Generative AI (GenAI) browser assistants integrate powerful capabilities of GenAI in web browsers to provide rich experiences such as question answering, content summarization, and agentic navigation. These assistants, available today as browser extensions, can not only track detailed browsing activity such as search and click data, but can also autonomously perform tasks such as filling forms, raising significant privacy concerns. It is crucial to understand the design and operation of GenAI browser extensions, including how they collect, store, process, and share user data. To this end, we study their ability to profile users and personalize their responses based on explicit or inferred demographic attributes and interests of users. We perform network traffic analysis and use a novel prompting framework to audit tracking, profiling, and personalization by the ten most popular GenAI browser assistant extensions. We find that instead of relying on local in-browser models, these assistants largely depend on server-side APIs, which can be auto-invoked without explicit user interaction. When invoked, they collect and share webpage content, often the full HTML DOM and sometimes even the user's form inputs, with their first-party servers. Some assistants also share identifiers and user prompts with third-party trackers such as Google Analytics. The collection and sharing continues even if a webpage contains sensitive information such as health or personal information such as name or SSN entered in a web form. We find that several GenAI browser assistants infer demographic attributes such as age, gender, income, and interests and use this profile--which carries across browsing contexts--to personalize responses. In summary, our work shows that GenAI browser assistants can and do collect personal and sensitive information for profiling and personalization with little to no safeguards.

In his interesting opinion article (Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI, 27 July), Ed Newton-Rex misses one of the most serious concerns about artificial intelligence: its surveillance potential. Governments have always spied on their subjects/citizens: technology multiplies their powers of spying. In his novel 1984, George Orwell had the authorities install a two-way telescreen system in every party member's home, and in all workplaces and public spaces. This allowed Big Brother to monitor individuals' actions and conversations, while he himself remained invisible. Today's digital control systems operating through electronic tracking devices and voice and facial recognition systems are simply Big Brother's control devices brought up to date.

Privacy experts are sounding the alarm on a new satellite capable of spying on your every move that is set to launch in 2025. The satellite, created by startup company Albedo, is so high quality it can zoom in on people or license plates from space, raising concerns among expert that it will create a'big brother is always watching' scenario. Albedo claims the satellite won't have facial recognition software but doesn't mention that it will refrain from imaging people or protecting people's privacy. Albedo signed two separate million-dollar contracts with the U.S. Air Force and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center to help the government monitor potential threats to U.S. national security. Albedo claims the satellite won't have facial recognition software but doesn't mention that it will refrain from imaging people or protecting people's privacy.

US Senators John Kennedy (R-LA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill Wednesday to end involuntary facial recognition screening at airports. The Traveler Privacy Protection Act would block the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from continuing or expanding its facial recognition tech program. It would also require the government agency to explicitly receive congressional permission to renew it, and it would have to dispose of all biometric data within three months. Senator Merkley described the TSA's biometric collection practices as the first steps toward an Orwellian nightmare. "The TSA program is a precursor to a full-blown national surveillance state," Merkley wrote in a news release.

It was a weekday afternoon in the spring when my son's kindergarten teacher got in touch about the ghost teen. During a social-studies unit about families, the teacher reported, my son had regaled his classmates with tales of his eighteen-year-old brother, who picks him up every afternoon at dismissal. I laughed out loud when I received this note, which was sent via ClassDojo, the messaging app used by our public elementary school in Brooklyn. My son has no brother of any age, and yet I could picture this brother immediately--I imagined him, for some reason, as one of the seniors from "Dazed and Confused," leaning against his scuzzy, old Pontiac parked just outside the school gate, a Marlboro Red hanging from his lips, Foghat wafting from the tape deck. But the teacher did not seem amused.

'The Big Weekend Show' panelists discuss Elon Musk offering to pay users' legal bills if they are'unfairly treated' by employers for likes or posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. That's what George Orwell would say if he could visit our world, 75 years after he wrote his final novel, "1984." Orwell sought to demonstrate the dangers not just of totalitarianism but of a world where words lose their meaning. Many of the terms he coined for the novel have since entered common discourse -- "thought police," "Big Brother," "doublethink," and the "memory hole," to name a few. And of course the adjective "Orwellian" comes to us because of this book.

Moves to ban live "Big Brother" facial recognition technology from being deployed across the streets of the EU will be tested in a key vote at the European parliament on Thursday. The amendment is part of a package of proposals for the world's first artificial intelligence laws, which could see firms fined up to €10m (£8.7m) or removed from trading within the EU for breaches of the rules. But the ban is expected to be challenged by a group of centre-right MEPs on the grounds that biometric scanning should be deployed to combat serious crime such as terrorism. An amendment to Article 5 of the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act prohibiting the use of cameras to follow people around shops, streets, parks or any other public places will go before the committee on Thursday. It will also ban companies from using AI to identify individuals by match scans on CCTV with images posted by users on Instagram, Facebook or other social media platforms.

Strive Asset Management founder Vivek Ramaswamy responds to the federal response to a derailed train in Ohio releasing toxic chemicals and discusses the growing list of potential GOP candidates as he weighs his own presidential bid. George Orwell envisioned the dangers of monolithic government armed with artificial intelligence in his famous novel of a future dystopia, "1984," published in 1949. The Party, led by Big Brother, uses omnipresent technology to monitor constantly and to propagandize to the docile citizens of Oceania. The terrifying tandem of technology and the human intoxicant of power is used in Oceania to rewrite history, control society, crush the human spirit and keep the Party entrenched forever. Protagonist Winston Smith works for the ironically named Ministry of Truth, a job he hates.

Researchers in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui say they have developed a device that can determine loyalty to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) using facial scans. A short video uploaded to the Weibo account of the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center on June 30 said the project was an example of "artificial intelligence empowering party-building." The Weibo post was later deleted, but a text summary of the video, produced in honor of the CCP's July 1 anniversary, remained available on the Internet Archive on Monday. "Guaranteeing the quality of party-member activities is turning into a problem in need of coordination," the text said. "This equipment is a kind of smart ideology, using AI technology to extract and integrate facial expressions, EEG readings and skin conductivity ... making it possible to ascertain the levels of concentration, recognition and mastery of ideological and political education so as to better understand its effectiveness," the description said.

An expert on machine learning responds to Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's "The State Machine." The world of software has a long-held, pernicious myth that a system built from digital logic cannot have biases. A piece of code functions as an object of pure reason, devoid of emotion and all the messiness that entails. From this thesis flows an idea that has gained increasing traction in the worlds of both technology and science fiction: a perfectly rational system of governance built upon artificial intelligence. If software can't lie, and data can't inherently be wrong, then what could be more equitable and efficient than the rule of a machine-driven system?