> Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns.

> Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.

> Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

> Meta’s plans could change. The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times.

> The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.

> Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

archive.is/2026.02.13-151340/n… #BigTech #DataProtection #UserPrivacy #WearableTech #META #RayBanMeta #NameTag #SurveillanceTech #DigitalPrivacy #BiometricData #Privacy #RayBan #blind #Facebook #SiliconValley

Nancy Guthrie's kidnapping has led many to question how private their data actually is, as the FBI has managed to recover footage of a suspect from her doorbell camera, despite it being supposedly disabled.

Shared by FBI Director Kash Patel in a post on X, the images and video footage shows a masked individual approach her house, following power being completely disabled.

It shouldn't surprise you to find out that your data is never truly safe or secure if it's being uploaded and shared on the cloud, as while the convenience is certainly handy, it's far from private.

As reported by Tom's Guide, the situation in Guthrie's case is a little more complicated though, as she appeared to have a 2nd Generation Google Nest Doorbell, which is both wireless – so it didn't shut off when the house's power was cut – and it has a small amount of on-device storage.

Following the Wi-Fi connection cutting out at her home, the device then switched to local storage, with three hours of event-based data also captured without a Nest Aware subscription.

This footage was then stored within Google's servers despite being 'deleted' – as things don't actually get removed entirely straight away – allowing officials to recover it from the backend before it was overwritten.

Ring is terminating its partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety, the Amazon-owned company announced Thursday.

The partnership between Flock and Ring came under scrutiny after the Amazon doorbell company ran an ad during the Super Bowl that touted a “Search Party” feature that uses AI to help locate lost pets. When a user initiates the feature, it activates a network of participating Ring cameras, which scan footage for images resembling the missing dog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the feature a “surveillance nightmare.”

Flock, meanwhile, operates a network of automated license plate readers, and sells access to that software to customers that include law enforcement agencies.

Ring’s decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this week, Salesforce employees pressed CEO Marc Benioff to cancel “ICE opportunities,” CNBC reported. More than 900 Google employees also asked their company to divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Google fulfilled an Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoena that demanded a wide array of personal data on a student activist and journalist, including his credit card and bank account numbers, according to a copy of an ICE subpoena obtained by The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.

I have been thinking a lot about privacy in AI companionship. Most AI companion apps harvest your most intimate conversations for training data, targeted advertising, or both. Replika, Character.AI, and similar services all have troubling privacy practices.

So I built an alternative on Telegram: Adola

The privacy architecture:

• Each user gets their own isolated Docker container. Your conversations never share memory, context, or processing with any other user.
• Memory stays on disk, not in a cloud database. The agent maintains a local MEMORY.md file. There is no vector database, no cloud sync, no analytics pipeline.
• No training on user data. Conversations go to the model API for inference only and are not stored by us for any other purpose.
• No social graph. There is no friend list, no recommended contacts, no "people who talked to your bot also talked to..." features.
• No ads, no premium tiers, no monetization of conversations.

The tradeoff is that this is running on a single server and cannot scale to millions of users. But for the people who use it, the privacy guarantee is real.

I am curious what this community thinks about the privacy implications of AI companions in general. Is it possible to build something like this ethically, or is the very concept of an AI companion inherently at odds with privacy?

Afternoon, y'all! It's been a week since I took the plunge into Graphene OS. I wanted to present my thoughts as a free flowing dialogue and hopefully encourage others to delve into the joy that is GOS.

So, I started using the web-based installer. I have Debian 13 and Chromium, so I didn't need any extra steps. Unlocking the bootloader was a blast of nostalgia to me. Brought me right back to the days of bouncing between AOKP and CyanMod. The installation process was honestly easier than anything I could have imagined. I booted up into GOS and locked everything back up and I was ready to go.

Beforehand, I had backed up all my app settings, and since I was already using FOSS apps it was relatively painless. I spent the next couple hours installing everything and importing settings. I'm using the fossify apps in place of the standard AOSP apps GOS provides. I have no idea if this will fuck me over, but I'm willing to find out. I ended up losing some SMS messages as the backup file corrupted, but I'm not that brokenhearted about it. But I went to bed at about 02.00 happy with my new phone.

Throughout my daily use, I noticed something peculiar. I was using my phone less and less. Inherently, becoming less reliant over time. It forced me to use my computer increasingly for things such as banking and social media.

Quick side note: I had Instagram installed and sandboxed, but it was killing my battery, so now I just use the website, which is actually kinda nice.

But the thing that stood out to me most was, I was using the phone for it's intended purpose; telecommunications. I chatted with people, answered some e-mails, did some daily games, browsed Lemmy a bit. But my screen time was significantly less. I read more, I'm more intentional about tasks and hobbies. It seems I had signicantly more damage to my brain from doomscrolling, than I had previously thought.

Overall, it made me feel like my phone, was my phone. I've not worried a bit about my privacy, I've been able to live in ease and a lot happier. I also use cash and interact with people more and more, because there's more personal connection in transactions and interactions now. (Why do so many businesses have an app?) I highly recommend it. The joy, the freedom 🇺🇲🦅🍔🛣️🛢️🏈, and the comfort is something I'll never give back. GOS for life, now.

Thank for reading my, probably, incongruent thoughts about GOS. I appreciate this community and the folks around Lemmy for helping and encouraging me. This place has been a nice reprieve from the waking nightmare of the current state of the world. I'm sorry if I didn't get to your comment on my previous post. I didn't expect it to blow up the way it did. I really appreciate it and I'm gonna hang around and see if I can also help and encourage folks.

Peace and cheers, with all my love.

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63572900

I've recently been working on scraping the app api for instagram for a project, and I'm surprised at the amount of data it sends that it shouldn't need. I knew it did a lot of tracking already, but after looking at what it sends, I am never installing that app outside of an emulator.

When you login it sends:
* How many sim cards you have installed
* Whether you have whatsapp installed
* whether you gave permission for: call logs, contacts, answer phone calls
* Timestamps for when you opened the app and when you clicked any component.

On most requests, it sends:
* Your connection type (WIFI/mobile data)
* Your connection speed
* Whether google play attestation is working
* If your phone is foldable or not
* Whether you have dark or light theme enabled
* What device you are running instagram on
* The components you clicked on to navigate to whatever page you are on, as well as timestamps for when you clicked them.

When loading your timeline, they payload contains:
* Whether instagram has permission for your camera
* Your battery level
* Whether your phone is charging
* The time you opened the app at.
* Whether you used pull to refresh to load your feed.
* Your volume level
* Your timezone offset.

For every useful request it sends about 2 to /logging_client_events, which has a binary, encoded as base64 payload.

🇫🇷 The French government is sending a message about digital independence by ditching Microsoft Teams and Zoom for its own platform, Visio. This move is not about a lack of features but a calculated push for digital sovereignty. By 2027, every government department in France will communicate via this sovereign stack, ensuring that sensitive data remains subject to European law. The shift addresses a growing concern that relying on foreign cloud giants creates a strategic vulnerability. France is opting for an open-source architecture built on Django and React, hosted on the domestic Outscale cloud. This infrastructure removes the risk of external service disruptions while fostering a local tech ecosystem.

🧠 The Visio platform integrates with Tchap, a secure messaging app based on the Matrix protocol.
⚡ French startup Pyannote provides the AI backbone for meeting transcripts and speaker identification.
🎓 The administration expects to save millions in annual licensing fees by using in-house software.
🔍 Data remains strictly within French jurisdiction to bypass foreign data access laws.

itsfoss.com/news/france-ditche…
#France #TechHistory #DigitalSovereignty #OpenSource #security #privacy #cloud #infosec #cybersecurity #FOSS