The Download: military personnel data for sale, and AI watermarking

For as little as $0.12 per file, knowledge brokers within the US are promoting delicate non-public knowledge about each active-duty navy members and veterans, together with their names, addresses, geolocation, web value, and faith, and details about their kids and well being situations. 

In an unsettling examine printed immediately, researchers from Duke College approached 12 knowledge brokers and bought hundreds of information about American service members with minimal vetting.

The examine highlights the acute privateness and nationwide safety dangers created by knowledge brokers. These corporations are a part of a shadowy multibillion-dollar trade that collects, aggregates, buys, and sells knowledge, practices which might be at the moment authorized within the US, exacerbating the erosion of non-public and shopper privateness. Read the full story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley

The within scoop on watermarking and content material authentication

Final week, President Biden released his executive order on AI, a sweeping algorithm and tips designed to enhance AI security and safety. The order put nice emphasis on watermarking and content material authentication instruments, which goal tocontent material to find out whether or not it was made by a machine or a human. The White Home is making an enormous wager on these strategies as a method to struggle AI-generated misinformation.

The White Home is encouraging tech corporations to create new instruments to assist shoppers discern if audio and visible content material is AI-generated, and plans to work with the group behind the open-source web protocol referred to as the Coalition for Content material Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA. Tate Ryan-Mosley, our senior tech coverage reporter, has written a helpful information to C2PA, what it might probably obtain, and, crucially, what it might probably’t. Read the full story.

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