Honor and Impact - Ralph and K get serious on 9/11

Welcome to the Serious Privacy podcast, where Ralph O'Brien, and Dr. K Royal take a moment (or 41 moments) to reflect on the meaning, history, and honor on 9/11. It's a humbling podcast, but one you will enjoy. We also bake in some privacy news. @trustarc @Paul Breitbarth,

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Tim 0:53

You're listening to the award-winning Serious Privacy Podcast sponsored by Trust Ark. Please welcome your hosts, Paul Breitbart, Ralph O'Brien, and Dr. Kay Royal.

Ralph 1:06

We're recording this today slightly late on September the 11th, 2026. And it's fair to say, 25 years ago, the world changed. For millions of people, September the 11th will be remembered through images, names, phone calls that never came, stories that have been carried from generation to the next. But I guess we're here to talk about another part of that legacy that's not so often discussed, data protection and privacy. So in the years that followed 9-11, governments around the world expanded surveillance, intelligence gathering, data retention, powers available to security agencies, all in the name of preventing the next attack. Some measures were supposed to be temporary, others became permanent. So that leaves us with different, difficult questions. How much liberty are we supposed to give up in the name of security? And who gets to decide where that line is? And once you introduce extraordinary powers, how do we make sure they don't become ordinary? So today on September the 11th, we remember lives that are lost. Examine the most consequential legacy that follows. My name is Ralph O'Brien.

K 2:15

And I'm Kay Royal, and welcome to Serious Privacy. So yeah, it's going to be an odd week for Ralph and I. We thought about talking about just a particular subject this week. So I think it's going to be government surveillance. I'm out of my comfort zone. I'm at my mom's house in Mississippi. And so if Ralph posts any of these videos on Instagram, I'm going to reach to the phone and I'm going to I'm going to pinch someone.

Ralph 2:38

No videos this week. Okay.

K 2:40

Actually, you know what? I don't have any vanity. I probably don't care, frankly. But unexpected question. I told Ralph I had one for this week, because y'all know I I chose 52 at the beginning of the year. So here's an interesting one for us, and I picked it because this is 9-11. What superpowers would you not want to have?

Ralph 3:02

Yeah. Leaping tall buildings in a single bound somehow seems inappropriate, doesn't it? Would I not want to have? That's the interesting one. I think not want to have. Hearing other people's faults. Edwin says it's fascinating to hear what's inside people's heads, but this is a privacy podcast, and people are really curious what other people think about them. I think I'd rather not know.

K 3:23

Oh my God, that is a good one. I all I could think about was lasers from your eyes that you couldn't control. Like Scott Cyclops in X-Men or whatever, but not hearing other people's thoughts. That's tell you what, you don't hear their thoughts, and I won't burn them to death.

Ralph 3:40

That's fair. Yeah, it's interesting. We talk about data protection and privacy quite a lot. And these days we're encouraged to share, aren't we? We're encouraged to push everything out there and share our thoughts and tell everyone what we're doing. And when I thought, where did that become normal? I remember a friend a little while ago, I told them something about the weekend, and they said, Oh, pictures where it didn't happen, or something like that. It was like a little saying, Oh, doc document it where it didn't happen. It happened and I'm telling you, you're calling me a liar, right? So it is interesting that we sort of evidence and capture everything we do now, right?

K 4:16

Nowadays you have to, not only with the fake news that comes out, but also just the AI faith as well that comes out. Not the fake news that someone fabricates, but the what the AI does with hallucinations and the deep fakes and everything like that, it's kind of interesting for anyone to still hold on to the documented or it didn't happen. If it's not written, it didn't happen, which is what we live in the medical world, right? If the nurse doesn't document it, it didn't happen. But nowadays, even if it's documented, are you really sure?

Ralph 4:50

Yeah, I suppose you do we've got the ability to produce fake content now, don't we?

K 4:55

And you can backdate it and you can change metadata and all of this. Interesting. I know in my AI class this week, we have to create groups, small groups. But today's or this week's discussion post was supposed to be us proposing a topic for our group to handle, but it's not our group proposing a topic. Everybody in the class proposes a topic. And then if you're in the group with the people, you have to figure out which topic you should do. And my two classmates, one of them, worked for the FTC.

Ralph 5:25

Right.

K 5:26

And so it's really interesting when we did the first week just a few weeks ago, introducing yourself. I read, watched his introduction, and then I was like, oh my God, you're with the FTC. I am so thankful you don't know my name. Because he was in the investigative division. And before he read my note, he watched my introduction. He's like, oh my God, I think I've met you. You're one of my people that I most admire. And you spoke at IEPP, and I'm like, oh, sweet, he does know my name. But not from an FTC investigation, which was good. So of course, when it said to create a group, he's the first one I reached out to, right? And so he's proposing a topic on AI impacting jobs. And are we really going to see the job losses that we have? My other group guy that joined us, he's proposing AI in healthcare, clinical decision making, which of course I would support that topic being a nurse and still basically working in a healthcare adjacent space. My topic is AI, child sexual abuse maturity. So I probably brought the entire emotions of the whole class down with my topic, right? Because nobody wants to think about something that ugly. But funny enough, yesterday when I was talking about I need to propose something, I hadn't even thought about it, given what I'm doing this week. And my husband I said, What AI topic do I want to propose doing a group project on? I'm like, What the heck? And Tim went, my husband went, You talk a lot about revenge porn.

Ralph 7:02

Yeah. Yeah.

K 7:02

And I'm like, oh, that's a good one, but let's take it even darker. Let's go to child sexual abuse material.

Ralph 7:08

Yeah.

K 7:09

Because the thought out there is if it's not a real child, you're not harming anyone. Well, yes, you are. It's enforcing darkness anyway. So that's what I proposed.

Ralph 7:19

Yeah, I was looking, I think I've talked a few times about these sort of AI companion, AI sort of chatbot, AI girlfriend kind of apps that you see out there. And what was really interesting is how I saw them advertised, actually. The advert that was thrown up on my screen was saying we was actually advertised as finally a woman that won't say no.

K 7:40

Okay, people, my mouth is open. I'm not rolling the eyes. I've got this incredulous look on my face, like, what?

Ralph 7:45

Yeah. And I was thinking if that's the way we're advertising these things, that doesn't vite us.

K 7:50

And is that how we're reinforcing behaviors?

Ralph 7:54

Yeah, I know. It is concerning, isn't it? Human behavior is really fascinating.

K 7:59

Yeah, you can't predict it, that's for darn sure.

Ralph 8:02

And there's a c there's a quote by a sociobiologist, E.O. Wilson. He says, The real problem with humanity is the following. We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And that's really fascinating because we are biologically our brains are adapted West African plains, like one melon, two melons, more melons than I can eat. We listen to stories over statistics. If you say little Johnny down the road's been hurt, that means much more to us than one in a million gets hurt, right?

K 8:35

Exactly.

Ralph 8:35

Things are more powerful when they have names. And but our institutions are medieval in their nature, but the technology we have now is truly godlike. We're able to produce fake content, we're able to we're able to cause benefits and harms at a scale that we've never seen before.

K 8:51

Where do we go from here?

Ralph 8:53

Yeah, where do we go from here? It it is concerning. In fact, the UK government today has actually rejected a mechanism for an AI kill switch because they were saying, hey, we were going to legislate for an AI kill switch for the UK, but they've said it doesn't matter because the Americans will create superintelligence that will bypass it anyway. Which I think is a really, really sad and dark.

K 9:13

To decide what you're gonna do, why bother doing it because they're gonna defeat it. Yeah. And there's a country song, not that my husband's ever heard it, that says, Where were you when the world came to an end? And I remember where I was. We were in Arizona. I think everybody remembers they were where they were, right? I was in Arizona and my mom called and said, Turn on the TV. And so we saw the plane hit the second time, the second set. And a friend of mine, Victoria, was had just come to the U.S. on an engineering, what do you call it, swap with Intel and landed at the Phoenix Sky Harbor from Columbia and she didn't speak English and they couldn't get out of the airport. They what they weren't letting anyone leave. And she called her mom. She's like, I don't know what's going on. They won't let us leave. They won't let us get our luggage, they won't let us do anything. And her mom's like, Are you not watching the TV? America's under attack. And she was like, I see the TV. Are you telling me that's real? She didn't speak the language, so she didn't know what they were saying, but she watched it. She said, You're telling me that's real, it's not a movie. And and of course, she was stuck here. She couldn't get back out, right? Yeah. And so she started as a maid at a hotel and then she became a receptionist at a law firm and she got fussed at for her accent being thick, and she's like, I'm just learning how to speak English. And so the the partner that said that to her encoura indirectly encouraged her to go to law school because she wanted to show him up that yes, she was good enough.

Ralph 10:53

Yeah.

K 10:53

And he later got disbarred, I think, for his behavior. I don't know what, not directly related to her, but that kind of behavior, right? So it impacted. And what I was telling Ralph when right before we started the recording is I don't guess I realized how much what happened to us impacted other countries. And not because I was taking an insular American view, but I didn't realize that what happened to the United States really impacted others until I saw all the the activities that were happening today around the world and what is it, the British Guard, their band playing a tribute for America today. So, Ralph, you're not in America.

Ralph 11:39

No, I'm not.

K 11:40

Did it really impact everyone so much?

Ralph 11:43

Yes, it did. Um I d I remember my own point where I was, I'd actually called in sick for work, would you believe, as a twenty one-year-old. I had called in sick for work and I'd gone out of bed in that morning, probably the afternoon by that time, and I turned on the television and took to the sofa with a sick blanket, actually. And like you said, for the first 10-15 minutes, I actually thought I was watching a movie.

K 12:07

I didn't actually It's unbelievable, it's just unreal.

Ralph 12:10

Yeah, it's just when it kept on going. We actually had our own the next year. Not quite as impactful, but we it's called the 7-7, which was ours the next year, where we had an attack on underground in London. Yeah. It was really interesting. So I was doing a lot of work in business continuity at the time, how to cope when disasters occur to businesses. And actually what the police did is they turned off all the cell phone towers because they were worried that was how they are activating explosions and told everyone to shelter in place. And what was really interesting is all the business had got plans for what to do if people can't come to work. They didn't actually have plans for what to do if they had people at work, they couldn't send them.

K 12:48

If they couldn't get rid of, they couldn't send home, right?

Ralph 12:50

Yeah, really interesting. There is the British stiff upper lip of keep calm and carry on, but yeah, but actually when you look at what's happened over the last 25 years, the sort of the climate that changed. I've actually been doing a rewatch of a show called Battlestar Galactica or the reboot of it pretty soon. And actually that was filmed shortly afterwards, and you can really see the influence of the fear of terrorism and the anyone could be a collaborator and attacks was not large-scale armies fighting abroad, but small-scale individuals operating at home. And I think that's still with us. Benjamin Franklin, again, I'm going to make another American quote: those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety. Which I think is really interesting because we passed a whole lot of laws, Patriot Act, Pfizer. You look at what happened with the NSA and the Snowden revelations in data protection, the sort of problems that's caused between America and Europe afterwards. You know, I think it's fair to say that Europe puts kind of liberty over security in a way, whereas America seems to put security over liberty in a way.

K 13:56

America locked everything down. We passed the USA Patriot Act, which is one of the most horrendous pieces of law, I think, I've ever seen. Not saying it wasn't warranted right after, but it never went away.

Ralph 14:09

Yeah, that was it. Let's do this temporarily for a year.

K 14:13

Yeah. And it's so invasive. It's, yeah, I want to keep our country safe as well, but do we do it that way? Is that how we're supposed to do it? And then to see what's going on with my country now with the immigration authorities and who they're taking away. They're not following warrants. They're I'm not going to get into a political diatribe about that, but let's just say that, yeah, I can see what's going on in my country and I don't see it being justified at all. But then also back at the time when it happened, there was a movie from Arnold Schwarzenegger that was supposed to come out, Collateral Damage. It was supposed to come out the beginning of October, and they pushed it out because it was too soon. You hear the jokes about, yeah, too soon. That was too soon.

Ralph 15:46

The end of the first Toby McGuire Spider-Man film had to be completely reshot because that was taking place on the trade towers, and I think it was re-reshot at Brooklyn Bridge.

K 15:55

Anything that had the Twin Towers in it.

Ralph 15:58

It actually really dates movies. You can really date a movie from seeing the skyline, actually. It's really interesting.

K 16:03

Oh, you can, absolutely. And some of them have digitally removed the skyline because they couldn't go back and reshoot because that was a year ago or whatever. So it it's interesting. I think I saw one of the tributes where they used, what was it, 2,977 drones representing each life loss in the Twin Towers recreating them. It's just it's a weird day. Let's just say it's it just feels like weird.

Ralph 16:28

Yeah, it's dark and it's horrible, but and it has impacted. It was really interesting looking at data protection concerns. I was working for the police at the time, and there was a project going on with the Metropolitan Police in the UK where they wanted to create after that a ring of steel around London, they called it.

K 16:46

Yeah.

Ralph 16:46

Which was uh a network of cameras in a circle around central London that would record number plates, ANPR, automatic number plate recognition, and that could be used for anti-terrorism reasons. And we spoke to the ICO at the time, the Information Commissioner. And the Information Commissioner back in 2001 said number plate recognition, ANPR, is so dangerous and so invasive that they would only let the police do it for a period of six months or something for anti-terrorism.

K 17:14

It just kept on.

Ralph 17:15

Yeah. And ANPR now is on every garage forecourt, every supermarket car park, every parking garage. And the original ring of steel around London is now what we call the congestion shard zone. Those cameras have been re repurposed for fines and penalties for people who don't pay a charge for congestion and emissions tax in London. So you've got some really good interesting example there of what we call function creep, something used for one thing that's now used for something else. But at the same time, that the temporary solutions, the convenience solutions that we adopt today might become the mandate of tomorrow. Right.

K 17:53

They're just going to continue forever with minimal changes to them. It's crazy. It really is. And trying to draw a comparison between 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, right? One of the only few times in the world where the US has been attacked by another country and or another group, whatever you want to call it, maybe not the country, but the group. And then draw that comparison to today. And what would happen today? What would you call the world being in it being under attack today by? Would it be technology? Would they take us down by technology? I don't know. I don't know. I don't I guess I don't have a war mindset.

Ralph 18:36

Yeah. There there's another quote, and I'm full of quotes today for some reason, but I I and I forget who said this one, but it was it is I don't know what the third world war would be for but the fourth world war would be with sticks and stones.

K 18:49

Exactly, is where I was going with it will be sticks and stones, right? Are we ever going to get to that point? I'm older than you and Paul. We've established that before. And I grew up in in the age where we all had to hide under our desks for the the every semester nuclear war test, right? Because it was back during the Cold War, which I really didn't understand what the heck the Cold War was. But alarms would go off and we'd all get under our desks and sit there thinking, how would getting under our desk protect us whatsoever during a nuclear war? But I also remembered thinking I never wanted to have children because I did not want to bring them in to a nuclear war zone. Why would I bring children into a war like this? Well, we don't really live under the threat of nuclear war anymore, right? I don't know if we recognize there's nothing we could do to stop it, or if we don't really think it would happen, we don't have the same threat looming over our heads.

Ralph 19:47

Yeah. So you're right. That we spend far more column inches talking about whether AI is going to kill us all. I saw one of the anthropic or open AI people came out this week and said that's got to happen.

K 19:59

Or we spend far more time talking about technology than we do talking about you know What was the movie where the machine was going to set off the nuclear war and kill us all?

Ralph 20:08

That's Terminator, Skynet.

K 20:10

Yes.

Ralph 20:11

Yeah, Skynet.

K 20:13

So now we may be closer to that, right?

Ralph 20:15

That's what I grew up listening to. When someone said the first term AI to me, my first thought was those 80s films, War Games, Terminator, The Matrix later on, when it's all we should take these as course retailers. Go in and adopt, right? Well that's perhaps it. And actually, I used to be an early adopter. I was one of the first with an iPhone, Bluetooth speakers, satellite TV, the internet. I really loved chat rooms and I met things that absolutely appalled me and things that actually I never did though. Yeah. It was really fascinating. ASL, age, sex, locations, all anyone wanted to know. Um because humans had got drives, right? And those drives are meant to be twofold. It's procreation, can I do things with this other person? Or security and safety, right? Can I protect myself? Is this person a threat? We're very good at othering other people. Interesting enough, there was uh an incident with our lifeboat, our sort of sea rescue organization here, the rural national lifeboat institution, helped uh a boat of migrants into shore. That's their job. They protect people who are in trouble on the seas. And what I found really distressing is they received a lot of death threats from people.

K 21:26

For helping others, right? For helping others. What the hell?

Ralph 21:31

Yeah, but no, we're very good at othering. And actually, I think that somewhat of the legacy I actually think terrorism wins when it spreads terror, when it spreads hate, when it spreads division. And some of the best things, we're looking at the bad things here, but some of the best things can be when people come together rather than fall apart. People still get married, babies still get born, people still fall in love, humans still go out and enjoy things together, they laugh, they smile, they cry. Very human experiences. And I'm falling back in in my as I get older to those more human experiences rather than the technological ones.

K 22:06

Human experiences will continue. Ralph goes to the positive side of them, I go to the negatives. Divorce is still gonna happen. Complaints and introverts staying at home is still gonna happen. The what makes us human is never gonna go away. We hate, we love, we cry, we laugh, we bitch and moan and complain. Those those basic human things are never gonna go away. But what I do wonder is are we ever gonna get to a point where we cherish human life over everything else? And I frankly don't think we do right now. I do not think as a whole, not talking about individuals, but as a whole, I don't think people cherish and honor human life more than they do everything else. Not everything else, but the technology, the strife, the the jobs, the the whatever, they're chasing their own pleasure and things. Do we cherish human life more than we do the ability to do things?

Ralph 23:08

I was having a conversation with Data Protection Education this morning, which is a client of mine. I w I was actually teaching their consultants some things, and you know, AI came up and AI in schools. And we had a conversation about the fact that all of these technology companies are throwing this automation in a race. We must be best, we must get there first, we must take advantage of this, we must earn money off this, we can't be left behind. And what it's actually left schools with, interesting enough, is where they don't have. Choice where it gets built into these tools, whether they like to or not. And AI ultimately is about automation. It's about saying machines more, humans less. We're just going to have consequence, environmental consequence, have economic consequence, and putting security over human life, putting security over liberty, putting technology in the machines over humans. Are we feeding the machine with data or should the machine be supporting us? These are really interesting societal questions that you in our race to make profit and money and feed the corporate machine, if you like, are we really paying attention to? Have we learnt the lessons of the past? I'm not sure we have in some ways. I remain hopeful because one thing I was taught about the news is they only show bad things. Generally speaking, apart from one and finally at the end of the newsreel, I was always taught the news is unusual. The news is news because it's different, and the news is news because and what they show us is things that they want to provoke emotion, clicks, vitriol, changes of opinion, people arguing.

K 24:42

It's always bad things. It's never good things.

Ralph 24:45

So I was always taught if you see it on the news, you don't have to worry about it. Because it Admittedly it happens to somebody. I'm not please don't think I'm making light of the 3,000 people almost who lost their lives that day, the emergency workers, the families who are still being affected. But at the same time, I think we have to remember when we live our lives consumed by social media and looking through a screen, that actually 99% of our real world around us is positive and lovely human people doing lovely things, right?

K 25:14

I remember that morning also that I went I was in my first year of law school. I went to law school. Sat in contracts class, which was probably a 9 a.m. class, I would think. I don't think it would have been an 8 a.m. class, probably a 9 a.m. class. I was in Arizona, and at this point would be on Pacific timeframe. And pretty much everyone showed up because we didn't know what else to do but the normal routine. Right? You don't know what to do other than the normal routine. So I look up what's happened in the past 25 years, unprecedented technological growth, Wi-Fi, online banking, search engines, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, inventions such as the Nuva Ring, contraceptive ring, and Lystraw, a low-cost water filtration device, breakthroughs in genomics, medicine, physics, DNA, the Human Genome Project completed in 2003, which, where I went to school, the human genomics, whatever, was right across the street from my law school. And a lot of my law professors worked for it, right? Duh mapping the DNA. The discovery of the Higgs boson, I don't even recognize that, which deepened our understanding of particle physics, geopolitical and social changes, new countries such as Timor Lest in 2002, and old unions like Yugoslavia dissolved. New nations came out like Serbia and Montenegro. The Republic of Afghanistan reshaped international relations. Everyday life and society was digital connectivity, as you were talking about, with the innovation, booking rides, ordering food, streaming in the nation, managing hell became central to us, right? AI assistance, web three technologies, hyper-conneated connected smart devices. Our phones are us. All the court decisions about someone's phone isn't private, it's public. Police can access it now, it becomes private because it holds everything about our lives on this little device who has more computing power than the rockets that went to the moon had, right? Rapid technological progress, groundbaking scientific discoveries, significant geopolitical shifts. What is there left? Where do we go from here? Can we even imagine the serious Friday C podcast, exactly? These world richness. How can you get any better? Some of them.

Ralph 27:46

Yet we all weekly get together and and share news and hopefully the people out there appreciate it, right?

K 27:54

That's one thing to think about. Paul and I started this right before the COVID shut the world down. We met once. Did not talk about the podcast in the one time that we met in San Francisco, and then started a podcast four or five days before Global Data Protection Data Privacy Day. And every year we restart the podcast for that season on that day. So we take the month of January basically off and we record our first episode for the next year on January 28th. Yes, it puts us a few episodes behind some of the other podcasts out there, but to us, it gives us one, a break and time to rejuvenate, to spend time with family, and then start that back. But years ago, this wouldn't have been a thing, right? We wouldn't have had a podcast. Paul and I became, okay, my words, because Paul's not here, best friends over COVID, right? We were the two, other than our families, we only ever saw each other. He had to stare at this face for two years to make a podcast. And trust me, for two more years, he argued that we couldn't do live podcasts or show recordings because I show up with my hair a mess and in a t-shirt and whatever. And I'm like, oh, don't let me be your excuse, Paul. You really just don't want to do a live one, let's be honest. But if y'all want us to do a live one, tell us.

Ralph 29:12

We call it Stockholm Syndrome now, when people who are kidnapped fall in love with their captors, right?

K 29:17

Exactly. I'm in love with Paul. What can I say? I'm in love with Paul.

Ralph 29:20

Yeah, we're missing.

K 29:21

But yeah, and then Ralph, you were always our backup host for whatever we needed to do. You were always the the third unofficial co-host. And so the fact that we brought you on, we absolutely love. But we are the only podcast doing what we're doing that has people on multiple sides of the world. Yeah.

unknown 29:40

Yeah.

K 29:40

You know, there is no other.

Ralph 29:42

But we take effort to bring in the Southern Hemisphere as well to make sure that we do our best to bring in the Southern Hemisphere, trust us.

K 29:48

We try our best to do that. Next week is going to be just me and Noelle, and it ain't going to be a blessed thing about privacy on here. We're just going to shoot the breeze, right? This week, Ralph and I haven't really talked about anything privacy specifically related, but we have, right? This is a topic 9-11, like I said, I didn't know, impacted other countries. I know not to the extent that it impacted America, but it did, from what I understand, remove people's comfort that where they were living, they were safe.

Ralph 30:20

Yep, true. And that balance between security and liberty is what I think we're going to continue to struggle with, especially when different countries take different approaches. The more draconian, the more security you put in place, the more it will impact normal people's lives. And their ability to act as autonomous people with their own creative dreams and ideas and freedom to be who they want to be.

K 30:43

Yeah, let's be fair. The ability to talk about privacy and data protection and cybersecurity law and AI, all of the birth roll problems. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Ralph 30:51

It's a privilege. It's a privilege to be able to sit here and talk about such things in a free and democratic society.

K 30:58

Yeah. Someone's not going to show up at my door to arrest me because I talked about the USA Patriot Act being one of the worst pieces of legislation ever. Now, in this day and age, would they probably? They could, but I'm in Mississippi, so good luck.

Ralph 31:12

Okay. Before we go, I've just got a couple of actual news.

K 31:16

Yeah, let's throw out a few news things that that happened this week. We don't have to talk about them in discussion, but if these were not on your radar, make sure that you're paying attention to what's on the radar. Go ahead.

Ralph 31:26

Yeah. We're just going to talk about a couple. One one's quite old now because it happened just after we recorded last week, but that in the UK, uh, grinder, the gay LGBT dating app settled the UK lawsuit without admitting any wrongdoing. Now, this is really unusual because the UK historically has struggled with what we call representative actions, what the US would call a class action. It's 26 million. They were sued in the High Court in 2024 with 11,000 claimants. And those 11,000 claimants alleged that they had been sharing a load of information from the app with third parties and advertisers, including HIV status, which people might disclose if they're going to get together. Six million into thirteen million payments. You can divide that amongst the 11,000 claimants and then take off the law firm's fee, I'm sure. But that's that's not insignificant. That's that's quite big. One of the other big ones that's kind of happened on this side of the pond as well is today we got a note saying that the ICO in the UK will actually be no more as of the 30th of September. Everything will transition to the Information Commission at that point. Ick, that iCO, ick. The Ick, yeah. So we'll have the Ick after the 30th of September. I don't expect there'll be massive change, to be honest. I think it'll be business as usual. It's really just a transfer of assets. But at that point, we'll formally have the commission. I've also been told that they're extending the application for the new chair to the 11th of September, so you can still apply to be the new chair of the information commission. Should you so desire.

K 33:08

Why?

Ralph 33:10

Yeah. Should you so desire, I think, is a bit of a poison chalice. I think they might be extending it because many people have applied, but we will find out. Or the wrong kind of people applied. On your side, Kay, I know there's some stuff in California we mentioned briefly.

K 33:24

California's always moving and grooving. So some of the bills we told you got signed into law. Let me pull up exactly what those were. The AI oversight framework signed yesterday, I believe, created the California Artificial Intelligence Standards and Safety Commission. So the COT is you can't even make that sound like a thing. In a state AI auditor residency, there is a ban on shock gloves for law enforcement. I don't know if y'all heard about that, but they trialed some shock gloves in a school and said it's not a thing. Oh, it's a thing. Leno's law, smog accept, oh, hold on, this is getting outside privacy things. AI and social media restrictions, 20 bills passed, which would curtail AI and social media by minors, education and health measures. So California just getting really busy here. Some of the other things that we have, not necessarily in the U.S., but Delaware's HB 380 updated the state's Personal Data Privacy Act. California, of course, the data brokers have started downloading consumer deletion requests from the drop platform. They have a few more days to be able to complete their work. Massachusetts passed a bill banning the sale of precise geolocation data, data breaches and cybersecurity. We may have talked about one or two of these last week. I pulled up September news, not September 11th news. So McKesson had a breach exposing 284 million patient records. Carhartt had a data breach by shiny hunters affecting 13 million people. UK airports over on your side were hit by a cyber attack, leaking 8.7 million customer records. Identity verification breach led to 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver's licenses being sold. Flot cameras are still controversial. Go figure. LGTVs are found to be logging voice and household device data even went off. Okay, that can't be a surprise to anyone. Meta still over their glasses, facing more and more stories. Apple Watch AI was raising concerns about constant listening. Microsoft Copilot can stamp AI-generated images with user identifiers. OpenAI warns of a limited window to strengthen defenses against AI-driven cyber threats. Grind agreed to a 35 million UK settlement over HIV data sharing. TikTok is facing the 400 million over children's privacy. And FTC sued hims and hers for allegedly sharing patient medical data with advertisers. So that wasn't everything. That was just a fast pass-through. If any of those sounded interesting, feel free to go look them up yourselves. We may cover them in more detail in a couple of weeks. Noelle and I probably won't talk a lot about them in a subject next time. But if any of these come through or are still shocking, we'll give you an update. But now is when you're going to start seeing a lot of the bills pending in U.S. legislatures either get passed or get killed. We're in September. We explained how the U.S. legislature worked last episode. So if you're curious about that and you missed it, go back and catch up on that. But this is when I would expect to start seeing a lot of bills either get pushed through quickly or get killed. The other thing is when you do see a bill in the United States, and Ralph, let me know if it works this way in other countries as well. You can tell whether or not it's anticipated to pass by the number of committees that it is assigned to. If it is assigned to three or more committees, it's not likely going to make its way through to a general vote.

Ralph 37:13

That's really interesting. I I suppose too many chefs spoil the broth, right? Right. Too many cooks in the kitchen break the cake or whatever it is.

K 37:23

Interesting. One of the other proposals by one of my classmates in the law was that you're he's a lawyer and he talks about all the cases in the U.S. and around the world that lawyers are being held accountable for, citing fake cases because they're using AI and the cases aren't real. He brought up an interesting thing. What about legislation that captures laws or regulations that are no longer valid, have been overturned by court cases, or simply never existed to begin with? And who's actually doing due diligence on those and who's accountable for them? You can't really hold a lawyer accountable for hallucinations in a bill drafting.

Ralph 38:03

That's interesting. Yeah, as people increasingly use technology to create these sort of things based on others. Yeah. But the three top ones from California that I saw, AB 1709, sounds like the Enterprise, including targeting kids under 16 with attention-grabbing features, SB1119, chatbot operators to give parental control, and A B2, uh social media companies making their products safer for young people.

K 38:30

So Yeah, didn't they say something like 25 or 27 of them went to the governor the last time we were talking? So they're slowly making their way through.

Ralph 38:38

Yeah. A lot of focus on children. And I think we're going to finish by saying actually, we shouldn't just be protecting children, and we shouldn't just be protecting, we should be protecting all humans. And so perhaps final thought for this week is for me is to perhaps look at the phone a little bit less, look at humans a little bit more, and make sure you reach out to someone you love and stay safe out there.

K 39:00

Yeah. I can't say anything better than that. So that will bring us to an end.

Tim 39:05

Goodbye.

K 39:06

Bye, y'all.

Tim 39:07

Now that with serious privacy. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. You can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Blue Sky at Sirious Privacy. Feel free to drop us a question or a comment. We'd love to hear from you.