Lock and Code

• Would you sext ChatGPT? (feat. Deb Donig)

  In the final, cold winter months of the year, ChatGPT could be heating up.On October 14, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the “restrictions” that his company previously placed on their flagship product, ChatGPT, would be removed, allowing, perhaps, for “erotica” in the future.“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” Altman wrote on the platform X. “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.”This wasn’t the first time that OpenAI or its executive had addressed mental health.On August 26, OpenAI published a blog titled “Helping people when they need it most,” which explored new protections for users, including stronger safeguards for long conversations, better recognition of people in crisis, and easier access to outside emergency services and even family and friends. The blog alludes to “recent heartbreaking cases of people using ChatGPT in the midst of acute crises,” but it never explains what, explicitly, that means.But on the very same day the blog was posted, OpenAI was sued for the alleged role that ChatGPT played in the suicide of a 16-year-old boy. According to chat logs disclosed in the lawsuit, the teenager spoke openly to the AI chatbot about suicide, he shared that he wanted to leave a noose in his room, and he even reportedly received an offer to help write a suicide note.Bizarrely, this tragedy plays a role in the larger story, because it was Altman himself who tied the company’s mental health campaign to its possible debut of erotic content.“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”What “erotica” entails is unclear, but one could safely assume it involves all the capabilities currently present in ChatGPT, through generative chat, of course, but also image generation. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Deb Donig, on faculty at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about the ethics of AI erotica, the possible accountability that belongs to users and to OpenAI, and why intimacy with an AI-power chatbot feels so strange.“A chat bot offers, we might call it, ‘intimacy’s performance,’ without any of its substance, so you get all of the linguistic markers of connection, but no possibility for, for example, rejection. That’s part of the human experience of a relationship.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

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• What does Google know about me?

  Google is everywhere in our lives. It’s reach into our data extends just as far.After investigating how much data Facebook had collected about him in his nearly 20 years with the platform, Lock and Code host David Ruiz had similar questions about the other Big Tech platforms in his life, and this time, he turned his attention to Google.Google dominates much of the modern web. It has a search engine that handles billions of requests a day. Its tracking and metrics service, Google Analytics, is embedded into reportedly 10s of millions of websites. Its Maps feature not only serves up directions around the world, it also tracks traffic patterns across countless streets, highways, and more. Its online services for email (Gmail), cloud storage (Google Drive), and office software (Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides) are household names. And it also runs the most popular web browser in the world, Google Chrome, and the most popular operating system in the world, Android.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, Ruiz explains how he requested his data from Google and what he learned not only about the company, but about himself, in the process. That includes the 142,729 items in his Gmail inbox right now, along with the 8,079 searches he made, 3,050 related websites he visited, and 4,610 YouTube videos he watched in just the past 18 months. It also includes his late-night searches for worrying medical symptoms, his movements across the US as his IP address was recorded when logging into Google Maps, his emails, his photos, his notes, his old freelance work as a journalist, his outdated cover letters when he was unemployed, his teenage-year Google Chrome bookmarks, his flight and hotel searches, and even the searches he made within his own Gmail inbox and his Google Drive.After digging into the data for long enough, Ruiz came to a frightening conclusion: Google knows whatever the hell it wants about him, it just has to look.But Ruiz wasn’t happy to let the company’s access continue. So he has a plan.”I am taking steps to change that [access] so that the next time I ask, “What does Google know about me?” I can hopefully answer: A little bit less.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://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.

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• What's there to save about social media? (feat. Rabble)

  “Connection” was the promise—and goal—of much of the early internet. No longer would people be separated from vital resources and news that was either too hard to reach or made simply inaccessible by governments. No longer would education be guarded behind walls both physical and paid. And no longer would your birthplace determine so much about the path of your life, as the internet could connect people to places, ideas, businesses, collaborations, and agency.Somewhere along the line though, “connection” got co-opted. The same platforms that brought billions of people together—including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat—started to divide them for profit. These companies made more money by showing people whatever was most likely to keep them online, even if it upset them. More time spent on the platfrom meant more likelihood of encountering ads which meant more advertising revenue for Big Tech.Today, these same platforms are now symbols of some of the worst aspects of being online. Nation-states have abused the platforms to push disinformation campaigns. An impossible sense of scale allows gore and porn and hate speech to slip by even the best efforts at content moderation. And children can be exposed to bullying, peer pressure, and harassment.So, what would it take to make online connection a good thing?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Rabble—an early architect of social media, Twitter’s first employee, and host of the podcast Revolution.Social—about what good remains inside social media and what steps are being taken to preserve it.“ I don’t think that what we’re seeing with social media is so much a set of new things that are disasters that are rising up from this Pandora’s box… but rather they’re all things that existed in society and now they’re not all kept locked away. So we can see them and we have to address them now.”Tune in today.

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• Can you disappear online? (feat. Peter Dolanjski)

  There’s more about you online than you know.The company Acxiom, for example, has probably determined whether you’re a heavy drinker, or if you’re overweight, or if you smoke (or all three). The same company has also probably estimated—to the exact dollar—the amount you spend every year on dining out, donating to charities, and traveling domestically. Another company Experian, has probably made a series of decisions about whether you are “Likely,” “Unlikely,” “Highly Likely,” etc., to shop at a mattress store, visit a theme park, or frequent the gym.This isn’t the data most people think about when considering their online privacy. Yes, names, addresses, phone numbers, and age are all important and potentially sensitive, and yes, there’s a universe of social media posts, photos, videos, and comments that are likely at the harvesting whim of major platforms to collect, package, and sell access to for targeted advertising.But so much of the data that you leave behind online has nothing to do with what you willingly write, post, share, or say. Instead, it is data that is collected from online and offline interactions, like the items you add in a webpage’s shopping cart, the articles you read, the searches you make, and the objects you buy at a physical store.Importantly, it is also data that is very hard to get rid of.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Peter Dolanjski, director of product at DuckDuckGo, about why the internet is so hungry for your data, how parents can help protect the privacy of their children, and whether it is pointless to try to “disappear” online.“It’s not futile… Taking steps now, despite the fact that you already have information out there, will help you into the future.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://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.

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• This “insidious” police tech claims to predict crime (feat. Emily Galvin-Almanza)

  In the late 2010s, a group of sheriffs out of Pasco County, Florida, believed they could predict crime. The Sheriff’s Department there had piloted a program called “Intelligence-Led Policing” and the program would allegedly analyze disparate points of data to identify would-be criminals.But in reality, the program didn’t so much predict crime, as it did make criminals out of everyday people, including children. High schoolers’ grades were fed into the Florida program, along with their attendance records and their history with “office discipline.” And after the “Intelligence-Led Policing” service analyzed the data, it instructed law enforcement officers on who they should pay visit to, who they should check in on, and who they should pester.As reported by The Tampa Bay Times in 2020:“They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.One former deputy described the directive like this: ‘Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.’”Predictive policing can sound like science fiction, but it is neither scientific nor is it confined to fiction.Police and sheriff’s departments across the US have used these systems to plug broad varieties of data into algorithmic models to try and predict not just who may be a criminal, but where crime may take place. Historical crime data, traffic information, and even weather patterns are sometimes offered up to tech platforms to suggest where, when, and how forcefully police units should be deployed.And when the police go to those areas, they often find and document minor infractions that, when reported, reinforce the algorithmic analysis that an area is crime-ridden, even if those crimes are, as the Tampa Bay Times investigation found, a teenager smoking a cigarette, or stray trash bags outside a home.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Emily Galvin-Almanza, cofounder of Partners for Justice and author of the upcoming book “The Price of Mercy,” about predictive policing, its impact on communities, and the dangerous outcomes that might arise when police offload their decision-making to data.“ I am worried about anything that a data broker can sell, they can sell to a police department, who can then feed that into an algorithmic or AI predictive policing system, who can then use that system—based on the purchases of people in ‘Neighborhood A’—to decide whether to hyper-police ‘Neighborhood A.’”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa...

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