NEW: State healthcare sites around the country have been quietly sending sensitive user data to Google and LinkedIn.

Over the past few years, there has been case after case of school-age children using deepfakes to prank or bully their classmates. And it keeps getting easier to do.

The bot couldn't: .Describe a given wildfire’s containment accurately.Provide a list for evacuation supplies.Tell users about evacuation orders. What else we found:

Want to know how much your California college spends on Turnitin? Search your school’s name with this tool and share what you find in the comments!

California schools are paying millions for the AI detection tool Turnitin, but the tech often makes mistakes and the company requires schools to allow them to keep students’ papers forever.

Schools and lawmakers are grappling with how to address a new form of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately targets girls. With The 19th:

The U.S. Senate voted not to interfere with state AI regulations, defeating a 10-year moratorium on such laws that had earlier cleared the House and alarmed California officials.

Honest students sometimes end up being caught in the crossfire of an arms race between technology that mimics human speech and technology that claims to identify it.

Nevada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine shared sensitive visitor data with companies like Google and LinkedIn via their own healthcare exchange website. How that happened:

This follows our investigation with Outlier Media last year that Detroiers pay more for car insurance because of where they live and their education levels. What we found:

A new bill wants to make it illegal for auto insurers to set prices based on factors unrelated to driving that disproportionately raise costs for Black drivers.

RT @CalMatters: .@Turnitin is a longtime leader in the plagiarism- detection market. In 2023, it released a new tool within six months of C….

And honest students are caught in the crossfire of an arms race between technology that mimics human speech and technology that claims to identify it.

But the technology offers only a shadow of accurate detection: It highlights any matching text, whether properly cited or not; it flags everything that mirrors AI’s writing style, whether a student used AI inappropriately or not.

It has been making this case for decades by pointing to its massive database of student papers, which it uses to market the superiority of its existing product as well as build new ones.

Turnitin helps convince college leaders to buy its tools by arguing it knows student writing better than any other company in the world.

NEW: Colleges and universities renew Turnitin subscriptions year after year even though its flawed detectors are expensive and require students to let the company keep their papers forever.

Using a VPN doesn’t stop website trackers from leaking your info. Here are some tangible steps you can take to mitigate the risks of surfing the internet:

Google might know what drugs you are taking or which doctors you’ve seen from your state health website.

Citing an investigation by The Markup and CalMatters, lawmakers in the House of Representatives are questioning why California’s state health insurance exchange shared sensitive health data with LinkedIn.

TL;DR: You can block website trackers via changing settings, installing privacy-protecting extensions, or switching to a new browser.