UK consumer group Which? finds some everyday items including watches and speakers are ‘stuffed with trackers’ Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which? The organisation tested three air fryers, increasingly a staple of British kitchens, each of which requested permission to record audio on the user’s phone through a connected app. Continue reading...

Social media platform uses pre-ticked boxes of consent, a practice that violates UK and EU GDPR rules Elon Musk’s X platform is under pressure from data regulators after it emerged that users are consenting to their posts being used to build artificial intelligence systems via a default setting on the app. The UK and Irish data watchdogs said they have contacted X over the apparent attempt to gain user consent for data harvesting without them knowing about it. Continue reading...

‘Unpredictable’ privacy regulations prompt Facebook owner to scrap regional plans for multimodal Llama * Business live – latest updates Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will not release an advanced version of its artificial intelligence model in the EU, blaming the decision on the “unpredictable” behaviour of regulators. The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is preparing to issue its Llama model in multimodal form, meaning it is able to work across text, video, images and audio instead of just one format. Llama is an open source model, allowing it to be freely downloaded and adapted by users. Continue reading...