404 Media

Here are the 200+ sites an ICE surveillance contractor is monitoring.

https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-contractor-is-monitoring/

"Everything I say leaks," Zuckerberg says in leaked meeting audio. "It sucks"

https://www.404media.co/zuckerberg-says-everything-i-say-leaks-in-leaked-meeting-audio/

The last few weeks have really highlighted just how fragile corporate social media is, and just how beholden to political power it is. To build any sort of ground-up power we must continue to invest in decentralized alternatives that are resistant to intervention

https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/

New: Meta has deleted trans and nonbinary Messenger themes, as well as the blog posts announcing them. Happens the same week that it has changed its rules to allow users to say LGBTQ+ people are "mentally ill"

https://www.404media.co/meta-deletes-trans-and-nonbinary-messenger-themes/

Hundreds of police license plate cameras are misconfigured to stream unencrypted to the open internet.

A privacy researcher took these streams and turned them into a real-time database that tracks car movements & information, highlighting how invasive this tech is

https://www.404media.co/researcher-turns-insecure-license-plate-cameras-into-open-source-surveillance-tool/

New: Days after Meta had to kill its AI-generated profiles due to backlash, some Instagram users are now being shown AI-generated images of themselves that are being automatically created by Instagram and put in their feeds

https://www.404media.co/instagram-begins-randomly-showing-users-ai-generated-images-of-themselves/

X's legal filing in the InfoWars bankruptcy case is both batshit crazy and also what you'd expect. It asserts that X owns every account, can do whatever it wants with them, and can inject itself into legal proceedings that have nothing to do with it.

This is why it's incredibly important that people invest in platforms that they own, and move toward federated/decentralized/portable, noncorporate social media as rapidly as possible

https://www.404media.co/xs-objection-to-the-onion-buying-infowars-is-a-reminder-you-do-not-own-your-social-media-accounts/

New: We got the pitch dek for the company that wants to target ads by listening to your devices. Google has cut them off in response to our reporting:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

We went deep into the world of TikTok spammers who claim to makes 5 figures a month posting stolen and AI-generated clips through its partner program. This community is very wild.

There are 80,000 people sitting in a Discord talking about how to turn Reddit posts, fun facts, redpill clips, Would You Rather, Minecraft gameplay into $$$. Entire industry has popped up around it. People selling clips, tools, US-based TikTok accounts, GPT prompts, ideas

https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/

NEW: Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to internal documentation we've reviewed

https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/