If you thought that opting out of surveillance on your smart TV would give you your privacy back, think again.

A study by researchers at Northeastern University found that some smart TVs still seem to send information about what you’re watching to third parties, even after you pressed the opt-out button.

The study, ‘Watching the watchers‘, tested twelve smart TVs from ten manufacturers to find out how well they respected opt-outs from automatic content recognition (ACR). ACR is a TV feature that captures audio and/or video content from smart TVs and uploads it to a third party (typically the TV manufacturer).

The third party converts this content into digital fingerprints to understand what you’re watching, and can then use it to send targeted advertising or allow others to do the same. It’s on most if not all smart TVs, and 82% of US households had a smart TV as of last year.

The test took in the eight operating systems behind roughly 95% of US smart TVs, and ran ten viewing scenarios on each of them. These ranged from viewing antenna TV through to viewing via screen mirroring from another device. The researchers tested viewing the first-party streaming services provided free with the manufacturers’ operating systems, along with sessions using third-party streaming apps. And they tested sessions where the TV was connected to another device via its HDMI port.

The study ran all of its tests both with ACR left on, and with the opt-out setting selected. The whole test involved over 5,000 automated sessions.

Vizio continued to send 100% of what looked like traffic when viewing its first-party streaming services and antenna-based TV services, even after people had opted out, the study said. It also sent the same amount of traffic when idle. However it didn’t send any ACR traffic for third-party streaming data, according to the report.

Samsung did appear to leak some traffic from third-party streaming services after the researchers opted out of its ACR function. They tested 30 runs of Samsung’s built-in streaming service after opting out of ACR, and found that it still showed traffic “consistent with ACR”.

After opt-out, the Samsung TV’s Tizen OS seemed to send ACR-related traffic about Netflix in 7% of runs, YouTube in 10% of runs, and Tubi TV in 20%. It sent ACR 60% of the time from HDMI sessions. Like the Vizio TV, it also sent ACR traffic for all of its first-party streaming sessions.

Late last month, a researcher reverse-engineered a Samsung Smart TV and cast doubt on whether disabling ACR worked on the device.

There was good news, though. Four smart TV operating systems went completely silent after the researchers turned off ACR: LG’s WebOS, Sony’s Google TV OS, Amazon’s FireTV OS, and Supersonic’s VIDAA OS.

Encryption is a research challenge

Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million in a 2017 FTC settlement over charges that it collected viewing histories on eleven million smart TVs without user consent. At the time, it agreed to allow people to opt out of ACR.

The Vizio TV that the researchers tested sent traffic to Kinesis, an Amazon-run data ingestion service that the manufacturer uses to analyze data from its smart TVs. The researchers noticed no dip in traffic to this domain when they opted out of ACR on a Vizio TV. They said:

“The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint. However, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement.”

That’s a challenge to this research because most smart TVs encrypt their ACR traffic, including Samsung. So the researchers had to infer that this was ACR traffic based on signals such as where it was being sent, along with timing, volume, and protocol details.

One exception was Supersonic’s VIDAA OS, which sent ACR data to servers unencrypted. The servers responded unencrypted with a genre for what they recognized. Anyone watching the network could see it all, they warned. And because the servers didn’t require a login at the time of the test, over 57 million ACR detection results from other people’s TVs were accessible.

Vizio’s first-party streaming service WatchFree+ also dropped unencrypted titles of any show or channel being watched into online communications with the free TV service provider. There’s no way to turn that off, the researchers warned.

Walmart acquired Vizio for $2.3 billion in 2024, partly to help “advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery”.

The retailer also runs Walmart Connect, a retail media business that uses its customers’ data to help other businesses target them with ads.

Walmart was particularly interested in Vizio’s advertising business it, said at the time:

“Pairing it with Walmart Connect will be impactful and allow us to invest in our business even further on behalf of our customers.”

What smart TV owners can do

What can you do to protect yourself from a smart TV that might be sending your viewing data elsewhere? The researchers have some suggestions:

• WebOS (LG), Fire TV OS, Google TV on Sony, and VIDAA OS on Supersonic all appeared to honor ACR opt-out, so selecting it on these TVs should be safe.
• Disconnect the TV from the internet and use an external streaming device. That way the TV can’t send back data, even if it picks it up from the HDMI connection.
• Use a blocklist. This takes a little more technical knowledge. If you run an internet router that can accept blocklists, then you can add a list of known ACR endpoints that will stop your TV’s traffic reaching them. The researchers provide one here.

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Online fashion retailer Revolve Group said customers’ payment card numbers and expiration dates were stolen. In its customer notification letter filed with the Massachusetts Attorney General, Revolve told recipients the incident involved their names, addresses, and payment card details.

What was stolen?

The at-risk data includes customer names and contact information, payment card numbers, and card expiration dates. The breach only affected customers who had saved their payment card as a payment method in their Revolve account.

A filing on the Texas attorney general data breach website lists 127,200 affected Texans, but not a nationwide total. We found the figure of 1,515,073 in data returned by the site when searching for Revolve. That data labels it as the total number of people affected, but the figure isn’t displayed on the public listing. Other sites have repeated it, though they appear to rely on the same Texas record. The SEC filing did not give a number of affected people, and Revolve has not confirmed the total.

Revolve’s SEC filing does not mention card verification value (CVV) numbers. These three-digit security codes printed on the back of payment cards (four digits on the front for American Express cards) are an extra layer of security for card-not-present transactions.

It is also unclear whether the card numbers were fully visible or masked, or whether Revolve or a third-party payment processor held them.

Even without a CVV, card numbers and expiration dates may be enough to make purchases at some online stores. And scammers who know your real card details and contact information may be able to send more convincing phishing messages to trick you into revealing your CVV.

How did they get the data?

Revolve has not said how the attackers accessed the saved payment data. In its SEC filing, Revolve said it believes an unauthorized actor may have obtained the data “through automated means.” Records on the Texas attorney general’s site indicate that the incident happened on September 11 and was discovered on September 29.

No group has publicly claimed responsibility for the theft.

What Revolve customers can do now

Revolve said it has taken extra security measures following the breach, although didn’t say what those are.

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If you have saved payment information in your Revolve account, your details may have been among those stolen. Fraud can often begin within days of a breach. If you’re concerned about your card details being exposed:

• Read your statements line by line to identify even small charges that you don’t recognize. Criminals will often make a small charge using stolen card details to see if the card works.
• Look for unfamiliar merchant names on your statement.
• Report unauthorized charges to the card issuer immediately.
• Consider removing saved cards from shopping accounts. You could use a password manager instead, some of which will store autofill data for payment cards.
• Ask your card issuer to cancel your card and reissue with a new number so that the old number becomes unusable.

Also, don’t immediately trust calls, texts, or emails about the incident. Scammers can use stolen information to make themselves sound convincing. If someone claims to be calling from your card issuer, call the number printed on your card to check.

If you’re unsure about a message or link, check it with Malwarebytes Scam Guard.

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As preparation for the UK’s planned social media ban, Ofcom has set out four ways social media platforms could check whether users are aged 16 or over. The government and Parliament will decide how the ban works in practice.

Ofcom is the regulator for the communications services in the UK. The BBC reports that Ofcom identified four ways to check someone’s age that it considers “highly effective.”

Here’s what those checks would involve:

• Photo ID matching: Comparing a live image of you with the photo on an identity document, such as your passport, and checking the age information on that document.
• Bank-based checks: Using age information your bank already holds about you, with your consent.
• Facial age estimation: Using technology to estimate your age from your face. Ofcom says this technology has improved recently.
• Digital ID services: Using a digital identity service to prove your age, rather than presenting a physical document.

Let’s think through what those checks could mean.

Challenges

The challenge isn’t simply checking someone’s age. It’s doing so without turning everyday internet use into an identity check.

Photo ID matching brings highly sensitive documents and facial images into the process, which raises questions about how that information is handled and protected. The risks aren’t hypothetical: as I reported last year, a breach at a third-party support provider for Discord exposed government ID images belonging to around 70,000 users.

Banking-based checks can be more privacy-preserving if they return only confirmation that someone meets the age threshold, rather than exposing financial information. But the important questions are what information each party receives, what gets retained, and whether the check can be linked to someone’s activity.

Facial age estimation can avoid uploading an identity document, but it still processes a sensitive image and makes an imperfect prediction. Ofcom acknowledges that some technologies can be wrong by a few years around age 16, so people near the threshold may face an additional verification check.

I would expect these checks to stop some underage access but not eliminate it.

Previous restrictions have been followed by workarounds, including increased VPN use, borrowed credentials, and migration to services outside the restrictions. The danger is treating a successful age gate as proof that children are now safe, when it might push them into less regulated spaces.

The effectiveness depends on how the checks are implemented. A VPN may help someone avoid a check triggered by their apparent location; it won’t, by itself, bypass an identity or facial check that is still required.

Similarly, Ofcom says matching a live image to an ID is intended to make it harder to borrow someone else’s document. We shouldn’t assume every workaround defeats every method. But Ofcom accepts that some motivated children will get through. The meaningful test is how much harm these measures prevent, weighed against the privacy risks and barriers they introduce— not whether every user has completed a check.

My personal preference is double-blind verification: a provider confirms that you meet the age requirement without learning which service you’re accessing, while the service receives proof of age without learning your identity. Proving you’re old enough shouldn’t mean revealing who you are.

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A group of hackers calling themselves the Department of Peace says it stole and published the personal details of more than 41,000 people working for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The department says it is aware of a potential breach.

The group, which also claimed the theft of contract documents from the DHS in March, gave the data to Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, who published it in collaboration with the transparency collective DDoSecrets. The latter also published the BlueLeaks data dump that listed law enforcement officers’ details in 2020.

The aim of publishing the data was to replace “anonymity with accountability,” DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best said in an online statement.

According to TechCrunch, timestamps on the records suggest the data was taken around mid-August. The group said it had launched the attack in response to a July 17 statement by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in which he promised to “turn up the heat” with traffic stops.

What was stolen?

The data files published online, which the publishers have called “Icepick,” span staff at nearly 7,000 offices. They include the names, work email addresses, phone numbers, office addresses, job titles and membership in internal DHS groups. The employees impacted include almost 6,600 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees. ICE is the DHS unit responsible for immigration enforcement and deportations in the US.

The dataset also carried details of over 21,000 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees, along with information on people who work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The data dump revealed less information than the ShinyHunters’ FBI data heist in September, which reportedly contained Social Security numbers, emergency contacts, medical records and home addresses. Nevertheless, this is more than just a phone book of folks in the DHS.

For one thing, it doesn’t take much to cross-reference data. Reuters matched six DHS employees’ data to credit bureau records and breach data from a dark web intelligence platform. Online activists regularly use open-source intelligence (OSINT) to “doxx” people from very few clues, meaning that even a leak of basic identity information can put someone in danger. In fact, the creators of a separate searchable version say they added information through automated and manual research. So some details shown in that version may not have come from the data stolen from DHS.

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The data in this case also included membership of groups within Active Directory, a Microsoft tool that contains identity information about computer users. Active Directory controls who can access different internal tools, services, and third-party software within an organization.

The files listed over 200 CBP users in a group that could access the facial recognition tool Mobile Fortify. Other groups reference a service called Penlink, which the company claims can track the location data of hundreds of millions of mobile devices.

According to the Guardian, job titles in the data dump show which agents were assigned to sensitive jobs such as special operations, surveillance, and undercover work.

How did they get the data?

The Department of Peace said that it got to the information via a single sign-on (SSO) service provided by identity company Okta. SSO is a prized target for hackers because a single authentication can get a user into many different workplace services and applications.

Okta says it has no evidence its data or systems were compromised, but that doesn’t rule out someone abusing a DHS account with stolen credentials.

DHS told reporters it was aware of a potential breach. One DHS employee whose data showed up in the breach told Reuters they hadn’t heard anything about it.

What DHS employees can do now

The leaked records include work contact details and internal group memberships. This information could help attackers create convincing messages or calls, and may expose some employees to unwanted attention or threats. DHS has warned about the risk of harassment, stalking, and physical harm. It is not yet clear whether the leak has led to specific threats or affected any operations.

If you work for DHS:

• Follow security advice and instructions from the DHS.
• Treat unexpected calls, emails, and texts about your role or colleagues with caution. Verify them through a contact method you already trust, and never share passwords or MFA codes.
• Change any personal passwords you’ve reused for work, and turn on MFA where available. Follow your agency’s process for work accounts.
• Report suspicious contact or threats to your agency’s security team. If you believe there’s an immediate danger, contact law enforcement.

Do you think your information might have been leaked in a data breach? Check out the Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection service.

Someone’s got their eye on your personal information. Make sure it’s us.

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A reverse engineer claims that their Samsung smart TV has been collecting audio without their consent.

The researcher, who calls themselves “log4j,” said in an X thread that their 2025 Samsung TV was delivering ads that seemed suspiciously relevant to them. Investigating, they claim to have found a package called “always on voice,” which uses the TV’s built-in microphone to collect sounds from the room.

The software logged events such as dogs barking and babies crying, log4j said, adding that these events are counted and reported back to Samsung.

Samsung advertises similar features on some of its AI-enabled TVs. The company says its Pet Care and Family Care features use on-device AI to detect a dog barking or a baby crying and alert users. This doesn’t confirm log4j’s claims about the package or the data it reports.

However, log4j says that on TVs without microphones, the software searches for connected devices such as soundbars or Bluetooth microphones and uses those to listen instead.

The TV was also collecting geolocation data and mapping local networks, they said, adding that it ran a service on the TV that analyzes traffic on the local network.

log4j also says that the system uses a neural network tailored to a particular region to analyze your viewing habits. A neural network is a type of machine-learning model. log4j said:

“…in youtube it’s looking for videos you watch, ads you skip, progress in a video, etc.”

The tracking that’s on the record

While log4j’s claims haven’t been independently verified, Samsung has used automatic content recognition (ACR), a system that identifies what’s on screen. Earlier this year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton settled with Samsung, getting the company to agree that it would get Texans’ express consent before collecting or processing ACR viewing data.

A class action complaint filed in New York in January also accused Samsung of using ACR to record video and audio passing through the TV. The complaint accused Samsung of using machine-learning algorithms to analyze and link this data back to consumers. This includes information displayed when the TV is used as a computer monitor, it said, adding that the information can be linked to different people using the TV. The case was voluntarily dismissed in July.

The New York complaint added:

“Samsung exploits this Sensitive Information by (a) selling targeted advertisements to its corporate advertising clients, and (b) providing it to third-party advertising companies such as Google and X (f/k/a Twitter) for targeted advertising.”

A separate class action complaint filed in California this month accuses Samsung Electronics America of not being transparent about its ACR data collection.

This isn’t the first time that Samsung has been criticized for allegedly picking up in-room audio. In 2015, privacy group EPIC filed a complaint with the FTC, accusing Samsung of recording conversations and relaying them elsewhere. The nonprofit said at the time:

“Everything a user says in front of the Samsung SmartTV is recorded and transmitted over the internet to a third party regardless of whether it is related to the provision of the service.”

EPIC identified text-to-speech company Nuance as the third party.

What you can do

We can’t confirm all of log4j’s allegations, and Samsung doesn’t appear to have commented. But there have been multiple complaints about the data smart TVs collect. You can turn off features such as ACR, internet-based advertising, and voice recognition where possible.

log4j has also raised concerns about whether monitoring services are truly off. They said:

“ACR off via your preferences menu on samsung TVs should not be assumed to actually disable ACR telemetry.

i’ve found several instances where the checks (whether deliberate or not) are either incorrectly implemented or not checked at all.”

log4j says disconnecting your TV from Wi-Fi is the best option for immediate peace of mind, though that also means losing internet-based TV features. They also suggest using an Apple TV or a modifiable Android TV box with open-source software.

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal may feel like very old news. But the consequences are still arriving, and the latest comes with a $25 billion price tag.

Reuters reports that a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found that Facebook misled consumers about its data practices and its handling of hate speech and misinformation. Meta says it expects to win on appeal.

This case is about more than information ending up in the wrong hands. It concerns what Facebook told people about who could access their information, how much control users had, and how the company enforced its own rules.

What Facebook told its users

In September, jurors found that the company and its leadership made 26 misleading statements on data privacy, hate speech, and other subjects. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 statement that:

“We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.”

That assurance appeared in a statement the jury found misleading. The judge found that choosing who could see a Facebook post did not necessarily control what outside app developers could access. That access was governed by separate settings that many users did not know existed.

New Mexico’s attorney general filed the lawsuit in 2021, following revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.

But New Mexico’s case went beyond Cambridge Analytica.

The state challenged Facebook’s representations to consumers about its data practices and its efforts to address misinformation and hate speech. The case centered on misleading consumers under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, the state’s consumer protection law.

The state argued that third parties had broad access to users’ information and that Facebook tolerated harmful content when doing so benefited its business. Meta disputed the allegations, denied selling users’ information, and said the state had taken statements out of context.

New Mexico’s Department of Justice says the jury found 43,899,725 violations of state law. That does not mean nearly 44 million individual New Mexicans had their data taken. The count reflected the estimated audience for each misleading statement, rather than the number of individual people affected.

State law allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. Judge Francis Mathew found that a penalty exceeding $219 billion was warranted under the law but reduced the amount to $25 billion.

The judge said earlier penalties had failed to stop Meta from misleading consumers, including a $5 billion FTC penalty in 2019.

The money is not earmarked for compensation payments to individual Facebook users. According to Attorney General Raúl Torrez, state law directs the penalties to New Mexico’s school system.

Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal and characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to impose “a tax on speech.” Meta has also argued that a multibillion-dollar penalty risks violating constitutional protections concerning due process and excessive fines.

How to stay safe on social media

The case illustrates why privacy is not just a matter of choosing who can see a post. In a separate 2019 case, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that Facebook had shared users’ information with third-party apps used by their friends, even when those users had chosen restrictive privacy settings.

A few precautions can help you limit what you share, although settings alone cannot guarantee privacy:

• Share selectively. Leave optional profile details blank, limit who can see your posts, and avoid publishing sensitive details such as your address or live location. Ask permission before posting information or photos involving other people.
• Check app permissions. Does a social media app really need your contacts, precise location, or entire photo library? Turn off unnecessary access in your device settings.
• Review tracking and advertising settings. Look for controls covering personalized ads, activity outside the platform, and data sharing. Restrict what you can, but don’t assume opting out of personalized ads stops all collection.
• Be selective about connected apps. Before connecting a quiz, game, or other service to your account, check what information it requests. Decline access that seems excessive for what the service does.
• Remember what “private” means. Restricting your audience helps control who sees your posts. It does not stop the platform itself from collecting or using information about your activity.

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Two Chicago customers say robots delivering their groceries and takeout scanned their faces and hands without consent, stored the data alongside their names and addresses, and used the recordings to train AI.

Their separate lawsuits accuse delivery robot operators Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics of violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law. Both companies dispute the claims.

The plaintiffs filed the cases in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, alleging that the robots used their cameras along with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors to scan them.

LiDAR uses laser pulses to build a detailed 3D map of a robot’s surroundings. The lawsuits allege that, at close range, these sensors capture facial geometry in enough detail to support facial recognition.

Mitchell Breidinger ordered DoorDash groceries in September 2025. A Coco robot, operated by Coco Robotics, made the delivery. To collect it, he had to stand within about a meter of the robot’s cameras and LiDAR sensor while he entered a PIN code in the DoorDash app, and a Coco remote pilot watched the live video, according to the complaint.

Barry Schain filed a similar complaint against Serve Robotics, which sent one of its robots to deliver his Uber Eats order.

The complaint against Cyan Robotics (the California-based company that does business as Coco Robotics) states that the robots record detailed 360-degree LiDAR data on the urban environments that they navigate. Coco has never said that it blurs, downsamples, or removes human faces or hands from that LiDAR data, the complaint adds.

It also says the company:

“gives no notice before a robot records a person, identifies no specific purpose or retention period for the data, obtains no written release, and has published no retention or destruction schedule.”

Those who are scanned by Coco robots have no account to close with the robotics company and don’t get to choose whether they are served by a robot, the complaint points out.

Cyan uses the data that the robots collect to train its AI, the complaint says, adding that it also has data-sharing partnerships with companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Schain, who most recently took a delivery from a Serve robot on October 4, makes similar claims in his complaint. The company fulfills food delivery orders for both Grubhub and Uber Eats, it says, noting (unlike the complaint against Cyan) that these robots also collect audio.

Serve Robotics licenses video and LiDAR data to third parties for model training, the complaint says, citing Serve’s own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Both companies have pushed back, according to reports.

Coco said it has not collected biometric data in Chicago, that the suit “fundamentally misunderstands our technology” and that “the data we share is navigational data used to make sidewalks safer for all users.” It called the case “frivolous.” Coco said that it doesn’t share data from the beginning and end of delivery runs. Serve said that the robot systems are “not designed to identify individuals or create biometric profiles.”

Whether the data the robots capture qualifies as biometric information under BIPA is central to the lawsuits.

Illinois’ biometric law

Illinois’ biometric privacy law gives people the right to sue companies over the unlawful collection and use of their biometric data.

Under that law, biometric identifiers include scans of hand and face geometry. Companies must tell people in writing what biometric information they’re collecting, what they’ll use it for, and how long they’ll keep it. They must also get each person’s written consent and publish a schedule for destroying the data, and they must not sell or otherwise profit from it.

These class action suits were not delivered in a vacuum. Chicago residents had already mounted a petition against the delivery robots, citing collisions, interference with emergency vehicles, and concerns about potential surveillance. More than 4,550 Chicagoans have signed it, the petition says.

Both suits were filed by the same Chicago law firm, Almeida Law Group. Each seeks $1,000 per class member for negligent violations or $5,000 for intentional or reckless ones. Each complaint says its proposed class “includes many thousands of persons.”

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Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are cameras that photograph passing vehicles, read their number plates, and typically log the time, location, and vehicle details. On their own, the images might be used to find a stolen car or locate a suspect.

But lately there have been a lot of concerns raised about the way they are used. The main worry is caused by what happens when many cameras feed data into a shared, searchable network: it can create a detailed record of where ordinary people travel.

Some agencies have already taken it upon themselves to act on these concerns, as well as those around inaccuracy. Data errors can have serious consequences. At a recent Senate hearing, Florida resident Lindsey Isaacs described being arrested and held for 13 days after data from an AI-enabled plate-reader system incorrectly implicated her in a fatal car crash.

As a result of all this, US lawmakers from both major political parties have introduced proposals aimed at restricting automatic license plate reader networks.

Most of the reasons brought up are about Flock Safety, one of the largest suppliers of these systems in the United States, but they would apply more broadly to other ALPR vendors as well.

Flock says it deploys only 120,000 cameras operating across the country, while a researcher cited by the Senate described a much larger network of connected devices and cameras. The exact size may be disputed, but the central concern is clear: Data from a camera in one location can potentially be searched by an agency elsewhere.

Two different approaches

Reportedly, there are two different proposed laws in the making, while Flock says it supports a legal framework for license-plate readers and argues that the technology can improve public safety when it is used with strong oversight and accountability.

The first proposal, the Stop Flock Abuse Act, doesn’t aim to banish ALPR systems outright, it would create rules for how government agencies and vendors can use them.

Among other measures, the bill would require written approval and a record for every search, regular supervisor audits, encryption, and deletion of most vehicle-location data after ten days. It would also prohibit sharing or selling the data to non-governmental third parties, prevent ALPR networks from incorporating facial-recognition technology, and require data to stay in the US.

A second proposal, the Ban Flock Act, takes a much harder line. It would prohibit US federal agencies from using ALPRs or accessing data they collect. It would also withhold federal grant money from state and local governments that use ALPR systems and allow people to sue the federal government if their rights are violated through ALPR deployment.

Both bills are proposals, not enacted laws. In the US system, each would need to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate in matching form, then be signed by the President.

Going forward

There is no guarantee either bill will receive a vote, let alone become law. But their introduction shows that ALPR technology is moving from a local procurement issue to a national privacy and civil-liberties debate.

License plate data may seem less sensitive than phone-location data, but a long enough record can reveal a person’s routines, relationships, medical visits, religious activity, or attendance at protests. The debate is therefore not just about cameras on streets to fight crime and find criminals, it is about whether governments and private vendors should be able to build searchable records of everyday movement.

So for consumers, the key question is not only whether a camera is installed on a street or near a business. It is also how long the resulting data is retained, who can search it, whether those searches are logged and reviewed, whether the information can be shared beyond the original agency, and what recourse exists when the system is wrong or abused.

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The US government is alerting millions of people that their personal information was stolen during a breach of the Pentagon’s personnel records at the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC).

The DMDC is a central US Department of Defense (DoD) organization that manages personnel records, ID credentials, and benefit entitlements for military and civilian staff, veterans, and their families. It maintains over 60 million records for US military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement.

Reportedly, cybercriminals had access from October 2025 to July 2026. CNN reports that the Pentagon confirmed the breach affects 2.76 million living individuals, potentially including current and former defense personnel or their dependents, and 294,000 deceased individuals.

A notification shared on Reddit states:

“A small number of unauthorized users accessed files on a server containing unencrypted PII.”

PII means personally identifiable information. The attackers gained access by exploiting a security vulnerability in an unspecified file-sharing system. The Pentagon says it has “no indication” of misuse. It hasn’t explained how it reached that conclusion or what it considers misuse, and it doesn’t rule out future misuse of the exposed information.

The exposed data is said to include Social Security numbers, names, dates of birth, sex, race, and service details. Some records also include contact information and occupational specialty.

Besides the risk that this data could help foreign intelligence services track US personnel, affected people face a lasting risk of identity theft. Birth dates cannot be changed, and Social Security numbers can only be changed in limited circumstances.

Breaches happen every day. Don’t be the last to know.

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What to do if you’re affected

The Pentagon is offering 12 months of credit monitoring through IDX. If you receive a notification letter, take up the offer and consider a credit freeze with all three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. A freeze is free and restricts access to your credit report, helping prevent someone from opening new credit accounts in your name.

Other recommendations are:

• Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN to prevent someone else from filing a federal tax return using your Social Security number.
• Be suspicious of unexpected calls, emails, and texts, especially ones that mention your unit, rank, or job. Attackers can use the stolen details to make phishing attempts more convincing.
• Verify requests through official channels you look up yourself, rather than through contact details in the message.
• Use unique passwords and multi-factor authentication on email, banking, and benefits accounts.
• Limit location sharing and review privacy settings on phones and apps, since military leaders have raised concerns about commercial location data being used to target personnel.
• Follow instructions in the breach letter and further official communications and report any suspicious approach to your security officer.

Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance. 

A study testing 21 cars from 19 brands and 30 companion apps found connections to advertising and tracking companies, and evidence that some apps shared sensitive personal data.

Modern cars can unlock remotely, route around traffic, stream entertainment, summon roadside help, and cool or heat the cabin before you get in. But those conveniences come with a privacy cost that drivers may struggle to see and are unable to refuse.

We’ve covered cars and privacy a few times before, especially after Mozilla researchers described cars as a “privacy nightmare.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton investigated car manufacturers seeking details of their data collection and sharing practices, and sued General Motors over allegations that it sold customer driving data to third parties.

Researchers from Northeastern University, working with Consumer Reports, tested vehicles from model years 2022 through 2025 and companion apps, observing network traffic while cars were stationary, driven, and used through their apps. The results reinforce an uncomfortable reality: connected vehicles are data-collection platforms on wheels.

The results in a nutshell:

• Both vehicles and companion apps contacted third-party domains, including those associated with advertising and tracking.
• 19 of 21 vehicles contacted at least one third party over Wi-Fi.
• 7 of 30 apps transmitted sensitive identifiers to third parties associated with advertising and tracking.

The troubling part is not that a car talks to its manufacturer. After all, a connected vehicle needs some network access for safety alerts, navigation, account functions, and maintenance. The bigger issue is the potential combination of identifiers. A vehicle identification number (VIN) can link a particular vehicle to its owner, while precise location can reveal highly sensitive patterns: where someone sleeps, works, worships, seeks medical care, spends time with friends, or travels. Add an email address or a name, and that information can be easier to connect to the detailed consumer profiles held by advertisers and data brokers.

And that’s before considering the privacy concerns around cameras that monitor drivers’ faces for signs of distraction or impairment.

Consent with strings attached

Consent is a weak safeguard when drivers have to accept extensive terms to use functions advertised as part of the vehicle. Several manufacturers said their connected services were opt-in, but declining can mean losing useful functionality. For example, Consumer Reports noted a Tesla warning that refusing its agreement may result in:

“reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability.”

That hardly sounds like freely given, informed consent.

There was one sign that scrutiny can matter: after researchers presented their findings, Honda told Consumer Reports it had directed vendor Amplitude to delete location data it received and stopped sending it going forward. But consumers should not need an academic study to discover who their car or its app is sharing data with.

Especially when Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—companies that already know plenty about us—were among the leading recipients of the driver data.

Until automakers collect less data and provide clear privacy settings, meaningful opt-outs, and deletion controls, drivers should treat a connected car, and especially its companion app, as another privacy-sensitive device. Review app permissions, turn off optional data-sharing settings, avoid linking unnecessary accounts, and ask manufacturers what data they retain, share, and delete.

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The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Google €403 million ($459 million) for violating European privacy law. The penalty follows a six-year inquiry into Google’s management of user location data between May 2018 and February 2020.

During that time, Google collected users’ location data without making clear that it could be used to infer their interests and shape the ads they saw.

Google’s location history keeps track of users’ locations when using their devices. It’s an opt-in service that includes a Timeline feature to display a private map of the places they’ve visited. A separate Android feature, Location Accuracy, helps devices determine their location more accurately than GPS alone.

Google had told users that they could stop Location History tracking by turning off that setting. But a report by the Associated Press in 2018 found that doing so wasn’t enough to stop Google from saving some of that location data. Researchers at Princeton University later confirmed the AP’s findings.

One reason was Web & App Activity, a separate Google account setting that can save information about what Google account holders have been browsing on the web and doing with their apps. That service was also collecting location data. Turning off Location History did not turn off Web & App Activity.

This issue led to payouts in multiple US jurisdictions. Google agreed to pay $85 million to Arizona in October 2022, $392 million to 40 states that November, and $9.5 million to the District of Columbia the following month. It also agreed to pay $39.9 million to Washington State in 2023, $1.38 billion to Texas in May 2025 as part of a two-suit settlement. Last September, a jury awarded $425 million in a separate class action case.

The DPC first looked into the issue in 2018 after the AP investigation and launched an official statutory inquiry in February 2020. Along with the fine, it has ordered Google to bring its location data processing into compliance within six months. The DPC says it will publish the full text of its decision in due course.

Google told Bloomberg that it had revised its practices since 2019 and launched tools to make location data easier to manage. In December 2023, Google announced that it would change its Timeline feature to keep its data on users’ devices. It also said that, for people turning on Location History for the first time, the default period before data is automatically deleted would fall from 18 months to 3 months.

This isn’t the only Google-related investigation that the DPC has launched. It launched one on Google’s processing of EU residents’ data for its AI model two years ago, and another related to the processing of personal data for its online Ad Exchange in 2019.

Check your Google location settings

Turning off Timeline doesn’t stop Google from saving location information through other settings. Check Web & App Activity and, if you see it, Search Services History too.

You can turn these settings off and delete activity already saved to your account.

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Apart from the privacy concerns around smart glasses, researchers have found that some cheap brands come with barely any security at all.

ABC Australia reports that researchers from NSB Cyber and Abstract Shield tested two inexpensive pairs, costing A$60 and A$110 (around US$42 and US$78), and found more than a dozen flaws across the smart glasses themselves, their app, and an associated website.

The main problem they uncovered was insecure Bluetooth pairing: If the glasses were powered on and not connected to their owner’s phone, an attacker could connect first, with no password or meaningful pairing confirmation.

After connecting, an attacker could reportedly control the glasses to capture photos or recordings, copy existing media, and intercept data moving between the glasses and the phone. An attacker could also make another device appear to be the victim’s glasses, allowing it to connect to the owner’s mobile app.

The testing also found that a Bluetooth-visible device identifier could allegedly be used with a weakness in the app’s website to retrieve a user’s email address and date of birth.

The research uncovered another privacy issue. ABC reports that voice or text submitted to the built-in AI, along with images sent to it, was first transmitted to a server in Shenzhen and could be forwarded elsewhere, depending on the function. The tests did not establish how the data was subsequently used.

The server locations, combined with some of the AI’s answers to specific questions, led researchers to conclude that the chatbot companion relied at least in part on Chinese sovereign AI models. Professor Kimberlee Weatherall, a technology regulation expert involved in the testing, said the failure to identify China in the privacy policy appeared to violate the Australian Privacy Principles,

The timing of the testing is also relevant because Australia’s smart-device security standards apply to most consumer smart devices manufactured on or after March 4, 2026. They require, among other measures, no universal default passwords, a way to report vulnerabilities, and information about the minimum security-update period. Devices made before that date are outside the requirements.

Experts quoted by ABC said the devices violated Australia’s privacy laws and were also likely to breach several sections of the Cyber Security Act. However, whether the new smart-device standards apply would depend partly on when the glasses were manufactured, and the rules have not yet been tested in a known enforcement action.

Professor Weatherall said:

“The rules say that the password must be unique. It doesn’t even seem like they were applying a password, which might mean that their standards are so low they don’t even technically breach that rule, which I find amazing.”

What to do

We’re not fans of smart glasses, expensive or cheap. But if you own a pair:

• Avoid pairing or using inexpensive camera glasses that lack a clear physical pairing step, account authentication, a published security-contact process, and a stated update-support period.
• Stop using their AI or cloud features for sensitive material, remove unnecessary permissions from the companion app, check for firmware and app updates, and consider returning the product if the vendor cannot document a fix.
• Ask permission before recording people, and check your local laws to understand what is and isn’t allowed.

From reporting threats to removing them.

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Flock Safety’s cameras are automated license plate readers (ALPRs) designed to help police find stolen cars or wanted suspects.

A joint investigation by 404 Media and WIRED, based on data recovered from a physically removed Flock camera, found that its on-device software explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, bicycles, and license plates.

Separately, Washington DC’s police union says the Metropolitan Police Department used Flock data to track officers under Internal Affairs investigation without their knowledge.

Together, these reports illustrate a privacy problem: A network built to record the movements of vehicles can readily be used to follow almost anyone.

The latest reporting adds an important technical detail to that debate.

What Flock cameras collect

A group of hackers reportedly removed a Flock camera from a roadway, copied its storage, and recovered an encryption key stored on the device. That allowed them to unlock videos of thousands of vehicle detections despite Flock’s claim that its devices are protected by on-device encryption. Flock said it could not assess the claims without more detail.

The recovered camera files reportedly contained software models that detect people, even though public discussion of Flock has usually focused on cars and license plates. The researchers found no evidence that face-recognition features were actively used. Reassuring, but it should not be mistaken for a clean privacy bill of health.

Even without facial recognition, a system that records repeated sightings can potentially reveal sensitive patterns of movement, including where someone lives, works, worships, seeks healthcare, attends protests, visits family, or spends time with other people. When a person is matched to a vehicle, vehicle-based tracking can become person-based tracking in practice.

As an example of how widely the data can be shared, WIRED found that records from the city of Alpharetta, Georgia:

“were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and, inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration.”

Targeted tracking of people

The Washington DC dispute shows what happens when the power to follow people is turned inward.

The DC Police Union says it learned in July that MPD’s Internal Affairs investigators had used Flock license-plate-reader data to track sworn officers under investigation without their knowledge. The union filed a complaint and asked the department to stop, arguing that MPD lacked adequate controls for a system with such extensive surveillance capabilities.

MPD defended the use, saying its position is that the use of license-plate-reader data in the misconduct investigation was appropriate. It said the labor dispute is headed to arbitration.

If police officers themselves are concerned that the system can be used to monitor them without transparent rules, the public should ask an obvious follow-up question: What prevents the same tools from being used to follow residents, employees, journalists, activists, former partners, or other people with no meaningful ability to challenge the search?

Even when Flock wants privacy to meet surveillance halfway, its measures do not eliminate the underlying civil-liberties issue.

The recovered camera software and the DC dispute make the same point from different directions. Flock’s network is not merely a collection of roadside plate readers. It is a distributed system for recording movement, identifying patterns, and making those records available for search.

Meaningful safeguards should include:

• Public approval before cameras are deployed, with clear maps showing their locations and stated purposes.
• Strict limits on collection, retention, searches, and cross-jurisdictional sharing.
• A requirement for documented investigative justification before a search, with elevated approval for sensitive investigations.
• Independently reviewable audit logs, regular public transparency reports, and meaningful penalties for misuse.
• Clear bans on searches related to protected activity, immigration enforcement where local law forbids cooperation, abortion-related investigations, political surveillance, and personal purposes.
• Independent security assessments covering the cameras, cloud services, identity controls, key management, and third-party integrations.
• Automatic deletion that cannot be overridden merely because data could someday be useful.

Privacy cannot depend on authorized users always following rules, vendors configuring every setting correctly, or abuses being discovered the hard way. The first safeguard should be limiting the system’s ability to build a searchable record of ordinary people’s lives at all.

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The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has seized the domains of 12 deepfake websites in what it called the largest known seizure of celebrity deepfake sites in history.

The sites, which marketed themselves as deepfake pornography platforms, hosted AI-generated videos of over 1,200 people, including those in the public eye, ranging from politicians to actors, musicians, and social justice advocates. At least one allowed users to create their own deepfakes by grafting real faces and bodies onto sexual imagery.

The term non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is increasingly used instead of pornography when the person depicted has not given permission. Deepfake NCII is growing, due in part to the ease with which it can be created. It only takes one photo to generate it, as we discussed on the Lock and Code podcast in June.

MrDeepFakes was previously the largest site for this kind of content. Its operators shut it down in May 2025, citing data loss. An Australian man who posted explicit deepfakes to the site was arrested, fined for contempt of court, and charged with publishing obscene material.

But other deepfake NCII sites continue to compete for attention online.

Deepfake technology can cause real harm when misused, and its effects continue to spread. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg warned that domestic abusers are threatening to release deepfake NCII depicting their victims. The FBI has also warned that sextortion attackers are using AI to turn social media photos of minors into sexually explicit images.

Legal action is growing

Law enforcement has been working hard to stem the flood of deepfake NCII sites. In June, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security seized two domains hosting hundreds of thousands of forged images and videos. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu’s office also sued 16 deepfake sites in August 2024, managing to get ten of them taken offline or made inaccessible in California. New York state also passed legislation prohibiting the distribution of intimate deepfake images and videos in 2023.

At the federal level, the TAKE IT DOWN Act, enacted in May 2025, made certain intentional publication of NCII, including sexual deepfakes, a federal crime.

Seizing a deepfake site stops the immediate distribution of its content, but operators can migrate quickly to other infrastructure. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that the deepfake ecosystem is made of many parts, from AI tool providers through to hosting companies and cryptocurrency payment processors. It called for a multi-sector collaboration to stop the production and spread of this material.

Bragg’s office said it will continue monitoring the seized websites to stop them reappearing under different domains.

What can you do?

If someone creates or threatens to share intimate deepfakes of you, save the evidence and report it to the police. Do not pay someone who threatens to publish the images, as payment does not guarantee that the threats will stop.

Bragg’s office said many of the victims it approached did not realize that action could be taken. It urged anyone affected by the seized websites to contact its Cyber Crime Bureau at 212-335-9600.

You can learn more in the Malwarebytes guide to deepfakes. UN Women also provides useful resources for people affected by AI-powered abuse.

Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once. 

Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection catches suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.

If you’re still OK with posting pictures of your kids on social media, take a minute to hear from mother of two Kalie Robins. At the start of September, she did something that hundreds of thousands of parents do every day. She posted a video of her young daughter on Facebook.

Under the video of Robins and her daughter singing in a car, Facebook’s Meta AI system displayed a suggested question: “Who is the child passenger?”

Robins was shocked that Facebook would ask this question about a minor, so curiosity prompted her to click it. That’s when a flood of automated stalker-type behavior began.

In Instagram post, an enraged Robins described what happened:

“It starts pulling completely separate information for each of my kids.”

That included names, birth dates, and videos of them.

The site also pulled up a picture of her newborn daughter that Robins’ mother had posted on Facebook years ago, along with a long-deleted picture that Robins said had once been in her own account.

Things got weirder. The site then presented another question: “Where does Kalie Robins live?”

An increasingly outraged Robins clicked that question. She described the results:

“[Facebook] started digging through completely unrelated sh*t from years of my life.”

It dug through old posts that hinted at where she had lived in the past and newer posts that connected her to her current home. It finished by attempting to pinpoint her location.

Robins complained:

“I didn’t ask Facebook to build a profile of my family.”

She expressed shock that Facebook would piece together snippets of personal information from historical posts and package them into a detailed profile for other users.

You can watch Kalie Robins’ Instagram video here:

Meta’s response

Meta launched Meta AI in April 2024 and has since built it into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It operates across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The assistant can answer questions, generate images, and help users create or retrieve information.

Meta admitted in a statement to the Verge:

“The feature never should have prompted the individual with questions like that.”

The company said the feature had “missed the mark” and that it had fixed the issue that caused Meta AI to suggest questions about personal topics.

In a classic “yes, but” non-apology, a Meta spokesperson also pointed out that the AI only surfaced information drawn from posts the person asking could already access. Although that doesn’t seem to explain why it reportedly surfaced a photo she had deleted years ago.

A pattern of Meta AI failures

Meta AI hasn’t always respected privacy. In June last year, we reported that users were publicly sharing conversations, often without realizing it. A separate bug we reported the following month could have allowed people to view other users’ private Meta AI chats by simply guessing their IDs. Late last year, Meta also started targeting people with ads based on their Meta AI conversations.

What can users do?

Parents get understandably irate when they discover just how much sites like Facebook can learn about their kids. While Robins regularly posted pictures and videos of her children, she had no idea that the service could aggregate information from years of posts to profile them. She’s not alone.

So what can people do about it? Perhaps the better question is: What should people not do? The clearest answer is not to post identifiable pictures of your kids (or other people’s) on social media. Not just to stop them being tracked in a privacy hellscape, but also to reduce the risk of even darker outcomes.

Robins described what she planned to do next:

“I’m done. I’m removing any identifiable pictures and videos of our kids.”

She added that she’ll ask her friends to do the same because, if they don’t, Facebook would still be able to harvest her children’s pictures from their accounts and use them in the profiles it builds.

From reporting threats to removing them.

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), together with Utah and California, has filed a lawsuit against telehealth provider Hims & Hers.

The FTC alleges that the company shared consumers’ sensitive health information with third‑party advertising platforms despite promising strong privacy protections.

Hims & Hers is a telehealth and digital health platform that connects users with licensed medical providers for online consultations, prescription medications, and personal care products.

The complaint also accuses Hims & Hers of deceptive billing and subscription practices that made it hard for users to avoid charges or cancel subscriptions.

According to the FTC’s complaint, filed in federal court in California, Hims & Hers:

• Shared sensitive health data, including details about medical conditions, with ad platforms such as Meta and Snap despite privacy promises.
• Charged before consultations. The company promised users they could consult a medical provider before being charged, but the FTC says many consumers were enrolled in recurring prescription subscriptions shortly after they submitted an intake form, often without first having a consultation.
• Made cancellation difficult. Before 2023, cancellation reportedly required contacting customer service by phone, email, or chat. Even after an online cancellation option appeared, the FTC alleges the button was hidden behind multiple steps and confusing options.

From a cybersecurity and privacy research perspective, this isn’t just about a single telehealth brand. It highlights three broader trends we see repeatedly in consumer programs:

Privacy policies versus reality. A company can market itself as privacy‑focused while still integrating third‑party advertising and analytics software development kits (SDKs) that leak sensitive information. This becomes especially concerning when health‑related events are linked to user accounts or tracking cookies.

Friction as a feature. Hard‑to‑find cancellation flows and unclear billing practices are examples of “dark patterns” that nudge users into paying for services they might not have chosen given all relevant information.

Regulatory pressure is growing. Health‑related services are under increasing scrutiny, especially when they handle sensitive data and combine it with advertising platforms.

The court will ultimately decide whether Hims & Hers violated the law, but the FTC’s action sends a clear signal: regulators are paying close attention to how health‑related services collect, use, and share sensitive data.

For anyone who values online privacy, the Hims & Hers case is a reminder that “health tech” does not automatically mean “privacy first.”

How to stay safe

More often than not, the privacy loopholes are hidden in the privacy policy somewhere.

Pro tip: one thing AI is good at is reading between the lines. Ask an AI chatbot to summarize a privacy policy and identify when your information may be shared with third parties. AI makes it much easier to understand lengthy privacy policies without reading every word yourself. If companies fail to follow their own privacy policies, regulators and consumers can hold them accountable.

Other than that:

• Don’t share sensitive information unless it’s genuinely needed to provide the service.
• Use strong, unique passwords and multifactor authentication (MFA). Even if a company is compliant, breaches happen. Unique passwords and two‑factor authentication limit the damage if your account details are exposed.
• Check your browser and app permissions. Disable unnecessary tracking features where possible, and consider privacy‑focused browser settings or extensions that limit third‑party cookies and trackers.

Your name, address, and phone number may already be for sale.  

Data brokers collect and sell your personal details to anyone willing to pay. Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover finds them and gets your information removed, then keeps watch so it stays that way. 

Reddit users found that by using a specific Google search query, it was possible to find Claude conversations that users had shared.

This exposed sensitive material, including crypto wallet keys, names, addresses, work notes, and even erotic or otherwise policy-violating chats. Fortune says Anthropic appears to have fixed the Google indexing issue, but the shared links themselves were still live for people who already had them.

The exposure was tied to Claude’s Share feature, which creates a public web link to a snapshot of a conversation rather than leaving it inside a user’s private account. Reddit users found a search query that surfaced many of these shared chats, plus Claude Artifacts (interactive documents, apps, and other content created by Claude) in Google results. Wired reports that this is still true for Bing.

The main risk is that people use chatbots to think through work, health, legal, or personal matters without realizing that a shared link can behave like ordinary public web content.

This isn’t unique to Claude. We’ve previously seen Grok chats show up in Google search results, and Meta AI conversations can also become public by design. We have also written about the share option in ChatGPT that was swiftly removed after users unintentionally made thousands of conversations searchable.

Anthropic says Claude chats are private by default, and only conversations users explicitly chose to share were affected. But the incident is a reminder that a “share” button on an AI chat can be more like publishing than messaging, especially if search engines can discover the resulting URL.

How to stay safe

The easy way out here is not to share your AI chatbot conversations with anyone, because you could end up reaching more people than you intended.

That’s because it’s harder to stop pages from being indexed than you might expect. And you don’t have those controls aren’t in your hands. The AI provider should take care of that.

But there are a few things you can do:

• Don’t share Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with a chatbot, so that if a conversation is ever exposed it can’t be easily linked back to you.
• To review or stop sharing conversations in Claude, go to Settings > Privacy > Shared chats.
• If you’re using an AI service from a social media company, such as Meta AI, Grok, or Gemini), remember that your conversations could be tied to your account—which might contain a lot of personal information.
• When using AI, make sure you understand how to keep your conversations private. Many services offer temporary or incognito chats that aren’t saved to your history, but they aren’t a guarantee against bugs, leaks, or data breaches. Only use the share feature when you’re comfortable with anyone potentially seeing that conversation.
• Read the privacy policy so you understand how your conversations are stored and shared. If it’s too long, you can always ask an AI to summarise the important points.

Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
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A prayer app launched by Pope Francis in 2019 contained a security flaw that exposed the personal information of hundreds of thousands of users before it was finally fixed this year.

The app, Click To Pray, was developed by La Machi Communication for Good Causes for the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network. Pope Francis endorsed the service and had an account on it. The app offers a “digital community of prayer” by guiding people through three prayers each day.

In January this year, independent researcher BobDaHacker discovered a flaw in the app’s API endpoint. An API is an online service that responds to requests for data. Typically, only the mobile app should send such requests, and the API should only return information about the specific person using that app. However, BobDaHacker found it was giving out information about any of the app’s users to anyone who asked.

Apps typically query an endpoint by sending it a specific ID for the person using it. In this case, those IDs were simply sequential numbers. According to BobDaHacker, there were 719,517 registered IDs for the app, meaning over 700,000 users had information stored in the system.

The problem was that the API didn’t check whether someone requesting a record was actually authorised to see it. Anyone could request information for any ID, from 1 through to 719,517. The API would then return that user’s record, including:

• Email address
• First and last names
• Country
• Date of birth

This kind of flaw is known as an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) and we’ve seen it before. Stalkerware-type app TheTruthSpy was found leaking details on its victims via an IDOR vulnerability in 2022, and it still hadn’t been fixed two years later. The web server for the MiCODUS MV720 vehicle-tracking GPS device also had the vulnerability in 2022, putting 1.5 million people at risk.

A second flaw in the Click To Pray API made things worse. When people register with an app, the service typically sends a link to their email address containing a unique code known as a validation hash. Clicking the link proves they have access to that inbox and therefore own the email address they registered with.

Unfortunately, the Click To Pray API also returned the validation hash in its response when someone clicked the verification link. These responses are easy to inspect using a web browser’s developer tools, meaning an attacker could register an account using an email address they didn’t control and verify it before the real owner even saw the verification email.

Six months, nine contacts, zero replies

BobDaHacker first reported the bug on January 3, 2026, eventually emailing nine addresses spanning the Click To Pray service, the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, and a general information address. They got no response. It was only fixed more than six months later after the researcher contacted a journalist, who filed a query with the Vatican.

Responsible disclosure only works when the recipient has a functioning intake process. Nine unanswered emails were a strong signal that no such process existed.

Not the first security flaw in a Vatican app

This isn’t the first security flaw involving a Vatican app. In 2019, UK firm Fidus Information Security found a flaw in the app for the Vatican’s Bluetooth eRosary device. It didn’t use a conventional password for logins. Instead, users entered their email address and the app sent a four-digit PIN to that address. They then entered the PIN to log in.

However, when the user entered their email address, the app also returned the PIN in plain text in its web response. That enabled an attacker to take over anyone’s account simply by inspecting the response.

That flaw was similar to the account verification issue that BobDaHacker discovered more than six years later. Although the incidents involved different apps, they show how the same type of security mistake can reappear years apart.

BobDaHacker also noted that Vatican City State introduced its own data protection regulation, Decree No. DCLVII, on April 30, 2024. The regulation requires appropriate safeguards for personal data. However, it’s not clear whether it applies directly to Click To Pray or the organisations that operate it.

What users can do now

Thankfully, someone on the Vatican side has now fixed the flaws, but the vulnerability meant that user data was exposed for a long time. If you registered an account, assume your email, name, date of birth, and country are potentially in circulation. Watch for phishing that references the app, and be especially skeptical of messages claiming to come from Vatican-affiliated services asking you to click, verify, or log in.

This is particularly important because BobDaHacker also reported that emails from the service failed standard email authentication checks. These checks help receiving email providers verify that a message really came from the domain it claims to represent. According to the researcher, this could make it easier for phishing attackers to impersonate the organisation.

Your name, address, and phone number may already be for sale.  

Data brokers collect and sell your personal details to anyone willing to pay. Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover finds them and gets your information removed, then keeps watch so it stays that way. 

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

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 billions—if not trillions—of dollars in value.

So how is it that, on the dark web, your stolen identity can be purchased for just 95 cents?

That’s what a Malwarebytes researcher found last month after spending 48 hours inside the dark web to investigate cybercrime. Across a variety of forums and directories, he found subscription plans for malware that steals information once implanted on a device. He found guides for deploying social engineering scams. He found people selling their services to build fake websites that trick people into handing over their usernames and passwords. And he found one of the dark web’s most traded commodities—personal data, packaged together about individual people, to help a cybercriminal commit identity fraud.

These packages are called “fullz.” For victims in the United States, a fullz contains a full name, Social Security Number, date of birth, address, and other personal details. That is enough, on its own, for a cybercriminal to potentially open a bogus line of credit, file a fake tax return, access financial accounts, or obtain medical services under someone else’s name.

As we wrote on Malwarebytes Labs:

“For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, a cybercriminal can buy enough information to devastate someone’s financial life.”

It’s the kind of risk that could scare anyone, especially considering the scale behind it. In just the first six months of 2026, Malwarebytes found more than 7,500 compromised data sets on the dark web containing more than 8.4 billion records.

And yet, even today, cybersecurity professionals still get asked why anyone should bother protecting their data.

The public, understandably, are exhausted. With data breaches happening every week—if not every day—cybersecurity can start to feel pointless. With young people unable to build financial security, they start believing that they have nothing worth stealing. And with Big Tech already collecting our every movement, behavior, click, and concern, people understandably feel powerless to fight any kind of data abuse, be it corporate or criminal.

So today’s episode approaches the question from a different direction. This isn’t about why you should protect yourself—plenty of company websites will tell you that, and most of them rely on fear. This is about why hackers want your data in the first place.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, host David Ruiz explains how cybercriminals turn a single repeated password into account takeover, how a screenshot of your house from Google Maps became a tool in extortion emails, and why the most benign information about you—an address, an age, one public photo—is often the most useful data a stranger can buy.

Tune in today to listen to the full episode.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

Meta’s smart glasses are once again at the center of a privacy debate due to face recognition.

WIRED reports that Meta had quietly embedded unreleased face-recognition code, internally called “NameTag,” into its Meta AI companion app, which powers the company’s smart glasses. The code was not active, but its presence in an app installed on more than 50 million devices raised immediate concerns about how quickly using smart glasses could slide into biometric surveillance.

Face recognition in glasses, even if disabled or unreleased, is especially sensitive because it can identify people at a distance, in real time, and without their consent. Many organizations have warned that this technology could be misused by stalkers, abusers, and others who want to identify people in public without drawing attention.

Gizmodo reports on a proposed Pennsylvania bill that would require smart glasses and similar wearable recording devices to include a visible indicator light when they are capturing audio or video. The bill would also prohibit users from disabling that indicator, a move clearly aimed at reducing covert recording in public spaces.

Most smart glasses already include such an indicator, but reporters noted that some users have been paying others to have them removed or disabled. The proposal is interesting because it tries to solve a hardware-level trust problem with a visible signal. But a visible light only helps if it is both mandatory and difficult to bypass, and history suggests that any visible privacy safeguard becomes a target for tampering when the incentives are high enough.

These two stories are really about the same issue: smart glasses are normalizing the use of always-on cameras, microphones, and AI features in a form that is much easier to conceal than a phone. That creates an unwanted privacy problem for people around the wearer.

Smart glasses are supposed to make computing more seamless. Instead, they are becoming a test case for what happens when cameras, microphones, AI, and biometric features are squeezed into everyday wearables before the privacy rules catch up.

From our point of view, smart glasses sit at the intersection of consumer privacy, surveillance tech, and potential abuse. The risk is not just that a device records audio or video. AI-enabled wearables can process what they see, deduce identities, and potentially store biometric data in ways that ordinary users and bystanders can’t easily detect.

We’d rather err on the side of caution and use an app that can detect when smart glasses are nearby. Unfortunately, it only detects some devices, and we don’t yet know how well it will perform if smart glasses become more common.

As noted by 404 Media, the app is an imperfect, tech-based response to a social and legal problem: it can misfire, it can’t tell you who is being recorded, and it risks giving a false sense of safety. The developer frames it not as a solution but as a small, user-controlled countermeasure in an environment where surveillance devices are becoming less visible and more AI-enabled.

Don’t get recognized

If facial recognition features ever become common in smart glasses, much of their effectiveness will depend on how much information about you is already available online. There are a few steps you can take today to reduce your visibility in facial recognition systems and people-search databases.

A major factor is limiting who can see the photographs you post on social media and other online platforms. But there is more you can do:

Remove yourself from reverse face search engines

The major, most accurate reverse face search engines, Pimeyes and Facecheck.id, offer opt-out and removal processes that can help reduce your visibility in search results:

• How to remove your images from Pimeyes search results
• How to delete your photos from FaceCheck.ID search engine

Remove yourself from people search engines

Most people don’t realize how much information can be found from a name alone. People-search sites often aggregate home addresses, phone numbers, ages, and relatives from public records and commercial databases.

The New York Times has compiled a useful guide to many of the major people-search sites, along with instructions for opting out and removing your information.

Scrub your data

If you’re in the US, you can also use Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover to help find and remove personal information that data broker sites have collected about you.