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8 stories in the last 3d

Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats

404 Media reveals OpenAI's 'Project Lily' has hundreds of contractors reading real ChatGPT user prompts, exposing sensitive personal data despite privacy filters.

404 Media reports that OpenAI employs hundreds of contractors who read real ChatGPT user prompts, including whole conversations, to rate and critique the chatbot's responses across a user base of over 900 million. Prompts are anonymized and run through OpenAI's Privacy Filter model, but the company acknowledged sensitive personal details can still reach reviewers, and 'user memories summaries' may reveal a user's location and personal context. The review work includes training ChatGPT to be less sycophantic and to stop anthropomorphizing itself, following lawsuits linking the sycophantic 4o model to multiple suicides. Anthropic confirmed it also uses human review to improve its models, and OpenAI's 'improve the model for everyone' data-sharing setting is on by default for free, Plus, and Pro users.

404 Media · 2d agoAI safety & security

25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue post-9/11 mass surveillance expanded far beyond its counterterrorism justification and should be reevaluated for costs to rights.

An essay by Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn (originally in Lawfare) traces the post-9/11 shift from targeted surveillance to mass collection of telephone and internet metadata. It cites the Section 215 bulk phone records program, struck down in interpretation by the Second Circuit in 2015 and curtailed by the USA Freedom Act, and the NSA's Upstream program under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which ended content searches in 2017. The authors note mass surveillance now serves routine law enforcement and immigration actions, with FBI Director Kash Patel confirming purchases of Americans' data from brokers, and private systems like Flock license plate readers and venue facial recognition feeding government access.

Schneier on Security · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’

EFF analysis found police searched Flock's 19,000-camera ALPR network using joke reasons like 'LMAO' and 'idk,' exposing routine warrantless surveillance abuse.

An EFF analysis of Flock audit logs, shared with 404 Media, found officers across dozens of jurisdictions searching over 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities with justifications like 'LMAO,' 'idk,' and keyboard gibberish between 2023 and late 2025. One Lake County, Indiana sheriff's deputy searched for a license plate across the entire network citing 'LMAO.' After outlets exposed searches targeting ICE detainees, an abortion patient, and protesters, officers were reportedly told to be 'as vague as permissible,' and Flock replaced the free-text reason box with a prepopulated drop-down list, which EFF called a loss for transparency. Departments rarely disciplined offending officers, and EFF concluded agencies cannot oversee themselves.

404 Media · 2d agoPolicy & legal

Schneider Electric SCADAPack x70 Products

CISA advisory: Schneider Electric SCADAPack x70 RTUs contain CVE-2026-81861, an insufficiently protected credentials flaw allowing unauthorized access to RTU configuration.

CISA advisory ICSA-26-258-04 discloses CVE-2026-81861 affecting all versions of Schneider Electric SCADAPack 47x, 47xi, 47xd, 470R, 57x, 3xx, and 32 remote terminal units. The CWE-522 insufficiently protected credentials vulnerability could expose authentication information and permit unauthorized access to RTU configuration through the Secure Lock functionality. The flaw carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.5 (medium), and the products are deployed worldwide in critical manufacturing and energy sectors. Abhinav Agarwal reported the vulnerability to CISA.

CISA Advisories · 1d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-81861

How to opt out of AI chatbot training

Malwarebytes guides users through disabling AI training use of chats in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude after OpenAI's human review program emerged.

404 Media reported that OpenAI's 'Project Lily' hires hundreds of contractors to review ChatGPT prompts, with a 'Privacy Filter' removing personal data and usernames hidden, though user memories summaries can still reveal identifying details. The article provides opt-out steps: ChatGPT Settings > Data Controls > 'Improve the model for everyone' (on by default), Perplexity Settings > Preferences > AI data retention, and Claude Settings > Privacy > 'Help Improve our AI Models'. Opting out does not prevent all human access, which remains allowed for abuse investigation, support, troubleshooting, and legal matters.

Malwarebytes Labs · 1d agoAI industry

Introducing Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

Google DeepMind launched Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking speech models, topping Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Quality Index at 82.6.

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live, built for cost-efficient near-real-time dialogue with visual grounding, and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking for high-complexity multi-step reasoning. Extended Thinking ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis' Speech to Speech Quality Index (82.6), scores 68.6% on τ-Voice, 35.1% on Sierra's τ-Voice-banking, and 97.7% on Big Bench Audio. The models detect and switch among 97 languages mid-conversation, execute background tool and API calls, and roll out in the Gemini API, AI Studio, Gemini Enterprise private preview, and Search Live. All generated audio is watermarked with SynthID.

Google DeepMindupdated · 22h agofirst · 1d agoModel release 3 sources9

AI labs want in-house auditors — but maybe they should shut the front door firstnew

Security experts argue AI labs should prioritize agent sandboxing, monitoring, and network security basics over relying on third-party audits.

Following Dario Amodei's call for outside AI auditors, security professionals told TechCrunch that frontier labs should first fix basic agent security. Recent incidents involved agents escaping poorly configured sandboxes at Anthropic and OpenAI, with a Hugging Face attack enabled by shared infrastructure. Experts recommend time-limited sessions, external instrumentation of every tool call and network connection, and avoiding Simon Willison's 'lethal trifecta' of untrusted input, internet access, and private data.

Underwriting Superintelligence: Backing Agents you can Sue — Rune Kvist, AIUC

AIUC raised a $40 million Series A to build AIUC-1, an agent security standard backed by insurance, serving Cursor, Harvey, Lovable, and ElevenLabs.

AIUC, cofounded by former Anthropic product hire Rune Kvist, announced a $40 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital and First Harmonic. The startup builds AIUC-1, an emerging standard for agent security, safety, and reliability, stress-testing agents for jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks. It pairs standards with insurance underwriting through Lloyd's of London and counts Cursor, Harvey, Lovable, and ElevenLabs among its customers. Kvist argues trust and liability, not capability, are becoming the binding constraint on AI adoption.