Mid-Year Review: The Year Privacy Became an Infrastructure Problem
Eight hundred data centers under construction. 101 gigawatts of announced private gas generation. Two-thirds of new AI facilities sited in water-stres...
midYearReview
13 articles on midYearReview.
Baylor Genetics Breached: 310,000 People's Genomic Test Results, Six Days of Access
Attackers were inside Baylor Genetics' network between 11 and 17 June 2026. The company noticed on 15 June, finished assessing the damage around 30 Ju...
471 Million Breach Notices in Six Months — And Only 24% Said How It Happened
The Identity Theft Resource Center's H1 2026 report counts 471.2 million victim notices from 1,803 tracked compromises in six months — more notices th...
100,000 Cameras, 20 Billion Plates a Month, 53 Cities Walking Away: Flock's Mid-Year Reckoning
Flock Safety scans roughly 20 billion license plates a month across more than 100,000 cameras in 49 states, serves over 5,000 communities, and reached...
144 Countries Have Data Protection Laws — And Privacy Is Still Losing. A Global Mid-Year Scoreboard
More than 144 countries now have data protection laws in force. Twenty-three US states have comprehensive privacy statutes. GDPR turned ten in May. By...
The AI Race as National Security Doctrine — and the Civil Liberties Bill Attached to It
A December 2025 executive order called for a national AI policy framework and preemption of conflicting state AI laws, plus a DOJ task force to identi...
The Open-Weights Gap Closed in Two Years — Why That's a Privacy Story
At the end of 2023 the best closed model scored around 88% on MMLU and the best open one about 70.5% — a 17.5-point gap. By early 2026 that gap on kno...
Two-Thirds of New AI Data Centers Are Going Up in Drought Zones — Mid-Year Water Review
American data centers consumed an estimated 17.5 billion gallons of water directly in 2023, a figure projected to double or quadruple by 2028. About t...
101 Gigawatts of Private Gas Plants: Data Centers Are Building Their Own Grid
Data center developers have announced roughly 101 gigawatts of behind-the-meter natural gas generation in the United States. About 57 GW of that has a...
Data Centers on Army Bases: What EO 14318 Actually Does — and What It Doesn't
You have probably read that the White House 'classified AI data centers as military installations.' That is not what happened, and the accurate versio...
$130 Billion of Data Centers Blocked in Three Months — The Consent Bottleneck Is Real
Data Center Watch counted at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed by local opposition in the first quarter of 2026 alone — ...
Texas Froze New Data Center Approvals — And the Reason Is 474 Gigawatts
On 3 August, Governor Greg Abbott halted approvals for new data centers connecting to the Texas grid until state regulators audit them. The trigger: a...
Nobody Agrees How Many Data Centers America Has — A Mid-Year 2026 Census
Halfway through 2026, the trackers put the United States somewhere between 2,000 and 2,100 operating data centers, around 800 under construction, and ...