An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government website, Meta to stop training its AI on 'visual data' from its smart glasses, and ShinyHunters hackers say they have up to 3TB of sensitive info about FBI employees

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An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government website.

Meta will stop training its AI on visual data from its smart glasses if you opt out.

And ShinyHunters hackers say they have up to 3 terabytes of sensitive information about FBI employees. It's Thursday, September 24th. And here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an OpenAI agent hacked into the public website of the Australian government's Medicare public health insurance system back in June. Albanese said he spoke with Sam Altman, the company's CEO, to express the country's extreme concern about the incident. He also criticized the company for taking too long to notify Australian authorities. According to The Guardian, OpenAI only sent an email about the breach to a General Australian Government email address on September 10th, and since authorities only checked that account once a day, they did not see it until the 11th. The news did not reach Minister of Government Services Katie Gallagher until the 17th. While the investigation is still ongoing, Albanese said it does not seem like the agent stole personal health information from the portal. Conrad Stoes, the head of governance at Transloose, a non-profit research lab working on technology to better understand AI systems, told The New York Times that this might be the first instance of an agent autonomously choosing to hack into a government. Transloose identified other previously undisclosed incidents wherein OpenAI's agents attacked real-world entities when they were instructed to collect data during testing. They all occurred before Hugging Face detected unauthorized access on its systems in July, and before OpenAI admitted that its agents broke into the AI repository. In addition to hacking into Australia's Medicare, OpenAI's agent also tried to infiltrate a digital library at the University of New Mexico in May, apparently trying to access photos of a historic tuberculosis treatment center from the library, and then actively looked for vulnerabilities to exploit when it could not get them. After failing to break into the digital library, it flooded the university's server with requests. In another incident that took place on May 28th, OpenAI's agent targeted DataUSA, an open source platform that visualizes information from multiple federal agencies. The agent sent a query to the site for data, and when it failed, it probed the website for vulnerabilities.

Meta is making another concession to privacy critics as it tries to get ahead of the ongoing privacy backlash against its AI glasses. Now, the company says it will allow people to opt out of having their visual data from the glasses used for AI training. The change means that users can opt out of having their camera-based interactions with Meta AI being used to train the company's models. Those images will also not be shown to third-party contractors in other countries. As Meta explained, if you've opted out and you ask your glasses to translate a menu, we'll use your visual data to answer your questions, and then it's gone. It is not used for training and nobody reviews it for product improvement. Meta has long said that the actual content of photos you capture with the glasses cameras are not shared or used for training. But the company has allowed images and video captured while using Meta AI to be used for that purpose. This is sort of confusing because these images and videos are not saved to your camera roll, so a lot of people likely did not know that these captures are being saved, much less used for anything else. Meta has also done a pretty poor job of explaining that to people, but the fact is that any interaction with Meta AI that relies on the camera, for example, Hey Meta, what does this sign mean? Well, it's storing those images. Even worse, those recordings are sometimes sent to third-party contractors in other countries who review and label the images for AI training. At least some of those contractors have reported seeing some pretty personal and intimate images of people while doing this work according to a report earlier this year. The new setting addresses that. Importantly, though, it only covers visual data. Your audio interactions with Meta AI are still fair game to the company for training and review, although the company does allow people to manually delete those recordings.