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In the news...
- What to Know Before You Buy an AI Toy [mashable.com]
Shopping for holiday gifts? This article explores four things to consider before buying AI toys for kids — including privacy. Mashable spoke with Shelby Knox, director of online safety campaigns at ParentsTogether, who "recommends focusing on who processes the data generated by your child and how that information is stored. You'll want to know if third parties, including marketers and AI platforms, receive audio recordings or text transcripts of conversations with the toy."
- X’s new location labels unmask users. Insiders say the idea was rejected for years. [nbcnews.com]
Social media platform X has "rolled out a new feature that disclosed what the company said were the country locations of accounts," with mixed results. "It wasn’t immediately clear what data X was using to label accounts' locations, but like many tech companies, X may have access to signals such as internet protocol (IP) addresses, phone numbers or devices' GPS data — any of which could be imperfect as a reflection of someone’s true location."
"Calli Schroeder, the Global Privacy Project lead at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said she wasn’t sure X fully understood the risks before it released the feature. 'If they’re willing to change something like this with no public consultation or discussion, that’s their right as a private company. But it does raise the question of how many other things are they going to decide are critical to share for transparency that they’re just going to unilaterally make changes to without talking to experts about how this could expose people to risk,' she said."
- Your Online Reservations Are Telling Restaurants All About You [theverge.com]
If you make reservations through OpenTable, restaurants may be getting more information about you than you realize. Because OpenTable isn't just for customers…it's “billed to restaurants as a one-stop shop" that can integrate with restaurants’ payment and order management systems. When you make a new reservation, OpenTable gathers information "based on the orders you’ve made and money you’ve spent at other restaurants in the past” and shows it to restaurants using AI-assisted tags. According to an OpenTable representative, “what [they] share with restaurants is guided by the choices you’ve made in your privacy preferences,” but The Verge found the platform’s privacy policy "actually a little opaque on this."
Want to opt out of this data sharing? "You can do so by logging into your account, heading to your profile, and then going to the 'Preferences' page. You’ll find six options related to the privacy policy, but the one that matters most is the last one: 'Allow OpenTable to use Point of Sale information.' Untick that, and your order history should be your own again."
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