GoKawiil
Tech News
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is testing a smart home display, internally coded J490/J491, in employee homes ahead of a possible launch as soon as next month. The device reportedly combines elements of iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, with its own home screen, widgets, and clock faces, and leans heavily on an upgraded Siri to handle tasks across apps like Notes and Reminders.
In a widely shared essay, free software advocate Richard Stallman argued that the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington could trigger a far more damaging 'secondary' harm: sweeping new government surveillance of phone calls, email and physical movement. He distinguished basic weapons screening at airports, which he considers a minor inconvenience, from mass data collection, which he says threatens core civil liberties regardless of whether it actually improves security.
A group of parents and children in Illinois and California filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in Chicago federal court, claiming Meta harvested their Facebook and Instagram photos without consent to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition feature for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models like Emu and Muse Image. The suit alleges these actions violated state biometric and privacy laws in Illinois and California.
Clearview AI, known for scraping billions of photos for facial recognition, is developing an experimental tool called InquiryIQ that would let police feed in a suspect's name and details to automatically scour the web for their employer, aliases, associates, and physical traits. The tool has reportedly tested a model from SpaceXAI, the company behind Grok, and its interface suggests entering demographic data like race and gender helps it make 'smarter decisions.' Clearview has not released InquiryIQ publicly and declined to explain how such inputs affect its outputs.
Tinder says 98 percent of its content-moderation actions in 2025 targeted fake accounts, scams and spam, prompting it to roll out a mandatory face-verification tool called Face Check for new users and expand it to existing users in markets like the US and UK. More than a dozen major dating platforms now use similar biometric checks, including liveness detection and video selfies, to confirm users are real people.