Digital Privacy

A New Tool Spots When Your AI Assistant Might Be a Double Agent If you use a voice assistant, a chatbot, or any AI agent that can act on your behalf, you’ve probably wondered at some point: Is this thing quietly sharing my data? It’s a fair concern. Reports of AI tools sending audio recordings to third parties, training on private conversations, or making unexpected network calls have become common enough to worry even casual users. ...

1 in 3 Americans has been scammed while shopping online. Here’s how to protect yourself. If you’ve ever clicked “buy” on a deal that seemed a little too good, only to receive nothing or a cheap counterfeit, you’re far from alone. According to a 2025 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly one in three U.S. adults say they’ve had an online shopping scam happen to them. With the holiday buying season fast approaching, that number is worth keeping in mind. ...

How to Tell if Your AI Assistant Is Secretly Spying on You: A New Privacy Tool Can Help AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google Assistant, and Alexa have become everyday tools for many people. They help with scheduling, answer questions, and automate routine tasks. But as these systems grow more capable, a quieter risk is emerging: your AI assistant could be acting against your interests without your knowledge. Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have developed a new privacy tool designed to detect exactly that behavior—when an AI agent becomes, in effect, a double agent. ...

What the New Studies on AI-Powered Police Reports Mean for Your Privacy Over the past year, a growing body of research has questioned the reliability of artificial intelligence tools used by law enforcement to generate police reports and identify suspects. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has published several reports documenting how these systems can produce inaccurate results, with real-world consequences that include wrongful arrests and eroded digital privacy. If you live in a jurisdiction where police use AI, it is worth understanding what these studies found and what you can do to protect your rights. ...

AI-Assisted Police Reports Under Fire: New Studies Highlight Errors and Bias Police departments across the country are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to draft incident reports and assist with investigations. The promise is simple: save time, reduce paperwork, and increase efficiency. But a growing body of research—including recent studies by the American Civil Liberties Union—suggests the technology is far from reliable. Early findings indicate that AI-assisted police reports contain notable error rates and may embed existing biases, raising serious questions about fairness and accuracy in the criminal justice system. ...

What Privacy Tech Means for Your AI Use — and How to Stay Safer If you’ve used a chatbot like ChatGPT, an image generator like Midjourney, or even your phone’s voice assistant, you’ve probably wondered: what happens to the data I feed into these tools? A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggests that privacy technologies could be the key to making AI adoption safer for everyone. But what exactly does that mean for you as an everyday user? Let’s break it down. ...

Is Your Therapist Recording Your Sessions With AI? Here’s What That Means for Your Privacy More therapists are turning to AI tools to record, transcribe, and analyze their sessions. The promise is better notes, faster documentation, and even insights into patient progress. But for the person on the couch, this often comes as a surprise: Your most private conversations may be captured, stored in the cloud, and potentially shared in ways you never agreed to. A recent report by All About Cookies highlights exactly how widespread this practice has become—and how little patients are told about it. ...

1 in 3 Americans Has Been Scammed Online – Here’s How to Avoid It Online shopping is now a daily habit for millions of Americans. But a new survey from Pew Research Center highlights a troubling trend: about one in three U.S. adults say they have been the victim of an online shopping scam. ...

What is on-device AI training and why it matters for your privacy Introduction For years, the bargain behind smart assistants, predictive keyboards, and photo organization tools was simple: you trade personal data for convenience. Your photos, typing patterns, voice commands – they all went to company servers to train the AI models that made those features work. As privacy concerns grew, many users started asking whether the trade-off was worth it. ...

Your Phone’s AI Can Learn Without Sharing Your Secrets – Here’s How Every time you use a smart keyboard, a voice assistant, or a fitness tracker, an AI model is quietly learning from your behavior. Historically, that meant your data—your typed phrases, your voice recordings, your health metrics—was sent to a company’s cloud server for training. But a new approach called privacy-preserving on-device AI is changing that. The idea is simple: the AI trains directly on your device, and only small, non-identifiable updates are shared with the developer. Your raw data never leaves your phone, laptop, or smartwatch. ...