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AI-enabled mental health tools are moving quickly from novelty to mainstream use, and regulators are starting to draw sharper lines around what those tools can and cannot claim to do. Recent lawsuits against Character Technologies Inc.,  the company behind Character.ai, allege that the platform hosted bots that mimicked licensed therapists, including one persona that allegedly…

A group of 40 Democratic lawmakers have sent a letter to 19 state governors warning that they may be “inadvertently sharing drivers’ data with federal immigration authorities.”

According to the letter, the states “are providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies ‘with frictionless, self-service access to the personal data of all of…

On August 4, 2025, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act into law, which went into immediate effect, and “prohibits anyone from using AI to provide mental health and therapeutic decision-making, while allowing the use of AI for administrative and supplementary support services for licensed behavioral health professionals.” The…

Kronos, Inc., has agreed to (and a federal judge has preliminarily approved) a $15.3 million settlement to resolve claims that it violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by collecting biometric information from thousands of workers through its time clock that uses fingerprints for timekeeping. 

The plaintiffs filed a class action suit against Kronos…

Polar Manufacturing has been making metal hinges, locks, and brackets in Chicago for over 100 years. While some of the machines in their manufacturing facilities date back to the 1950s, Polar started using a robot employee to meet rising product demand during a shortage of workers. The robot arm performs a simple job: lifting a…

Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) continues to be a problem for employers who are using biometric information such as palm readers or fingerprint timekeeping software.
This week, waste management company GFL Environmental Services USA Inc. (GFL) agreed to settle a proposed class action case filed by some of its employees alleging violation of BIPA.…

Two more state governors, those of Maine and North Dakota, have signed bills into law that adopt the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) data security model law (Model Law). Maine and North Dakota join several other states that have already passed similar laws. Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin have similar…

Applus Technologies, Inc., a vendor of multiple state Departments of Motor Vehicles that assists states with vehicle inspections, recently announced that its systems have been affected by malware, disrupting motor vehicle inspections in Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Utah. As a result of the outage, vehicle inspections have not been able…