Topic of the Week

AI note-takers sound perfect: no more scrambling to write everything down, no more “sorry, can you repeat that?”, and everyone gets clean notes after the meeting or class. But when you invite an AI bot into a conversation, you are also inviting a third party to capture, store, and sometimes reuse that content in ways you may not expect.Lately, we've seen a growing number of requests for using AI note-taking tools. If you've submitted one, you've probably noticed that our response often comes with a long list of questions. 

As of May 1, 2026, the world was made aware of a breach of Instructure - the company that owns and runs the Canvas learning management system. This breach directly affected the University of Maryland students, faculty, and staff due to the nature of use of Canvas. For students, Canvas is vital for completing classwork, tracking assignments and grades, and communicating with professors or other classmates. For faculty, Canvas is vital to running and maintaining the courses you teach. For staff, Canvas provides a platform for trainings and microcredentialing.

It is somehow already the first week of May, and summer is just around the corner. Hopefully your summer plans consist of a lighter workload, time spent in the water (or near the water, if that is what you prefer), a little bit of a tan (with SPF, of course), and some more free time to review the data you have been slowly accumulating over the course of your career at UMD. We can’t imagine how else you would want to spend a little bit of your free time! Seriously though, not everything needs to linger around forever.

One of the greatest advantages of our current society is the power of change and evolution: the ability to make the world a place for everybody, regardless of their circumstances. Today, public buildings increasingly offer accommodations by default and remind us that not everybody fits one single template. And, luckily, we’re taking this beyond the physical restraints.

Somehow we have already found ourselves through the first quarter of the year, and even more shockingly, it is already the end of April… Apologies for the jump scare! Even though we have found ourselves nearing May, the year is still new, and there are new privacy laws (or amendments to existing privacy laws that we can look forward to seeing over the remainder of the year). Who doesn’t like more rules, right? Let’s dig into some of the changes we can anticipate seeing in the privacy world within the United States.