Privacy

TechCrunch found that the RAW dating app actually exposed its user’s personal information and location data. That’s... not great! As for why that even matters, earlier this week I wrote about how the folks behind the app are also creating a smart ring for couples that some have described as a “dystopian loyalty tracker.” The company has since fixed the bug, and the RAW Ring doesn’t exist yet. But this definitely isn’t a great look.

David Pierce and I dug into this and other privacy questions on this week’s episode of The Vergecast.

The data-mining company recently did a three-week sprint to build a tool that will help Trump execute his mass deportations. It includes a “self-deportation tracking” project and a database of “actionable leads” of people who can be deported.

Makled, whose clients include demonstrators arrested at University of Michigan protests, was asked to hand over his phone to Customs and Border Protection after flying into Detroit with his family.

Hoan Ton-That, the founder and former CEO of Clearview AI, is fixated on “race, IQ, and hierarchy” and “solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists” to build his facial recognition system, Mother Jones reports.

The Guardian reports Apple has a secret appeal hearing tomorrow against the UK government’s demand for a backdoor to encrypted iCloud backups. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal lists a private hearing in its schedule.

In 2006 the AT&T whistleblower exposed a secret room inside the company that routed network traffic to the NSA, leaking documents that showed how the agency’s mass surveillance was carried out.

The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”

“The investigation will focus on the platform’s compliance with federal privacy law with respect to its collection, use, and disclosure of Canadians’ personal information to train artificial intelligence models,” according to a statement from The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada published by Reuters.