Flock Safety Tightens Data Rules After Police Misuse

Flock Safety Cuts Data Retention to One Week After Police Misuse

The American Civil Liberties Union called the reforms minor. Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said his biggest concern was and will continue to be that Flock is a mass surveillance company collecting billions of license plate scans every month on people who have done nothing wrong. He welcomed the shorter retention but noted a week still exceeds the ACLU’s recommended 48 hours, and said the reforms do little to address the fundamental issue of warrantless access to location data on virtually every car in America.

Surveillance company Flock moves to increase oversight after police misuse →

DHS Confirms Warrantless Location Data Purchases From Ad Auctions

A September 2023 DHS Inspector General report found CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service purchased and used commercial geolocation data in ways that violated internal privacy policies and federal law, including failing to conduct required Privacy Impact Assessments. In one documented case, a CBP employee used the system to track coworkers’ movements. The surveillance pipeline persists due to a gap in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which prohibits phone companies and internet service providers from selling customer data to law enforcement without a warrant but does not extend to data brokers. The Brennan Center for Justice described the arrangement as data being effectively laundered through a middleman, and Montana became the first state to require a warrant for law enforcement data broker purchases in May 2025.

Ad Auctions Feed Warrantless Government Surveillance: New Tool Maps Pipeline →

German Privacy Watchdog Calls for EU-Wide Cookie Banner Replacement

The proposal comes amid ongoing EU-level talks on a digital simplification package. The European Commission had originally proposed that users set cookie preferences once in their browser, but EU capitals dropped that proposal from their position in June after lobbying from advertising and media groups concerned about revenue effects. Specht-Riemenschneider warned politicians to take popular opinion on cookie banners seriously. She announced her resignation in March citing health reasons, with a successor approved to take over in October, amid a broader German discussion about reforming privacy-rule enforcement.

German privacy watchdog urges EU to scrap cookie banners →

Anthropic Quietly Watermarks Every Claude AI Output

The mark travels with text when copied and pasted and may persist through some editing, with files receiving a second layer of protection via signed metadata under the C2PA open standard. Anthropic has not disclosed how the watermark is made or released detection documentation, though researchers infer it is a statistical signature similar to Google’s SynthID Text approach. Open-source projects to remove the watermark appeared within days, including guillaumemeyer/watermarks-remover with 4.6k stars on GitHub, whose authors argue a statistical text mark is not a reliable way to prove origin. Anthropic is upfront that heavy editing can strip the mark, and that a missing mark does not prove a human wrote something.

Anthropic Is Quietly Watermarking Every Claude AI Output. Builders Are Already Trying to Break It →