Lock and Code

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 "epidemic of mental illness" for young adults in America, many balked at the simplicity. Writing for the outlet Platformer...

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, every major settings change you made, every time...

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, students who are kindergartners all the way through high school seniors cannot use cellphones, smartphones, smart watches, earbuds, smart glasses, and any...

“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, Overwatch can allegedly help with the identification, investigation, and arrest of criminal suspects.Understanding exactly how...

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 accessed classified information belonging to the US Agency for International Development. On February 17, multiple outlets reported that DOGE sought access...

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 phone listening to me?”This question has been around...

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 to questions, looking up recipes, applying for jobs, posting on forums, ac...

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 Federal Trade Commission last year, the company claimed to “collect, process, and curate more than 17 billion signals from around a billion mobile devices daily.”Those many billions of signals, because of the...

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 most people find distasteful, but it’s also a pricing model that could become the norm if companies across the world begin implementing something called “surveillance pricing.”Surveillance...

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 actors, its writer, or producers, but none of that mattered, as, over time, Seltzer came to entrust Daenerys with some of his most vulnerable emotions.“I think about killing myself som...

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 of Malwarebytes—from Malwarebytes Labs, to the Lock and Code podcast, to the engineers, lawyers, and staff at wide—work on data privacy, and we fault no ad...

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 next gold rush, it seems, is in AI, and for a group of technical and legal researchers at New York University and Cornell University, that could be a major problem.But to understand their co...

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, and views. With this go-around, however, the methodology is turbocharged with generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and MetaAI, which can all churn out endless waves of images and text w...

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 included in so many targeted ads, privacy is the legal right to ask a marketing firm how they collect their data.In all these situations, privacy is being provided to a...

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 smart, AI-assisted vacuum that, through the failings of a group of contractors, allowed an image of a woman on a toilet to be shared on Facebook.These cautionary tales involved “smart devices,” products...

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 wings, and flakier reheated pastries—they also wanted a lot of user data, from precise location to voice recordings from a user’s phone.“In the air fryer category, as well as kn...

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 it can include the upsetting and increasing threats made to election officials and volunteers across the country.But there’s an even broader category of election interference that is of particular importance to this podcast, and that’s...

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 other companies use when deciding who should see their advertisements.Have a new mortgage? There are data brokers that collect that information and then sell it to advertisers who believe new...

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 victims would receive a mysterious, unwanted message from alleged royalty, and, in exchange for a little help in moving funds across international borders, would be handsomely rewarded.The scam w...

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 editors would swap the actors of one film for another—replacing, say, Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future with Tom Holland.But very soon into the t...