GoKawiil
Tech News
Ireland's Data Protection Commission, acting for the EU, fined Google €403 million (about $462 million) for mishandling location history and web/app activity data. The regulator found Google failed to be transparent about Location Accuracy on Android and unlawfully retained users' location data longer than necessary.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission concluded a five-year inquiry into how Google Ireland handled location data across Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy features between 2018 and 2020. The regulator found multiple GDPR violations spanning lawfulness, transparency, accountability and data retention, and has fined the company €403 million while giving it six months to fix its practices.
Regulators concluded that Google mishandled location tracking, gathering and storing data that could expose sensitive personal details about users without adequate safeguards. As a result, the company has been fined $462 million.
An independent researcher used supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning to train a small 4B-parameter open-weights language model to generate PostgreSQL execution plans. On a set of 113 join-heavy queries, the tuned model cut latency by 44.7% on average compared to Postgres's default planner, even though the base model initially failed to produce valid plans for 99 of those queries. The project also involved building a custom measurement rig to reduce caching noise and a modified GRPO reinforcement learning method for scoring plans in a noisy environment.
OpenAI is temporarily lowering the price of its GPT-5.6-Sol model, with the discount running until at least November 21. Separately, the company is phasing out its fine-tuning platform, closing it to new users while letting existing customers keep submitting training jobs for a limited time. Models already fine-tuned will still work for inference until their underlying base models are retired.