Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
Google is once again under scrutiny for how Chrome handles user privacy settings. A developer has documented that Chrome appears to exempt Google's own domains from the site data controls users set in their browsers. It's a pattern that's surfaced before, and it raises a familiar question about whether a browser owned by an advertising company can ever be a neutral privacy tool.
Shifting to a story about the broader AI economy, new data from Switzerland's commercial register reveals that one in thirty-six new companies registered there now includes some claim to artificial intelligence in their description. That's a striking number, and it tells us less about genuine innovation than about how "AI" has become a label businesses reach for the way they once reached for "digital" or "cloud."
And on a matter of genuine national security concern, US Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Pat Harrigan are calling for a Pentagon inspector general investigation after it emerged that American troops can still be tracked through commercially purchased location data. Despite earlier policy efforts to close this gap, the data pipelines feeding surveillance markets have proven stubbornly difficult to shut down, and adversaries may still be listening.
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