The cops who’re using Flock cameras to supposedly track down criminals and stalk their ex-girlfriends alike are quite literally laughing in our faces as they tap into the all-seeing surveillance panopticon.
According to a new investigation by the Electric Frontier Foundation, a not insignificant number of police officers are submitting nonsense, joke reasons to officially justify the searches they conduct on Flock systems.
One officer with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department wrote “LMAO” in the Flock software’s “reason” box, before searching across more than 19,000 cameras in over 1,500 cities and towns.
The frivolous reasoning is a case in point of why there’s so much outrage over Flock’s AI-powered cameras — which are nominally intended to be licenese plate scanners — and how they’re frequently being abused by cops. Unlike traditional surveillance cameras, Flock’s are part of a centralized network and require no warrants to use. With such little oversight, it’s easy for police officers to conduct sweeping searches for wanton reasons.
In its investigation, which was reported on by 404 Media, the EFF found dozens of examples of cops writing childish responses like “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” and “IDK,” in the reason box for Flock searches.
An alarming number simply button mashed their keyboards. “ghjhghjg,” was a sufficient reason for one officer in Oklahoma to plow through the recordings of over 83,000 cameras. Thousands of others simply wrote uninformative responses like “investigation” and “test.” The odd cop left short little messages, all seemingly unaware that their stated reasons would become public record.
“robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone,” one wrote.
“f*** this new search engine,” wrote another.
Following up on its findings, the EFF contacted police departments and found that few, if any, of the cops were meaningfully disciplined for their flippant entries. At most, a few were “counseled,” but by and large the departments tried to deflect and offered excuses.
Flock, conveniently, changed its software in late 2025 so that cops can no longer type in their own “reason.” Now, they’re provided a dropdown list of pre-made reasons instead. The EFF blasted the move for causing a “loss of transparency,” as it obviously doesn’t encourage cops to be more serious. It merely papers over the fact that they weren’t treating the powerful surveillance tools seriously in the first place.
“This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine,” condemned the EFF in a post about its findings, “permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.”
After only a few months on the market, Meta’s new AI-integrated smart glasses are already being exploited for nefarious purposes.
Dubbed “pervert glasses” for their incognito ability to film anybody in public, the new specs have enabled voyeurs and content creeps the world over, leading to widespread harassment, bullying, and privacy violations.
And now the pervert glasses are also feeding another grim genre of content: joybait.
You may have heard of ragebait, which is online content deliberately designed to piss people off, therefore driving clicks and views. Joybait is ragebait’s seemingly innocent twin: content designed to stir up those warm fuzzies and make you smile.
A now-viral clip uploaded by public prank content creator Levese shows that a user of Meta’s AI glasses shows how the scheme unfolds. The video, first spotted by journalist James Vincent, shows Levese catch a glimpse of the author Travis Schick as he shops with his partner in a Walmart.
Crucially, Levese doesn’t approach Schick right away, but rather uses his phone to snap a photo of Schick’s face, which he then searches using a facial recognition site. After the service uncovers Schick’s social media accounts — revealing the random man as an aspiring novelist — Levese makes his approach, recording with his Meta glasses as he catches the unassuming writer off guard.
“Wait, Travis?” Levese asks as Schick tries to check out. “You wrote the book ‘The Readhead?'”
“Yeah?” the confused writer confirms.
“No way I love that book man! Yo I love that book bro,” Levese replies disingenuously. “It was a really good novel.”
“Yeah that was me,” Schick says, trying to contain a smile.
As positive as the interaction seems on its surface, it’s all based on a false premise constructed through use of facial recognition software, without which Levese never would have known who Travis Schick actually was. Of course, Schick himself is ancillary to the entire scheme, which was really about making some content — joybait — for Levese to post to his 225,000 TikTok followers.
And as content, the stunt was wildly successful. The reel has over 60 million views and 30,000 comments on Levese’s TikTok page alone, and has become easy fodder for content farms on every social media feed you can think of.
On uncovering the clip, the journalist James Vincent remarked that it embodies “individualized surveillance culture posing as feelgood content.”
Falling for the original premise of the bait, some excused the privacy violation, arguing the exposure is boosting Schick’s work.
Sure enough, comments under Schick’s novel “The Redhead” on the creative platform Quotev are flooding in by the hundreds, full of well wishers and supporters who otherwise never would have found his work. Schick’s TikTok page has likewise exploded, going from around 150 followers to well over 12,700 in just a few short days.
But Schick’s viral moment is beside the point, as Vincent observes: “there may be positive outcomes from this one video (which stem from its novelty as short form content) — but the larger effect is creating a society where we monetize kindness, exploit the goodwill of strangers, and destroy the right to privacy in public,” he wrote in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter.
And the aspiring novelist is far from alone. Levese has dozens of videos following the exact same format, each with millions of views. For his part, the content creator is well aware that he’s crossing a line. The first one, in which the content creator stalks a man buying bananas, prominently features pinned text reading “day 1: stealing people’s digital footprint.”
“This app is dangrous [sic],” Levese wrote in the video caption.
In record time, Meta’s camera-adorned smart glasses have turned from a lucrative and well-reviewed consumer product into a widely-reviled and privacy-infringing tool of abuse in the arsenal of creepy men.
The backlash has grown so much that many owners of the “pervert glasses” have become too afraid to use them in public, a PR disaster for what once was an accessory that was flying off the shelves.
And now, as The Information reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is now looking to release a camera-free pair as well later this year — the clearest indication yet that Meta is losing in the court of public opinion.
Whether removing the camera from the glasses will be enough to assuage ongoing concerns over privacy remains to be seen. The camera-free glasses, code-named Luna, will still feature an array of six microphones to allow users to speak to the company’s AI chatbot and its recently-released AI assistant, called Muse. They’ll presumably pick up audio from users’ environments as well, where bystanders may not be aware of the eavesdropping.
The glasses could be the ultimate litmus test on what drew buyers to the pair of spectacles in the first place. By relying on microphones alone, Meta is betting that people are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars just to talk to its flawed AI companions — not take first-person view photos.
Project Luna could be unveiled as soon as next week’s Meta Connect conference. It’ll be interesting to see how the company will address the major backlash to its camera-equipped smart glasses, if at all. An admission that its consumer product is facilitating some incredibly creepy behavior in public feels unlikely — but it’ll certainly be the elephant in the room.
Screen Time has received one of its most substantial parental-control updates with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, adding new ways for parents to manage how long children use categories of apps, which websites they can visit, and what content reaches them through Messages and FaceTime.
The features were previewed at WWDC in June and are now available as part of Apple’s latest operating-system releases. Rather than relying only on fixed app limits, the redesigned Screen Time gives parents a more flexible set of controls that can change throughout the day and adapt as a child gains access to more apps and services.
Among the additions are Time Allowances, Ask to Browse, a simpler child-device setup process, expanded Communication Safety protections, and faster controls for temporarily pausing or extending access.
Apple is also working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to adapt the organization’s Family Media Plan into guidance parents can reference when setting up devices and Screen Time.
Screen Time introduces Time Allowances by app category
Time Allowances give parents a daily amount of time that can apply across categories including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.
That differs from managing each application individually. Parents can set time allowances for categories such as Entertainment, Games, and Social Media, then adjust those settings based on the needs of their household.
Apple provides suggested starting points based on a child’s age and guidance informed by clinical and child-development research. Those recommendations are optional, with parents able to change them based on their own household and the individual child.
The updated Screen Time also supports schedules that control which apps remain available at different periods of the day. Parents can therefore create separate access patterns around school, homework, evenings, and weekends rather than relying on one universal daily restriction.
Temporary adjustments have been made easier as well. Parents can quickly limit access to apps and the web during periods such as meals, then restore access without rebuilding their existing restrictions. When a child reaches a limit, they can request additional time from a parent to complete an activity or finish a conversation.
The redesigned interface puts device usage and the most frequently used applications closer to the front, reducing the amount of navigation required to understand how a child is spending time on a device.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Ask to Browse extends parental approval into Safari
Ask to Browse brings a permission model already familiar from app downloads to the web.
When the feature is active, a child who attempts to visit a new website in Safari can be required to request permission first. The parent receives the request through Messages and can review it before allowing access.
The feature is available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac and works alongside existing web-content restrictions.
It complements Ask to Buy, which requires children to obtain permission before downloading or purchasing an app or making an in-app purchase. Apple has also expanded the initial setup process so a parent configuring a personal device for a child can choose which apps are available from the beginning.
Setup Assistant offers the option to provide only essential apps, use a recommended group, or manually choose which ones are permitted. More applications can then be introduced later as the parent decides the child is ready for them.
The approach gives parents a way to begin with a comparatively limited device instead of configuring a full standard account and removing unwanted access afterward.
Communication Safety expands beyond detected nudity
Communication Safety now intervenes when it detects gore or violent imagery in shared photos and videos, expanding protections that previously centered on nudity.
Apple says the feature works with content shared through areas including Messages and FaceTime, with the new protection also extending to live FaceTime calls.
Communication Safety is designed to intervene before a child views or shares detected sensitive material. Apple has previously built these protections around on-device analysis, allowing the system to identify content without requiring Apple to receive the underlying images.
Parents can also continue controlling who children communicate with. Contact-management settings can require approval before a child adds someone new and then communicates through Phone, Messages, or FaceTime.
Child Accounts remain the foundation for these controls. Apple generally requires Child Accounts for children under 13, although the applicable age can vary by state, country, or region. Child Accounts remain available for family members up to age 18.
The accounts automatically activate age-based safeguards and connect parental controls through Family Sharing.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
iOS 27 requires the family’s devices to stay in sync
The new Screen Time controls arrive with one practical requirement: devices participating in the same Family Sharing setup need current software.
Apple says all devices in the Family Sharing group must be updated to the corresponding 27-generation releases — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 — before the updated Screen Time controls can be used consistently across the family.
The family organizer, parent, or guardian must also update the parental-control configuration after the software upgrades.
That requirement is worth checking before troubleshooting a missing setting on one child’s device. If every device in the group cannot be updated, Apple says the family can continue using the previous version of Screen Time and its parental controls, but the new controls will not be available consistently across the group.
The features themselves also vary by platform. Ask to Browse and Time Allowances are available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, while some Family Sharing and communication features extend to other devices.
Apple has launched a dedicated Child Safety site alongside the software release, collecting setup instructions, explanations of Child Accounts, Screen Time controls, communication protections, App Store age tools, Find My, and Apple Watch options for families.
The updated Screen Time controls are available now with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, although individual features can vary by region, language, and hardware. For families upgrading several devices at once, checking every device in the Family Sharing group for its corresponding version 27 update is the most useful place to start.
Microsoft’s top lawyer argued Tuesday that legislators “must make secrecy [orders] the exception” in government subpoenas demanding information about LinkedIn users.
LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, is fighting what it calls overly broad subpoena demands from the US government, which sometimes come with secrecy orders that prevent LinkedIn from alerting customers whose information is being requested.
The company is asking federal courts “to enforce meaningful limits on both the scope of government demands and the secrecy that can accompany them,” wrote Jon Palmer, Microsoft’s chief legal officer, in a Tuesday blog post. “We recognize law enforcement’s important role in protecting public safety and investigating crime, and sometimes that does need to be done covertly. At the same time, customers and users deserve meaningful limits and independent oversight through an adversarial process.”
He pointed out: “People and organizations increasingly entrust their most sensitive information to online services. If providers cannot challenge demands they know are overbroad—or if courts may silence them without a rigorous, adversarial review—the safeguards the law requires will be weakened precisely when they are most needed.”
A tricky issue
The issue is a tricky one. Law enforcement often use this type of subpoena as an investigative tool, seeking those who are engaged in illegal activities. The theoretical justification for secrecy is to avoid alerting the investigative target to make it less likely the suspect will try to destroy evidence or flee the jurisdiction.
Government lawyers are supposed to only make secrecy requests when absolutely essential. Microsoft is suggesting that courts and congress need to step in to curtail blanket government efforts.
“The Fourth Amendment protects the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. That right applies to papers kept in a desk and it also applies when personal and business records are stored online,” Palmer wrote. “Online service providers, like LinkedIn and Microsoft, also have a First Amendment right to speak to their customers when the government obtains an order to search their private information. Secrecy may sometimes be justified, but it should be tailored to demonstrated needs and subject to meaningful review.”
He added: “The government must seek only relevant information, justify secrecy with specific evidence and infringe on speech to the least extent possible.” In his post, he pointed to a recent legislative effort in the US House of Representatives that might mitigate the issue if it ends up becoming law.
“On August 31, the House passed legislation to rein in secret surveillance and strengthen notice protections when the government seeks data held by technology providers,” he wrote. “The reforms would place clearer limits on secrecy orders, require greater accountability, and help ensure that secrecy is the exception – not the rule. The Senate should act promptly to send these historic reforms to the President.”
LinkedIn privacy battles
LinkedIn itself is currently fighting litigation that accuses it of directly violating the privacy rights of its customers, and a federal judge this month dismissed another similar case, but gave plaintiffs permission to refile, with a caveat.
“Given LinkedIn’s further arguments that users voluntarily download browser extensions, which by their nature intentionally expose data to websites, it seems unlikely that the plaintiffs will ever be able to allege a privacy violation, much less prevail at the end of the day,” US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria wrote. “But in an abundance of caution, dismissal is with leave to amend.”
But, he added, if the amended complaint isn’t filed within 14 days, “dismissal will be with prejudice.”
Privacy now a ‘data stewardship obligation’
Jeff Valdes, a director at Acceligence, noted, “there is definitely some irony here.”
“If Microsoft wants customers to view it as a steward of their privacy when the government comes asking for their information, customers are naturally going to apply that same standard to how Microsoft and LinkedIn collect, use, protect, and disclose information themselves,” he said. “Privacy is difficult to compartmentalize. You cannot have one philosophy of customer privacy for government access, another for product design, and another for your own commercial data practices without eventually creating a credibility problem.”
Mike Wilkes, enterprise CISO at Aikido Security, agreed, pointing out, “without meaningful limits, judicial scrutiny, and an expiration mechanism, a temporary investigative necessity starts looking a lot like a permanent architecture for invisible surveillance. The individual may never have an opportunity to challenge the scope of the request, because they may never even know the request existed until prosecutors show up with an indictment.”
That, he said, “is why Microsoft’s argument matters, despite the obvious irony of LinkedIn simultaneously defending itself against privacy claims from its own users.”
But Ryan O’Leary, an IDC research director, offered a different perspective.
“Microsoft makes no bones about using the data contained within its own systems for its own purposes. Both things can be true: Microsoft can fight for the privacy of its platform while still not necessarily respecting the privacy rights of its end users,” O’Leary noted. “This seems to come down to protecting its own proprietary data sets, not some altruistic privacy crusade.”
At the same time, Valdes pointed out, Palmer’s post highlights how deeply privacy has become a top-tier enterprise IT priority.
“Privacy is rapidly becoming a much broader data stewardship obligation,” he said. “Companies holding sensitive information increasingly have to think simultaneously about government requests, third-party access, their own collection practices, AI use, data retention and what they tell customers about all of it. If you want to be trusted as the custodian of the world’s data, customers are going to judge how you protect that data in every direction.”
However, Wilkes noted, “Microsoft does not need to be a perfect privacy saint to be right about this particular problem.”
Our solution hinges on splitting the Apple Reference Image process into two phases: creating a secure digital negative, and developing that negative into a reference image. Each phase receives our strongest protections.
[…]
Apple Reference Image provides both a lower bound and an upper bound on capture time from Apple’s cryptographic timestamp service, and we guarantee the photo was taken between the two bounds. On a regular heartbeat, the device requests a cryptographic timestamp token, and retains the most recent one it has received. Globally this happens on average every 15 minutes, though the interval depends on local network conditions. This provides a proven lower bound timestamp for the photographic capture. After capture, the device requests a second timestamp to use as an upper bound, and both timestamps are embedded and signed with the sensor data.
[…]
When the user chooses to create a reference image, the device uploads the digital negative to PCC, which runs the processing steps needed to render the image — including demosaicing, tone mapping, and compression — in a highly secure, private, and verifiable environment. Experts can verify that PCC doesn’t alter a digital negative during development: they can examine the software that does the work.
[…]
Finally, as no security system is perfect, we created a revocation system that can revoke individual photos, as well as all photos from a specific sensor.
[…]
We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC.
A hacker collective pulled down a Flock camera and dumped its data. The files included thousands of videos and logs showing that the device captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles in 21 days.
A hacker collective pulled down a Flock camera and dumped its data. The files included thousands of videos and logs showing that the device captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles in 21 days.
When 23-year old Lindsey Brooke Isaacs surrendered to police at the advice of her attorney, she was treated like a hardened criminal. Facing eight felony charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide, she spent her first days in custody in solitary confinement, separated from the rest of the jail population.
Having been denied bond, Isaacs would spend nearly two weeks in jail, swallowing the prospect of spending the rest of her life behind similar bars.
“I was devastated, I was scared,” Isaacs told Fox News. “I thought my life was over.”
As grim as it looked, the Florida woman did have one thing going for her: she was completely innocent.
Isaacs’ arrest was first reported by WESH2in June, but resurfaced by FoxNews, which notes that the case around Isaacs proceeded solely based on evidence gathered from an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) provided by the extremely controversial company Flock Safety. Her charges stemmed from an incident in October 2025, when a horrific crash in DeBary, Florida killed three people, including a county official and his wife. One driver involved had fled, leading police to conclude that they were behind the tragic accident.
Using the Flock’s network of ALPRs, investigators canvased hours of surveillance footage recorded near the incident, following a tip by witnesses. The fleeing vehicle had been identified as a Dodge Durango — the exact kind of vehicle Isaac drove.
Sure enough, FoxNews reports Isaacs’ Durango was traveling in the area at the time. A Flock ALPR had identified her vehicle three miles away from the crash site two miles prior to the incident, moving in the direction of the fatal crash. But that sighting is where the coincidences end, and the life-altering guesswork began.
During the investigation, witnesses and residue left on the impacted vehicle both pointed to a maroon-colored vehicle. On top of sporting a black paintjob, Isaacs’ Durango bore no damage indicating it had even scratched another vehicle per a Florida Highway Patrol analysis, let alone hit one hard enough to kill three people.
“Where is the damage on the vehicle?” the woman told FoxNews, recalling her discussion with police, who impounded her car anyway. “Because I’m standing right in front of it and I don’t see any damage.”
Half a year later, Isaacs received the call from her attorney, informing her of the charges and advising her to surrender to police. After a 13-day stint in jail, she was released, after the Florida attorney general declined to bring any of the eight charges police had attempted to stick her with. Another woman was later identified as the driver of the maroon SUV and arrested on nine felony charges.
For her part, Isaacs says she’s filed a federal civil rights suit against two Florida Highway Patrol officers, claiming false arrest, wrongful imprisonment, and malicious prosecution.
“This took and is going to take maybe years to get better mentally, physically, emotionally,” she told FoxNews of the ordeal. While the director of the Florida Highway Patrol extended a personal apology, it’s an insufficient gesture in the face of obviously shoddy police work and abuse of the ALPR network.
Even for the wrongfully accused, a two-week jail term is difficult to come back from. If Isaacs had a job she likely lost it, and there’s no telling what kind of reputational harm the ordeal will have on her career or her relationship with her community. That’s to say nothing of the psychological scars that come along with wrongful imprisonment, let alone a holding period in solitary confinement.
And though Flock was the technical lynchpin in this case, Isaacs told FoxNews she holds more blame for police officers eager to snag a conviction, regardless of whether the accused was innocent or guilty.
The sad fact is that police in the US have long behaved this way, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop on their own. But now with unfettered access to Flock’s network of over 100,000 ALPRs, it’s becoming remarkably easy for officers to sculpt a criminal to fit their crime — inculpatory evidence be damned.
A new section in the iOS 27 privacy policy shows that Apple has reversed its stance on using customers’ data to train its AI models. Previously, the company assured customers that it had no need for customer data, and would figure out how to make Siri AI work well without it.
Apple maintains that it “takes steps to ensure that personal data is not stored or used by Apple.” But as Heisepoints out, and Apple has said in the terms of service for a few years now, the audio material may be listened to by Apple employees after anonymization.
[…]
It also admits that data collected may be reviewed by “review personnel.” It is unclear if “review personnel” are Apple employees or a third-party company contracted to read conversation transcripts, as it has historically been.
Starting today, when a user enables Siri AI, they will see a setup screen asking whether they want to opt in to “improve Siri and Apple Intelligence,” with two options: “Share Audio and Text” or “Not Now.”
[…]
What’s important to note here is that nothing is changing about the type of data Apple collects if you opt in to this setting. What’s changing is that Apple will now use the data to train and refine its Foundation Models, as well as Siri and Dictation like before.
Siri AI is beginning its public rollout as Apple transforms its familiar assistant into a substantially more conversational system built around personal context, onscreen awareness, web knowledge, and the ability to perform actions across apps.
The beta is available first in English on compatible devices running iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27. French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish support is scheduled for October. Availability remains more limited in some regions, with Siri AI initially unavailable on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in the European Union and unavailable in China while Apple addresses regulatory requirements.
The release follows several years of gradual Apple Intelligence expansion, but Siri AI represents a more fundamental change. Instead of handling each request largely as an isolated command, the assistant can maintain conversations, find relevant personal information, understand what is displayed on a device, and combine those capabilities to complete multistep tasks.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Siri AI can connect personal context with app actions
The system can search across a user’s messages, email, photos, notes, and other information when responding to a request. Apple offers an example in which someone asks what a family member suggested doing during an upcoming visit. Siri can locate the relevant conversation, find a recipe previously sent by email, and then place the ingredients into a Reminders grocery list.
That combination of retrieval and action is central to the new design. Siri AI can draft an email, edit and share photos, create calendar events, manage reminders, control media, and perform other supported actions without requiring users to manually move information between applications.
Third-party apps can participate through Apple’s App Intents architecture. Existing integrations include tasks such as messaging through WhatsApp or playing an audiobook in Audible, with Apple also previewing deeper capabilities in applications including Microsoft Outlook, Notability, and Tripsy.
Onscreen awareness adds another layer. Siri can identify information currently visible on a device and act on it. Someone viewing a sports website, for example, can ask Siri to identify upcoming home games and add them to Calendar without manually copying dates.
Apple has also expanded Siri beyond voice. On iPhone, users can invoke the assistant with the side button, voice command, or by swiping down from Dynamic Island. On iPad and Mac, Siri AI is integrated into Spotlight, while systemwide context menus can send selected files, images, or text directly to the assistant.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Siri AI gets its own app and conversation history
Siri AI is no longer confined to a temporary interface that disappears once a request is complete.
Apple has introduced a dedicated Siri app where users can begin new conversations or revisit previous ones. Conversation history can sync privately through iCloud across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro, allowing a discussion started on one device to continue on another.
Follow-up questions can retain the context of an earlier answer, giving Siri a more conventional conversational interface for longer exchanges.
The assistant also has access to broad web knowledge for questions that cannot be answered through personal information or local device data. Apple says Siri can retrieve current information for topics ranging from sports results to travel planning and nearby businesses.
Visual Intelligence expands alongside the assistant. On iPhone, a dedicated Siri mode inside Camera can identify and respond to objects or information in front of the user. A concert poster, for example, can become the starting point for questions about performance times followed by the creation of Calendar events.
On iPad, Visual Intelligence is integrated with screenshots. Mac users can select content on their displays through a keyboard shortcut, while Vision Pro users can ask Siri about app windows or physical objects simply by looking at them.
Writing Tools are similarly integrated across the system. Siri can generate drafts, revise existing text from natural-language instructions, and provide writing suggestions. In Mail and Messages, Apple says it can take a user’s typical communication style with a particular recipient into account, including tone and punctuation patterns.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Siri AI runs across on-device and private cloud models
Siri AI is powered by a new generation of Apple Foundation Models developed in collaboration with Google using Gemini technology, marking a notable shift in Apple’s AI infrastructure.
The architecture divides processing between models running directly on the device and larger models operating through Private Cloud Compute. Apple says requests sent to Private Cloud Compute are processed without personal data being stored or made accessible to the company.
Core resources such as the Spotlight index and Apple’s App Toolbox can remain on-device, allowing Siri to retrieve local information and perform supported actions without sending every request to a remote server.
More capable devices can also use AFM Core Advanced, Apple’s highest-performance on-device model. It powers improvements including more expressive Siri voices and advanced systemwide dictation that automatically handles capitalization, punctuation, and formatting.
Compatibility varies by feature. Apple Intelligence supports iPhone 16 models and later, iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, M1 or later iPads and Macs, iPad mini with A17 Pro, Apple Vision Pro, and supported Apple Watch models when paired with a nearby Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone.
AFM Core Advanced requires newer hardware, including iPhone Duo, the iPhone 18 Pro line, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro models, qualifying M4 or later iPads with at least 12GB of unified memory, M3 or later Macs with at least 12GB, and Apple Vision Pro with M5.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Siri AI arrives with limits as Apple expands access
The initial Siri AI release remains explicitly labeled beta, and some of the surrounding Apple Intelligence features are scheduled for later updates.
Apple also confirms that features relying on server-side models can be subject to daily usage limits. That includes Siri AI, cloud-based photo editing, Image Playground, and AFM 3 Cloud models used through Shortcuts. Limits can vary depending on the feature, request complexity, system demand, and other factors.
Apple says expanded access to server-dependent features will eventually be available for a fee, introducing a future paid layer to parts of Apple Intelligence even as the core system remains integrated into supported devices.
Apple will also expand its intelligence capabilities on Apple Watch later in 2026. Planned Audio Intelligence features on Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 include Live Rewind, which can display text representing the previous 15 seconds of a conversation, and Siri Recap, which generates high-level summaries that can be reviewed later in the Siri app.
Those functions are designed around a hardware-isolated Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, with Apple saying raw audio is processed in isolation and immediately deleted rather than stored as recordings. Live Rewind and Siri Recap are scheduled to enter beta later in 2026, making the current Siri AI launch the beginning of a staged expansion rather than the final form of Apple’s new assistant.
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.”
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.
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.
In the biggest-ever legal action against harmful deepfake websites, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has seized 12 sites that collectively targeted around 1,200 victims.
President Donald Trump continues to push the boundaries of what it means to be out-of-touch after he gave a ringing endorsement for Flock Safety, the deeply unpopular surveillance company behind a national network of AI-powered cameras and license plate scanners.
His reasons for backing the firm, however, weren’t particularly illuminating,
“I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump, told reporters on Sunday, sagaciously. “They think it’s an infringement,” he added, apparently speaking of Flock’s critics. “I like them.”
The comments are the first from Trump publicly endorsing Flock, according to the Washington Post. As recently as last month, the president had been more reticent about the tech, refusing to give a straight answer when asked for his opinion.
Flock has become a political landmine in the past year, as more Americans become alarmed over having a powerful, centralized surveillance network suddenly appear in their communities with little public oversight. Much attention has focused on how its over 120,000 cameras, which Flock frames as for strictly enforcing traffic laws and catching crime, are being abused.
A recent WaPo investigation found over fifty cases of police officers misusing Flock cameras and similar systems, including to stalk women. And Flock systems have either malfunctioned or been improperly used and caused innocent people — including a journalist — to be swarmed by armed cops. Such is the revulsion the company inspires that a grand jury in Ohio refused to indict a man who was caught destroying a Flock pole, despite surveillance footage clearly catching him in the act.
Trump’s endorsement is swooping in, in other words, while the company’s reputation is at its absolute nadir. Last month, its CEO Garrett Langley was forced to make a public apology after the WaPo investigation documented how its systems were frequently abused. Later, he insisted that his company was “not Big Brother,” before trying to reason with his critics by calling for a “compromise” between privacy and safety.
For Trump to be throwing his weight behind it now, without any perfunctory appeals to safety or concerns for Americans’ privacy, is quintessentially Trump, epitomizing how he has long abandoned any care for public opinion. (His full-throated support for data centers, which are even more unpopular than Flock, serve as a similar example.)
Even his Republican allies have taken a more cautious stance. Last month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the cameras are “out of control,” adding that he didn’t want “to have this become a surveillance state,” WaPo noted.
A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later secured after the disclosure, but it's unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused. BleepingComputer reports: Kinryu Labs discovered the Elasticsearch cluster on June 3 while surveying exposed databases as part of research into ransomware activity. The cluster, named 'pax-info', contained 29 indices and roughly 107 GB of data. Its two principal indices held 210,318,069 passenger records and 10,465,631 crew records, for a combined 220,783,700 entries. According to Kinryu Labs, the cluster was hosted in Viettel-assigned IP space in Hanoi. BleepingComputer could not confirm which Vietnamese organization operated the system.
The exposed information included passengers' and crew members' names, dates of birth, sex, nationalities, passport or travel-document numbers, document expiration dates, and issuing countries. Associated travel data included flight numbers and dates, airlines, departure, destination and transit airports, seat assignments, baggage references, and scheduled, estimated, and actual flight times, information typically carried by APIS and related airline systems.
Sample records reviewed by BleepingComputer included travelers of Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and New Zealand nationality, among others. While the researchers could not provide a complete breakdown by nationality, the data covered numerous international airlines across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. As a result, the exposed records could relate to people from virtually anywhere who visited or transited through Vietnam over the nine-year period. Kinryu Labs expects to publish additional details on its blog later this week.
In case you thought the extreme backlash against automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) was excessive, a veteran police investigator was just arrested after conducting over 4,000 unauthorized searches using the software provided by Flock Safety.
According to New York’s NEWS10, Albany County Sheriff’s Office senior investigator Laurie Moore was arrested on Wednesday after conducting thousands of allegedly illegal searches on five different subjects.
One of the victims of Moore’s alleged ALPR abuse was reportedly her ex-girlfriend, whose license plate was reportedly queried in the system 3,000 separate times. Four additional vehicle plates were also searched hundreds of times each, bringing the grand total of unauthorized queries to over 4,000 across the last two years.
After being suspended from the police agency, Moore was charged with official misconduct and second-degree falsifying business records, both misdemeanors. Another unnamed employee of the Sheriff’s office was also placed on administrative leave, NEWS10 reported, though their fate is pending an internal investigation.
“She was an outstanding investigator, one of my absolute best employees,” Sheriff Craig Apple told local press. “That’s why it literally breaks my heart.”
Following Moore’s arrest, the agency said it revoked access to the Flock software for non-supervisory staff, and updated protocols to require an audit by Internal Affairs staff once every 30 days.
It’s just the latest in a deluge of cases involving police abuse of ALPR systems. Recently in Georgia, three officers and a staffer of the Savannah Police Department were arrested after an investigation uncovered similar misconduct, though details on the abuse haven’t been disclosed.
At the time of writing, the nonprofit Institute of Justice has logged 227 cases of ALPR abuse across the US.
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