TL;DR – YouTube is expanding age checks for viewers and tightening identity checks for creators. The UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s new under-16 social-media rules are the big levers forcing platforms toward “highly effective age assurance” (read: ID, credit card, or selfie verification). Read on for details about the changes, and how you can […]

Meta has redefined the boundaries of digital consent – again.  Facebook has started testing a sneaky feature that scans your private photos from your phone’s camera roll. They disguise this under the name of “creative suggestions powered by Meta AI”. While the tech giant claims this feature is optional, the implications are more sinister for […]

Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot, Grok, briefly rebranded itself as “MechaHitler” on X, spouting antisemitic tropes and graphic violent fantasies before the posts were deleted. Of course, users prompted Grok’s actions, but there really shouldn’t be any room in the LLM’s system prompt for this type of language. Screenshots, outrage, and hate speech spreads fast – […]

Are you using Google’s Gemini API, or apps and bots built with it? Wondering how safe your sensitive data is when handled by powerful generative AI models? As leaders in privacy protection and personal data removal, Redact.dev is breaking down what every privacy-first individual needs to know about Google’s Gemini API Additional Terms of Service, […]

Researchers have discovered another ethically concerning abuse of user privacy from Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp). The same technology appears to have been used by Russian search paltform Yandex too. Tracking users has been a critical part of Meta’s business model for years (and almost any ad-support platform) – for […]

In a story that’s equal parts dystopian and deja vu, Aaron Cohen, a former IDF operative, and actor, turned Fox News commentator, recently pitched an “AI-powered threat detection system” designed to preemptively identify mass shooters and domestic threats. The system, if implemented, would reportedly draw on publicly available data – social media, purchase histories, online […]

Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) has begun roll out of its AI features in the EU. Meta says this will improve tools like Meta AI and Imagine, as well as future integrations across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. Watchdogs are on the defensive, with NOYB sending a cease and desist and widespread criticism […]

Microsoft recently introduced a new feature called Recall for Windows PCs, designed to automatically take snapshots of your desktop activity throughout the day. While Microsoft claims Recall helps users “find anything they’ve seen on their PC,” it also raises concerns about privacy, data storage, and potential misuse. In this guide, we’ll explain exactly what Microsoft […]

In a story by 404media that reads like a textbook example of modern surveillance creep, researchers recently scraped and published over 2 billion Discord messages – sourced from more than 620 public servers. This comes about a month after the last claim of a massive Discord scraping job. The dataset, created under the guise of […]

Social media connects billions of people – both friends & family… and hackers & scammers. Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to perform “social engineering” attacks, where they manipulate human trust to steal information or money. In this article, we’ll explore real-world examples of how these attacks play out on each […]