Privacy

The banning and purging of TikTok from U.S. college networks and devices continues apace, with federal officials expressing bipartisan concern about the app's data collection and potential for nefarious use by China.

A Texas district attorney asked a local school district on Dec. 9, and again on Dec. 19, to notify up to 30,000 people that a security breach had exposed their confidential information, before making the announcement himself.

Since Gov. Greg Abbott banned the app on government-issued devices, the UH system has scanned 15,000 devices across its four universities, finding only six devices with the app installed, which was then removed.

Faced with teacher shortages, district officials proposed adding cameras to classrooms in order to record and livestream lessons to other rooms. Teachers say this could harm learning, and students have privacy concerns.

Following Idaho Gov. Brad Little's ban of TikTok on state-owned devices and networks, the state's colleges and universities are deleting their accounts and blocking access to the app on campus Wi-Fi networks.

Following a memo from Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey last week banning use of TikTok on state networks and devices, the university has made the app inaccessible on campus housing networks and warned employees not to install it.

More Dayton-area cities have installed new automated license plate reading devices in the past several months and at least one other local police department said it wants to add them next year.

On the heels of a week-long civil trial surrounding the data collection practices of the Maine State Police, officials will seek an outside review into whether its intelligence unit is violating federal privacy laws.

The U.S. government regulates many industries, but social media companies don’t neatly fit existing regulatory templates. Systems that deliver energy may be the closest analog.

Houston County commissioners voted to move forward on a four-year agreement with Flock Safety. District Attorney William Kendall said the photos will only be used for active investigations and certain emergency situations.

Despite using facial recognition technology to identify criminal suspects nearly 2,000 times last year, findings from the LAPD inspector general's office show that the department has no way to track the technology’s outcomes or effectiveness.

Cobb commissioners agreed to allow the county police to enter a three-year contract with Clearview AI — a company that has come under fire for data privacy — to utilize its face recognition software.

According to the nonprofit Internet Safety Labs, most ed-tech software tools share student data with third parties, in many cases without user consent, and schools should treat data privacy as an enterprise IT problem.

A recent audit of the Cayuga County Health Department by the state comptroller’s office found that half of the devices assigned to personnel contained some form of sensitive personal data.

In a U.S. Supreme Court filing on Wednesday night, the Justice Department argued that social media websites should be held responsible for some of the ways their algorithms decide what content to put in front of users.

The Brookings Institution hosted a panel of experts to discuss the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which was recently issued by the White House, and what this document means and the work that remains.

An audit report released this week determined that personal and confidential information of roughly 192,000 permit holders was left unprotected when the California Department of Justice exposed it earlier this year.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally posted personal identity information and locations of more than 6,000 immigrants currently in agency custody to its website this week.