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The vibes are bad for Flock in Washington

2026-09-24T17:53:31-04:00

Flock is in the hot seat in Washington, even if its CEO declined to actually face senators at a hearing about its "AI Surveillance Network" on Wednesday.

"There's many players in this industry, but there's one name that really stands out above the rest, and that is Flock," Senate Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) said. "If you haven't heard of Flock, all I have to say is, Flock's probably heard of you."

Though the CEOs of Flock and peer companies Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada declined to testify, according to Hawley, seats in the hearing room were in high demand. A standby line stretched dow …

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Meta’s Muse is creepy, but maybe not for the reasons you think

2026-09-23T17:04:49-04:00

Meta's Muse is apparently an effective AI assistant, but one that's a little creepy. Part of that is because of its new Mac app, which can access Messages, Calendar, and Notes. But for all its smarts, Muse doesn't actually know how to describe itself. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted on Threads screenshots of an interaction he had with Muse in which the assistant asks him some questions about a conversation he was having in Messages.

The problem is that Aten says he didn't give Muse access to his messages. When asked how it knew about the contents of his messages, Muse replied, "I saw the notification previews, not …

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Your robotaxi might be a narc

2026-09-17T10:57:54-04:00

In early September, two teenagers got into a Waymo, but then ended up in the back of a police car. The robotaxi company said it detected "a violation of our terms of service involving a firearm," pulled the car over, and alerted emergency services, according to the Los Angeles Times. Police arrested the passengers after allegedly finding a loaded AR-style "ghost gun" in the vehicle.

The arrests exposed a lot of unanswered questions about privacy and autonomous vehicles, including what they are recording, what they do with the footage, and how much privacy riders should expect while riding inside them.

Waymo's camera-covered cars have alre …

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What happens after a town de-Flocks

2026-09-13T12:54:13-04:00

Demonstrators hold a banner against Flock security cameras during a protest outside the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. Photographer: Cornell Watson/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Bloomberg via Getty Images

From Florida to Washington state, local governments across the country are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind the controversial AI-enabled license plate readers, in response to public outcry. But ending the contracts doesn't necessarily mean the cameras will come down immediately - or that the information they've gathered will be deleted anytime soon.

Even as state and local governments decide to rein in their surveillance capabilities, uncertainty remains about what Flock can and will do with data that has already been collected. Each jurisdiction's contract is different, but many of them let Flock retain data long af …

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Your car is selling your data

2026-09-11T15:38:01-04:00

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on cars, data privacy, and autonomous vehicles, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission issued an unprecedented penalty against General Motors: a five-year ban on selling customer data to consumer reporting agencies and third-party data brokers.

For years, GM had been collecting all sorts of data on its customers - such as how often they sped or whether they drove at night - and selling it to brok …

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LG responds to TV spying allegations

2026-09-14T09:30:53-04:00

Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers detailed some alarming findings about how LG's TVs are logging and uploading data on its users. Now the company is pushing back against those allegations, saying that "Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work."

LG:

LG smart TVs do not continuously record or transmit users' conversations. Speech-to-text processing begins only if a user activates a voice interaction through a supported wake-word feature or by pressing the voice (or AI) button on the remote control. Audio used for wake-word detection is proc …

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Read the Apple document explaining how new listening features still protect your privacy

2026-09-09T16:44:43-04:00

At Wednesday's iPhone Duo launch event, Apple announced a handful of new Siri AI Audio Intelligence features, including Siri Recap, Live Rewind, Sound Recognition, and Music Recognition. Alongside its announcement, Apple released a document laying out how it plans to balance AI "ambient listening" and users' privacy. It says the raw audio from the new features "is handled within dedicated hardware, is not saved as a file, and is not accessible to the operating system, apps, or Apple."

Apple explains that Audio Intelligence relies on the Secure Exclave in the S11 chip that powers the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4:

The …

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LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby

2026-09-14T09:37:43-04:00

The LG G5 OLED is one of the TVs tested by Gamers Nexus. | Photo by John Higgins / The Verge

LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mode, according to a new report from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus. The company's TV sets scan Wi-Fi networks for nearby devices, record audio logs through their microphones, and use audio and video sampling to recognize exactly what you're watching from across the TV inputs.

Gamers Nexus partnered with fellow YouTubers Level1Techs and independent security researchers for the investigation, which involved testing retail LG OLEDs. Packet captures showed the TVs scanning the local area network for nearby hardware like pho …

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DJI’s new robovac can climb obstacles, vacuum quietly, and claims much improved privacy

2026-09-03T11:29:07-04:00

DJI has announced a second generation of its Romo robovac. The Romo 2 series is quieter, more powerful, and better at climbing over small steps and other obstacles. But more importantly for DJI, a new local-only data mode should go some way to reassuring anyone concerned by the first Romo's serious security flaws.

There are actually two new Romo models, the transparent P2 and the opaque A2. Both benefit from improved navigation, apparently able to avoid cables and other obstacles as small as 2mm in size, as well as transparent objects like mirrors or glass. There's also "human-like reasoning and concept transfer" that supposedly allows Romo …

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Americans are cheering for vigilantes who take down Flock cameras

2026-08-27T11:56:45-04:00

Americans have declared war on Flock cameras. They've protested them, damaged them, and destroyed them. This is only the beginning.

The spontaneous and decentralized nature of the vigilante protests is also what makes them difficult to suppress. There isn't a uniform method of disruption; people have done everything from unplugging, smashing, stealing, and spray-painting the surveillance devices to taking less destructive actions like physically blocking the cameras for hours. Some of the culprits have been caught, but that clearly hasn't dissuaded others from taking matters into their own hands.

"Nonviolent direct action is a recognized …

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