data privacy

Anthropic

2026-09-01 18:23:47

Anthropic Revises Data Retention Policy in Response to Customer Feedback

AI company Anthropic has revised its data retention policy, directly responding to feedback from enterprise clients. The update aims to enhance trust and transparency in data handling. The Enterprise Frontier Safeguards changes were shaped by customer input. The new policy clearly defines rules for storing, using, and deleting user data. The news was reported by CNBC.

800

John Deere

2026-09-01 16:03:08

John Deere Tests AI Assistant JD to Help Farmers Boost Yields

John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer, is testing an AI assistant named "JD" aimed at helping farmers improve profitability. The assistant uses users' farm, equipment, and operational data to answer questions about best practices and historical trends, covering equipment settings, fuel usage, and harvest timing. The company has launched an early access program for the chatbot and outlined a ten-point "Farmer Data Promise," vowing not to sell user data and allowing farmers to control their data. The specific AI technology behind the platform has not been disclosed.

820

UC Berkeley

2026-08-23 10:55:51

UC Berkeley and UT Austin researchers release edge-native MoE inference engine FreeToken

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin have introduced FreeToken, an edge-native mixture-of-experts inference engine designed to turn personal computers into a unified elastic inference platform. According to the release cited by Techub, the system can run the 753B-parameter GLM-5.2 model on a single workstation GPU, a 284B model on a gaming desktop, and a 35B model at interactive speed on a laptop GPU with 8GB of VRAM. FreeToken has been open-sourced under the Apache-2.0 license on GitHub and published on PyPI. The team also provides one-click desktop applications for Windows and Linux. Its command-line interface supports Linux x86_64 systems and NVIDIA GPUs, and the ft serve command can expose an API endpoint on port 1919 that is compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic. The project is aimed at individual developers, startups, and engineering teams at small and medium-sized businesses, with a focus on privacy-sensitive use cases such as healthcare, legal work, defense, finance, and intellectual-property-heavy R&D. Example applications include local coding agents, private code review, offline contract analysis, and synthetic data generation.

1390

Google

2026-08-18 17:19:44

Google Plans $10 Million Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data for AI Training

Google plans to pay $10 million for business data from Spirit Airlines, adding another example of major technology companies buying large data sets to improve artificial intelligence systems. According to CNN, the proposed deal covers internal communications and company records, including emails, spreadsheets, bookings, frequent-flyer information, and employee human resources data. Reuters separately reported that the package also includes Microsoft Teams messages and calendars, along with marketing, productivity, and operations records. Google told CNN that it acquired part of an enterprise data set from Spirit Airlines because the material could help improve its products and AI models. The company said it will not receive personal information, and the data is expected to be stripped of details that could identify individuals before transfer. The sale has not closed yet and still needs court approval. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane is scheduled to review the transaction at a hearing on Wednesday. Spirit halted operations in May and has been selling remaining assets through bankruptcy. Reuters said AI data company Mercor also competed for the assets with a reported $7.5 million bid. The agreement fits into a broader pattern. Google struck a reported $60 million-a-year deal with Reddit in February 2024, OpenAI reached its own Reddit agreement in May 2024, and the Wikimedia Foundation announced content access agreements in January with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and others.

570

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.

1890

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.

2560

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.

2040

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.

2120