ANO—THER. ● NEWS

Privacy

Surveillance, tracking, recording devices and what happens to personal data.

Illustration for the Anthropic activist monitoring story
privacypolicy

Anthropic pays a risk firm to flag protests against it in real time

The American Prospect reported on September 9, 2026 that Anthropic contracts the risk detection firm Samdesk for real-time alerts about protests. Anthropic's Global Security Operations Center manager Keon Ellison described a case in which Samdesk gave roughly 60 minutes of warning that protest organizers had moved their timeline, letting the company reroute a traveling executive through a hotel service entrance. Anthropic has advertised an enterprise intelligence specialist role paying 180,000 to 230,000 dollars covering geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime and activism. The company told the Wall Street Journal in July that it tracks behavior through a person-of-interest process. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect's request for comment.

Illustration for the OpenAI training data and private chats story
privacyresearch

A mathematician says OpenAI's answer about his private chats was evasive

Andreas Thom, a group theorist at TU Dresden, published a three-part account on Mathstodon after OpenAI announced on August 1, 2026 that its model had constructed the first known non-sofic group, settling a question Mikhail Gromov posed 27 years earlier. The central step of that proof leans on a 2019 paper by Gabor Kun and Thom. Thom and a colleague had spent months working the problem inside ChatGPT. He emailed OpenAI researchers Mark Sellke and Sebastien Bubeck asking whether those exchanges entered training data and whether the system could reach them during the proof. Sellke replied with one line, that did not happen. Thom argues the answer covers only the second question and calls it unjustifiably broad and dishonest in hindsight.

Illustration for the Border Patrol predictive targeting story
privacypolicy

A Border Patrol unit uses financial data to pick who gets pulled over

404 Media reported on a Border Patrol program in which teams review law-enforcement-sensitive databases, including financial activity, and pass leads to local police, who then stop drivers on unrelated pretexts such as an obstructed license plate. The outlet identified teams operating in the Spokane and Laredo sectors. 404 Media said it found no case in which the program surfaced an already-committed crime.

Illustration for the Flock camera reinstallation story
privacypolicy

Flock reinstalled cameras a California city had removed

Grass Valley police ended their Flock contract in August over data collection and privacy concerns and physically removed the license plate cameras. Over the weekend residents spotted a utility crew reinstalling them. Flock says its automated maintenance system saw the cameras go offline, treated that as equipment failure and generated replacement work orders on its own. Police are removing the cameras a second time.

Illustration for the police and Meta smart glasses story
privacyproducts

US police fear Meta glasses could secretly record them

US law enforcement is worried that Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses could be used to covertly record officers. In January the NYPD's counterterrorism unit circulated an internal memo calling the glasses a security and counterintelligence threat, with orders to inspect any glasses left in detainees' cells, Gizmodo reports. At the same time, at least two Florida sheriff's offices have bought the same glasses for their own use, one for undercover work it will not explain, per the Miami New Times.

The wrapped Toyota Yaris from the noRecognition test
privacyculture

An AI-generated car wrap kept Flock cameras from classifying a Yaris

Cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen's noRecognition project generates patterns designed to confuse the computer vision behind surveillance systems. Working with Donut Media, he covered a 2009 Toyota Yaris in the pattern and drove it past a Flock camera at DEF CON in Las Vegas: the camera records, but the software struggles to classify what it sees. Swearingen says the patterns defeated 11 open-source surveillance algorithms and reportedly also confuse Axon body cams and Clearview AI.

Illustration for the Meta glasses camera shutdown story
privacyproducts

Meta disabled the camera on thousands of glasses over a taped-over light

Meta VP of wearables Alex Himel told Semafor on September 1, 2026 that a recent software update detects a covered or removed recording LED on Meta glasses and disables the camera. Meta estimates under 0.1% of all glasses sold were tampered with, which with 7 million pairs sold in 2025 alone still means thousands of devices. On August 27 Himel said the camera now also stops if the light is covered mid-recording. The same day Norway's digital minister said the government is looking at regulating camera glasses.

Illustration for the SweepLED hidden camera detector story
privacyresearch

A $7 phone clip-on finds hidden cameras with 94% accuracy

Researchers at KAIST, the National University of Singapore and Singapore Management University, led by Professor Han Jun, announced SweepLED on September 2, 2026. A clip-on with multiple LEDs lights an object from different angles while the phone camera records the reflections, and a deep learning model tells a camera lens apart from ordinary reflective surfaces. In tests on 30 types of common objects it reached about 94% accuracy in under 5 seconds per object, works on cameras that are switched off, and the components cost under $7. It is not yet commercialized.

Demo photo of the Digital Camouflage shirt with detection boxes on everyone except the wearer
privacyculture

This shirt makes you invisible to AI cameras

Berlin artist Simon Weckert built Digital Camouflage, a shirt whose intense colors and overlapping shapes break the visual features object-detection models use to connect a head, limbs and torso into one person. He made it in response to the AI video surveillance pilot at Berlin's Kottbusser Tor and shot the demo at that station. In his demonstrations with the open-source YOLO detection system, pedestrians around the wearer are boxed and labeled while the wearer goes unmarked. Weckert says it is not guaranteed against every system and frames the project as commentary on how easily automated vision breaks.

Illustration for the Sanders and Flock surveillance story
policyprivacy

Bernie Sanders says he will introduce a bill to ban Flock cameras

On August 27, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders announced he will introduce legislation to ban Flock Safety's AI-powered surveillance cameras, which he says number more than 120,000 across over 6,000 US communities. The bill has not been introduced yet. House Republicans separately filed a bill to bar the federal government from buying Flock cameras, and Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into the company's data practices.

Illustration for the Australian smart glasses import ban story
policyprivacy

Australia may freeze imports of 'pervert' smart glasses for a year

Australia's Greens are introducing a Senate bill for a 12-month freeze on importing smart glasses and other wearable recording devices, with carve-outs for accessibility uses. Independent senators David Pocock and Kate Chaney back the move. The trigger was a flood of cheap camera glasses: Kmart's in-house model at 89 Australian dollars sold out across the country within days, and basic models sell for as little as $40. Critics call the devices 'pervert glasses'; Electronic Frontiers Australia reports misuse in gyms and on beaches.

Illustration for the Flock camera backlash story
privacyculture

Americans are cheering the people tearing down Flock cameras

The Verge reports that destroying Flock Safety license plate readers has grown into a national movement. The FlockStats tracker counts 162 cameras destroyed, and DeFlock logged more than 20 cities and counties dropping Flock contracts in July 2026 alone, the most in a single month since tracking began in 2021. Under a report about a West Virginia man's arrest for cutting down cameras, commenters volunteered alibis. The backlash is bipartisan and openly celebrated.

Illustration for the Flock officer plate searches story
privacypolicy

A Florida officer searched his wife's plate in Flock 717 times

Christopher Goodson, 31, of the Haines City Police Department in Florida was arrested this week on charges of official misconduct and computer offenses. Investigators say that between September 1, 2024 and June 30, 2026 he entered his estranged wife's license plate into the Flock license plate reader database 717 times, including 280 times in September 2025 alone, using a department-issued laptop and phone on and off duty; she was not part of any investigation. He is charged, not convicted. Separately, HaveIBeenFlocked.com launched with a searchable archive of publicly obtained Flock audit logs covering nearly 242 million searches of more than 4.6 million plates between December 2021 and July 2026. Flock operates more than 120,000 cameras and connected devices.

Illustration for the Meta glasses courtroom ban story
policyprivacy

Meta's smart glasses are banned from every court in England

His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed on August 11, 2026 that Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses fall under the standing ban on recording devices in courts and tribunals in England and Wales; the glasses are confiscated at the entrance and returned on exit. The urgency traces to a January case before ICC Judge Raquel Agnello KC, in which businessman Laimonas Jakstys gave evidence wearing smart glasses connected to his phone, which began broadcasting a coaching voice aloud in court. The judge rejected his evidence in its entirety as unreliable and untruthful; his claim that the voice was ChatGPT was found to lack any credibility.

Illustration for the noRecognition adversarial pattern story
privacyresearch

An adversarial wrap hid a Toyota from Flock cameras

Security researcher Bill Swearingen built noRecognition, a reinforcement learning system that generates adversarial patterns. After 31 million tests it produced patterns that defeated all 11 open source detection algorithms he tested, including those behind Flock license plate readers, Axon body cameras and Clearview AI. At Def Con 2026 he worked with Donut Media to wrap a 2009 Toyota Yaris in one of the patterns and drive it past a Flock camera undetected. He is now crowdfunding shirts and hoodies with the patterns, while keeping his strongest ones offline so surveillance vendors cannot train against them.

Illustration for the Apple smart glasses story
productsprivacy

Apple targets 2027 for smart glasses built around privacy

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on July 26, 2026 that Apple plans to unveil its first smart glasses at WWDC in June 2027, with shipments targeted for late 2027. The open question inside Apple is the camera: drop it entirely, or restrict it so it cannot capture user-initiated photos and video at all, serving only as the eyes of Siri's visual intelligence. Apple is expected to position the glasses directly against Meta's Ray-Bans on privacy.

Illustration for the Instagram smart glasses ban story
privacypolicy

Instagram will ban covert smart glasses footage of strangers

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced that accounts posting covert footage of strangers filmed with Meta's Ray-Ban glasses will be banned, after a wave of pickup and prank videos filmed people, mostly women, in public without consent. Two accounts with more than a million followers each have already been deactivated. Meta also says the glasses' camera will now shut off automatically if the recording indicator light is tampered with.

Illustration for the Muse Image privacy story
privacyproducts

Meta's Muse Image can use your photos by default

Muse Image, Meta's image generator inside Meta AI, WhatsApp and Instagram, lets anyone @ mention a public Instagram account and generate AI images based on that person's photos, with public adult accounts opted in by default and no notification when your likeness is used. Opting out is not retroactive: already-generated images stay. The opt-out lives in Instagram Settings under Sharing and reuse (per TechCrunch, July 9, 2026); private accounts and users under 18 are excluded automatically.