Tech news picked on 2026-11-02
Ford Announces 'Privacy Promise' to Explain How It Uses Connected Car Data
- Ford announced its 'Privacy Promise' on November 2. It said it will protect vehicle data and let customers decide how much to share. It also opened a website that explains how data is collected and used and shows how to change settings.
- The website will cover the types of data collected, how the data is used, and how to agree to or withdraw from data sharing. Ford's chief privacy officer said the settings feature has existed for years and that this effort aims to explain it more clearly.
- Ford said it does not sell vehicle driving behavior data to data brokers and does not use it for targeted advertising. This is the company's claim, and the source did not independently verify it.
- According to several surveys cited in the source, only 14% of U.S. consumers said they fully know what data their vehicles collect. Ford's chief privacy officer said Ford's own survey of 1,000 people found that 91% consider data privacy important.
Apple Creator Studio update adds AI assistants and new effects for video editing and document work
- Final Cut Pro for Mac includes MotionVFX visual effects, transitions, and templates by default, and Apple said Content Hub stock footage selected by Apple can be found and used directly inside the editing app.
- Keynote, Pages, and Numbers get an AI assistant in beta that understands document content. According to the source, Keynote helps with slide design and animation, Pages helps with draft writing and structure, and Numbers helps with chart recommendations and table creation.
- Pixelmator Pro's Generate Fill lets you select part of an image, describe in a sentence what you want to replace it with, and fills the area to match the surrounding lighting, perspective, and texture. The claim that it blends naturally is Apple's claim.
- Logic Pro for Mac's Stem Splitter was introduced as making it possible to separate, replace, or balance the drum part even without the original multitrack recording. Logic Pro's AI assistant is also available in beta.
- ISUCON is a web service performance contest held in Japan that scores whether an SNS app with photo posting and friend features works accurately and quickly. This article is a record of an author with little infrastructure experience who took part using the AI coding agent Codex.
- The author reports that the score rose from 4,645 points on the official load test to a final 19,593 points, about 4.22 times higher. The provisional ranking the author tallied was rank 497.
- The largest gain came from adding 4 DB search indexes, which recorded 18,395 points (about 70.5% higher). Signature calculation and DB connection reuse also raised the score, and one change dropped the overall score to 16,623 points, so it was reverted.
- A point was raised that INSERTs targeting all users cause long locks in the notification feature. The agent proposed narrowing the lock scope, but the author said that a person approved the change after confirming whether structural changes are allowed under the contest rules.
- Dark web researcher Taiki Watanabe, whose post was featured on Togetter, claims that the main product on black markets has shifted from lists of IDs and passwords to browser data containing login states and device characteristics.
- According to the presenter, this data includes login information such as cookies and device fingerprints like screen size, fonts, and language settings, and buyers can reproduce the same environment with an anti-detect browser.
- The original text says personal data is priced at 1 per item, ranging from 300 yen to 1,500 yen, and access data for corporate admin screens sells for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yen, but the source and counting method are not given in the text.
- According to the presenter, data can leak even from the latest Chrome through malicious extensions or by interfering with browser processes, and this has not been independently verified.