Lock and Code tells the human stories within cybersecurity, privacy, and technology. Rogue robot vacuums, hacked farm tractors, and catastrophic software vulnerabilities—it’s all here.
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Your prices could be going up because of a little something that one group has started calling the “cyber tax.” Not a “tax” in any regulatory sense of the word, this newly named “cyber tax” is instead a consequence of the growing number of cyberattacks on small businesses. According to the latest research from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 81% of small- and medium-sized businesses suffered a data breach, a security breach, or both, within the past year. And of those businesses, more than 5...
A dreadful thing happens far too often whenever an older adult falls for a scam: They get blamed for it. Not the scammers who lied and cheated their victim out of money. Not law enforcement for failing to recover funds. Not even the Big Tech companies that could have the most important role in protecting people online—and which, it turns out, knowingly bring in revenue every year from fraud . Instead, it is the older adults themselves whose stories are often shirked aside because of a mix of age...
Big news : Lock and Code is nominated for a Webby Award! You can help us win the People’s Voice Award by voting here . --- We have to talk about killer robots. No, not the Terminator, and not some Boston Dynamics robot run amok . We have to talk instead about a technological reality that is very much already here. In late February, the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic made a perhaps surprising statement for those who are only familiar with its helpful chatbot tool Claude: The company ...
Forget the runaway train thrillingly shot in Buster Keaton’s 1926 film “The General,” and never mind the charging locomotive rescued by actors Denzel Washington and Chris Pine in the 2010 film “Unstoppable,” as there’s a far more frequent (and far less heart-pounding) railcar drama happening across California’s Bay Area: The repeated breakdown of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, all because of a few networking errors. Opened in 1972, BART today carries about 175,000 people every weekday...
On February 8, during the Super Bowl in the United States, countless owners of one of the most popular smart products today got a bit of a wakeup call: Their Ring doorbells could be used to see a whole lot more than they knew. In a commercial that was broadcast to one of most reliably enormous audiences in the country, Amazon, which owns the company Ring, promoted a new feature for its smart doorbells called “Search Party.” By scouring the footage of individual Ring cameras across a specific reg...
A funny thing happened on TikTok last month, and its brought allegations of censorship, manipulation, and control. It was the week of January 22, and after a long legal battle, TikTok had finally—for the first time in its company history—moved its ownership to new, American stewards. But with the American restructuring, TikTok users immediately reported that something had changed : videos would sometimes fail to record any views, and even direct messages would fail to send. But, according to use...
In January, Google settled a lawsuit that pricked up a few ears: It agreed to pay $68 million to a wide array of people who sued the company together, alleging that Google’s voice-activated smart assistant had secretly recorded their conversations, which were then sent to advertisers to target them with promotions. Google denied any admission of wrongdoing in the settlement agreement, but the fact stands that one of the largest phone makers in the world decided to forego a trial against some pot...
When you hear the words “data privacy,” what do you first imagine? Maybe you picture going into your social media apps and setting your profile and posts to private. Maybe you think about who you’ve shared your location with and deciding to revoke some of that access. Maybe you want to remove a few apps entirely from your smartphone, maybe you want to try a new web browser, maybe you even want to skirt the type of street-level surveillance provided by Automated License Plate Readers , which can ...
There’s a bizarre thing happening online right now where everything is getting worse. Your Google results have become so bad that you’ve likely typed what you’re looking for, plus the word “Reddit,” so you can find discussion from actual humans. If you didn’t take this route, you might get served AI results from Google Gemini, which once recommended that every person should eat “ at least one small rock per day .” Your Amazon results are a slog, filled with products that have surreptitiously pai...
There’s an entire surveillance network popping up across the United States that has likely already captured your information, all for the non-suspicion of driving a car. Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, are AI-powered cameras that scan and store an image of every single vehicle that passes their view. They are mounted onto street lights, installed under bridges, disguised in water barrels, and affixed onto telephone poles, lampposts, parking signs, and even cop cars. Once installed, th...
This is the story of the world’s worst scam and how it is being used to fuel entire underground economies that have the power to rival nation-states across the globe. This is the story of “pig butchering.” “Pig butchering” is a violent term that is used to describe a growing type of online investment scam that has ruined the lives of countless victims all across the world. No age group is spared, nearly no country is untouched, and, if the numbers are true, with more than $6.5 billion stolen in ...
Re-airing for Thanksgiving, this episode delves into the pervasive issue of consumer device data collection, revealing how products like air fryers demand sensitive information and smart rings publish aggregate health data. It also examines a shocking incident where a robot vacuum's test images, including a private photo, were shared by AI trainers. The discussion emphasizes the lack of transparency in data supply chains and the challenging "bargain" consumers unknowingly make when purchasing smart technology.
Everything’s easier with AI… except having to correct it. In just the three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT, not only has onlife life changed at home—it’s also changed at work. Some of the biggest software companies today, like Microsoft and Google, are forwarding a vision of an AI-powered future where people don’t write their own emails anymore, or make their own slide decks for presentations, or compile their own reports, or even read their own notifications, because AI will do it for them...
Lock and Code dives into OpenAI's decision to loosen restrictions on ChatGPT, potentially allowing AI erotica for adults, which CEO Sam Altman linked to mental health concerns and a "treat adult users like adults" principle. Guest Deb Donig discusses the ethical complexities of AI intimacy, including the lack of vulnerability and risk, global impact, and parallels to the troubled AI companion Replica. The conversation also scrutinizes corporate accountability, the "vaporware" nature of the product as a test balloon for market profitability, and proposes a future where AI development prioritizes ethical frameworks and long-term societal well-being over immediate growth, drawing lessons from bioethics.
Google is everywhere in our lives. It’s reach into our data extends just as far. After investigating how much data Facebook had collected about him in his nearly 20 years with the platform , Lock and Code host David Ruiz had similar questions about the other Big Tech platforms in his life, and this time, he turned his attention to Google. Google dominates much of the modern web. It has a search engine that handles billions of requests a day. Its tracking and metrics service, Google Analytics, is...
“Connection” was the promise—and goal—of much of the early internet. No longer would people be separated from vital resources and news that was either too hard to reach or made simply inaccessible by governments. No longer would education be guarded behind walls both physical and paid. And no longer would your birthplace determine so much about the path of your life, as the internet could connect people to places, ideas, businesses, collaborations, and agency. Somewhere along the line though, “c...
There’s more about you online than you know. The company Acxiom, for example, has probably determined whether you’re a heavy drinker, or if you’re overweight, or if you smoke (or all three). The same company has also probably estimated—to the exact dollar—the amount you spend every year on dining out, donating to charities, and traveling domestically. Another company Experian, has probably made a series of decisions about whether you are “Likely,” “Unlikely,” “Highly Likely,” etc., to shop at a ...
In the late 2010s, a group of sheriffs out of Pasco County, Florida, believed they could predict crime. The Sheriff’s Department there had piloted a program called “Intelligence-Led Policing” and the program would allegedly analyze disparate points of data to identify would-be criminals. But in reality, the program didn’t so much predict crime, as it did make criminals out of everyday people, including children. High schoolers’ grades were fed into the Florida program, along with their attendanc...
If there’s one thing that scam hunter Julie-Anne Kearns wants everyone to know, it is that no one is immune from a scam. And she would know—she fell for one last year. For years now, Kearns has made a name for herself on TikTok as a scam awareness and education expert. Popular under the name @staysafewithmjules , Kearns makes videos about scam identification and defense. She has posted countless profile pictures that are used and repeated by online scammers across different accounts. She has fla...
The internet is cracking apart. It’s exactly what some politicians want. In June, a Texas law that requires age verification on certain websites withstood a legal challenge brought all the way to the US Supreme Court. It could be a blueprint for how the internet will change very soon. The law, titled HB 1181 and passed in 2023, places new requirements on websites that portray or depict “sexual material harmful to minors.” With the law, the owners or operators of websites that contain images or v...
For decades, digital rights activists, technologists, and cybersecurity experts have worried about what would happen if the US government secretly broke into people’s encrypted communications. The weird thing, though, is that it's already happened—sort of. US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and NSA, have long sought what is called a “backdoor” into the secure and private messages that are traded through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s Messages. These applications all provid...
“Health” isn’t the first feature that most anyone thinks about when trying out a new technology, but a recent spate of news is forcing the issue when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). In June, The New York Times reported on a group of ChatGPT users who believed the AI-powered chat tool and generative large language model held secretive, even arcane information. It told one mother that she could use ChatGPT to commune with “the guardians,” and it told another man that the world around him...
There’s a unique counter response to romance scammers. Her name is Becky Holmes. Holmes, an expert and author on romance scams, has spent years responding to nearly every romance scammer who lands a message in her inbox. She told one scammer pretending to be Brad Pitt that she needed immediate help hiding the body of one of her murder victims . She made one romance scammer laugh at her immediate willingness to take an international flight to see him. She has told scammers she lives at addresses ...
Complex problems often assume complex solutions, but recent observations about increased levels of anxiety and depression, increased reports of loneliness, and lower rates of in-person friendships for teens and children in America today have led some school districts across the country to take direct and simple action: Take away the access to smartphones in schools. Not everyone is convinced. When social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt proposed five solutions to what he called an "epidemi...
There’s an easy way to find out what Facebook knows about you—you just have to ask. In 2020, the social media giant launched an online portal that allows all users to access their historical data and to request specific types of information for download across custom time frames. Want to know how many posts you’ve made, ever? You can find that. What about every photo you’ve uploaded? You can find that, too. Or what about every video you’ve watched, every “recognized” device you’ve used to log in...
There’s a problem in class today, and the second largest school district in the United States is trying to solve it. After looking at the growing body of research that has associated increased smartphone and social media usage with increased levels of anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and isolation—especially amongst adolescents and teenagers—Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) implemented a cellphone ban across its 1,000 schools for its more than 500,000 students. Under the ban, s...
“Heidi” is a 36-year-old, San Francisco-born, divorced activist who is lonely, outspoken, and active on social media. “Jason” is a shy, bilingual teenager whose parents immigrated from Ecuador who likes anime, gaming, comic books, and hiking. Neither of them is real. Both are supposed to fight crime. Heidi and Jason are examples of “AI personas” that are being pitched by the company Massive Blue for its lead product, Overwatch. Already in use at police departments across the United States, Overw...
If you don’t know about the newly created US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there’s a strong chance they already know about you. Created on January 20 by US President Donald Trump through Executive Order , DOGE’s broad mandate is “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” To fulfill its mission, though, DOGE has taken great interest in Americans’ data. On February 1, DOGE team members without the necessary security clearances ...
It has probably happened to you before. You and a friend are talking —not texting, not DMing, not FaceTiming—but talking , physically face-to-face, about, say, an upcoming vacation, a new music festival, or a job offer you just got. And then, that same week, you start noticing some eerily specific ads. There’s the Instagram ad about carry-on luggage, the TikTok ad about earplugs, and the countless ads you encounter simply scrolling through the internet about laptop bags. And so you think, “Is my...
Google Chrome is, by far, the most popular web browser in the world. According to several metrics, Chrome accounts for anywhere between 52% and 66% of the current global market share for web browser use. At that higher estimate, that means that, if the 5.5 billion internet users around the world were to open up a web browser right now, 3.6 billion of them would open up Google Chrome. And because the browser is the most common portal to our daily universe of online activity—searching for answers ...
