Lock and Code tells the human stories within cybersecurity, privacy, and technology. Rogue robot vacuums, hacked farm tractors, and catastrophic software vulnerabilities—it’s all here.
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You will die. Your data will not. The afterlife of our information is a recent phenomenon, and some of the companies with the most to sort through are still just figuring it out. As far back as 2007, Facebook was forced to reckon with mass grief when users asked the company to maintain the profile pages of the 32 victims killed by a school shooter at Virginia Tech that year. Those pages became de…
It may sound entirely bizarre but the prices you once paid for hotels, educational classes, or staplers could have all been higher because you used a Mac computer, lived in a certain zip code, or lacked an Office Depot in your neighborhood. No, really. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that the travel booking site Orbitz showed Mac users pricier hotel options than PC users, because the…
Twenty years ago, a British mathematician named Clive Humby popularized a phrase that came to describe data’s relationship with the entire global economy: “Data is the new oil.” Pithy as the phrase sounds, it is undeniably true. Data steers decisions at businesses of every size. Data created entirely new industries built around its capture. And, for a select number of companies, data has produced…
There is a lot going on right now regarding the safety of kids online. In the United States, the majority of state legislatures have passed age verification laws requiring a variety of websites to more rigorously verify the age of their visitors. In the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Spain, and Germany, lawmakers are considering bans on social media access for anyone under the age of 16—Australia…
Pay is personal for plenty of Americans, but a new distribution model that consumes vast quantities of worker data is turning pay into something else: personalized. For an increasing number of workers in America, the money they can expect to be paid on any given day, week, or month is unknown to them. They could work the same number of hours as they did the shift before. They could help the same…
If you weren’t taking deepfakes seriously before, it’s too late now to ignore them. According to new research from Malwarebytes , one in three people who use AI every day said it’s okay to generate pornography of people without their consent. Nearly 10 years ago, “deepfake” technology provided hobbyists and film editors with artificial intelligence (AI) tools to swap the face of one person onto…
In the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes, like funding terrorism, engaging in money laundering, or violating sanctions. Sensible, right? Well, you can also face financial ruin for teaching poetry. That’s what seemingly happened to a Persian poetry teacher from Detroit whose accounts…
In May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the Holocaust. The people in said images were sometimes real—with real names, birthplaces, and stories of deportation that the Auschwitz-Birkenau…
Your prices could be going up because of a little something that one group has started calling the “cyber tax.” Not a “tax” in any regulatory sense of the word, this newly named “cyber tax” is instead a consequence of the growing number of cyberattacks on small businesses. According to the latest research from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 81% of small- and medium-sized businesses suffered a…
A dreadful thing happens far too often whenever an older adult falls for a scam: They get blamed for it. Not the scammers who lied and cheated their victim out of money. Not law enforcement for failing to recover funds. Not even the Big Tech companies that could have the most important role in protecting people online—and which, it turns out, knowingly bring in revenue every year from fraud .…
Big news : Lock and Code is nominated for a Webby Award! You can help us win the People’s Voice Award by voting here . --- We have to talk about killer robots. No, not the Terminator, and not some Boston Dynamics robot run amok . We have to talk instead about a technological reality that is very much already here. In late February, the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic made a perhaps…
