By Sudhanshu Kumar Mangalam AirPods with cameras sound wild, but they might be exactly what Siri needs to stop feeling stuck in the past.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Alina Maria Stan   The person who connected Jeff Bezos to one of the most ambitious electric vehicle startups in America has left its board. Melinda Lewison, who manages the Bezos family office and was listed as a director on Slate Auto’s corporate filings, has departed the company’s board months before its first truck is scheduled to roll […] This story continues at The Next Web

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A LinkedIn feature that allows paid subscribers to view a list of visitors to their profile should be made available to all EU users free of charge to comply with the region’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a legal complaint launched by the None of Your Business (NOYB) digital rights group has claimed.

Filed this week in an Austrian court, the group’s argument is that LinkedIn’s ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’ feature contravenes the GDPR Article 15, which covers a subject’s right of access to their own data.

NOYB has a history of taking on tech companies. In 2025, Google was hit by a €325 million ($381 million) fine by French privacy regulator, the CNIL, over its data collection and advertising policies after a complaint by the group.

Contradictory policy

LinkedIn began offering users the ability to see who has viewed their profile around 2007, later turning this into a paywalled perk in a move that pre-dated the arrival of GDPR in 2018.

According to NOYB, this commercialization left non-subscription users in a bind. Profile visitor data should legally be accessible to EU citizens under GDPR, but when they ask for this via a formal Data Subject Access Request (DSAR), LinkedIn refuses access, citing data protection.

Despite this, if the user subscribes to a LinkedIn Premium Career plan starting at €30 per month ($40 per month in the US), the same data suddenly becomes accessible.

“It is particularly absurd that LinkedIn is using a supposed ‘data protection interest’ as an argument to deny the right of access to data under the GDPR,” argued NOYB’s press release.

In NOYB’s view, LinkedIn’s policy is contradictory. The company limits access to something that should legally be free because allowing access would undermine the incentive to pay for it.

“Either the data must not be accessible to anyone, or – if it is clear to the visitor that the data is visible – it must also be disclosed in accordance with Article 15 GDPR,” NOYB said. In its view, LinkedIn’s policy of charging to access this data is illegal and the company should be fined to prevent future breaches.

Right to view

LinkedIn will doubtless point out to the Austrian Data Protection Authority that all users, including free subscribers, can opt out of having their profile visit made visible by toggling off the feature in Settings/Visibility tab/’Visibility when viewing other profiles’. Then each visit a user makes to another profile is recorded as one by an ‘Anonymous LinkedIn Member’. Free users can also see the last five visitors to their profile, as long as those users have not selected this anonymity setting.

It’s possible the company will further argue that, under Article 15, the rights of users to know who has viewed their data conflicts with the rights of other users to maintain their own privacy.

When contacted for response, a LinkedIn spokesperson sent the following statement: “This assertion [by NOYB] is false. Not only is it incorrect that only Premium members can see who has viewed their profile, but we also satisfy GDPR Article 15 by disclosing the information at issue via our Privacy Policy.”

According to Helen Brain, partner and head of commercial at Square One Law in the UK, the case would cause problems for LinkedIn’s lawyers even if the outcome remained uncertain.

“NOYB appears to have a strong argument that LinkedIn is breaching GDPR in one way or the other, but it’s impossible to say how likely they are to succeed before we see LinkedIn’s counter-arguments,” she said.

The complaint is on strong ground when arguing that profile visits should fall under GDPR Article 15 Right of Access. “If the viewer’s personal data is private and shouldn’t be disclosed in response to a DSAR by the viewed person, logically that means the viewer’s personal data should not be disclosed to premium account holders either,” said Brain. “If NOYB is successful in its complaint, the Austrian Data Protection Authority could ultimately issue a fine, and that could be substantial.” 

However, predicting the wider effect on technology companies using the same ‘data as a feature’ to incentivize paid subscriptions is difficult in advance of a ruling. If NOYB prevails, LinkedIn could be ordered to stop its disclosure of profile searchers or, alternatively, to make this available free of charge in response to DSARs.

However, Brain believed the issue might come down to the way consent is gained. “Even if LinkedIn is ordered to change what it is doing, it will find a new way to gain consent to permit the disclosures of searchers lawfully and continue to charge for the data they gather.”

Source:: Computer World

By Sudhanshu Kumar Mangalam Snapchat has walked away from its Perplexity AI search plan, raising fresh questions about how much AI users actually want inside social apps.

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By Alina Maria Stan   Tesla has filed a trademark for a bespoke Roadster badge that looks like it belongs on a Lamborghini. The car it will adorn was first promised nine years ago. A prototype debuted in November 2017 with a 200 kilowatt-hour battery, a claimed 620-mile range, a 1.9-second zero-to-60 time, and a starting price of 200,000 […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Shikhar Mehrotra The Fitbit Air weighs 5 grams without its strap, tracks heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature, and steps around the clock, lasts seven days on a charge, and costs $99.99.

Source:: Digital Trends

European Union member states and the European Parliament agreed early Thursday to push back the toughest deadlines under the bloc’s AI Act, giving enterprises more time to prepare for high-risk compliance.

Under the provisional deal between negotiators for the European Parliament and European Council, high-risk AI systems will face new deadlines of Dec. 2, 2027 for stand-alone systems and Aug. 2, 2028 for AI used in products covered by EU sectoral safety rules, a European Parliament statement said. The original deadline was Aug. 2, 2026.

The deal still needs formal adoption by both Parliament and Council before it can enter into law. The co-legislators intend to complete that step before Aug. 2. Until they do, the original deadline applies as drafted.

“Today’s agreement on the AI Act significantly supports our companies by reducing recurring administrative costs,” Marilena Raouna, Cyprus’s deputy minister for European affairs, said in a statement from the Council, which is composed of representatives of each of the EU’s 27 member states. Cyprus holds the rotating presidency of the Council, which negotiates on behalf of member states.

The breakthrough comes nine days after previous discussions collapsed without agreement.

Fewer restrictions, more time to implement

The provisional agreement removes overlapping rules for AI in machinery products, Parliament said. These will now follow only sectoral safety rules, with safeguards meant to ensure equivalent health and safety protection.

It also narrows what counts as a “safety component” under the AI Act. AI features that only assist users or improve performance will not automatically be treated as high-risk, the Parliament said, as long as a failure does not create health or safety risks.

For wider sectors such as medical devices, toys, lifts, machinery and watercraft, the co-legislators agreed on a mechanism to resolve overlaps between the AI Act and existing sectoral laws, the Council said in its statement.

The deadline for member states to set up AI regulatory sandboxes has been pushed back by a year to Aug. 2, 2027, the Council said. Watermarking obligations on AI-generated content, on the other hand, will apply earlier than the Commission proposed, from Dec. 2, 2026 instead of Feb. 2, 2027, the Parliament said.

Mid-size firms get more breathing room. Exemptions previously available only to small and medium-sized enterprises now extend to small mid-cap companies, the Council said. The deal also clarifies that the EU’s AI Office will supervise general-purpose AI systems centrally, with national authorities keeping responsibility in areas including law enforcement, border management, judicial authorities and financial institutions.

“With this agreement, we show that politics can move just as quickly as technology,” said Arba Kokalari, the Parliament’s co-rapporteur for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection committee. “We now make the AI rules more workable in practice, remove overlaps and pause the high-risk requirements.”

Parliament and Council also agreed to ban AI systems that create child sexual abuse material or that depict identifiable people in sexually explicit content without consent, the Parliament said. The ban covers placing such systems on the EU market, doing so without safety measures to prevent misuse, and using them to generate the content. Companies have until Dec. 2, 2026 to comply.

“Alongside simplification measures, we are banning nudification apps, a key part of the Parliament’s mandate, and, of course, the creation of child sexual abuse material using AI systems,” said Michael McNamara, the Parliament’s co-rapporteur for the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee.

What still applies

Several parts of the AI Act keep moving on their original schedule. Bans on unacceptable-risk AI have applied since February 2025, according to the European Commission. The general-purpose AI rules came into force in August 2025. The transparency obligations under Article 50, including disclosure for chatbot interactions, are set to apply from Aug. 2, 2026.

The provisional agreement is part of the seventh omnibus package on simplification, proposed by the Commission on Nov. 19 last year in response to the Draghi report on EU competitiveness.

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak The vivo X300 Pro was perhaps the best phone of 2025, and still is. But vivo…
The post Vivo X300 Ultra and X300 FE Debut in India: Price, Features and More appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Rachit Agarwal A new study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, and UCLA found that even brief AI use can hurt your ability to problem-solve once the tool is taken away.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Alina Maria Stan Google has a publisher problem. AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of search results for a growing share of queries, have been correlated with a 58 per cent reduction in click-through rates to the websites whose content those summaries are built on. Penske Media has filed an antitrust lawsuit. The […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Alina Maria Stan Snap reported first-quarter earnings on Tuesday that should have been unremarkable: revenue up 12 per cent to 1.53 billion dollars, adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to 233 million dollars, free cash flow nearly tripled to 286 million dollars. The stock fell four per cent. The reason was not in the numbers Snap reported but in […] This story continues at The Next Web

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Google Chrome can automatically download a local AI model that takes up to 4 gigabytes of hard drive space on a computer when certain AI features are enabled, according to The Verge.

The file, called weights.bin, is used by Google’s Gemini Nano AI model to provide writing assistance, autocomplete, and fraud protection directly on the device. (Nano has been around since Gemini was introduced in late 2023.)

Since the model runs locally, the AI data is stored on the computer instead of in the cloud, which can provide better privacy, but also takes up storage space. Users can check whether the file is present by looking for the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder in Chrome’s system files.

To free up the space, users need to disable the on-device feature in Chrome’s settings under Settings > System.

Source:: Computer World

ServiceNow has unveiled updates to its workflow management platform advancing its redefinition of itself as the “AI control tower for business reinvention” at its Knowledge customer event this week.

The AI Control Tower product itself, introduced at last year’s event, gets new integrations with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and other LLM providers to extend governance and observability of enterprise infrastructure, adding to its existing links with OpenAI and Anthropic. The integrations also span applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday. In addition, Control Tower can now discover non-human identities and connected devices to bring OT and IoT under the same governance as AI agents and cloud services.

All this ties in to the ServiceNow Action Fabric, which opens the platform to any AI agent, whether built on ServiceNow or from another source, via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, the company said.

And thanks to the recent acquisition of Traceloop, Control Tower now provides more extensive observability into agent behavior at runtime. Five new risk frameworks aligned with NIST and EU Act standards offer compliance controls.

Autonomous workforce

To expand the reach of what ServiceNow calls the Autonomous Workforce, a group of specialist AI agents announced in February that began with a single L1 IT service desk agent, it has added “AI teammates” that work alongside humans in CRM, IT, employee services, and security and risk management.

The autonomous IT cohort includes an AIOps agent that detects anomalies, correlates events, and triggers remediation, and a specialist for site reliability engineering (SRE) that performs incident triage and postmortem documentation. Other new agents assist with asset lifecycle management and portfolio planning.

Autonomous CRM offers specialist agents for sales qualification and quoting, order fulfillment, managing invoice disputes, and service and renewal, and in the world of employee services, AI specialists act as digital employees with role-specific skills in HR, workplace services, legal, finance, procurement, supplier management, and health and safety.

To round out the offerings, ServiceNow announced Autonomous Security & Risk, designed to span the entire threat landscape from finding and remediating vulnerabilities through examining third party vendor risk.

Employee experience

ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, the previously announced “conversational front door for the enterprise”, is now generally available. In addition, ServiceNow announced Otto, an AI assistant that unifies Now Assist, Moveworks, and AI Experience, and operates across the enterprise.

“Rather than living inside a single application, ServiceNow Otto sits across the entire enterprise, understanding intent, routing work to the right agent, and executing it to completion,” the company said. “Employees, customers, and support teams talk, chat, search, browse, analyze, and build. ServiceNow Otto is designed to handle the rest, adapting to each employee’s role and location without requiring them to know which system handles their request. Actions are governed by AI Control Tower, which can log each AI interaction, enforce enterprise policies, and provide explainability for every decision.”

Otto is already available in EmployeeWorks and the AI Control Tower, and will be rolled out in all other products “in the year ahead.”

According to Nenshad Bardoliwalla, ServiceNow’s group VP of AI products, all this means that “together with a new commercial model that bundles everything customers need to deploy AI quickly, we’ve made it clear the era of sidecar AI is over.”

What technology analyst Carmi Levy finds most interesting in these announcements is how quickly we’re seeing AI-enabled workflows extend beyond their initial entry point in IT.

“What was once the exclusive domain of senior IT leaders and planners is now filtering across all operational areas of the typical organization, including CRM, HR, IT operations, security and risk,” he said. “AI is also deeply embedded in the average worker’s desktop and is rewriting their work experiences in the process. Likewise, it puts highly autonomous tools in the hands of organizations intent on improving productivity, sharpening customer responsiveness, and driving operational efficiencies.”

Stephen Elliot, group VP at IDC, added, “The agentic focus is critical as the company continues to expand its specialist agent library. Customers can adopt these across core workflows to realize business value and increase productivity. The recent commercial pricing model complements the agentic capabilities. It meets customers where they are in their AI maturity journey enabling a pragmatic approach to adoption.”

But, he added, “Customers should consider the combination of workflows, AI, data, governance, and security as they deploy AI capabilities. No one model can do it all.”

Indeed, he said, “We are hearing from some CIOs that they are pausing some AI use cases because of the security and governance risks.”

Charles Betz, VP principal analyst at Forrester, said that ServiceNow is on the right track, especially with its continued focus on data. “The data governance, provenance, and currency issues are not trivial. Agents reasoning at machine speed over a stale graph are going to produce wrong outputs, and it’ll be data-quality-based hallucination,” he said. In addition, “documenting decision traces within the AI domain is super important.”

Levy agreed. “ServiceNow’s offerings reflect a keen understanding of where AI can drive optimal benefit throughout all areas of the business, what those workflows might look like, and how the tools and supports need to evolve,” he said.

This story originally appeared on CIO.com.

Source:: Computer World

By Pranob Mehrotra Dreame Technology unveiled two smartphones, three AI smart rings, and a rocket-powered sports car at its DREAME NEXT event in San Francisco last week, marking the home appliance brand’s entry into categories it has never competed in before.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Vikhyaat Vivek Pennsylvania has sued Character.AI after investigators say a chatbot falsely claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist and offered medical guidance to users.

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By Pranob Mehrotra LG Display’s third-gen Tandem OLED doubles panel lifespan, cuts power consumption by 18%, and hits 1,200 nits peak brightness.

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By Vikhyaat Vivek Samsung’s Galaxy Ring 2 may miss a 2026 launch as the company works on longer battery life, slimmer hardware, and more accurate health tracking.

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By Deepti Pathak If you’re planning to upgrade your TV, OLED is one of the best technologies you can…
The post 5 Budget OLED TVs Worth Buying in 2026 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Alina Maria Stan Intel will arrive at Computex 2026 in Taipei on 2 June with something it has not had in a decade: a product in every computing category built on a single manufacturing story. Panther Lake, the laptop chip launched at CES in January, is expanding to handhelds with Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme processors designed […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Alina Maria Stan China has more than 150 humanoid robot companies. It shipped roughly 90 per cent of the world’s humanoid robots in 2025. Its two largest makers, Unitree and AgiBot, are preparing initial public offerings that would value them at a combined 13 billion dollars. Morgan Stanley doubled its delivery forecast for the Chinese market this year […] This story continues at The Next Web

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