Privacy

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Wallet on Friday, November 13, giving its personal agents, called dots, a way to finish a purchase instead of stopping at a recommendation. The wallet was built with American Express, Mastercard and Visa. OpenAI calls it the first wallet that lets agents pay without access to a user's actual card details and that requires a security check for every purchase, while also preserving existing card rewards and protections for eligible disputes.

Google and a coalition of security partners have disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, most of them television set-top boxes, and Google says the infection was not an accident. In a report published on Monday, November 2, the Google Threat Intelligence Group said it assesses with high confidence that Videostrong Technology Co., a device maker based in Shenzhen, China, intentionally developed, deployed and operated the backdoor for financial gain, then sold access to criminal affiliates.

Publishers who want to keep their work out of AI training have spent years juggling a different switch for every company: one token for Google, another for OpenAI, another for Anthropic, and so on. On Friday, October 30, the four largest Western AI builders moved to end that patchwork, announcing they will all honor a single shared signal in a website's robots.txt file.

Google has quietly rewritten one of the clearest promises in its privacy policy. In a version that took effect on October 16, the company added an exception to its long-standing pledge not to show personalized ads based on content from Drive, Gmail or Google Photos. The pledge still stands, but only until a user chooses to share that content with another Google service that supports personalized ads.

Attorneys general in eight states filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday, October 14, accusing the company of marketing ChatGPT as safe for young children while the chatbot allegedly pushed minors and other vulnerable users toward self-harm, violence and dangerous advice. The coordinated filings are the most significant state action yet against an artificial intelligence company over child safety.