The EU’s executive arm has also developed its own age verification app, which has the “highest privacy standards in the world,” according to Von der Leyen. Member states will soon be able to integrate it into their digital wallets, and it can easily be enforced by online platforms. “No more excuses – the technology for age-verification is available,” the EU chief said.

So more pro age-verification propaganda, instead of what the headline suggests: nothing concrete in that regard. How about devices with parental control for kids, which only allow access to platforms suitable for the demographic, instead of “age”-gating the entire internet (including for adults)?

More consumer spyglasses and bodycams, which perpetually feed an AI agent; that isn’t dystopian, you are…

A resolution low enough to be able to identify “ingredients they have in front of them”. And they’re also planning to launch smart glasses (read: spyglasses) and AI pendants (read: consumer bodycams), as to be able to compete with Meta and OpenAI (with regards to harvesting data without consent?) But I guess you first introduce them into one of your most widely-adopted wearable, where the high probability of people being spied on, isn’t as obvious compared to relatively uncommon spyglasses or bodycams.

It turns out reCAPCHA has been a privacy nightmare from the beginning: from silently monitoring user activity in the background, to sending payment information to Google; in order for an AI to assess the data, and return a risk-score to the website. But that apparently wasn’t bold enough, and now an effective 2FA is required, which provides additional telemetry to Google (but not to the website or app: which is obviously the privacy concern). So get ready to 2FA with Google upon registration, login, updating your cart, and payment; or to skip the hassle, you should just let an approved “shopping assistant” make purchases for you (“that drive a projected 25% increase in average order value”). I don’t even own a modern Android or iOS device, so how am I supposed to solve these?

It seems they’re really focusing on “registration, login, cart, and payment”, which would mean the customer would have to do this effective 2FA (which most consumers have conveniently been conditioned into using…), at least during these stages. This paired with the ability to allow “trusted” AI agents (including shopping assistants “that drive a projected 25% increase in average order value”), really makes it appear they’re incentivizing use of these shopping assistants (in order to avoid the 2FA hassle). It’s batshit insane the big-tech oligopoly has enshittified the internet to such a degree, the average consumer is required to outsource their usage to a big-tech agent (or at least one “trusted” by these platforms), for them to get any meaningful use out of it. And the rogue actors? Well, they’ll probably resort back to exploiting the third-world for solving CAPTCHAs…

I’ll give it a year before this “voluntary” evaluation becomes mandatory, while standards based on industry-leading models, dictate guardrails impossible to implement for upcoming models. And thus giving reason to consider would-be competitors’ models a “national security risk”: evaluated by a board, which by then, is composed of “experts” with a vested interest in the leading industry…

Personally I believe AI models, using content for which they do not have the creator’s explicit permission, have no right to exist (at least as a commercially available product).

It’s not a data protection issue, it’s a data collection issue