The public messaging surrounding Meta’s flashy smart glasses hasn’t exactly gone in the company’s favor.
The camera-equipped devices have garnered a reputation for allowing shady individuals to record strangers without their consent, garnering them the memorable pejorative of “pervert glasses.”
So when Wired revealed in June that Meta had silently added facial recognition code to the smart glasses — stoking fears that the creepy glasses could be used to identify people on the street based on biometric data — that simmering distaste grew into a major PR disaster for the company.
Meta has ever since vehemently denied that it was planning on ever releasing the tech, a feature dubbed “NameTag.” That’s despite its CTO Andrew Bosworth happily describing those plans in excruciating detail in public and arguing it would be a “great feature” — mere days after calling Wired‘s bombshell reporting “absolutely dishonest.”
Now, the company is facing a proposed class action lawsuit over the ordeal, as Wired reports, with a set of families in Illinois and California accusing the company of illegally scraping their Facebook and Instagram photos to build a massive facial recognition system for “NameTag.”
The news comes just days after a mother in Utah accused Meta of using its AI to scour Instagram and Facebook posts to reveal invasive information about her young daughters.
Meta told Wired in a statement that the latest “lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work.”
“We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products,” the a spokesperson told Wired. “As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”
The proposed class action accuses Meta of extracting biometric signatures from publicly available social media profiles. As Wired first noted in June, these “faceprints” appeared in the code for the AI companion app of its smart glasses.
A patent described the software as matching these signatures to profile photos. An AI image generator Meta released called Emu was also trained on a vast swath of user-uploaded images and text. The complainants accuse Meta of using this AI system to harvest biometric data.
Meta has already been caught with its pants down after allowing users to generate images inspired by public Instagram accounts, admitting that it had “missed the mark” with the feature.
The company has a long history of mishandling sensitive user data, settling a class action lawsuit in 2020 over an entirely separate facial recognition system for $650 million. In 2024, it agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle yet another facial recognition data lawsuit in Texas.
More on Meta’s glasses: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters
The post Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Futurism.
Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.
Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.
As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.
One of the most recent discussions took place on Wednesday in Colorado, during an annual meeting hosted by the Edison Electric Institute. Dominating the agenda, Politico notes, were discussions on electrical grid security, evidently spurred by the OpenAI-Hugging Face debacle, in which rogue AI agents allegedly broke free of their research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another AI company.
Though the incident spawned plenty of commentary around the pace of AI development and the advanced state of OpenAI’s models, the flow of information has been decidedly one-sided, with most of the details coming from OpenAI itself. As the New York Times reported, third-party safety researchers investigating the incident after the fact were only given a few days to access the reams of data generated by the hack, severely limiting their findings.
That said, OpenAI has an obvious incentive to play up its own AI’s supposedly terrifying capabilities, while suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts its own narrative: that of rogue AI agents capable of threatening the US energy grid.
To give just one example, OpenAI’s narration of the Hugging Face incident relies almost entirely on its agents’ “chains-of-thought,” where an AI model essentially generates statements explaining how it rationalized certain decisions. That sounds fine in theory, but researchers have found plenty of evidence showing that chains-of-thought aren’t reliable at narrating the actual moves made by natural language processors.
Despite the unanswered question around chain-of-thought reasoning, OpenAI is using the incident to lobby for regulatory safeguards that would cement its role as the authority around AI development.
This being the case, the timing of OpenAI’s energy security meetings is hard to overlook. As Politico notes in its reporting on these meetings, Altman has been hawking his company’s own cybersecurity services to top utility executives — conveniently riding the hype of the Hugging Face incident to secure a seat at one of the most important tables in the country.
More on Altman: Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman
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Months after China’s Intermediate People’s Court ruled against a company using AI to liquidate an employee’s position, the country’s highest judicial body has come out with another whopper: a massive crackdown on AI deepfakes.
In a new ruling on Monday, China’s Supreme People’s Court — the top judicial organ in the country — issued new guidance on how judges in lower courts should handle civil issues arising from abuse of AI tools. As the South China Morning Post reports, the court’s opinion spans 24 articles, establishing official guidance on disputes around AI-generated video and audio, sexualized content, financial misconduct, digital privacy, and surveillance pricing.
One of the key platforms of the opinion revolves around deepfakes, which are lifelike images, video, and audio modeled after existing people — tech, as the ruling observes, that can easily be used to “bring the dead back to life.” This kind of content has exploded across the internet as sophisticated generative AI models become increasingly accessible to the general public, resulting in a staggering rise in scams, misinformation, and abusive content.
“In practice, many people express their strong concerns about AI deepfakes. AI face-swapping technology can indiscriminately harvest anyone’s likeness, making ordinary people potential targets of deepfakes,” Si Yanli, deputy head of the Supreme People’s Court’s research office, said in a statement. “AI voice cloning technology can also ‘steal’ voices at a very low cost, with results that can be convincingly realistic.”
Now, the SCMP notes that courts across the People’s Republic are being advised to view disputes around such content with an eye toward protecting individual identities, personal traits, and reputations.
Beyond abuses of AI, the new opinion also includes guidance on cases of doxing, or the practice of obtaining and spreading others’ personal information online.
“Doxing has emerged as a prominent form of cyberbullying, gravely violating victims’ privacy, disturbing their daily lives and eroding public security in cyberspace,” Si explained.
It’s worth noting that China uses a civil law system, so courts don’t follow the common-law principle of stare decisis. This means that, unlike the US, lower Chinese courts aren’t automatically bound by precedent set by other court rulings.
However, guidance issued by the Supreme People’s Court carries significant legal weight, with lower court bodies required to refer to such opinions in their own rulings — making the recent issuance a hefty rebuff against potential abuses of AI.
More on AI regulation: Dozens of Humanoid Robots Gather for a Protest, Marching and Waving Signs
The post Top Chinese Court Issues Sweeping Legal Crackdown on AI Deepfakes appeared first on Futurism.
Meta’s platforms are in a sorry state as grotesque AI slop continues to proliferate widely.
As a recent Futurism investigation found, many Facebook accounts have been flooding the platform with horrid videos depicting violent child abuse, and Meta appears to be woefully unprepared — and downright unwilling, judging by its ambiguously-phrased policies — to do anything meaningful about it.
At the same time, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is finding plenty of new ways to creep out its user base. As part of the CEO’s lagging efforts to turn Meta into a viable competitor in the ongoing AI race, Meta launched a new AI assistant called Muse this week, and it’s already turning out to be deeply unsettling.
According to Meta’s marketing, the assistant is designed to “take the busywork off your plate,” such as booking tickets, making appointments, or filling out forms.
To actually reap any benefits, however, users have to hand over a staggering amount of trust — which, considering Meta’s catastrophic track record when it comes to protecting its users’ privacy, could easily turn out to be an absolutely terrible idea. While Meta claims the service runs on a secure “dedicated virtual machine” and that it will store login credentials in a place that cannot be accessed by the AI agent, the company has a lot of work to do to gain its users’ trust.
Perfectly illustrating the problem, as The Verge‘s Emma Roth found in her testing, Muse uncovered an “unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me.”
As part of her investigation, Roth linked both her Gmail and Amazon accounts to Muse and was immediately put off by how much personal info Muse pieced together right off the bat. It figured out the state where she was visiting her family, for instance, admitting it “pulled” data from the “shipping address on my Amazon order.”
It also listed off her “very specific interests” at a level of specificity that goes far beyond the “ad topics” section in the Instagram settings menu, which shows why certain advertisers target your account.
The experience left Roth “with an uneasy feeling about letting Muse sort through personal emails and handle my credit card.”
Meta’s creepy new AI chatbot perfectly illustrates how tech companies are continuing to push the boundaries of how much personal information we’re willing to give up just so we don’t have to complete mundane tasks — an extremely lopsided value proposition.
These same companies have repeatedly proven that they cannot be trusted with our private data. AI chatbots, which are turning out to be a surveillance-led cybersecurity nightmare in their own right, don’t instill much more confidence, either.
The post Meta Releases Uber-Creepy AI Chatbot as Its Platforms Crumble Under Grotesque Child Abuse appeared first on Futurism.
It’s no exaggeration to say that if you own an LG smart TV, it might be spying on you.
The widely respected computer hardware experts at the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the company’s boob tubes and pricey OLEDs can scan your Wi-Fi network to search for the devices you own, secretly record audio logs of your conversations using built-in microphones, and keep tabs on what you’re watching and listening to.
It collects all this data, Gamers Nexus found, even when the TV is disconnected from the internet and appears to be off in standby mode.
To unearth these surreptitious practices, Gamers Nexus partnered up with independent security researchers and Level1Techs. Their resulting two-hour video report has since been picked up by other trusted cybersecurity voices like Malwarebytes.
By digging into the firmware and intercepting some of the data the TVs were sending, the team found that the TVs were extensively scanning local Wi-Fi networks to log what devices were on it, including phones, computers, and other smart-home devices like thermostats. It even collected the names of nearby Wi-Fi networks, creating an alarmingly detailed picture of all the devices in a user’s household.
Why might that information be relevant to LG? The TVs also use a controversial technology called automated content recognition (ACR) that routinely scans and determines what you’re watching so it can sell that data to advertisers.
Combined together, they build an advanced and disturbingly comprehensive profile of what you watch and the devices you use, Gamers Nexus warn. All this data is sent back to LG Ad Solutions, its lucrative advertising business.
LG TVs, on top of it all, can also listen to you. Tests showed that their built-in microphones could capture clean audio of nearby conversations and generate transcripts of them, even when the TVs were in standby mode, which most TVs default to when you think you’ve turned them off, with the display powering down. The recording feature continued even when the TVs were unplugged from the internet, storing the audio files locally and uploading them the moment the internet connection was restored.
The researchers also found a vulnerability that allegedly allow a hacker to remotely execute code, though they’re keeping the details on this light so they can responsibly disclose their findings.
Many LG owners are furious about the news.
“LG hardware is just spyware,” fumed a post on the r/LGOLED subreddit. “You[r] TV is wiretapping your whole house.”
Smart TVs collecting data on you isn’t new — ACR in particular is well-documented — but the reported findings here illustrate a degree of invasiveness the public could only speculate about previously.
It’s far from the first time LG has caused a stir over purported privacy violations, either. Another Gamers Nexus investigation last month found that LG monitors were sneakily installing pop-up ads onto customers’ computers. The ensuing controversy caught Microsoft’s attention, with the company demanding LG remove the ads.
More on surveillance: The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers
The post LG TVs Caught Secretly Recording Users and Scanning Their Homes For Other Devices, Even When Disconnected From the Internet appeared first on Futurism.
Anyone keeping track of world news in the early 2010s, and reports on tech in particular, has probably heard about Stuxnet. That malware spawned a large number of conspiracy theories — with the kicker that some of them were actually true. The malware targeted Iranian nuclear facilities and is believed to be the first digital worm to cause direct physical damage in meatspace. An unknown security researcher has now published a source code reverse-engineering of Stuxnet in all its glory.
The worm's ultimate target, allegedly a successful one, were industrial controllers from Siemens that were reportedly used in Iranian's Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. Once it reached the target, Stuxnet's payload manipulated the frequency converters in industrial centrifuges, in a bid to subtly damage the rotors — all while keeping the plant staff in the dark by reporting normal operation.
The repository contains build instructions so interested techies can try it out for themselves and learn all about its inner workings. You'll need a Windows XP or Windows 7 virtual machine, and for obvious reasons, you shouldn't configure any network connectivity for it. To witness the full effects of the payload rather than just the spreading mechanisms, you'll need the appropriate Siemens software, and ideally hardware — though we figure that industrial-scale centrifuges aren't exactly common in techies' cable drawers.
In its heyday, Stuxnet spread via three mechanisms. The primary infection vector was USB sticks with Windows shortcuts and autorun.inf files. Upon plugging one of those sticks in, just viewing the drive's contents would immediately trigger infection thanks to a zero-day vulnerability.
Infected systems then autonomously tried to spread the worm further via the network using a zero-day Windows Print Spooler vulnerability that would let an attacker write system files into any machine sharing a printer. It would also copy itself into accessible network shares. To evade Windows driver signature checks, Stuxnet used two digital certificates stolen from Realtek and JMicron.
The worm also had code to inject itself into Siemens software, by way of the WinCC SQL Server database, and embedding its code in Step 7 project files that automatically ran when engineers opened them. Since those files were almost guaranteed to be shared among more than one engineer, it made for an excellent internal infection vector that didn't depend on having network share control.
The final step was taking charge of the DLL that communicated with the actual centrifuges and injecting malicious code into the PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) of those machines to stealthily mess with the rotors.
Stuxnet was part of Operation Olympic Games, an alleged coordinated effort between the U.S. and Israel to try and curb Iran's purported progress in creating nuclear weapons at its Natanz facility. The initiative seemingly ran under both the Bush and Obama administrations, and was supposedly a way to dissuade Israel from launching its own preemptive strike against Iran. The software was allegedly developed by both the Pentagon and Israel's Unit 8200, and was reportedly successful in bringing down about 10% of Natanz' centrifuges by ultimately seriously damaging their rotors.
However, the worm had a nasty bug: it didn't have sufficient checks about which environment it was in, and failed to notice it was no longer in a local network environment. When engineers took their laptops home, it escaped out to the internet at large, at which point security researchers worldwide let out a collective "huh, that's odd" and proceeded to investigate. Mercifully, the worm contained a hard-coded self-destruct date set for June 24, 2012.
Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass — and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.
Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET, a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret they wouldn’t tell the “trusted people” in their lives.
There’s a grim irony there, because by telling an AI chatbot those closely guarded secrets, you may inadvertently be sharing intimate details with tech companies, police departments, lawyers, and even your boss. That’s according to new reporting by the Washington Post, which notes that there have been a dozen court cases where chatbot transcripts were cited in the public record over the last two years.
Even if your transcripts don’t end up in the hands of Johnny Law, they can easily be obtained by your boss, assuming you’re using a company-provided AI service. And of course, there’s no telling how long AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might hold onto details of your conversations, as WaPo notes numerous scenarios in which they may be required to hold onto your chatlogs by law.
There’s also the grim possibility of leaks from the AI companies themselves. In July, it was revealed that a whole trove of chats with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude had been exposed to the open web — and not for the first time.
“Unless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version… [and] you’re also having it within a browser that’s not tracking you, the answer is no,” Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence told WaPo. “You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private.”
And though users are remarkably comfortable divulging those details to their favorite bot, fewer are aware of those myriad ways their chat logs might live on in perpetuity. According to the DuckDuckGo poll, 53 percent of regular users said they didn’t know that AI chatbots are training on data obtained through their conversation, while 75 percent didn’t realize that conversations with large language models (LLMs) can easily be subpoenaed by police.
So when in doubt about whether to tell ChatGPT about your intimate relationship troubles, keep in mind that the internet is forever; and that goes double for AI chatbots.
More on AI chatbots: New AI Chatbot Turns Out to Be One Overworked Guy Answering All the Messages by Hand
The post People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public appeared first on Futurism.
The digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses of individuals from the United States and Canada are being sold on the dark web through an easily accessible service called Nexus.
As noted cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs noted on his blog this week, the sale has now caught the attention of the FBI, which has launched an official inquiry.
On the same day Krebs published his post, the service mysteriously vanished from the dark web, which could make tracking down the people behind the hack more difficult.
Nonetheless, the scale of the leak is staggering, and includes not just drivers licenses, but 10 million ID cards, over three million travel documents, and over half a million medical cards as well, representing over 170 million individuals total. That’s pushing half of the United States’ and Canada’s combined populations.
The ID scans appear to have been taken from a widely-used ID verification company based out of Louisiana and even include the license of US defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
The incident highlights the dangers of having little regulatory oversight over identity verification services — a thorny subject, considering regulators continue to push for age limits for content online, rules that could put people at risk of having their identity stolen by bad agents.
The ID scans first appeared on a Russian cybercrime forum. The owner of the files caught Krebs’ attention after showing the journalist a scan of his Virginia drivers license, strongly supporting the leak’s validity.
Before it was taken down, the shadowy dark web service called Nexus allowed virtually anybody to peruse identity documents of over 170 million people in the US and Canada.
“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service boasted in a post on the Russian forum. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”
According to the people behind Nexus, the source of the leak is a “major identity verification company” that’s in business with several Fortune 500 companies, Krebs writes.
While the feds are starting their own investigation, Krebs dug a little deeper and found a fascinating common thread: many of those, whose identity cards showed up in the database had rented cars from the company Hertz.
“I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine,” Krebs wrote. “That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time.”
Other individuals the reporter talked to recalled giving their driver’s license to a dispensary, which struck a deal in 2022 with ID verification company idscan.net — which also provides services to other big brands, including Hertz.
The New Orleans-based firm told Krebs that it’s now investigating the matter. The FBI has also confirmed that it’s also officially looking into the company.
More on identity leaks: Discord’s Verification Saga Has Devolved Into a Complete Self-Inflicted Embarrassment
The post Hackers Are Selling Stolen Scans of 153 Million US and Canadian Drivers Licenses, Which Very Likely Include Yours appeared first on Futurism.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation looks almost unrecognizable under director Kash Patel’s leadership.
The agency’s head has been embroiled in a seemingly endless list of controversies, from allegations of excessive drinking to buying up location data on everyday American citizens to furthering of harebrained conspiracies.
Patel lacked virtually any degree of relevant working experience for the job before the Senate confirmed him — and now, the agency is opening the doors for even more highly questionable hirings.
As inside sources told CBS News, the FBI has quietly lowered standards of its background checks for potential federal agents and other personnel. The bureau is now officially looking the other way when it comes to prostitution, for instance — as long as recruits didn’t hire sex workers over three times.
Even more eyebrow-raising is that the FBI is even allowing the consideration of candidates who engaged in bestiality or animal cruelty, according to CBS‘ sources. However, any such incidents would’ve had to have taken place before the candidate turned 18.
The broadcaster’s sources also said there was no distinction between candidates who were forced into sexual activity with animals or if they did so willingly. An FBI spokesperson claimed that eligibility requirements were limited to a “narrow set of circumstances, such as in cases where a person was sexually abused with animals as a child.”
Experts, however, were appalled at the news, arguing that the FBI is undermining its responsibility in vetting applicants by changing background check standards.
“Bestiality is clearly a potential indication of a more serious emotional issue, and even in a circumstance where it is not, the pool of candidates should be extensive enough that the criteria should certainly not be eliminated,” former FBI agent James Davidson told CBS.
Before the changes, which were reportedly implemented earlier this summer, the FBI’s webpage was clear about automatically disqualifying special agents who engaged in “prostitution or bestiality.”
Both current and former FBI employees told the CBS that the bureau could now be hiring “people with questionable backgrounds,” allowing them to undermine the integrity of the service. Others warned that the news was evidence of a major “recruiting problem.”
Considering the fact that the agency is being helmed by a personality as controversial as Patel, these changes shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.
While he hasn’t personally acknowledged the latest changes, Patel has frequently called for new hiring standards at the bureau, arguing that “we are losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear” in a July interview with former FBI agent John Nantz.
Patel’s motivation for lowering standards could be to bring in his closest associates. As ProPublica reported in November, his personal assistant didn’t clear their polygraph test and required a waiver, claims the FBI has since denied.
More on Patel: The Head of the FBI Just Admitted Something Moderately Horrifying
The post FBI Now Allowing History of Bestiality Among New Recruits appeared first on Futurism.
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