Please tell your parents and family members this kind of thing is a scam: this image was sent to a family member with a 737 (Austin) area code - QR code goes to a payment page that starts with this “real person” question
Started listening to a new audiobook …
Important read here if you’re looking for big tech product safety insights …
Related bsky.app/profile/robl...
Trust in US institutions is close to its lowest level since Gallup began measuring this in 1979
Here’s a sad example of how hyper-localized deepfake scams are:
“former [Finnish] prime minister Sanna Marin and former president Sauli Niinistö… he clicked on an ad for a phony investment scheme after seeing images of the two politicians seeming to endorse it. ->
www.occrp.org/en/project/s...
Great: of course this will mean consumers in other areas will get scammed more if platforms clamp down in the EU, because scammers are mobile.
First-mover advantage for regulation at work. (1/2)
Some data brokers lean on this as a primary reason to ignore deletion requests and in turn, some deletion agents don’t even try to submit to certain problematic brokers. It’s not ideal -> robleathern.substack.com/p/robs-notes...
Part of the reason why it is still quite manual or ineffective is data brokers claiming not to be able to properly confirm the identity of the requester and/or the authorization provided on their behalf.
Latest note:
While I personally love the idea of a web-based agent going around and cleaning up my digital PII data footprint, there are still a lot of problems with agent-based data deletion. The best known companies in this category are DeleteMe, Incogni and Optery but there are several others.
Nice. How do I know it’s really you?
It's a home and away series today! @robleathern.bsky.social and I have traded newsletters to continue our reaction to @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social article about Meta's shockingly high fraud rates. 1/3
Anyone here?
Fun, I submitted a very small Facebook mobile web bug which Meta fixed but it fell below their threshold for a bug bounty (I would have donated it to charity of course)
Clownocracy day 79
2025 is not like other recent years in so many ways
A friend (very happily switched from another electric car brand and) just got a @Rivian and asked me, a longtime owner:
“Got my Rivian! Another Rivian driver waved as he passed by. Is that a thing like with Jeeps? Do I have to wave at everyone now?”
More relevant than ever
The TV show Silicon Valley still holds up. Hilarious.
“I’m not going to be the one to tell him we’re 15 weeks behind, but feel free”
If he was trying to sell these in Germany, that would likely be the kind of illegal activity they do not allow. So if his store was unavailable there, ie he was blocking German customers, then it might be different?
“Thank you for registering your phone number with the National Do Not Call Registry. You successfully registered your phone number ending in XXXX on June 29, 2003.”
The OAI o1 and DeepSeek r1 models are obviously not designed to play chess optimally (vs say Stockfish which is better than all human players) but this was LOL hilarious to watch with the kid youtu.be/JHq4EKMg7fI?...
Extrapolating our behavior from search to AI, we underestimate how many more details (health, private, intimate) we will tell a machine than another person
Have some sympathy for the comms teams scrambling to write DeepSeek into earnings call scripts
I bet you you’ve never checked out the Apple Ad Repository!
On your iPhone if you want more than one free “20 minute” wi-fi session on the plane eg American Airlines, just touch the (i) next to Wi-Fi network name and toggle the “Private Wi-Fi Address setting between off/fixed/rotating
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw
I’d like to write more here about online privacy and trust - and I would love some help getting more followers. If you’ve seen my content elsewhere on X or Threads pls re-share this
bsky.app/profile/robl...
