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ICE bans agents from using Meta smart glasses, but wants to build its own

Mashable

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Agents have been spotted wearing Meta glasses during raids. Now ICE is telling every employee to take them off. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.


The FCC just changed the rules for robot vacuums. Here's what it means for yours

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The FCC just changed the rules for robot vacuums. Here's what it means for yours The U.S. just put new restrictions on advanced robots, and your next robot vacuum could be affected. Recently, the U.S. government announced new restrictions affecting certain "advanced robotic devices" sold in the country. According to the Federal Communications Commission, the rules cover " mobile robots, such as humanoids and quadrupeds," as well as autonomous mobile robots.


Understanding Fairness and Prediction Error through Subspace Decomposition and Influence Analysis

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning models have achieved widespread success but often inherit and amplify historical biases, resulting in unfair outcomes. Traditional fairness methods typically impose constraints at the prediction level, without addressing underlying biases in data representations. In this work, we propose a principled framework that adjusts data representations to balance predictive utility and fairness. Using sufficient dimension reduction, we decompose the feature space into target-relevant, sensitive, and shared components, and control the fairness-utility trade-off by selectively removing sensitive information. We provide a theoretical analysis of how prediction error and fairness gaps evolve as shared subspaces are added, and employ influence functions to quantify their effects on the asymptotic behavior of parameter estimates. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate our theoretical insights and show that the proposed method effectively improves fairness while preserving predictive performance.


Simple and Effective Specialized Representations for Fair Classifiers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fair classification is a critical challenge that has gained increasing importance due to international regulations and its growing use in high-stakes decision-making settings. Existing methods often rely on adversarial learning or distribution matching across sensitive groups; however, adversarial learning can be unstable, and distribution matching can be computationally intensive. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach based on the characteristic function distance. Our method ensures that the learned representation contains minimal sensitive information while maintaining high effectiveness for downstream tasks. By utilizing characteristic functions, we achieve a more stable and efficient solution compared to traditional methods. Additionally, we introduce a simple relaxation of the objective function that guarantees fairness in common classification models with no performance degradation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently matches or achieves better fairness and predictive accuracy than existing methods. Moreover, our method maintains robustness and computational efficiency, making it a practical solution for real-world applications.


Manual vs. AI-Powered PDF Redaction: Protecting Sensitive Data in 2026

PCWorld

Cut complexity, control costs, and boost productivity with powerful PDF and eSign solutions. Learn the difference between manual and AI-powered PDF redaction and how modern AI tools improve compliance, accuracy, and sensitive data protection. Research shows that humans play a role in 60% of breaches that expose sensitive data. That "role" often involves an employee falling for a phishing scam or using PASSWORD for their login credentials, but data exposure can also be a result of how your business redacts sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) in your documents. Historically, manual, "black-box" redaction was considered best-practice, but this approach only obscures data, it doesn't permanently remove it.


In Differential Privacy, There is Truth: On Vote Leakage in Ensemble Private Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

When learning from sensitive data, care must be taken to ensure that training algorithms address privacy concerns. The canonical Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles, or PATE, computes output labels by aggregating the predictions of a (possibly distributed) collection of teacher models via a voting mechanism. The mechanism adds noise to attain a differential privacy guarantee with respect to the teachers' training data. In this work, we observe that this use of noise, which makes PATE predictions stochastic, enables new forms of leakage of sensitive information. For a given input, our adversary exploits this stochasticity to extract high-fidelity histograms of the votes submitted by the underlying teachers. From these histograms, the adversary can learn sensitive attributes of the input such as race, gender, or age. Although this attack does not directly violate the differential privacy guarantee, it clearly violates privacy norms and expectations, and would not be possible at all without the noise inserted to obtain differential privacy. In fact, counter-intuitively, the attack becomes easier as we add more noise to provide stronger differential privacy. We hope this encourages future work to consider privacy holistically rather than treat differential privacy as a panacea.



Appendix A Algorithm details

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 GLASS Algorithm 1 GAN-based latent space search attack ( GLASS) Require: A standard ResNet-18 network is divided into blocks, as shown in Figure 8. From Similarly, for GLASS, we set the learning rate to 1e-2 and the number of iterations to 20,000. Regarding IN, we selected a learning rate of 1e-3 and performed 30 training epochs. The accuracy of each defended model and its corresponding defense hyperparameters are shown in Table 3. Table 3: Details of defense hyperparameters (we set the split point uniformly to Block3). We train 50 distributions for Shredder, maintaining an accuracy of over 77% for all of them. As Figure 10 shows, the upper left curve implies a better privacy-utility trade-off. NoPeek and DISCO achieve the optimal defensive effect on almost all DRAs.



In Differential Privacy, There is Truth: On Vote Leakage in Ensemble Private Learning Jiaqi Wang

Neural Information Processing Systems

When learning from sensitive data, care must be taken to ensure that training algorithms address privacy concerns. The canonical Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles, or P A TE, computes output labels by aggregating the predictions of a (possibly distributed) collection of teacher models via a voting mechanism. The mechanism adds noise to attain a differential privacy guarantee with respect to the teachers' training data. In this work, we observe that this use of noise, which makes P A TE predictions stochastic, enables new forms of leakage of sensitive information. For a given input, our adversary exploits this stochasticity to extract high-fidelity histograms of the votes submitted by the underlying teachers. From these histograms, the adversary can learn sensitive attributes of the input such as race, gender, or age. Although this attack does not directly violate the differential privacy guarantee, it clearly violates privacy norms and expectations, and would not be possible at all without the noise inserted to obtain differential privacy. In fact, counter-intuitively, the attack becomes easier as we add more noise to provide stronger differential privacy. We hope this encourages future work to consider privacy holistically rather than treat differential privacy as a panacea.