyzed, or even leaked. A new technique from MIT researchers could change that equation by making it possible to train AI models directly on your phone, without ever transmitting your raw personal data. ...

Your Phone Can Now Train AI Without Sharing Your Data: MIT’s Privacy Breakthrough Most AI services today work by sending your personal data to cloud servers for processing. Photos you edit, text you type, health data you track—all of it leaves your device to train the models that make those features work. That arrangement has always been a privacy trade-off: better AI in exchange for handing over your data to companies you have to trust. ...

Your Phone Can Now Learn From You Without Sending Data to the Cloud — What MIT’s New Technique Means for Privacy Most of us rely on apps that get smarter over time. Your keyboard predicts what you’ll type next. Your photo app suggests edits. Your voice assistant understands your accent a little better each week. But behind the scenes, those improvements often come at a cost: your personal data is uploaded to company servers, where it’s used to train the AI models. ...