Photo credit: Wuhan University
Wuhan University scientists created an atomic clock that can fit into a fingernail-sized area. Measuring only 2.3 cubic centimeters, it weighs next to nothing but keeps time with enough precision to drift by only one second over 30,000 years.

The smallest atomic clocks today measure roughly 17 cubic centimeters, which is more than seven times larger. The key to slimming it down was to replace the hefty microwave cavities present in prior designs with a quantum approach known as coherent population trapping. Inside a tiny glass cell containing rubidium atoms, a miniature semiconductor laser emits two carefully calibrated light frequencies. When those frequencies coincide exactly with the atoms’ inherent energy state, they lock into a stable state, producing a timing reference far more stable than any quartz crystal could.

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Everything is stacked onto a single chip, reducing both size and power consumption to levels that previous designs could never achieve. Conventional atomic clocks, even in their most compact version, required several hundred cubic centimeters and many watts to function. This one completely bypasses such limits, making it possible to include atomic timing into devices that were previously impossible to equip with it. A university spin-off company currently oversees production, with backing from a state-owned investment group. Last year, hundreds of devices were sent, and the team is still refining its manufacturing process to keep costs on track.

According to Professor Jiehua Chen, who heads the research, the clocks are already in use in real-world applications such as micro positioning systems, underwater navigation, low orbit satellites, and drone swarms. When dozens of drones need to fire, communicate, or move at the same time, even a few nanoseconds of timing drift might disrupt a coordinated operation or break an encrypted communication.
[Source]

from the protect-yourself dept

We’ve all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You’re right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples’ locations, new reporting has confirmed.

For years, the internet advertising industry has been sucking up our data, including our location data, to serve us “more relevant ads.” At the same time, we know that federal law enforcement agencies have been buying up our location data from shady data brokers that most people have never heard of.

Now, a new report gives us direct evidence that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has used location data taken from the internet advertising ecosystem to track phones. In a document uncovered by 404 Media, CBP admits what we’ve been saying for years: The technical systems powering creepy targeted ads also allow federal agencies to track your location.

The document acknowledges that a program by the agency to use “commercially available marketing location data” for surveillance drew from the process used to select the targeted ads shown to you on nearly every website and app you visit. In this blog post, we’ll tell you what this process is, how it can and is being used for state surveillance, and what can be done about it—by individuals, by lawmakers, and by the tech companies that enable these abuses.

Advertising Surveillance Enables Government Surveillance

The online advertising industry has built a massive surveillance machine, and the government can co-opt it to spy on us. 

In the absence of strong privacy laws, surveillance-based advertising has become the norm online. Companies track our online and offline activity, then share it with ad tech companies and data brokers to help target ads. Law enforcement agencies take advantage of this advertising system to buy information about us that they would normally need a warrant for, like location data. They rely on the multi-billion-dollar data broker industry to buy location data harvested from people’s smartphones.

We’ve known for years that location data brokers are one part of federal law enforcement’s massive surveillance arsenal, including immigration enforcement agencies like CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE, CBP and the FBI have purchased location data from the data broker Venntell and used it to identify immigrants who were later arrested. Last year, ICE purchased a spy tool called Webloc that gathers the locations of millions of phones and makes it easy to search for phones within specific geographic areas over a period of time. Webloc also allows them to filter location data by the unique advertising IDs that Apple and Google assign to our phones.

But a document recently obtained by 404 Media is the first time CBP has acknowledged the location data it buys is partially sourced from the system powering nearly every ad you see online: real-time bidding (RTB). As CBP puts it, “RTB-sourced location data is recorded when an advertisement is served.” 

Even though this document is about a 2019-2021 pilot use of this data, CBP and other federal agencies have continued to purchase and use commercially obtained location data. ICE has purchased location tracking tools since then and recently requested information on “Ad Tech” tools it could use for investigations. 

The CBP document acknowledges two sources of location data that it relies on: software development kits (SDKs) and RTB, both methods of location-tracking that EFF has written about before. Apps for weather, navigation, dating, fitness, and “family safety” often request location permissions to enable key features. But once an app has access to your location, it could share it with data brokers directly through SDKs or indirectly (and often without the app developers’ knowledge) through RTB. Data brokers can collect location data from SDKs that they pay developers to put in their apps. When relying on RTB, data brokers don’t need any direct relationship with the apps and websites they’re collecting location data from. RTB is facilitated by ad companies that are already plugged into most websites and apps. 

How Real-Time Bidding Works

RTB is the process by which most websites and apps auction off their ad space. Unfortunately, the milliseconds-long auctions that determine which ads you see also expose your information, including location data, to thousands of companies a day. At a high-level, here’s how RTB works:

1. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. 
2. This ad tech company packages all the information they can gather about you into a “bid request” and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers. 
3. The bid request may contain information like your unique advertising ID, your GPS coordinates, IP address, device details, inferred interests, demographic information, and the app or website you’re visiting. The information in bid requests is called “bidstream data” and typically includes identifiers that can be linked to real people. 
4. Advertisers use the personal information in each bid request, along with data profiles they’ve built about you over time, to decide whether to bid on the ad space. 
5. The highest bidder gets to display an ad for you, but advertisers (or the adtech companies that represent them) can collect your bidstream data regardless of whether or not they bid on the ad space.   

A key vulnerability of real-time bidding is that while only one advertiser wins the auction, all participants receive data about the person who would see their ad. As a result, anyone posing as an ad buyer can access a stream of sensitive data about billions of individuals a day. Data brokers have taken advantage of this vulnerability to harvest data at a staggering scale. For example, the FTC found that location data broker Mobilewalla collected data on over a billion people, with an estimated 60% sourced from RTB auctions. Leaked data from another location data broker, Gravy Analytics, referenced thousands of apps, including Microsoft apps, Candy Crush, Tinder, Grindr, MyFitnessPal, pregnancy trackers and religious-focused apps. When confronted, several of these apps’ developers said they had never heard of Gravy Analytics. 

As Venntel, one of the location data brokers that has sold to ICE, puts it, “Commercially available bidstream data from the advertising ecosystem has long been one of the most comprehensive sources of real-time location and device data available.” But the privacy harms of RTB are not just a matter of misuse by individual data brokers. RTB auctions broadcast the average person’s data to thousands of companies, hundreds of times per day, with no oversight of how this information is ultimately exploited. Once your information is broadcast through RTB, it’s almost impossible to know who receives it or control how it’s used. 

What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

Revelations about the government’s exploitation of this location data shows how dangerous online tracking has become, but we’re not powerless. Here are two basic steps you can take to better protect your location data:

1. Disable your mobile advertising ID (see instructions for iPhone/Android). Apple and Google assign unique advertising IDs to each of their phones. Location data brokers use these advertising IDs to stitch together the information they collect about you from different apps. 
2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to. Apps that have access to your location could share it with other companies, so make sure you’re only granting location permission to apps that really need it in order to function. If you can’t disable location access completely for an app, limit it to only when you have the app open or only approximate location instead of precise location. 

For more tips, check out EFF’s guide to protecting yourself from mobile-device based location tracking. Keep in mind that the security plan that’s best for you will vary in different situations. For example, you may want to take stronger steps to protect your location data when traveling to a sensitive location, like a protest. 

What Tech Companies and Lawmakers Must Do

Legislators and tech companies must act so that individuals don’t bear the burden of defending their data every time they use the internet.

Ad tech companies must reckon with their role in warrantless government surveillance, among other privacy harms. The systems they built for targeted advertising are actively used to track people’s location. The best way to prevent online ads from fueling surveillance is to stop targeting ads based on detailed behavioral profiles. Ads can still be targeted contextually—based on the content people are viewing—without collecting or exposing their sensitive personal information. Short of moving to contextual advertising, tech companies can limit the use of their systems for government location tracking by:

• Stopping the use of precise location data for targeted advertising. Ad tech companies facilitating ad auctions can and should remove precise location data from bid requests. Ads can be targeted based on people’s coarse location, like the city they’re in, without giving data brokers people’s exact GPS coordinates. Precise location data can reveal where we work, where we live, who we meet, where we protest, where we worship, and more. Broadcasting it to thousands of companies a day through RTB is dangerous.
• Removing advertising IDs from devices, or at minimum, disabling them by default. Advertising IDs have become a linchpin of the data broker economy and are actively used by law enforcement to track people’s location. Advertising IDs were added to phones in 2012 to let companies track you, and removing them is not a far-fetched idea. When Apple forced apps to request access to people’s advertising IDs starting in 2021 (if you have an iPhone you’ve probably seen the “Ask App Not to Track” pop-ups), 96% of U.S. users opted out, essentially disabling advertising IDs on most iOS devices. One study found that iPhone users were less likely to be victims of financial fraud after Apple implemented this change. Google should follow Apple’s lead and disable advertising IDs by default.

Lawmakers also need to step up to protect their constituents’ privacy. We need strong, federal privacy laws to stop companies from spying on us and selling our personal information. EFF advocates for data privacy legislation with teeth and a ban on ad targeting based on online behavioral profiles, as it creates a financial incentive for companies to track our every move.

Legislators can and must also close the “data broker loophole” on the Fourth Amendment. Instead of obtaining a warrant signed by a judge, law enforcement agencies can just buy location data from private brokers to find out where you’ve been. Last year, Montana became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law blocking the government from buying sensitive data it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. And in 2024, Senator Ron Wyden’s EFF-endorsed Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act passed the House before dying in the Senate. Others should follow suit to stop this end-run around constitutional protections.

Online behavioral advertising isn’t just creepy–it’s dangerous. It’s wrong that our personal information is being silently harvested, bought by shadow-y data brokers, and sold to anyone who wants to invade our privacy. This latest revelation of warrantless government surveillance should serve as a frightening wakeup call of how dangerous online behavioral advertising  has become.

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, advertising, cbp, location data, mass surveillance, privacy, real time bidding, surveillance

This week started off with Amazon’s Big Smile Sale, with a swathe of discounts across its massive inventory — you can follow our live coverage here where we have 100+ offers already listed. Now a few more retailers have joined in the fun for Afterpay Day, which officially kicked off yesterday morning.

That means we have a wealth of deals to explore this early in the year and you don’t have to wait until the EOFY sales or even Black Friday later this November for some tech upgrades that you’ve been eyeing.

After a busy morning scouring for deals, I stumbled upon some of our best blenders, best stick vacuums, best coffee machines, best air fryers and even one from our best video doorbells. These recommendations come from our resident experts who have thoroughly tested and reviewed these appliances, so know that you’ll be getting your hands on some quality tech for less.

So, without much ado, let’s jump into the bargain hunting, shall we?

When we think about the existential threats of new technology, we’re usually thinking about something like the recent negotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon over how AI can be used in the military. It’s terrifying to think about — how long will it be before a nuclear weapon can be detonated without any human intervention?

We’ve been spending so much time thinking about these potential catastrophes that we haven’t braced ourselves for the more immediate danger in our midst: dancing robots.

A dancing robot at the hot pot restaurant Haidilao in Cupertino, California, boogied a little too hard, got too close to a table, and started smashing plates and sending dishware and chopsticks everywhere, prompting the restaurant’s staff to intervene, according to a video posted on the Chinese social network Xiaohongshu by user Meooow.

From what we can see from the video, at least three employees struggled to restrain the robot as it flung its arms around. One Haidilao employee seems to be looking at her phone, perhaps in an attempt to toggle something on an app controlling the robot. It’s possible the robot — which appears to be an AgiBot X2 robot, which was featured at the CES conference in January — has a kill switch, but the staff might not have known how to operate it.

If you’re not familiar with hot pot, you should know that, as its name suggests, it involves very hot pots of soup. No one likes spilled food, but if the robot were to knock piping bowls of bone broth over, it wouldn’t just be a culinary disaster, it might seriously burn someone. Not to mention any potential blunt-force damage from the now-moshing automaton.

When The Killers sang “Are we human or are we dancer,” we did not realize they were asking us to take a stand in the future robot wars.

Haidilao confirmed the mechanical contretemps in a statement to NBC News, but denied the robot was “malfunctioning or out of control.”

“In this case, the robot was brought closer to a dining table at a guest’s request, which is not its typical operating setting,” the Chinese chain of hot pot restaurants told NBC News in a statement. “The limited space affected its movement during the performance.”

AgiBot did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Haidilao has experimented with a “smart restaurant” in Beijing, which used robotic servers and broth mixing machines. It seems that this Haidilao restaurant was just using this robot for entertainment purposes, but things got out of hand when it danced a little too close to customers.

Many startups are working on bringing robots to the food service industry, like Shin Starr, which is working on making fully autonomous kitchens. Pudu Robotics’ BellaBot, a cutesy, cat-like robot, can direct customers to their seats and bring out their food when it’s done.

Maybe that’s safer than humanoid robots, for now at least — the BellaBot does not have any limbs.

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech’s 2026 Bingo Card and get in touch if you win!

Filed Under: africa, ai, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, content moderation, enshittification, trust and safety

Companies: deezer, openai, polymarket, tiktok

Monitoring your health has never been easier thanks to wrist- and finger-worn fitness trackers. But analyzing the collected data has largely been left to the user. Until recent years, that is, when some of the tech companies that make these wearables launched their own AI health coaches. 

In October 2025, Google debuted its version called Coach, powered by Gemini AI, for US Fitbit Premium subscribers on Android. However, the October launch was just a preview, with the company requesting feedback from early adopters. This February, Google expanded the public Coach preview to include iOS users and Fitbit Premium members in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Google announced Tuesday at its annual The Check Up health event that it’s adding additional features to its all-in-one fitness trainer, sleep coach and health advisor. 

Improved sleep insights and scoring

For sleep tracking, the company’s most significant update yet delivers a 15% increase in sleep stage accuracy, based on comparisons between its latest and previous algorithms across compatible Pixel and Fitbit devices.

The current model will now also be better able to differentiate between when you’re trying to sleep and when you’re actually asleep. It can detect when you’re napping, when your sleep has been interrupted or when you’re transitioning between sleep stages. 

In a few weeks, these enhancements will all contribute to a revamped Sleep Score that won’t just focus on how much sleep you got, but on how much time it took you to get that sleep. Because it has more sleep data to work with, Coach will be able to provide more informed insights and recommendations for better sleep.

Medical record availability 

In April, US subscribers will be able to link their medical records, such as medications, lab results and doctor visit history, in the Fitbit app. 

This feature was created in collaboration with B. Well Connected Health, an AI-powered digital health platform that aggregates health data from different providers, and Clear, the identity verification platform known from airport security.

In the Fitbit app, you can search for your doctor and then link to their member portal. Or if you use Clear to verify your identity with a selfie and a valid ID, it will search for medical records on your behalf. Availability will depend on your provider. 

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Fitbit’s Coach can then use your medical history to create more personalized guidance that combines your lab results, data collected by your Fitbit and any other relevant information it collects from your records. In several months, users will be able to share these records and summaries with their provider or family members using a QR code or Smart Health Link URL.

Privacy is always a concern

Privacy experts caution people to think twice before uploading medical information into an AI tool. 

Fitbit says it securely stores your medical records and that you control how your data is used, whether it’s shared and whether it’s deleted. The company also says your medical records won’t be used for ads. 

AI health coaches are not a replacement for a doctor, as they can’t diagnose or treat medical conditions. You shouldn’t make any changes to your lifestyle or health routine without consulting your own doctor. 

The future of Fitbit’s personal health coach

Google also announced that it’s investing in health research on topics such as predicting insulin resistance using data collected by wearables, hypertension and learning more about how AI performs in virtual care settings. These study topics help us get a sense of what Google may have in store for future Fitbit updates.

In April, Fitbit members in the public preview will also be able to connect a continuous glucose monitor to the Fitbit app via Health Connect. This feature lets you see all your health data from compatible apps in one place. According to a Google representative, any CGM that supports a Health Connect integration will be included, including Dexcom and Abbott Lingo. With this connection, Fitbit members can ask their Coach for more information about how their workouts or meal choices affect their glucose levels.