Privacy Please

Send us Fan Mail In June, an AI agent was given a boring research task: find out how much Victoria, Australia, spends on skin medicines. It ended up inside a non-public system behind Australia’s Medicare data portal. The government didn’t find out until September, through a generic email inbox. This week on Privacy Please, Cameron Ivey traces how AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta broke ou...

Send us Fan Mail Cameron & Gabe dig into 2026's wave of AI-blamed layoffs — the stats companies cite, the receipts they never bring, and what it actually means for the next generation of workers. Headlines vs. reality, Problem Lounge style. Explicit language. Stat Disclaimer The AI-attributed layoff figures cited in this episode (~38–40K May 2026 cuts, 100K+ total 2026 cuts, the 80% no-RO...

Send us Fan Mail Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic. This week he resigned and posted a seven-part thread claiming neither company is acting responsibly with how fast they're racing toward self-improving AI. It hit 100 million views in a day. This episode covers what he actually said, how Anthropic's own alignment science lead responded...

Send us Fan Mail Flock Safety's automated license plate readers are in over 5,000 communities and used by more than 40,000 cameras nationwide — sold to cities as a tool to catch car thieves and find missing people. But a Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers accused of misusing the system, most of them to track romantic partners. This episode covers: The scale of Flock&apos...

Send us Fan Mail Jonathan Sander is back on Privacy Please — and he's brought two blog posts worth arguing about. Sander (42 Notions, now in an operational role at Myota) joins Cam and Gabe to dig into why ransomware resilience should work like New York City's storm surge infrastructure — building something that pays off before disaster strikes, not just a wall you wait behind. Then the...

Send us Fan Mail Full Show Notes This week on Privacy Please, Cam breaks down four stories that all come back to one theme: choice. GigaWiper — Microsoft researchers uncovered a new backdoor malware built from pieces of older malware families, giving attackers the ability to decide after they're already inside a network how they want to cause damage — from low-level disk wipes to fake ransomw...

Send us Fan Mail Last year, every major outlet ran the same story: 16 billion passwords exposed. Apple. Google. Facebook. The largest breach in history. It was overblown. Security experts tore it apart within 48 hours. But here's the thing: the real story underneath that headline is actually scarier. And nobody covered it. It's called infostealer malware. It's been quietly running o...

Send us Fan Mail Gabe and I dig into Shiny Hunters and why the scariest cyberattacks now look like ordinary logins instead of dramatic break-ins. We map how credential theft, social engineering, and SaaS data exports turn basic security hygiene into the difference between a close call and a headline.  • Shiny Hunters’ scale, loose structure, and why takedowns rarely stick  • Why ransomware and ext...

Send us Fan Mail SHOW NOTES  The Pornhub breach is being reported as a data story. It's actually a story about shame as a weapon. In December 2025, a hacker group called ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen 200 million records from Pornhub Premium users — including email addresses, locations, and intimate watch and search history. They sent extortion demands. The data was verified as real. In...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Privacy Please, Cameron Ivey investigates Palantir Technologies — a data analytics company founded in 2003 with CIA backing that has quietly become embedded across nearly every major arm of the U.S. federal government. This week's investigation covers: The USDA Deal On April 22nd, the Department of Agriculture signed a $300 million blanket purchase agreemen...

Send us Fan Mail A normal data breach steals names and passwords. This one may have stolen the recipe for building the world’s most powerful AI models, and it happened through software most people will never notice until it breaks. We follow the Mercor breach from the first warning signs to the moment poisoned Python packages hit PyPI and spread in minutes across systems that were set to auto-upda...

Send us Fan Mail You already knew you were the product. But did you know you're also the teacher? Companies are quietly feeding your emails, your work decisions, your customer interactions, and your daily patterns into AI systems — systems designed to automate exactly what you do. And most people have no idea it's happening. In this episode of Privacy Please, we break down how it works,...

Send us Fan Mail Your anonymous account isn't anonymous anymore. Researchers just proved it costs $4 to find out who you are. In February 2026, a team from ETH Zurich and Anthropic published a paper that quietly ended the era of practical online anonymity. Their AI pipeline, using nothing but your posts, comments, and forum activity, correctly identified 67% of pseudonymous users from a pool...

Send us Fan Mail Cameron and Gabe sit down with Girish Redekar, co-founder and CEO of Sprinto, to pull back the curtain on one of the most misunderstood areas of security: compliance. Girish built his first startup, RecruiterBox, to 3,500 customers before selling it, and it was the painful, expensive, duct-taped compliance process he experienced firsthand that sparked the idea for Sprinto. Today,...

Send us Fan Mail How a Super Bowl dog commercial accidentally revealed America's surveillance infrastructure A family loses their dog. Ring runs a Super Bowl ad. America collectively goes "wait… what?" This week, we're digging into Ring's "Search Party" feature, the AI-powered doorbell camera tool that lit up millions of living rooms during the big game and immed...

Send us Fan Mail Autonomy sounds like progress until the system turns your choices against you. We dive into how AI agents change the risk equation, why “don’t trust, verify” now beats “trust but verify,” and what to do when the update button itself becomes the attack vector. We start with the Ivy League leak tied to Harvard and UPenn, where attackers exposed admissions hold notes that map influen...

Send us Fan Mail We kick off season seven with a tour of the year’s early privacy & security news: neighborhood watchtowers from Ring, a rival-led hack of Breach Forums, a massive stitched leak in France, a heavy Microsoft patch drop, AI agents on the rise, and new state privacy laws. We share practical steps: self-host cameras, freeze your credit, harden identity portals, and keep humans in t...

Send us Fan Mail We look back at 2025’s privacy and security reality: useful AI where data was ready, repeating breach patterns, and infrastructure limits that slowed the hype. We call out backdoors, weak 2FA, and the shift toward passkeys, decentralization, and owning more of our stack. • AI succeeds when data, process and governance are mature • Power, chips and cost constraints limit AI growth...

Send us Fan Mail It is Monday, December 15th, and the battle for Hollywood has officially gone nuclear. What started as an $82 billion acquisition by Netflix has morphed into a $108 billion hostile takeover battle with Paramount Skydance. As of this morning, stocks are volatile, the government has frozen the deal, and a massive Class Action Lawsuit has just been filed to burn it all down. In this...

Send us Fan Mail A week where the lawful intercept backdoor became the front door, a supply chain hop hit 200+ companies, a bargain app faced a malware lawsuit, and a university breach turned into a donor-targeting roadmap. We share simple moves to lower risk fast and set guardrails that actually hold. • Salt Typhoon abusing CALEA at major US telecoms • Negligence, unpatched routers and weak passw...

Send us Fan Mail A sleepless night, a soft prompt, and a flood of relief—the rise of AI therapy and companion apps is rewriting how we seek comfort when it matters most. We explore why these tools feel so human and so helpful, and what actually happens to the raw, intimate data shared in moments of vulnerability. From CBT-style exercises to memory-rich chat histories, the promise is powerful: inst...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Privacy Please, host Cameron Ivey discusses significant security threats, including a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's WSUS, a major data breach at the University of Pennsylvania, and the emergence of sophisticated malware known as Glassworm. The conversation highlights the importance of cybersecurity measures and the potential consequences of negligen...

Send us Fan Mail She has millions of followers, lands six-figure brand deals, and lives a life of curated perfection. The only catch? She isn't real. She was entirely created by artificial intelligence. Welcome to the unsettling world of synthetic influencers . In this compelling episode of Privacy Please, we dive deep into the booming industry of AI-generated online personalities. Discover:...

Send us Fan Mail We unpack how Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement changes the rules of mobile security by rebuilding memory architecture, not just adding guardrails. We weigh who should upgrade now, what this means for Android, and why people remain the biggest risk. • memory corruption explained with apartment analogy • why NOP sleds and heap sprays fail under MIE • tags, type segregation, and...

Send us Fan Mail You click "agree," you swipe a loyalty card, you browse online – every digital breadcrumb you leave is being collected, but not just by the apps and websites you use. Welcome to the world of data brokers , a multi-billion-dollar, hidden industry that aggregates, analyzes, and profits from your most intimate personal information. In this special episode from Privacy Pleas...