Most of Us Have Been Cyberattack Targets, Consumer Reports Finds. AI Isn’t Helping
A joint study by Consumer Reports, Aspen Digital, and the Global Cyber Alliance reveals that 90% of Americans have experienced at least one digital scam or cyberattack. Consumer confidence in personal data privacy has significantly declined, with 29% of US adults expressing no confidence, a figure that nearly doubled from the previous year. Experts warn that AI is accelerating the scale and personalization of fraud, urging policymakers to enact legislation like the SCAM Act to hold companies accountable.
- ▪Nine in ten Americans report having faced at least one digital scam or cyberattack according to the new study.
- ▪29% of US adults are not confident in their personal data privacy, up from 16% in 2025.
- ▪Consumer confidence in the privacy of sensitive data dropped from 48% in 2025 to 32% this year.
- ▪AI technology is making fraud faster, cheaper, and more personalized for scammers.
- ▪Consumer Reports advocates for federal laws such as the SCAM Act to penalize scammers and improve platform accountability.
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| Original publisher | CNET |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/most-of-us-have-been-cyber-attack-targets-consumer-reports-finds-ai-isnt-helping/ |
| Publication time | 2026-10-02T16:53:34Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T16:55:52.580Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T16:55:52.580Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | C-bA1YiXWW78 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tech > Services & Software > Cybersecurity Most of Us Have Been Cyberattack Targets, Consumer Reports Finds. AI Isn’t Helping From snooping smart glasses to AI bots going rogue, I'm not surprised US adults are more concerned about their privacy. Dashia Milden Senior Consumer Insights Editor Dashia is the consumer insights editor for CNET.… Read full bio Dashia Milden Senior Consumer Insights Editor Read full bio October 2, 2026, 12:53 pm ET 2 min read Consumer Reports found that 29% of US adults are not confident in personal data privacy, which is up from 16% last year. Moment/Getty Images Pretty much all of our personal data is online at this point. Whether it’s saved credit cards or photos in your social media profiles, your private life is easily accessible — including to hackers.
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