If you've spent any time in San Francisco, you might believe we're on the cusp of the self-driving future promised by car makers and the tech industry: a high-tech utopia where roving robot cars pick up and drop off passengers seamlessly and more safely than if they had a human behind the wheel. While the city certainly has one key element down – a small network of driverless cars – the reality is far different and much more awkward and invasive than what the people building the technology once portrayed. What companies pitched were ultra-smart, AI-driven vehicles that make people inside and outside of the cars safer. But in addition to reports that the cars are becoming a frequent impediment to public safety, the always on-and-recording cameras also pose a risk to personal safety, experts say. A new report from Bloomberg reveals that one of the companies behind the self-driving cars that are operating in San Francisco, Google-owned Waymo, has been subject to law enforcement requests for footage that it captured while driving around.

The season of holiday gift buying is upon us, and it can be hard to resist the coolest new tech gadgets. But not all items are created equal when it comes to privacy, experts say. In the US, there are few limits on what companies can do with your data, putting the onus on us to do our homework, says Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist at the digital advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She urges people to think through the privacy implications of gifts they're giving to friends and family. "Think about what information is going to be collected," she said.

More than 50 million smart speakers have been installed in American households. For police, that means 50 million potential virtual witnesses to crimes that occur in the privacy of one's home. But the legal protections for this type of privacy-invading, Internet of Things–enabled evidence are still very unclear. The question matters because one of those smart speakers was just called to be a witness in a brutal double homicide in New Hampshire. Timothy Verrill stands accused of stabbing Christine Sullivan and Jenna Pellegrini to death over suspicion that one of them was a police informant.

Apple has now responded to a letter from Senator Franken last month in which he asked the company to provide more information about the incoming Face ID authentication technology which is baked into its top-of-the-range iPhone X, due to go on sale early next month. As we've previously reported, Face ID raises a range of security and privacy concerns because it encourages smartphone consumers to use a facial biometric for authenticating their identity -- and specifically a sophisticated full three dimensional model of their face. And while the tech is limited to one flagship iPhone for now, with other new iPhones retaining the physical home button plus fingerprint Touch ID biometric combo that Apple launched in 2013, that's likely to change in future. After all, Touch ID arrived on a single flagship iPhone before migrating onto additional Apple hardware, including the iPad and Mac. So Face ID will surely also spread to other Apple devices in the coming years.

Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill has had a long couple of days. The company he runs recently ignited a firestorm among its users when it announced a privacy policy change that would have required users to open up all their notes for analysis in order to take advantage of forthcoming machine learning features. "We let our users down," he said in an interview. "We really tactically communicated in about as poor a way as we could." Evernote is going back to the drawing board and reversing course on the proposed policy.