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Flock Camera Contracts Canceled in 23 Jurisdictions
Twenty-three jurisdictions nationwide have voted to cancel or reject Flock license plate camera readers following controversy and concerns about surveillance and privacy.
Flock cameras are solar-powered automatic license plate readers made by Flock Safety.
“Flock technology combines video, gunshot detection, and investigative software to help law enforcement, schools, and businesses locate vehicles, understand incidents, and collaborate across jurisdictions while maintaining clear privacy safeguards, local control, and responsible data use,” the company’s website says.
Flock cameras are marketed to police and local officials as a way to track criminals, but following hundreds of reports of police abuse and cases of mistaken identity, local leaders nationwide are pushing back on the camera network.
Police departments use these devices to locate vehicles that may be stolen or involved in a crime, and the technology has been around since the early 2000s. As the Washington Examiner reported, 23 city councils have voted to cancel, reject, not renew or deactivate Flock cameras in their municipalities.
Florida Threatens to Defund Catholic Schools Unless They Allow Students to Opt Out of Vaccines
Florida’s attorney general has threatened to pull funding from Catholic schools unless they allow their students to opt out of vaccine requirements. James Uthmeier, the attorney general, revealed on X that he had sent a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops (FCCB) expressing concern that schools within the faith may refuse to grant religious exemptions for vaccinations for the upcoming school year.
The letter, which was sent on July 31, is the latest in a series of pushes by lawmakers to change Florida’s vaccine mandates. According to Uthmeier, at least one diocese appears to have “embraced” a position raised by the National Catholic Bioethics Center that the schools cannot offer exemptions on religious grounds because the Catholic Church does not teach that use of vaccinations produced in cell lines derived from the tissue of an aborted fetus is “intrinsically evil.”
Uthmeier, a Catholic himself, says that such a position is “concerning” as state law requires public and private schools to offer exemptions if parents have religious objections.
The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding
It takes a lot to get your typical white-bread American riled up enough that they’re willing to go to jail. Getting arrested is a massive pain, bringing court dates, fines, and a record that can shadow your job and housing prospects for the rest of your life. For most folks, just the threat of jail time is enough to keep them on their best behavior. Yet in 2026, data centers have become one of the rare issues pushing more and more of Americans to risk it anyway.
So far in the US, Futurism has counted at least 37 arrests stemming from protests related to data centers this year. There were an additional 12 cases where police intervened to prevent protestors or speakers from confronting civic leaders, though in reality that number is likely much higher, as these cases aren’t as likely to make the news.
Unlike in other moments of political unrest in recent memory, it’s hard to pigeonhole these anti-data center activists demographically. They range from landowning farmers to physics teachers, zoomers to boomers, rural townspeople to suburban parents.
Despite their differences, the arrestees all have one thing in common: they each felt the actions of democratically elected officials are failing to reflect the wishes of their constituents, instead deferring to massive tech corporations.
Women’s ‘New Health Ecosystem’ Takes Shape on Reddit: Report
With the help of emerging internet communities on social media spaces such as Reddit, women are discovering new ways to navigate a historical gap in women’s health research, a new report finds.
Weber Shandwick and Reddit partnered up in a July report (PDF) that aims to decode the “new health ecosystem” and the modern women’s health content discovery journey, which, as it turns out, takes place on Reddit. The partners surveyed 886 adult women and their partners in the U.S., analyzing their information-seeking behaviors across Reddit and the broader social media landscape.
The survey findings suggest a growing preference for Reddit as a place to partake in unfiltered, anonymous discussion about health topics, with 81% of women reporting that they’re more comfortable discussing their bodies on Reddit than with their own family and friends when it comes to sensitive health topics.
Your Walk May Be the Next Powerful Biometric
Identifying people from a distance has long been a challenge for security systems. Facial recognition often requires high-resolution images and unobstructed views, while clothing, camera angle, or partial occlusion can reduce the effectiveness of many existing identification methods. As a result, researchers are exploring alternative biometric characteristics that remain recognizable even when facial features are unavailable.
A newly developed artificial intelligence system takes a different approach by identifying individuals based on the unique way they walk. Instead of analyzing body appearance, the system focuses on gait, as in the distinctive movement patterns created as a person walks. Every individual moves their joints slightly differently, creating a biomechanical signature that can be measured and compared over time.
The AI platform extracts key points representing major body joints from ordinary video footage. It then calculates the position of those joints as well as their angles, angular velocity, and acceleration throughout each walking cycle. Together, these measurements form a detailed digital representation of a person’s gait.
Anti-Creep Features on Meta’s Smart Glasses May Still Be Easy to Sidestep
Meta might be trying to make its smart glasses less creepy, but if recent reports are any indication, it’s still got some work to do. It turns out, as Engadget details, that the capture LED on the company’s smart glasses — intended to inform people that they’re being recorded — can easily be obscured.
In a test with a pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, Engadget found that the indicator light can be blocked, to the point that it’s barely noticeable, using cheap stickers purchased online.
Onedrive Photos Silently Installs on Windows 11 With Biometric Scan Capability, No Removal Path
Windows 11 users discovered a new app in their Start menus last week that they did not install: OneDrive Photos, a full-featured photo organizer with facial recognition capability that arrived via a Windows Update or OneDrive client update, without a consent prompt and without an independent removal path.
The app can read your local photo library before you sign in to a Microsoft account, presents a People section that groups faces using biometric scanning, and cannot be uninstalled on its own — removing it requires uninstalling the OneDrive sync client itself, a core productivity dependency for most Microsoft 365 organizations.
For enterprise IT teams, the more immediately consequential problem is what Microsoft has not said: the company has not published documentation clarifying whether facial analysis runs on your device or on Microsoft’s servers, and that omission makes a mandatory compliance step under European privacy law impossible to complete before the software is already active on managed endpoints.
Apple to Face $32.5 Billion Lawsuit Over Facial Recognition in Photos App
Apple is set to face a class-action privacy lawsuit that could cost it nearly $32.5 billion.
As 9to5Mac reports, the lawsuit was brought in 2020 by a group of 10 Apple users in Illinois, who claimed Apple violated the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) when it collected users’ biometric data without their consent to organize the People album in the Photos app.
The People album has been part of the Photos app since 2016. It uses on-device machine learning to recognize people in your photo library and organize photos into separate albums.
Though some might find that helpful, facial-recognition features have faced intense scrutiny. In Illinois, BIPA requires companies to notify users and get their written consent before collecting their biometric information. For violating the law through Facebook’s photo-tagging feature, Meta paid nearly $650 million to users in the state in 2022 and a record $1.4 billion to users in Texas in 2024 for a similar violation.
Smart Clothes Will Soon Be on Sale. But Regulations Are Needed to Prevent a New Waste Mountain
When you think of advanced futuristic clothing, what comes to mind? Perhaps shirts that can detect and alert users to low blood glucose levels or socks that can track your running form, step count and speed? What about pyjamas that observe subtle bodily changes while you sleep leading to early detection of cancer or warn carers of imminent seizures? Imagine if all these were items that required no external power source, just the energy generated by your own body.
Although these products are not in the shops yet that day is not far off. Researchers are already designing advanced textiles that look exactly like regular clothes or fabrics but come with with embedded electronic functions. These are referred to as electronics textiles, e-textiles or smart fabrics.
E-textiles integrate sensing, computation and power into fabrics so that the threads themselves become the sensors and the stitches become the circuits. These textiles can monitor health, temperature, motion and air quality. They can communicate wirelessly and harvest various forms of energy.
