Alfred Ng

A mother’s viral post criticizing Meta’s AI for compiling details about her young daughters has sparked a debate on what privacy looks like in a future where technology can instantly build dossiers on people by crawling the internet. Kalie Robins, a Utah mom who posts videos about her family’s travels, uploaded a clip of herself singing in the car, her daughter in the background, when she saw a prompt underneath the post asking: “Who’s the child passenger?” Robins thought Meta wanted to verify her daughter’s identity, and she clicked to deny the request.

Lawmakers across the nation are increasingly looking to a new tool to protect people’s personal data online: A public repository of the companies collecting, selling and sharing people’s phone numbers, addresses, and shopping habits. Four states currently have laws on the books requiring so-called data brokers—the companies that collect and sell millions of people’s information—to register in a public database, serving as a directory for people to send data deletion requests and potential targets for enforcers.

A growing movement in state capitals is trying to get ahead of fears that artificial intelligence will soon be able to use troves of data on every American to pinpoint exactly how much someone is willing to pay for a gallon of milk or a plane ticket. As concerns about the cost of living and anxieties about AI’s impact on everyday life continue to rise, lawmakers are pushing regulations to prevent algorithms from using personal data gathered from mobile apps, web browsers and other online tools to automatically estimate the highest price a person is willing to pay.

The Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown has been meticulously documented through smartphones—most recently, in the anonymous bystander videos of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shooting Renee Good in Minneapolis (MN). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under President Trump, has argued that recording and publishing images of its officers while on operations is a crime that threatens officials’ safety.

Erie Meyer is a former chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission who will be a senior fellow researching the intersection of tech, artificial intelligence, and regulation at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and the Georgetown Tech and Society Initiative. Meyer, a co-founder of the U.S. Digital Service that’s better known today as DOGE, talks about how existing consumer protection laws already apply to AI, whether DOGE is making the government efficient, and how AI chatbots could violate financial regulations. 

Federal workers are on edge after the Trump administration spent its first days dismantling long-held protections for career staffers. There’s another safeguard that government employees worry the Trump administration will kneecap before it even gets off the ground: protecting them from online harassment.