Gutenberg's Spyware

If the printing press had shipped with spyware, the Renaissance would have died in a decade — and it's a fair description of how most organizations use frontier AI today.

An early printer works a wooden Gutenberg press by candlelight, unaware that thin wires run from the press to a small wall cabinet carved with a watching eye and the motto 'Quod imprimis, videmus' — what you print, we see.

Data minimization isn't a compliance checkbox — it's the discipline that decides whether the printing-press metaphor holds or breaks. Most AI deployments skip it entirely: broad access grants by default, no floor on what a model retains or forwards, and no owner asking why.

Read the full dispatch on the Blue Jacket Operating Log →

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