Whitney Merrill

Congress must prevent AI surveillance. The Anthropic feud proves it | Ashley Gorski and Patrick Toomey The company’s clash with the Pentagon is a fight over the future of American privacy

The Pentagon is demanding AI companies allow them to use their products to mass surveil Americans.

Congress must step in and take action now.

If there’s anyone who follows me doing consumer protection (FTC or state). Here’s a lead: autorenwal practices of Coterie. Definitely deceptive!

It is true that Proton is located in Switzerland and responded to a legal request from the Swiss authorities. But it is also true that most people do not know what an MLAT is and there is a widespread misunderstanding that using Proton will protect your account from US govt requests.

*dead father. You don’t have heirs until you die.

From Ukraine to Iran, Hacking Security Cameras Is Now Part of War’s ‘Playbook’ New research shows hundreds of attempts by apparent Iranian state hackers to hijack consumer-grade cameras, timed to missile and drone strikes. Israel, Russia, and Ukraine have also adopted this trick...

Hacking internet-connected civilian security cameras for recon has become a standard operating procedure of modern warfare. First for Russia and Ukraine, now for Israel and Iran.

Your insecure internet-of-things surveillance system is now their targeting system.

www.wired.com/story/from-u...

Meta Workers Say They're Seeing Disturbing Things Through Users' Smart Glasses Meta contractors in Kenya told two Swedish newspapers that they're being told to review highly sensitive footage recorded by smart glasses.

Most of the footage should never leave the user’s device. But of course the worst company doesn’t do privacy.

Meta Workers Say They’re Seeing Disturbing Things Through Users’ Smart Glasses
futurism.com/artificial-i...

Also if you work in sales at a company, do not call me. Email, fine.

No matter how many times I tell zoominfo to not sell my personal data, they continue to sell it to companies.

I am so frustrated with their non compliance with California law.

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...