Whitney Merrill

Security and Privacy Analysis of Tile's Location Tracking Protocol We conduct the first comprehensive security analysis of Tile, the second most popular crowd-sourced location-tracking service behind Apple's AirTags. We identify several exploitable vulnerabilities an...

When we talk about the problems with Bluetooth-enabled physical trackers, we usually talk about AirTags, but let us save some rage for Tile, powered by this paper discussing Tile's privacy, security, and accountability problems: arxiv.org/abs/2510.003...

Computer Terminal Replica Inspired By 70s Hardware Hackaday Article

Computer Terminal Replica Inspired By 70s Hardware

Data Broker Breaches Fueled Nearly $21 Billion in Identity-Theft Losses A report copublished by WIRED sparked a probe into opt-out pages hidden by data brokers. Now congressional Democrats say breaches tied to the industry have cost people tens of billions of dollars.

Data Broker Breaches Fueled Nearly $21 Billion in Identity-Theft Losses

www.wired.com/story/data-b...

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge In an abrupt shift, the company may release future AI models without ironclad safety guarantees

In the end, ethics and safety standards are no match for the promise of potential $$$ and profits… time.com/7380854/excl...

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

This is cool as hell: An app designed to ping people about nearby smartglasses.

Also cool: The creator was inspired by @404media.co coverage, a great illustration of why their journalism is so essential. This kind of work is funded by paid subscribers so become one of those if you can.

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby

Doesn’t look like its available for iphones. www.404media.co/this-app-war...

Rent-Only Copyright Culture Makes Us All Worse Off In the Netflix/Spotify/Amazon era, many of us access copyrighted works purely in digital form – and that means we rarely have the chance to buy them. Instead, we are stuck renting them, subject to

Buying a track or ebook that you can’t pass on, share, or transfer isn’t ownership; it’s a rental. We need to restore digital first sale. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

I’m so so tired of the drug ads during the Olympics.

Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

Hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software, Persona. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet, and that was just the beginning.

www.therage.co/persona-age-...

Ring’s Founder Knows You Hated That Super Bowl Ad

Part of the myth of Ring is that this is MY camera on MY door--but when you see a map and realize that there are a hundred in your neighborhood and they're all connected by a corporation that serves the police, the illusion dissolves.

Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake. Allison Nixon had helped arrest dozens of members of The Com — a loose affiliation of online groups responsible for violence and hacking campaigns. Then she became a target.

Anonymously threatening a security researcher seems like a shooting-yourself-in-the-dick level bad decision. Kudos to Allison Nixon for not taking any shit.

www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/16/1...

Absolutely shocked.

Colbert Doesn’t Give an FCC About Calling Out CBS

Speaking of jawboning, this is a very effective example of the art. Or at least, it was until Stephen Colbert refused to play along. But impt to note: Brendan Carr has NO POWER to abolish an exemption that Congress wrote into the equal time rules. He is bluffing here. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/a...

this RAM crisis feels like it’s going to ruin consumer electronics over the next decade. Bloomberg reports that Sony is considering pushing the PS6 release to 2028 or even 2029 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

Oh it got better. Ars Technica used ai to write a story about it me it made quotes up.

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

This might actually be the most peak "dead internet theory" example I've ever seen. An AI bot writing a hit piece on an open source maintainer because they rejected its AI slop pull-request.

(1/11) If you live in NY, you’ve probably started seeing a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

For my ham radio friends:

The Internet Still Works: Wikipedia Defends Its Editors Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook

Wikipedia receives hundreds of legal demands every year to remove user-written content. Almost all are rejected. We spoke with Wikimedia’s legal team about how Section 230 helps protect volunteer editors and public knowledge. www.eff.org/pages/inter...

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

New story up on the Homeland Security Department’s new tactic: flood social media companies with subpoenas to unmask anonymous accounts that criticize ICE or monitor the movements of ICE agents.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Seven Billion Reasons for Facebook to Abandon its Face Recognition Plans Meta’s analysis that it can avoid scrutiny by releasing a privacy invasive product during a time of political crisis is craven and morally bankrupt. It is also dead wrong.

Meta thinks now is a great time to launch facial recognition surveillance tech in their creepy glasses because EFF will be too distracted by fascism to notice.

We noticed.

www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

In an internal memo in May, Meta laid out its plans to release facial recognition in its smart glasses, to the blind first, & then to the general public.

“Civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

Facebook plans to put facial recognition in its glasses and they think we’re too stupid to fight back.

Their internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

DOJ ramps up AI for legal work, crime predictions, surveillance, inventory shows The agency’s 31% year-over-year surge in AI use cases includes work with predictive models and surveillance technologies that sparked concern from privacy and technology safety advocates.

“The concept of an AI that predicts the future in terms of whether somebody is going to commit a crime is fundamentally problematic,” EFF’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told @FedScoop.bsky.social. fedscoop.com/justice-dep...

I wrote about that in @fastcompany 4 years ago!
Video doorbells can hear you, even when you can't see them, for up to 25'
www.fastcompany.com/90747119/vid...

Probably Bob Newhart or John Mulaney?

This was futile. They’re not even asking for the right information to properly process the request. They take your name and email and then say “no results.”

I asked them why they didn’t ask for relevant car/license plate info, and they just didn’t respond.

ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, months-long expansion campaign. WIRED is publishing dozens of these locations.

NEW: ICE has a plan to lease offices across the US as part of a secret, months-long expansion campaign.

Today, @wired.com is publishing dozens of those locations. Many are near schools, medical offices, and places of worship.

Vital work from @leahfeiger.bsky.social that I'm proud to publish.

Screenshot of Amazon customer support chat getting refund for a Ring Floodlight Cam https://www.reddit.com/r/FlockSurveillance/comments/1r0m509/comment/o4jc9xz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Screenshot of chat with Amazon customer support getting refund for a Ring product bought in October 2020 https://www.reddit.com/r/FlockSurveillance/comments/1r0m509/comment/o4k6nqk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Infographic telling Ring customers they can get refunds for their purchases through Amazon

People on Reddit are getting Amazon to refund their Ring products because of their partnership with Flock and that creepy Super Bowl ad
www.reddit.com/r/FlockSurve...