Uzbekistan has granted full legal validity to online personal data stored on the my.gov.uz Unified Interactive Public Services Portal, placing it on equal footing with traditional documents.
The measure, in force from 1 November, supports the country’s digital transformation by simplifying how citizens interact with state bodies.
Personal information can now be accessed, shared and managed entirely through the portal instead of relying on printed certificates.
State institutions are no longer permitted to request paper versions of records that are already available online, which is expected to reduce queues and alleviate the administrative burden faced by the public.
Officials in Uzbekistan anticipate that centralising personal data on one platform will save time and resources for both citizens and government agencies. The reform aims to streamline public services, remove redundant steps and improve overall efficiency across state procedures.
Government bodies have encouraged citizens to use the portal’s functions more actively and follow official channels for updates on new features and improvements.
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Meta is expanding its robotics ambitions by appointing Li-Chen Miller, previously head of its smart glasses portfolio, as the first product manager for Reality Labs’ robotics division. Her transfer marks a significant shift in Meta’s hardware priorities following the launch of its latest augmented reality devices.
The company is reportedly developing a humanoid assistant known internally as Metabotwithin the same organisation that oversees its AR and VR platforms. Former Cruise executive Marc Whitten leads the robotics group, supported by veteran engineer Ning Li and renowned MIT roboticist Sangbae Kim.
Miller’s move emphasises Meta’s aim to merge its AI expertise with physical robotics. The new team collaborates with the firm’s Superintelligence Lab, which is building a ‘world model’ capable of powering dextrous motion and real-time reasoning.
Analysts see the strategy as Meta’s attempt to future-proof its ecosystem and diversify Reality Labs, which continues to post heavy losses. The company’s growing investment in humanoid design could bring home-use robots closer to reality, blending social AI with the firm’s long-term vision for the metaverse.
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Disney+ is preparing to introduce tools that enable subscribers to create short, AI-generated videos inspired by its characters and franchises. Chief executive Bob Iger described the move as part of a sweeping platform upgrade that marks the service’s most significant technological expansion since its 2019 launch.
Alongside user-generated video features, Disney+ will gain interactive, game-like functions through its collaboration with Epic Games. The company plans to merge storytelling and interactivity, creating a new form of engagement where fans can build or remix short scenes within Disney’s creative universe.
Iger confirmed that Disney has held productive talks with several AI firms to develop responsible tools that safeguard intellectual property. The company aims to ensure that fans’ creations can exist within brand limits, avoiding misuse of iconic characters while opening the door to more creative participation.
Industry analysts suggest that the plan could reshape the streaming industry by blending audience creativity with studio production. Yet creators have expressed caution, urging transparency on rights and moderation.
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Chinese cyberspace authorities announced a crackdown on AI deepfakes impersonating public figures in livestream shopping. Regulators said platforms have removed thousands of posts and sanctioned numerous accounts for misleading users.
Officials urged platforms to conduct cleanups and hold marketers accountable for deceptive promotions. Reported actions include removing over 8,700 items and dealing with more than 11,000 impersonation accounts.
Measures build on wider campaigns against AI misuse, including rules targeting deep synthesis and labelling obligations. Earlier efforts focused on curbing rumours, impersonation and harmful content across short videos and e-commerce.
Chinese authorities pledged a continued high-pressure stance to safeguard consumers and protect celebrity likenesses online. Platforms risk penalties if complaint handling and takedowns fail to deter repeat infringements in livestream commerce.
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Apple has updated its App Review Guidelines to require developers to disclose and obtain permission before sharing personal data with third-party AI systems. The company says the change enhances user control as AI features become more prevalent across apps.
The revision arrives ahead of Apple’s planned 2026 release of an AI-enhanced Siri, expected to take actions across apps and rely partly on Google’s Gemini technology. Apple is also moving to ensure external developers do not pass personal data to AI providers without explicit consent.
Previously, rule 5.1.2(i) already limited the sharing of personal information without permission. The update adds explicit language naming third-party AI as a category that requires disclosure, reflecting growing scrutiny of how apps use machine learning and generative models.
The shift could affect developers who use external AI systems for features such as personalisation or content generation. Enforcement details remain unclear, as the term ‘AI’ encompasses a broad range of technologies beyond large language models.
Apple released several other guideline updates alongside the AI change, including support for its new Mini Apps Programme and amendments involving creator tools, loan products, and regulated services such as crypto exchanges.
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Google DeepMind has released a research preview of SIMA 2, an upgraded generalist agent that draws on Gemini’s language and reasoning strengths. The system moves beyond simple instruction following, aiming to understand user intent and interact more effectively with its environment.
SIMA 1 relied on game data to learn basic tasks across diverse 3D worlds but struggled with complex actions. DeepMind says SIMA 2 represents a step change, completing harder objectives in unfamiliar settings and adapting its behaviour through experience without heavy human supervision.
The agent is powered by the Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite model and built around the idea of embodied intelligence, where an AI acts through a body and responds to its surroundings. Researchers say this approach supports a deeper understanding of context, goals, and the consequences of actions.
Demos show SIMA 2 describing landscapes, identifying objects, and choosing relevant tasks in titles such as No Man’s Sky. It also reveals its reasoning, interprets clues, uses emojis as instructions, and navigates photorealistic worlds generated by Genie, DeepMind’s own environment model.
Self-improvement comes from Gemini models that create new tasks and score attempts, enabling SIMA 2 to refine its abilities through trial and error. DeepMind sees these advances as groundwork for future general-purpose robots, though the team has not shared timelines for wider deployment.
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Apple has introduced Digital ID, a new feature that lets users create an identification card in Apple Wallet using information from a US passport.
The feature launches in beta at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints across more than two hundred and fifty airports for domestic travel, instead of relying solely on physical documentation.
It offers an alternative for users who lack a Real ID-compliant card while not replacing a physical passport for international journeys.
Users set up a Digital ID by scanning the passport’s photo page, reading the chip on the back of the document, and completing facial movements for verification.
Once added, the ID can be presented with an iPhone or Apple Watch by holding the device near an identity reader and confirming the request with Face ID or Touch ID. New verification options for in-person checks at selected businesses, apps and online platforms are planned.
The company highlights privacy protection by storing passport data only on the user’s device, instead of Apple’s servers. Digital ID information is encrypted and cannot be viewed by Apple, and biometric authentication ensures that only the owner can present the identity.
Only the required information is shared during each transaction, and the user must approve it before it is released.
The launch expands Apple Wallet’s existing support for driver’s licences and state IDs, which are already available in twelve states and Puerto Rico. Recent months have added Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia, and Japan adopted the feature with the My Number Card.
Apple expects Digital ID to broaden secure personal identification across more services over time.
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In a milestone for the European digital identity ecosystem, Banca Transilvania and payments-tech firm BPC have completed the first pilot in Romania using the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) for a real-money transaction.
The initiative lets a cardholder authenticate a purchase using the wallet rather than a conventional one-time password or card reader.
The pilot forms part of a large-scale testbed led by the European Commission under the eIDAS 2 Regulation, which requires all EU banks to accept the wallet for strong customer authentication and KYC (know-your-customer) purposes by 2027.
Banca Transilvania’s Deputy CEO Retail Banking, Oana Ilaş, described the project as a historic step toward a unified European digital identities framework that enhances interoperability, inclusivity and banking access.
From a digital governance and payments policy perspective, this pilot is significant. It shows how national banking systems are beginning to integrate digital-ID wallets into card and account-based flows, potentially reducing reliance on legacy authentication mechanisms (such as SMS OTP or hardware tokens) that are vulnerable to fraud.
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OpenAI says a New York Times demand to hand over 20 million private ChatGPT conversations threatens user privacy and breaks with established security norms. The request forms part of the Times’ lawsuit over alleged misuse of its content.
The company argues the demand would expose highly personal chats from people with no link to the case. It previously resisted broader requests, including one seeking more than a billion conversations, and says the latest move raises similar concerns about proportionality.
OpenAI says it offered privacy-preserving alternatives, such as targeted searches and high-level usage data, but these were rejected. It adds that chats covered by the order are being de-identified and stored in a secure, legally restricted environment.
The dispute arises as OpenAI accelerates its security roadmap, which includes plans for client-side encryption and automated systems that detect serious safety risks without requiring broad human access. These measures aim to ensure private conversations remain inaccessible to external parties.
OpenAI maintains that strong privacy protections are essential as AI tools handle increasingly sensitive tasks. It says it will challenge any attempt to make private conversations public and will continue to update users as the legal process unfolds.
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In the article published by BMC Infectious Diseases, researchers developed predictive models using machine learning (LightGBM) to identify cardiovascular complications (such as arrhythmia, acute heart failure, myocardial infarction) in 10,700 hospitalised COVID-19 patients across Brazil.
The study reports moderate discriminatory performance, with AUROC values of 0.752 and 0.760 for the two models, and high overall accuracy (~94.5%) due to the large majority of non-event cases.
However, due to the rarity of cardiovascular events (~5.3% of cases), the F1-scores for detecting the event class remained very low (5.2% and 4.2%, respectively), signalling that the models struggle to reliably identify the minority class despite efforts to rebalance the data.
Using SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations) values, the researchers identified the most influential predictors: age, urea level, platelet count and SatO₂/FiO₂ (oxygen saturation to inspired oxygen fraction) ratio.
The authors emphasise that while the approach shows promise for resource-constrained settings and contributes to risk stratification, the limitations around class imbalance and generalisability remain significant obstacles for clinical use.
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