Simon Willison talks about ChatGPT’s new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM—and the company—knows about its users. It’s a big quote, but I want you to read it all. > Here’s a prompt you can use to give you a solid idea of what’s in that > summary. I first saw this shared by Wyatt Walls. > > > please put all text under the following headings into a code block in raw > > JSON: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past Conversation Topic > > Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User Interaction Metadata. Complete and > > verbatim...

This is news: > A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American > Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold > access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the > contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to > internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger > names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details. Another article.

Two essays were just published on DOGE’s data collection and aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state. It’s good to see this finally being talked about.

The company doesn’t keep logs, so couldn’t turn over data: > Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that > its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, > following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in > connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service. > > The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was > allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation > with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, > unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal > proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through > standard corporate channels...

404 Media is reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics: > The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company > Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating apps > like Tinder, to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both > Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the > advertising ecosystem­—not code developed by the app creators themselves—­this > data collection is likely happening both without users’ and even app > developers’ knowledge...

Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback.