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Australia's Albanese government is weighing what could be a world-leading ban on smart glasses in public buildings and government offices. The proposal reflects growing unease about always-on cameras embedded in wearables, and how easily they can capture faces, documents, and conversations without anyone nearby knowing.
Shifting to a data rights battle playing out in India, the government there is now requiring caller-ID apps like Truecaller to feed their spam reports directly to telecom operators. Truecaller is pushing back hard, arguing the mandate forces them to hand over a commercially valuable, proprietary dataset they spent years building — essentially a one-way gift to the carriers.
And on the privacy research front, a paper out of arXiv is getting renewed attention for its finding that federated learning, the technique Google uses in GBoard's next-word prediction, is not nearly as private as advertised. The research suggests that even when data never leaves your device in raw form, the model updates themselves can leak sensitive information about what you type.
Those are the stories worth watching today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
