The European Union’s highest court has invalidated the Privacy Shield agreement that lets U.S. companies freely import data on European citizens. (Here’s the press release.) It’s a big deal but transfers are still allowed when the partners sign contracts that protect data from misuse. It’s almost as if the Europeans have decided the U.S. government can’t be trusted.

And speaking of privacy, Google Cloud plans a set of Confidential Computing services which will protect all kinds of data, not just customer identities. They just announced the beta version of the first product, Confidential VMs, which will use special hardware to encrypt data while it’s being processed. Traditionally, data had to be decrypted during processing, which gave bad guys a chance to steal it.

Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content.   But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines.  Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results.  We’ll see if competitors do the same.