|
It's time once again for the weekly roundup. On the podcast this week: A $60 mod that disables the privacy-protecting recording light in the smart glasses, and how some people are abusing the glasses to film massage workers. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, the future of advertising: AI-generated ads personalized directly to you. And in this week’s interview episode, Joseph sat down with Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock, to talk about Apple and Google’s broader crackdown on similar apps, and what this all means for people trying to access information about ICE. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. COZY SEASON ALERT: New sweatshirts are shipping now! As are the new t-shirts, restocked DOOM stuff, and more. Get yours in time for the holidays here.
|
|
|
|
|
Keep Your SSN Off The Dark Web Every day, data brokers profit from your sensitive info—phone number, DOB, SSN—selling it to the highest bidder. What happens then? Best case: companies target you with ads. Worst case: scammers and identity thieves breach those brokers, leaving your data vulnerable or on the dark web. It's time you check out Incogni. It scrubs your personal data from the web, confronting the world’s data brokers on your behalf. And unlike other services, Incogni helps remove your sensitive information from all broker types, including those tricky People Search Sites. Help protect yourself from identity theft, spam calls, and health insurers raising your rates. Plus, just for 404 media readers: Get 55% off Incogni using code INCOGNI404
|
|
|
|
Ok, here’s what went down this week at 404 Media. IT'S ABOUT MORE THAN THE BOOKSLast month, a company called the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database announced a new version of a product called Class-Shelf Plus. The software, which is used by school libraries to keep track of which books are in their catalog, added several new features including “AI-driven automation and contextual risk analysis,” which includes an AI-powered “sensitive material marker” and a “traffic-light risk ratings” system. Librarians told 404 Media that AI library software like this is just the tip of the iceberg; they are being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books that they need to wade through. But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics. This story was reported with support from the MuckRock Foundation.  Image: Steve Johnson via Unsplash NEWS YOU CAN USEMost people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government. The data broker has compiled billions of ticketing records the government can search without a warrant or court order. The data broker is called the Airlines Reporting Corporation, and, as 404 Media has shown, it sells flight data to multiple parts of the Department of Homeland Security and a host of other government agencies, while contractually demanding those agencies not reveal where the data came from. It turns out, it is possible to opt-out of this data selling, including to government agencies. We'll show you how.  Image: Getty Images via Unsplash+ 'IDENTIFY AND PROCESS INDIVIDUALS' IN THE APP STORECBP publicly released an app that sheriff offices, police departments, and other local or regional law enforcement can use to scan someone’s face as part of immigration enforcement, 404 Media has learned. The news follows Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of another internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) app called Mobile Fortify that uses facial recognition to nearly instantly bring up someone’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation. The new local law enforcement-focused app, called Mobile Identify, crystallizes one of the exact criticisms of DHS’s facial recognition app from privacy and surveillance experts: that this sort of powerful technology would trickle down to local enforcement, some of which have a history of making anti-immigrant comments or supporting inhumane treatment of detainees.  Image: Alina Rubo on Unsplash and CBP Over the last few months 404 Media has covered some concerning but predictable uses for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They have been worn by CBP agents during the immigration raids that have come to define a new low for human rights in the United States. Most recently, exploitative Instagram users filmed themselves asking workers at massage parlors for sex and shared those videos online, a practice that experts told us put those workers’ lives at risk. 404 Media reached out to Meta for comment for each of these stories, and in each case Meta’s rebuttal was a mind-bending argument: What is the difference between Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and an iPhone, really, when you think about it? Since they don’t seem to know, we wrote a handy guide. READ MORE PSA: This is the last chance to use a discount code on the paperback version of Joseph's book DARK WIRE. It's all about how the FBI secretly ran a tech company for criminals to wiretap the world. Use code WIRE20 here for 20% off. Replying to Automattic Inc. Claims It Owns the Word 'Automatic', kit writes: “While this is way more immediately embarrassing for the relevant tech guys, I think this public forum mod drama version of tech guy is a lot healthier overall than the like self-styled roman emperor tech mogul archetype”
And in response to US Army Tells Soldiers to Go to German Food Bank, Then Deletes It, Tony S writes: “We spent ~$850billion on the DoD in the previous fiscal year(FY25) and yet 1 month into a funding lapse they can't feed the troops (they closed some mess halls in Kansas too this week.) Let that sink in.”
BEHIND THE BLOGThis is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss archiving to get around paywalls, hating on smart glasses, and more. JASON: I was going to try to twist myself into knots attempting to explain the throughline between my articles this week, and about how I’ve been thinking about the news and our coverage more broadly. This was going to be something about trying to promote analog media and distinctly human ways of communicating (like film photography), while highlighting the very bad economic and political incentives pushing us toward fundamentally dehumanizing, anti-human methods of communicating. Like fully automated, highly customized and targeted AI ads, automated library software, and I guess whatever Nancy Pelosi has been doing with her stock portfolio. But then I remembered that I blogged about the FBI’s subpoena against archive.is, a website I feel very ambivalent about and one that is the subject of perhaps my most cringe blog of all time. Read the rest of Jason's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam, Emanuel, and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
|
