AI GDPR Privacy

Austria deals blow to “Pay or Okay” consent model

The Austrian Federal Administrative Court confirmed that DerStandard’s “Pay or Okay” model breaches the GDPR. Users had to either accept tracking by hundreds of third parties or pay a subscription. Authorities ruled that this coercive model invalidates consent, which must be free and specific. Real consent rates drop to 1–7% when asked transparently, but the […]

AI Privacy

When privacy becomes training data

Researchers found millions of passports, credit cards, résumés, and faces in DataComp CommonPool, a massive AI training dataset scraped from the web. Auditing just 0.1% revealed hundreds of millions of likely PII (personally identifiable information) items, including sensitive job and health details. Despite face-blurring tools, researchers estimate 102 million faces were missed, and metadata/captions still […]