Apple Inc must “immediately make clear” what data it collects from users of its products and for what purposes, Germany’s justice minister was quoted as saying by Der Spiegel magazine on Saturday.
“Users of iPhones and other GPS devices must be aware of what kind of information about them is being collected,” Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told the German weekly.
According to Der Spiegel, the minister’s criticism was aimed at changes Apple has made in its privacy policy whereby the company can collect data on the geographic location of the users of its products — albeit anonymously.
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she expected Apple to “open its databases to German data protection authorities” and clarify what data it was collecting and how long it was saving the data.
An Apple spokesman said he could not comment on the report.
Germany has some of the toughest privacy laws in the world as a result of its experience with state surveillance systems once put in place by the Nazis and the former East German Stasi secret police.
The German consumer protection minister made headlines earlier this month when she said she would quit Facebook over what she called privacy law violations.
Meanwhile, after an audit requested by Germany, Google Inc in May acknowledged it had been for years mistakenly collecting personal data sent by consumers over wireless networks.
The justice minister said it would be “unthinkable” for Apple to create personality- or location-based user profiles.
“Apple has the obligation to properly implement the transparency so often promised by (CEO) Steve Jobs,” she said.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.