Data Collection
Policy Signal monitors 30–50 high-quality sources across five categories. Volume is deliberately constrained — breadth without quality control produces noise, not signal. Sources are polled on a 1–2 hour cycle via RSS feeds, web scraping, and direct API integrations.
Official feeds from EDPB, FTC, ICO, CNIL, DPC, NIST, and key state attorney general offices. Primary source of enforcement and legislation developments.
IAPP, The Record, GDPRHub, Politico Tech, Ars Technica policy, Reuters, Bloomberg Law. Curated for signal density — not volume.
US Congress (congress.gov API), EU legislative observatory, UK Parliament publications, and select state legislature trackers for high-priority US states.
Polymarket public API, filtered for markets related to AI regulation, privacy legislation, and technology policy outcomes.
Deduplication: Each ingested item is fingerprinted by URL and content hash. Duplicate entries from multiple sources covering the same development are suppressed before AI processing begins.
AI Processing Pipeline
Every ingested item passes through a four-step AI pipeline using Anthropic's Claude API. Different tasks use different model tiers to balance cost efficiency with output quality.
Each item is classified into one of six content categories (Legislation, Enforcement, Industry, Standards, Breach, Analysis) and tagged with the relevant jurisdictions. Haiku handles this step — classification is high-volume and relatively deterministic.
Items that fall outside Policy Signal's coverage scope are filtered out before further processing. This step suppresses genuinely off-topic content that slips through source-level filtering.
Each item receives an impact score (Low / Medium / High) against a defined rubric. Scores surface the most consequential items in the dashboard and are used to construct the Daily Briefing.
A 2–3 sentence plain-language summary is generated for each item. Sonnet is used here because summary quality directly affects the user experience. Summaries are written in analyst voice: neutral, factual, with judgment where warranted.
Impact Scoring
Each development receives an impact score of Low, Medium, or High. Scores are assigned by the AI pipeline against a defined rubric and are used to surface the most consequential items in the dashboard.
Precedent-setting, broad scope, immediate enforcement implications, or significant industry-wide compliance burden.
Meaningful development in a major jurisdiction or sector, or an incremental step in a closely-watched regulatory process.
Routine regulatory activity, minor procedural update, or a development in a smaller jurisdiction with limited extraterritorial reach.
Daily Briefing Generation
Each day at 06:00 UTC, a synthesis prompt feeds the most recent processed events into a dedicated briefing generation step. The output is a 3–5 paragraph analytical narrative written in neutral, analyst-grade prose — not a list of headlines, but an integrated assessment of what the day's developments indicate.
The briefing is generated using Claude Sonnet, which is reserved for the highest-quality writing tasks in the pipeline. The prompt specifies analytical tone, structural format, and editorial judgment criteria — the goal is a briefing that reads as if written by a senior regulatory analyst, not a summarization tool.
Coverage Scope & Editorial Standards
Policy Signal covers six content categories across a tiered set of jurisdictions. Coverage extends beyond narrow "privacy and AI" to include adjacent regulatory areas that materially affect technology companies — including age verification mandates, algorithmic transparency requirements, content moderation rules, and cross-border data transfer frameworks.
Editorial note: Policy Signal exists to surface “sleeper laws” — state-level, sector-specific, or technically-focused regulations that fly under the radar until enforcement begins. These are weighted equally to headline-grabbing regulations. The motivating example: a senior technical leader at IBM/Red Hat discovered via a niche newsletter that a California age verification law had passed with fines kicking in within 9 months. That is the gap this product fills.