It’s Friday. In the late 2010s, states made efforts to establish data privacy laws, given a dearth of federal rules. Are AI regulations headed the same way? As part of Morning Brew’s Quarter Century Project, Tech Brew’s Patrick Kulp looked back at the push to regulate data privacy—and how it lays the groundwork for future tech policy.
In today’s edition:
- Are AI regulations following in data privacy laws’ footsteps?
- Workers want a say when it comes to AI tools
- Can an ‘e-nose’ outsniff a hound?
—Patrick Kulp, Cassie McGrath, Annie Saunders
AI
A private matter
Picsmart/Adobe Stock
With federal legislation caught in a holding pattern, states are blazing ahead with new AI laws. The tech industry is lobbying against the specter of a patchwork of rules, while advocates worry a weaker federal law preempting states will erase hard-won gains.
All this might sound like a familiar story to anybody who’s followed data privacy policy in the US over the last several years. In fact, if you’re searching for an example of a fragmented state-by-state approach to regulation, look no further than data privacy law, experts said.
“We’re pretty much stuck with a patchwork state approach for the short to midterm future,” Jonathan Tam, a partner at Baker & McKenzie, told Tech Brew.
Now that the GenAI wave has thrust tech policy conversations into a brighter spotlight, lawmakers are revisiting some of these privacy issues—data privacy and AI overlap quite a bit, after all. And states are continuing to push forward with new laws; just this month, for instance, Maryland enacted protections that experts say are stronger than many other states’.
As part of Morning Brew’s Quarter Century Project, we looked back at the late 2010s push to regulate data privacy and how it led to our current moment in tech policy.
AI
Work it out
Amelia Kinsinger
AI is becoming widespread in the workplace, but employees who have no say in how it’s used report lower job satisfaction.
That’s according to one of a handful of recent data points on how AI is shaping the future of work. Any big AI job-pocalypse might be further off than the current panic would indicate, another report found, but that doesn’t mean the technology isn’t reshaping offices in the meantime.
Here’s a roundup of some of the latest research on AI and jobs.
Tech influencers: Plenty of studies tally the number of job openings and employment levels; a new index aims to take a deeper look at the quality of those jobs.
The report comes from a group of nonprofits and research orgs—Jobs for the Future, the Families & Workers Fund, the W.E. Upjohn Institute, and Gallup.
It found that 60% of Americans lack quality jobs, with more than half feeling left out of important decisions in the workplace, including the adoption of new technology like artificial intelligence tools, where 55% of respondents said they would like more influence.
This lack of input was consistent across education levels: From “high school or less” to graduate degrees, the portion ranged between 53% and 57%. Those who do have a say in tech adoption tend to be happier—46% of those with desired influence reported satisfaction, versus 28% among those without.
“Employees have opinions about the way that technology is implemented, and they experience the direct impacts of that technology on their jobs,” Molly Blankenship, director of strategy and impact at Jobs for the Future, told Tech Brew.
HEALTH TECH
Top dog
Callie Evie Lewis
Back in 2008, Claire Guest started training dogs to detect the odor of bladder cancer… from her dining room.
As an animal behaviorist, she had read about the science and heard enough stories to believe dogs’ snouts, which have hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors (humans typically have just a few million), could track diseases. So she took samples from volunteers and people she knew to run tests.
“Even though it was a small-scale study, it was obvious the dogs could do it very reliably,” Gemma Butlin, head of communications and people engagement at Guest’s UK-based research organization and charity Medical Detection Dogs, told Healthcare Brew.
The initial research was published in 2010, and has since been built out under the organization to study how dogs can detect bowel cancer, bacterial infections, Covid-19, pseudomonas, urinary tract infections, Parkinson’s disease, malaria, and prostate cancer. It collects samples from organizations like Hull University Teaching Hospital National Health Service Trust and Milton Keynes University Hospital in the UK and Johns Hopkins in the US.
With prostate cancer, for example, the novel detection method was 71% sensitive and 70%–76% specific at identifying high-grade Gleason 9 prostate cancer in the samples, according to 2021 research.
“The science is very legitimate,” Bruce Trock, professor in the departments of urology, epidemiology, and oncology and director of the division of epidemiology in the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins, told us.
Their long-term goal is to build an e-nose that can do all the sniffing itself and “inform technology,” Butlin added.
BITS AND BYTES
Stat: 33%. That’s the percentage of EVs that were registered to women in H1 2025, per S&P Global Mobility Data, The Washington Post reported in a story about the “EV gender gap.”
Quote: “Our customers know that they have a huge exposure right now with employees giving agents access to corporate data.”—Eric Kelleher, Okta president and COO, to Revenue Brew about how the identity security company is handling the AI age
Read: I used an AI tool to resurrect my grandmother, and it was awful (The Washington Post)
Written by Patrick Kulp, Cassie McGrath, and Annie Saunders