No, no it cannot. Looks like we need to re-up our paper @jevan.bsky.social

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

The cover of the report, with dark blue title "How Big Cloud becomes Bigger" with "Bigger" in bold, and subtitle in light blue "Scrutinizing Google Microsoft and Amazon's investments", and light grey author line "David Gray Widder and Nathan Kim" on light grey page background with three clouds: white, dark grey, and very dark grey getting bigger and going towards the top right until they're off the page.

📣🚨NEW: ☁️ Big Cloud—Google, Microsoft & Amazon—control two thirds of the cloud compute market. They’re getting rich off the AI gold rush.

In new work with @nathanckim.bsky.social, we show how Big Cloud is expanding their empire by scrutinizing their *investments*… 🧵

📄PDF: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Article abstract

I'm delighted to share that my article, AI and Doctrinal Collapse, is forthcoming in Stanford Law Review! Draft at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.....

Judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members

Excellent scoop by @eileenguo.bsky.social! This is a timely reminder: always keep private data off public sites. If it's out there, it will likely be harvested. Prioritise your online privacy and think twice before oversharing.
#PII #Privacy #Cybersecurity

A great @technologyreview.com article quoting from @rachelhong.bsky.social and @willie-agnew.bsky.social!

Important new work from @jevan.bsky.social, Yoshi Kohno, & other UW & CMU coauthors.

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices....

My response to Ring's decision to roll back reforms and go back to surveillance on behalf of police as a business model.

This is part of a trend of companies bending over backwards to get in on the techno-authoritarian money/power grab that comes with being a lapdog of the carceral state.

Another major AI privacy violation and, again, almost no way for injured individuals to get remedy—or even to know who stole or misused their sensitive personal data.

The bottom line, says @willie-agnew.bsky.social, a postdoctoral fellow in AI ethics at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the coauthors, is that “anything you put online can [be] and probably has been scraped.”

The paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17185

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

NEW FROM ME: new research has found millions of ex's of personal info, including credit cards, passports, résumés, birth certificates etc in 1 of the largest web-scraped datasets used to train image generation AI models.

It's a major privacy violation.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

Super excited and thankful to have Tech Review feature our work!

Please join us for the Co-Constructing the Future of Digital Intimacy workshop at #CSCW2025! (with @lucyq.bsky.social, @allismc.bsky.social, @dianafreed.bsky.social, @jevan.bsky.social, @eredmil1.bsky.social, @zahrastardust.bsky.social, @mirandawei.bsky.social ++)

futureofdigitalintimacy.github.io

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found.

Some Thoughts on Techno-Fascism From Socialism 2025 "This is the endgame of our isolation."

"Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines. They want techno feudal subjects who will believe and do what they’re told. We, as people, are being strategically simplified. This is a fascist process."

organizingmythoughts.org/some-thought...

A Common Pool of Privacy Problems: Legal and Technical Lessons from a Large-Scale Web-Scraped Machine Learning Dataset We investigate the contents of web-scraped data for training AI systems, at sizes where human dataset curators and compilers no longer manually annotate every sample. Building off of prior privacy con...

New paper alert! In a collaboration between computer scientists and legal scholars, we find a significant amount of PII in a common AI training dataset and conduct a legal analysis showing that these issues put web-scale datasets in tension with existing privacy law. [🧵1/N] arxiv.org/abs/2506.17185

Woman with computer data overlay

Forget Me Not? Machine Unlearning's Implications for Privacy Law: this paper explores the
technical challenges, and legal implications, of effectively removing or suppressing personal #data from large, complex models.
http://spkl.io/63325fCCiz
@jevan.bsky.social @cedricwhitney.bsky.social

If another world leader had threatened, in the middle of a bombing campaign, that a government "must make a deal, before there is nothing left" -- both scholars and the U.S. government would have labeled it a threat of genocide.

ICE is going to parks in Los Angeles and kidnapping nannies who are caring for small children

The children are witnessing these kidnappings and being held in custody until their parents are contacted

Women and children in parks

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?

New from me @gabrielgeiger.bsky.social + Justin-Casimir Braun:

Amsterdam believed that it could build a #predictiveAI for welfare fraud that would ALSO be fair, unbiased, & a positive case study for #ResponsibleAI. It didn't work.

Our deep dive why: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/11/1...

Palestinians gunned down while trying to reach food aid site in Gaza, hospital says Witnesses say Israeli forces opened fire on people near distribution point run by Israel-backed foundation More than 20 people were killed on Sunday as they went to receive food at an aid distribution point set up by an Israeli-backed foundation in the Gaza Strip, according to a hospital run by the Red Cross that received the bodies. Witnesses told the Associated Press that Israeli forces had opened fire on people as they headed toward the aid distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). “There were many martyrs, including women,” the 40-year-old resident said. “We were about 300 metres away from the military.” Continue reading...

Palestinians gunned down while trying to reach food aid site in Gaza, hospital says

The shocking far-right agenda behind the surveillance tech used by ICE and the FBI Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump administration.

“Thousands of newly obtained documents show” that the founders of Clearview AI—which is backed by Peter Thiel—“always intended to target immigrants & the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump admin.” This is incredible reporting by @lukeobrien.bsky.social, 4/2025 1/

Trump administration threatens to arrest House Democrats over ICE facility incident "There will likely be more arrests coming," a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said.

The Administration has arrested a judge in WI and a mayor in NJ, and is threatening to arrest federal lawmakers. In any other country we would say the strongman's security forces are locking up political opponents. We need to treat it exactly that way here. www.axios.com/2025/05/10/t...

Elon Musk’s AI data centers polluting Black communities so that his Nazi followers can ask his chatbot questions is a perfect distillation of why AI is fascist technology

U.S. pushes nations facing tariffs to approve Musk’s Starlink, cables show Some countries have turned to the satellite internet firm in preparation for trade talks, State Department staffers wrote. The U.S. has a strategic interest in countering Chinese internet providers, b...

Exclusive: A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name.

Behind Trump’s Deal to Deport Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Most Feared Prison New details deepen questions about the deportations, showing that El Salvador’s president pressed for assurances that the migrants were really members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

The entire CECOT atrocity was every bit the haphazard shitshow you probably imagined—and more so.

Important, detailed reporting from the @nytimes.com

I unironically love this.

A singular blooming Trillium flower

A Roosevelt Elk standing in the forest

Towering fiddle leaf ferns

A massive blooming rhododendron

Signs of spring on the Olympic Peninsula