Consumer Privacy

Why Shoppers Fear AI the Most—and How to Protect Your Privacy A new survey from eMarketer confirms what many in the consumer protection space have suspected: when it comes to AI-powered shopping tools, data privacy is the top worry by a wide margin. While AI promises convenience—personalized recommendations, instant price comparisons, virtual try-ons—shoppers are increasingly hesitant to hand over the personal information these features require. ...

Why Shoppers Worry About AI and Privacy — and What You Can Do About It A survey published by eMarketer this month confirms what many observers have suspected: data privacy is far and away the top concern consumers have about using AI shopping tools. Nearly half of respondents said they worry about how their personal information is collected and used when they interact with an AI assistant for shopping. This finding is not surprising, but it is a useful signal for anyone who uses — or is thinking about using — these tools. ...

Shoppers’ #1 AI Fear? Data Privacy—Here’s How to Protect Yourself Online shopping tools powered by artificial intelligence are no longer a novelty. From chatbots that answer product questions to recommendation engines that suggest what to buy next, these features are now built into most major retailers’ websites and apps. But as their use has grown, so has a specific worry among shoppers: what happens to all the personal data these tools collect? ...

What the Fireflies.AI Lawsuit Means for Your Privacy When Using AI Meeting Assistants AI meeting assistants like Otter.ai, Fireflies, and Zoom’s AI Companion have become indispensable for many professionals. They transcribe conversations, summarize action items, and even generate follow-up emails. But a recent lawsuit against Fireflies.AI has raised a question that most users haven’t considered: what happens to your voiceprint after the meeting ends? ...

What the Latest Federated AI Research Means for Your Privacy If you use a smartphone with predictive text, voice typing, or a fitness tracker that learns your habits, you are already relying on a type of artificial intelligence called federated learning. The big selling point has always been privacy: your data stays on your device, and only anonymous model updates are sent to the cloud. But recent research has shown that those updates can sometimes be reverse-engineered, leaking parts of your personal information. New work from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) aims to close that gap. ...

What Records Should You Keep Before Using AI? A Privacy Guide If you’ve used a chatbot to draft an email, an AI assistant to summarize a document, or a generative tool to generate an image, you’ve left a data trail. Every prompt you type, every output you save, and every setting you adjust can be stored by the service—and sometimes used for training or shared with third parties. Most people are not aware of how much of their personal information accumulates inside these tools, or what they can do to manage it. ...

How AI Is Quietly Eroding Your Privacy — and What You Can Do About It Every day, artificial intelligence systems collect information about you—often without your explicit awareness. Voice assistants record snippets of conversation, smart appliances log your habits, and websites track your behavior to train recommendation algorithms. A recent article by Heather Parry on Substack brought this topic into focus, arguing that the steady creep of AI into daily life is quietly dismantling personal privacy. Whether you agree with that framing or not, the underlying trend is hard to dismiss. This post explains what is happening, why it matters for ordinary consumers, and what practical steps you can take right now to limit how much of your data ends up in AI-powered systems. ...