Ukraine's human rights ombudsman has urged international organisations to respond to an allegation that several Ukrainian prisoners of war were executed in Russia's Kursk region. DeepState, a Ukrainian battlefield analysis site close to Ukraine's Defence Ministry, said that Russian troops killed nine Ukrainian "drone operators and contractors" on October 10 after they had surrendered. Dmytro Lubinets said on Sunday that the international community "must not turn a blind eye" to the alleged executions. The ombudsman wrote on Telegram that he had sent letters to the United Nations and the International Red Cross about the incident, referring to it as "another crime committed by the Russians". Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin also said his office had opened a criminal investigation into the alleged execution and said killing prisoners of war was a "gross violation" of the Geneva Convention.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman has agreed to open a new investigation into Centrelink's Online Compliance Intervention (OCI), better known as'robo-debt'. The OCI is a government initiative to recover supposed welfare overpayments. As part of the OCI, hundreds of thousands of letters have been sent to current and former welfare recipients asking them to explain discrepancies between Australian Taxation Office (ATO) income data and income reported to Centrelink. If they were unable to explain the difference, then a debt would be raised against them. The program was widely criticised for putting the onus on individuals to explain discrepancies in government data.

As artificial intelligence proliferates, companies and governments are aggregating enormous data sets to feed their AI initiatives. Although privacy is not a new concept in computing, the growth of aggregated data magnifies privacy challenges and leads to extreme ethical risks such as unintentionally building biased AI systems, among many others. Privacy and artificial intelligence are both complex topics. There are no easy or simple answers because solutions lie at the shifting and conflicted intersection of technology, commercial profit, public policy, and even individual and cultural attitudes. Given this complexity, I invited two brilliant people to share their thoughts in a CXOTALK conversation on privacy and AI.