Data privacy

SEC

2026-08-06 21:36:03

SEC Bought Access to More Than 1 Billion Airline Records, Raising Questions Over Warrantless Travel Surveillance

Documents obtained by 404 Media through a Freedom of Information Act request show that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission purchased access to a global airline ticketing database containing more than 1 billion records. The data came from Airlines Reporting Corporation, a clearinghouse co-owned by American, Delta, and United that sits between airlines and travel agencies and resells bookings made through platforms including Expedia and Kayak. The records included passenger names, credit cards used to buy tickets, departure and arrival cities, and flight numbers. The SEC subscription also included an alert tool that checked new bookings against a watchlist and flagged travel from the previous 24 hours, with the agency requesting between one and 25 alerts per day. According to the report, no court order was required because the government purchased the data instead of demanding it directly. The report links that practice to a broader concern around crypto oversight, noting that travel and payment trails can overlap with exchange-linked financial activity. It also points to similar data collection efforts by the IRS and references the SEC’s earlier Coinbase probe as another example of its interest in user information. Critics describe the arrangement as a “data broker loophole,” while ARC said the program was created after the September 11, 2001 attacks and likely helped prevent and apprehend criminals involved in money laundering and terrorism.

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DeepSeek

2026-08-03 05:33:04

DeepSeek in 2026: V4, funding, compute claims and the policy disputes around it

DeepSeek, an AI team spun out of Chinese quant hedge fund High-Flyer, has moved from a niche research outfit into one of the most closely watched names in the global model race. The company first drew broad attention in January 2025, when its reasoning model R1 was presented as a low-cost open model and the market reaction helped fuel what many called the “DeepSeek moment,” a day when Nvidia lost $589 billion in market value and DeepSeek climbed to No. 1 among free iOS apps in the U.S. By 2026, DeepSeek had rolled out the V4 family, including V4-Flash and V4-Pro, while also completing roughly $7 billion in first-round external financing. A planned second round was later put on hold after comments from founder Liang Wenfeng about China’s AI gap with the U.S. leaked from an investor meeting. The company’s appeal rests on a mix of open weights, relatively low API pricing and local deployment options. At the same time, its privacy policy, censorship concerns, restrictions by several governments on official use, and allegations related to model distillation and data sourcing continue to shape the debate around the company.

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Coinkite

2026-08-02 17:17:58

Coldcard seed flaw tied to 1,367 BTC loss as Coinkite faces criticism over retained customer emails

A randomness flaw in seed generation for Coldcard hardware wallets has been linked to the theft of more than 1,000 BTC over the past two days, according to the report cited by Odaily. Data from Galaxy Research showed that, as of 5:36 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday, the incident involved 1,367 BTC, with losses topping $88 million. In response, hardware wallet maker Coinkite said it sent security alerts to email addresses it had retained since 2019 through its store and newsletter systems in order to reach potentially affected users. Coldcard confirmed the messages were authentic and said it had contacted as many reachable addresses as possible. That step, however, drew scrutiny to Coinkite’s data retention practices. The company said its public policy states that purchase email addresses are kept so customers can log in and verify that other information has been cleared, but it did not provide a deletion timeline and said those addresses would be kept temporarily. The report also noted that Coinkite co-founder and CEO Rodolfo Novak had previously said the company does not store customer information, deletes customer data 90 days after purchase, and offers an anonymous purchase option.

1950

Binance

2026-07-29 12:53:48

NYT says Binance changed law-enforcement request process, drawing concern from European police

Binance quietly changed its law-enforcement cooperation policy in April last year, according to The New York Times, introducing a process that requires authorities in various countries to route requests through foreign government agencies and international treaty channels. The report said the change has materially extended response times. Police representatives from five European countries said at an enforcement meeting in the Netherlands that, except for urgent cases involving child sexual abuse, terrorism, or threats to life, most requests were redirected to the government of the United Arab Emirates, where Binance is registered. They said the arrangement had seriously hindered investigations. At the same time, several senior members of Binance’s compliance team have left the company, adding to outside concern. Binance denied that it had slowed cooperation and said the policy was intended to ensure compliance with data privacy rules.

2090

Anthropic

2026-07-27 18:27:52

Google indexed Claude share pages, exposing wallet seed phrases and other sensitive data

A Reddit user said on July 25 that a Google search for "site:claude.ai/share" surfaced hundreds of Claude shared conversations that could be read in full. The exposed material reportedly included crypto wallet seed phrases, suspected Social Security numbers and legal discussions. The issue was tied to Anthropic not placing a noindex meta tag on Claude share pages. Although the company’s robots.txt blocked crawling of Claude share URLs, Google could still index those pages when shared links appeared on public websites. The same indexing issue also affected public Claude artifacts, including apps, dashboards and financial tools created by users inside Claude. Search results had shown items such as payroll sheets with employee names, internal CRM chat exports and unpublished product roadmaps. Before July 26, Anthropic updated its configuration and added noindex tags, after which Google began removing Claude-related results. Bing was still showing some shared links, and one GitHub repository had archived 453 Claude conversations and 519 Grok conversations, containing a combined 11,241 plaintext messages.

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OpenAI

2026-07-24 03:21:35

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT Health across the U.S. as lawsuit challenges its medical advice

OpenAI has expanded ChatGPT Health to users across the United States, opening the product to adults 18 and older who are logged into ChatGPT and making it available across Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans on web and iOS. At the launch briefing on Thursday, health product vice president Ashley Alexander said the company’s models now show reasoning that exceeds the level of clinical physicians. The rollout came in the same week that OpenAI was sued in San Francisco Superior Court by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old former pastor from Florida. The complaint says ChatGPT gave what it described as dangerously misleading medical advice, repeatedly downplayed his symptoms, urged him to stay home and rest, and discouraged him from seeing a doctor. Winters alleges that the delay allowed a blood clot to worsen into a massive pulmonary embolism. OpenAI said the service requests permission before using health data to personalize responses, encrypts conversations in transit and at rest, and applies extra encryption protections to connected Health data. Users can review and adjust linked data types, including post-visit summaries, care team notes, lab reports and medication records, with integrations extending to providers as well as Apple Health, Weight Watchers, MyFitnessPal and Function. The company has not disclosed which model Winters used.

790

ZKP

2026-07-23 16:55:16

ZKP: How Zero Knowledge Proofs Are Redefining AI Security and Data Ownership

The ZKP project uses zero-knowledge proofs to create a privacy-first network addressing AI's data bottleneck. Its Proof-of-Intelligence mechanism trains AI on encrypted data without exposure. Presale targets $1.7B, mainnet in 2027.

2020

Chrome Web St

2026-07-23 14:10:15

Chrome Web Store to Restrict Prediction Market, AI Bypass, and Data-Hungry Extensions From August 1

Chrome Web Store will enforce new developer rules on August 1, 2026, targeting prediction market extensions, AI tools that bypass safeguards, and opaque data collection practices. Non-compliant extensions could be removed.

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