Tag: ai

Meta Faces Criminal Complaint in Germany for Its AI-Glasses, Accused of Violating Privacy Laws

Who wants to be filmed all the time?

The struggle between new, useful tech gadgets and the objections that these new capabilities raise is a field expected to grow in the next few years, and make many lawyers very wealthy.

One such example is the Meta AI-Glasses.

In principle, it seems a great idea to pack so much computing power in a pair of glasses for our benefit.

But once you start to compute the legal and ethical objections that this gadget raises, it becomes a much less clear question.

Today (12), a German advocacy group took matters into their own hands, and filed a criminal complaint against Meta and other companies, ‘arguing the devices violate privacy laws’.

Reuters reported:

“Digital rights group HateAid said in a statement on Wednesday that the launch of the devices, the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer in particular, broke German digital privacy laws, in the latest sign of legal scrutiny in a nation where the right to privacy is highly valued.

‘There’s no place to escape from smart glasses. You have to expect at any moment to be filmed and then exposed on the internet’, said HateAid managing director Josephine Ballon.

The organization reported the management of Meta, units of spectacles maker EssilorLuxottica including Ray-Ban, as well as retailers Fielmann, Apollo-Optik, Mister Spex and MediaMarkt to the Frankfurt-based digital crime prosecution unit ZIT.”

The complaint is based on Germany’s federal digital data protection law, which prohibits the sale of communication devices designed to film people without them noticing.

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He Spoke at a Town Meeting. Then Flock Cameras Started Tracking His Car.

A resident steps up to the mic at a town council meeting, says something inconvenient, then drives home — unaware that somewhere in a police database, that license plate just became a person of interest. No warrant. No probable cause. Just an officer with a grievance and a subscription service the town approved at a meeting most residents never knew about.

That scenario isn’t hypothetical anymore. In 2026, it’s documented — from Georgia to Rhode Island.

How Flock Works – and How It Can Be Weaponized

The system was built to catch criminals; the problem is there’s nothing reliable stopping it from being aimed at everyone else.

Flock Safety sells automated license-plate reader (ALPR) networks to police departments nationwide. The pitch is straightforward: catch criminals faster by searching vehicle movement data after incidents occur. What the system doesn’t include is a reliable filter between a legitimate investigation and a personal score to settle. Unlike federal wiretap law, no federal statute currently governs ALPR data retention periods or inter-agency sharing agreements, leaving oversight entirely to municipal contracts.

The documented abuse cases are piling up:

  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation identified more than 50 agencies running hundreds of Flock searches tied to protest activity
  • A CNN report from July 2026, citing an Institute for Justice tally, found at least two dozen cases where officers resigned or were arrested for allegedly using Flock to stalk romantic partners
  • A police chief in Braselton, Georgia, was arrested for allegedly using ALPR cameras to stalk and harass private citizens
  • Court documents show searches conducted far outside officers’ jurisdictions, according to a 2026 investigation republished by Yahoo
  • Flock told 404 Media it was “aware of 15 incidents of abuse” — a figure critics argue the platform’s design makes structurally impossible to trust

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New Orleans Becomes First Major U.S. City To Let AI Answer 911

New Orleans is testing just how much Americans are willing to trust artificial intelligence when the stakes are considerably higher than writing an email or ordering dinner, according to the New York Post.

The city has begun allowing an AI system to field certain 911 calls, apparently making it the first major U.S. municipality to put a bot directly between emergency callers and human operators.

The idea is largely about volume. New Orleans’ emergency communications center receives more than 1,000 calls on a typical day, and officials believe automation can clear some of the clutter while dispatchers concentrate on genuine emergencies.

The technology isn’t supposed to take over the entire 911 operation. Instead, it can deal with situations that appear redundant or relatively routine when human operators are tied up. A flood of calls about the same already-reported car accident, for example, could potentially be filtered through the automated system rather than occupying multiple dispatchers.

The Post writes that city officials insist humans remain at the center of the operation. But skeptics say emergency calls are precisely the kind of messy, unpredictable interactions computers may struggle to interpret.

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Zuckerberg manifesto sketches out Meta’s ambitions for world-changing AI technology

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a vision Monday of what he said artificial intelligence can do for the world, imagining a future where everyone has their own, all-knowing AI agent that strives to improve all aspects of their lives.

Zuckerberg detailed his ambitions for the technology in a 6,500-word essay published online where he also outlined why he favors open-source AI technology, in which developers make key components accessible for anyone to examine, modify and build upon.

In a document derided by critics as fantastical, Zuckerberg said his company is working toward an era where everyone will have the tools to create new businesses, receive Ph.D.-level tutoring and provide personalized lifestyle tips. His 8-year-old daughter, he wrote, can already code her ideas and quickly produce videos.

“Everyone will soon have invention superpowers,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Zuckerberg warned of risks if control of advanced AI is concentrated with a select few companies, institutions or governments. On Monday, Meta also announced the release a new open-source AI model, Muse Glimmer, which can run on a personal computer, and Zuckerberg said the company would also would provide a way for developers to access a more powerful AI model, Muse Spark 1.2.

Meta makes AI models, like several other tech companies, and uses them to power platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. The Menlo Park, California, company also makes them available to developers who can create their own apps and features.

Skeptics urge a slower pace of AI development
Critics said Zuckerberg was not reckoning fully with the risks inherent in AI’s rapid development.

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La.: New Orleans 911 turns to AI call triage amid staffing shortages

New Orleans is among the first major American municipalities to integrate an AI voice agent into its 911 emergency call workflow as a limited triage tool.

Overseen by the Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD), the system — known as AI Emergency Call Triage and powered by software from Carbyne — has been in use on the 911 line since approximately 2023. This is following development work that began around 2022, the department added.

A separate AI agent for the city’s non-emergency 311 service was planned and began rolling out later, around spring 2026.

OPCD reportedly handles more than 1,000 emergency calls per day. The AI tool was designed to reduce workload pressure on human dispatchers during high-volume periods, particularly by filtering redundant reports of the same incident. It functions strictly as a triage layer rather than a replacement for human operators.

Under current protocol, the AI agent activates primarily when all human call-takers are busy and an incoming call originates within roughly 200 meters of a previously reported incident (most commonly a traffic collision). The system asks whether the caller is reporting that known incident.

If the caller confirms they are, the AI can provide reassurance or updates that help is already on the way. If the caller indicates a different or new emergency, or requests a human, the call is immediately routed to an available dispatcher. All calls remain logged and recorded.

OPCD Executive Director Karl Fasold has since defended the limited deployment, noting that 911 centers nationwide face staffing shortages and budget constraints. Filtering duplicate calls during major incidents frees human staff to focus on life-threatening or novel emergencies, he argued.

While other cities, including Atlanta and Seattle, have similarly adopted AI tools for supporting functions such as precise caller location, real-time translation, or dispatcher prompts, New Orleans stands out for using a conversational AI agent that can directly field a narrow subset of active 911 calls under the specific conditions described above.

However, public-safety advocates have voiced growing concern through the media, questioning how well the AI handles panicking callers, heavy accents, ambient noise, or covert distress calls like domestic violence. Critics also cite cybersecurity vulnerabilities and the risk of hallucinated or inaccurate responses during fast-moving crises.

“I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst idea you could possibly think of,” warned one online critic and alleged former dispatcher. “You have scenarios where the person can’t speak well [or have strong accents] — or if they’re in a domestic situation and they pretend to call for pizza or something — you have to be able to determine how someone feels or pick up on what they aren’t saying.”

Nonetheless, OPCD officials maintain that the tool operates under strict conditions and oversight, has performed reliably in its limited role, with early monitoring showing no false positives or negatives in audited periods, and is not used for other categories of 911 calls.

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AI: The Ominous Opportunity

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow, 1987

The economy has been growing steadily since we started to recover from the 2020 pandemic and shutdown; the unemployment rate is and has been near the bottom of the range normally considered to be full employment; and, wages adjusted for inflation are the highest they’ve ever been. Nevertheless, the productivity slowdown observed by Robert Solow forty years ago seems to have returned, and surveys of consumer confidence are at or near their all-time lows. This essay explores possible reasons for the productivity slowdown and widespread economic uncertainty in the midst of our AI boom.

Measurement Problems

Among the possible explanations of the productivity slowdown or what merely appears to be a productivity slowdown is our limited ability to measure productivity in an economy increasingly dominated by services.

It wasn’t so long ago that productivity was measured in the sectors of the economy concerned with physical output such as agriculture and manufacturing. The productivity of office workers was either ignored or simply subsumed into the productivity of goods-producing companies.

There were problems of measuring quality differences in goods, but these could in theory be surmounted. For example, by comparisons of the prices of old and new vintages of similar products. And, the changing composition of production could be represented by slowly-changing weights in indexes of production.

As much effort as was put into measuring production, systematic discrepancies persist in indexes of the prices of services versus the prices of commodities. The CPI, for example, typically registers a 1 or 2 percentage point higher rate of inflation than the PPI. With the digital economy, now augmented by AI, a serious effort must be made to measure the production of information, entertainment and services. For example, an hour of broadcast time prior to the development of the internet might have cost something like $1 million (in today’s dollars). What about the several hundred thousand hours of video uploaded to YouTube nowadays?

Prototypes (as Opposed to Practical Inventions)

In the past, it took a while for breakthroughs such as the steam engine to have a discernible impact on production. It was more or less a century from prototype steam engines to when steam engines were first put to a practical use (in the refreshing of air in coal mines). Then, several more decades until steam engines were used to run industrial machinery. Then, yet several more decades until steam-powered locomotives were used in transportation.

Even when the steam-powered locomotive was developed, horse-drawn trains were more reliable. The story is told of a race in 1830 between a steam-powered locomotive and a horse-drawn train along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad from Baltimore to Endicott City. The horse won the race since the locomotive broke down. Nevertheless, over the next century, horses lost their jobs in transportation.

Ditto, the steam-powered hammer. According to folklore, John Henry who—through superhuman effort—beat the steam-powered hammer, preserving jobs for the men of railroad work gangs. Nevertheless, over the next century, men lost their jobs to industrial machinery. Warehousemen who relied on their strength to manhandle barrels of pork, flour, and other produce were replaced by forklifts. Dockworkers lost their jobs to electric-powered derricks.

It is easy, looking back, to see the impact of the Industrial Revolution on productivity, on wages, and on standards of living. But, in real time, it took time for these benefits to accrue. In the meanwhile, workers had to deal with disruptive change.

More recently, in 1996, a super-computer named Deep Blue challenged Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion of the humans. Kasparov won the match 3 games to 1 game to 2 draws. However, the victory was fleeting. A year later, Deep Blue won a rematch; and, nowadays, a decent laptop computer can easily defeat a grandmaster. Today, in the current phase of the Industrial Revolution, computers, robots, and AI are coming after our jobs, not steam-, gasoline- and electric-powered machines.

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High-Schoolers in Denmark Will Make Oral Defenses on Assignments To Curb AI Cheating

9,000 students will not cheat.

Everywhere you go, nowadays, you will run into students abusing the AI tools to get good grades.

And the Scandinavian kingdom of Denmark is no exception.

But now, Danish High school students will be required to verbally defend their written assignments, as part of emergency government measures to combat AI cheating.

Politico reported:

“A verbal defense will be needed for all exams written at home, Denmark’s Ministry of Education announced in a statement Thursday, adding that it will work with schools to create the best framework for this.

The rule, which comes into force immediately, applies to students in upper secondary education, which typically begins around age 16. It will include the approximately 9,000 students enrolled in the country’s two-year Higher Preparatory Examination program, who have to submit major written assignments each year, according to the ministry.”

High Schools will also use a firewall to keep students from accessing content to get an advantage.

“In addition, it is encouraging schools to get students to complete more assignments in school, under controlled environments, to make supervision easier.

‘Unfortunately, we have a problem with students using AI to cheat in upper secondary school’, Education Minister Magnus Heunicke said in the statement. ‘Action is needed now, and we are starting with these three initiatives’.”

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Flock Camera Mix-Up: Wisconsin Woman Pulled Over Twice at Gunpoint Due to Error

A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system.

Fox 6 Milwaukee reports that on Thursday, police in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield, Wisconsin, conducted a high-risk traffic stop on Interstate 94 after a Flock camera flagged a vehicle in connection with a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Video footage from the incident shows multiple officers with weapons drawn and a passenger extending their hands out the car window in compliance with police commands.

The vehicle’s driver, Amber Newell, and her passengers were detained during the stop. However, when Brookfield Police contacted the Milwaukee Police Department to coordinate the arrest, MPD informed them they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. The officers immediately released Newell and the other individuals.

According to the Milwaukee Police Department, the incident resulted from a personnel error rather than a technological malfunction. MPD staff had failed to remove the wanted vehicle alert from the Flock system after the investigation no longer required monitoring that particular car. Brookfield Police Chief Christopher Garcia stated that his officers’ actions were consistent with the information available to them at the time of the stop.

In an interview with FOX6 News, Newell described the emotional impact of the experience. “I haven’t been asleep since this has happened,” Newell said. “Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns.” Newell recounted the terrifying moments when police surrounded her vehicle. “My momma is like my go-to person, I wanted to call her so bad yesterday, but I’m like, if I make a sudden move, it’s gonna be over, it’s going to end my life,” Newell said.

What makes the situation even more disturbing for Newell is that this was not an isolated incident. She reported that Milwaukee police conducted a similar stop on Monday, also with guns drawn. According to Newell, officers provided no explanation, towed her vehicle, and released her without charges.

“It was very embarrassing because after they put us in cuffs, they walked us to the car, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m scared, all you see is people in they cars recording,” Newell said.

Milwaukee police declined to provide an interview regarding the incident. The department emphasized the error was related to data entry procedures rather than the Flock camera technology itself, but has not publicly addressed how similar mistakes might be prevented in the future.

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Country’s biggest teachers’ unions efforts to get DEI into AI for schools K-12 sparks backlash

he country’s two biggest teachers unions are working to get diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) ideology into artificial intelligence models before they are used in grades K-12, sparking backlash from at least one education and parental rights advocacy group.

The unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, essentially say they are making such efforts, including becoming involved in the process at state-level education departments, to mitigate AI models’ “algorithmic bias.” 

The term is essentially defined as AI-generated results that are incorrect, unfair or prejudiced as a result, in part, of the prejudices, whether blind or intentional, of the model creators, typically white or Asian men.  

Such efforts were flagged in a recent report by Defending Education, a national conservative and right-of-center grassroots advocacy organization.

“Within the next few years, most K-12 schools and colleges will integrate AI into their curricula … helping students with research assignments and even creating specialized feedback for each student,” says the group before warning, “The problem is that unions, left-wing activists, and groups in the education field are already setting the foundation to use these AI tools to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to students during their formative years.”

While the group singles out the country’s two most powerful teachers’ unions, it cites similars efforts by such groups, associations and organizations as:

  • The California Teachers Association assisting the California Department of Education in creating guidance for K-12 schools with language advocating for “educators to approach AI with an equity lens.”
  • The American Association of School Administrators promoting the idea that “white males” are a problem in the creation of AI.

“The goal of these groups is to implement DEI ideology into AI before it can be fully integrated into America’s education system,” Defending Education continued. “If DEI is embedded in AI before schools adopt these new tools, then DEI, as part of AI, becomes institutionalized in the nation’s schools once the tools are adopted.”

Neither the AFT nor NEA responded to a request for comment.

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We’re Being Plunged Into Dystopia When We Could Be Living In Paradise

It’s funny the things that get to you when you’ve been at this for a while. 

Today the thing that smacked me upside the head and made me lay my face in my hands for a minute was a viral video clip of Canadian politician Bill Oliver accidentally reading out text from the AI chatbot which had authored his speech before the New Brunswick legislature.

“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver said while reading from his prepared statement, before blurting out “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

I mean, damn dude.

I can’t get over how this is the future we wound up in. Things could have been so beautiful, and instead we wound up with this.

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