Lock and Code

“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 moth...

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 immed...

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...

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...

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) imple...

“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 f...

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 grea...

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 t...

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 t...

Something’s not right in the world of location data. In January, a location data broker named Gravy Analytics was hacked, with the alleged cybercriminal behind the attack posting an enormous amount of data online as proof. Though relatively unknown to most of the public, Gravy Analytics is big in the world of location data collection, and,  according to an enforcement action from the US Feder...

Insurance pricing in America makes a lot of sense so long as you’re one of the insurance companies. Drivers are charged more for traveling long distances, having low credit, owning a two-seater instead of a four, being on the receiving end of a car crash, and—increasingly—for any number of non-determinative data points that insurance companies use to assume higher risk. It’s a pricing model that m...

In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy from Orlando, Florida, committed suicide after confessing his love to the one figure who absorbed nearly all of his time—an AI chatbot. For months, Sewell Seltzer III had grown attached to an AI chatbot modeled after the famous “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen. The Daenerys chatbot was not a licensed product, it had no relation to the franchise’s a...

It’s Data Privacy Week right now, and that means, for the most part, that you’re going to see a lot of well-intentioned but clumsy information online about how to protect your data privacy. You’ll see articles about iPhone settings. You’ll hear acronyms for varying state laws. And you’ll probably see ads for a variety of apps, plug-ins, and online tools that can be difficult to navigate. So much o...

The era of artificial intelligence everything is here, and with it, come  everyday surprises  into exactly where the next AI tools might pop up. There are major corporations pushing customer support functions onto AI chatbots, Big Tech platforms offering AI image generation for social media posts, and even Google has defaulted to include AI-powered overviews into everyday searches. The n...

You can see it on X. You can see on Instagram. It’s flooding community pages on Facebook and filling up channels on YouTube. It’s called “AI slop” and it’s the fastest, laziest way to drive engagement. Like “click bait” before it (“You won’t believe what happens next,” reads the trickster headline), AI slop can be understood as the latest online tactic in getting eyeballs, clicks, shares, comments...

Privacy is many things for many people. For the teenager suffering from a bad breakup, privacy is the ability to stop sharing her location and to block her ex on social media. For the political dissident advocating against an oppressive government, privacy is the protection that comes from secure, digital communications. And for the California resident who wants to know exactly how they’re being i...

Two weeks ago, the Lock and Code podcast  shared three stories about home products  that requested, collected, or exposed sensitive data online. There were the air fryers that asked users to record audio through their smartphones. There was the smart ring maker that, even with privacy controls put into place, published data about users’ stress levels and heart rates. And there was the sm...

The month, a consumer rights group out of the UK posed a question to the public that they’d likely never considered: Were their air fryers spying on them? By analyzing the associated Android apps for three separate air fryer models from three different companies, a group of researchers learned that these kitchen devices didn’t just promise to make crispier mozzarella sticks, crunchier chicken wing...

The US presidential election is upon the American public, and with it come fears of “election interference.” But “election interference” is a broad term. It can mean the now-regular and expected foreign disinformation campaigns that are launched to sow political discord or to erode trust in American democracy. It can include domestic campaigns to disenfranchise voters in battleground states. And i...

On the internet, you can be shown an online ad because of your age, your address, your purchase history, your politics, your religion, and even your likelihood of having cancer . This is because of the largely unchecked “data broker” industry. Data brokers are analytics and marketing companies that collect every conceivable data point that exists about you, packaging it all into profiles that othe...

Online scammers were seen this August stooping to a new low—abusing local funerals to steal from bereaved family and friends. Cybercrime has never been a job of morals (calling it a “job” is already lending it too much credit), but, for many years, scams wavered between clever and brusque. Take the “Nigerian prince” email scam which has plagued victims for close to two decades. In it, would-be vic...

On August 15, the city of San Francisco launched an entirely new fight against the world of deepfake porn—it sued the websites that make the abusive material so easy to create. “Deepfakes,” as they’re often called, are fake images and videos that utilize artificial intelligence to swap the face of one person onto the body of another. The technology went viral in the late 2010s, as independent film...

On August 24, at an airport just outside of Paris, a man named Pavel Durov was detained for questioning by French investigators. Just days later, the same man was charged in crimes related to the distribution of child pornography and illicit transactions, such as drug trafficking and fraud. Durov is the CEO and founder of the messaging and communications app Telegram. Though Durov holds citizenshi...

Every age group uses the internet a little bit differently, and it turns out for at least one Gen Z teen in the Bay Area, the classic approach to cyberecurity—defending against viruses, ransomware, worms, and more—is the least of her concerns. Of far more importance is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today, the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz revisits a prior episode from 2023 about what...

Somewhere out there is a romantic AI chatbot that wants to know everything about you. But in a revealing overlap, other AI tools—which are developed and popularized by far larger companies in technology—could crave the very same thing. For AI tools of any type, our data is key. In the nearly two years since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public, the biggest names in technology have raced to compet...