Privacy
7 items across 3 editions · appeared in the last 2 editions in a row. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Tue 15 Sep.
- STAT reported on 15 September that the rollout of the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model, or WISeR, "was hasty and error-ridden, according to more than a thousand pages of recently released documents and data" obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
- STAT reports the pilot launched in January, requires prior approval for certain procedures and products including skin substitutes and epidural injections for pain management, operates in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and Washington, and will run until 2031. STAT reports the documents show one WISeR vendor warned CMS that it was unrealistic to expect a working product by the launch date the agency wanted.
- The EFF's own analysis of the same records, published 8 September, reports that one prior authorisation request went unanswered for 83 days against a 72-hour standard, that two vendors alone denied over 20,000 requests in the first three months, that Virtix denied more requests than it approved in that period, and that low quality scores reduce vendor payments by only 5–10%. EFF quotes Innovaccer telling CMS about a month before launch that "auto-affirming is the only path available".
- The remainder of the STAT article is paywalled, so the figures in the previous bullet come from the EFF analysis rather than from STAT. CMS has not published a response to the released records.
- Euronews, publishing on 15 September at 8:36 GMT+2, reports that a confidential European Commission document it obtained would bar minors under 15 from creating accounts on social media and video-sharing platforms without parental approval, alongside safety-by-design rules for risky online services.
- Euronews reports the draft covers social media, video-sharing platforms and online games "considered to pose 'specific design risks for minors', as well as AI-powered chatbots and companions, described as 'virtual tools that can give mental health and personal development advice to minors'". The document says these services get "tailored commitments… offering a co-regulatory approach based on industry-led self-regulation".
- The age tiers as reported: children under three barred entirely from social media and other high-risk services; from three to 13, access to child-friendly services under adult supervision; 13 to 15, restricted access with limited features under parental control; and safety-by-design rules still applying to 15- to 18-year-olds, who could access platforms without parental consent. Companies would have to verify age at account creation using an EU-wide app or national solutions.
- The text is a draft, not law. Euronews reports Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to preview it in her State of the Union address and that the bill is due to be published on Thursday; it would then need agreement from member states and the European Parliament.
- 404 Media reported on 14 September that "OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users' ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information", and that what reviewers see "can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot, conversations that most of ChatGPT's more than 900 million users probably don't realize may be read by actual people".
- 404 Media reports the reviewers rate and critique the chatbot's replies, and that internal documents it saw show contractors training ChatGPT "to not anthropomorphize itself, and to be less sycophantic".
- On privacy, 404 Media reports the contractors do not see ChatGPT usernames and that OpenAI says it tries to remove personal information before prompts reach reviewers, but "the company acknowledged sensitive details can still get through". Anthropic confirmed to 404 Media that it also uses human review to improve its models.
- 404 Media quotes someone who works with the prompts, asked whether users know humans read their chats: "No. I don't think they would imagine some contractor somewhere [...] is analyzing the conversations." The report is 404 Media's alone and OpenAI has published no response.
- Quartz, writing on 14 September and citing The Information's reporting, says Palantir, Nvidia and Booz Allen Hamilton are restricting or threatening to drop advanced models from Anthropic and OpenAI unless the labs provide stronger data protections: Palantir has pressed Anthropic for guarantees of zero data retention, Nvidia restricts Anthropic's models to less sensitive internal tasks in favour of its own Nemotron models, and Booz Allen has forbidden staff from running Anthropic's commercial model on cybersecurity projects that touch proprietary data.
- Quartz traces the dispute to a 30-day data retention policy Anthropic introduced in June with the rollout of Fable 5, which the company said it needed "to detect sophisticated attacks that unfold across multiple sessions" and would not use for training.
- Tom's Hardware, relaying the same report, says a large US utility company cancelled plans to test Fable — it had wanted to know whether the model could run core power infrastructure — after Anthropic refused a nonrevocable zero data retention policy, that Northrop Grumman runs open-source models on its own air-gapped servers instead, and that Novo Nordisk uses Claude but bans proprietary data from it.
- Quartz reports Anthropic's answer is Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, which lets enterprise customers keep activity data in their own Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage under their own keys, with automated monitoring and no human review by Anthropic staff, rolling out in phases with broader availability targeted for later this autumn. The originating report is The Information's, which we could not open.
- "K-Bench: A Benchmark for LLM Unlearning in Agentic Deployments" (arXiv 2609.12808, submitted 11 September, announced 14 September) is by authors at the University of Technology Sydney and CSIRO. It inspects all six channels a ReAct agent exposes — chain of thought, tool calls, tool observations, retrieval, the answer and an elicited summary — and counts a query as leaked if the secret appears in any of them.
- The abstract states: "When the secret lives in the prompt or the retrieval store, TOFU and MUSE report no leakage, while the deployed agent still leaks it on 22--86% of queries." On structured retrieval, "the secret stays verbatim in the tool-observation channel and the aggregate leak rate is unchanged".
- Where the secret is in the weights, the authors report that "none of the twenty evaluated published methods demonstrably removes it, and only an input-corruption intervention reaches selective forgetting under the evaluated observer".
- Preprint, not peer reviewed. The measurement is against the authors' own observer and benchmark rather than a live deployment, and they note the top-ranked unlearning method changes across base models, so no method is established as correct.
- In a report published on 14 September, Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights called for a new bill on AI to "address the scale and seriousness" of the threats it identifies, saying the current legal framework is "fragmented and difficult to navigate".
- The committee's chair, Labour MP Alex Sobel, said: "Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose."
- IT Pro lists the recommendations: a single independent statutory AI oversight body able to set codes of practice, enforce transparency and impose sanctions; a distinction between low-risk and high-risk systems; outright bans on some uses including subliminal techniques and inappropriate biometric profiling; due diligence across the AI supply chain; and clarification of data protection law on automated decision-making. The report notes the AI Security Institute operates voluntarily, without statutory power to test or block a risky release.
- This is a select-committee recommendation, not law. The BBC reports Education Minister Georgia Gould pointed to existing government action on non-consensual deepfakes, cyber security legislation and the AI Security Institute; no dedicated AI bill has been introduced, and the government is not obliged to accept the recommendations.
- On 10 September California enacted thirteen bills. SB 1119 (Padilla, with Wicks and Bauer-Kahan), known as Adam's Law after Adam Raine, requires companion chatbot operators to maintain crisis protocols for suicidal ideation, provide parental controls, commission independent child-safety audits and conduct annual risk assessments.
- The package extends beyond chatbots: AB 1709 (Lowenthal) restricts platform features for minors and creates an e-Safety Advisory Commission; SB 867 (Padilla) regulates companion chatbot toys; SB 1276 (Rubio) expands child sexual exploitation offences to cover AI-generated and AI-altered material; and AB 1856 (Wicks) requires age-verification signals from software applications. Civil penalties of up to $250,000 per action apply to third parties facilitating distribution of deepfake pornography.
- This is the most detailed operational mandate yet placed on conversational AI products in the US — auditing and risk assessment obligations rather than disclosure alone — and California's market size makes it a de facto national floor.
- The Governor's announcement does not state effective dates or compliance deadlines for the individual bills, and does not specify which regulator enforces the chatbot audit requirement.