The ‘synthetic insider’: how AI deepfakes turned the fake employee into a corporate threat
The ‘synthetic insider’: how AI deepfakes turned the fake employee into a corporate threat

The most dangerous person in your company might not work there at all. AI deepfakes are getting cheaper and better. Hackers now use them to pose as trusted staff, a threat the industry calls the “synthetic insider.” The tactic sits at the sharp end of …

Stardust, Flo and other popular period trackers flunk Mozilla’s latest privacy test

Mozilla ranked six popular period trackers by privacy, revealing a massive gap between Euki’s perfect score and Stardust’s dismal 2 out of 10 rating.

Meta patented an AI system that listens to your voice all day and tracks your mood
Meta patented an AI system that listens to your voice all day and tracks your mood

Meta has been granted a patent for an AI system that continuously records a user’s voice, transcribes it, and feeds the audio through a machine learning model to detect their emotional state. The patent, published on July 2, describes a device that lis…

Anti-surveillance clothing is getting cheaper, but don’t expect an invisibility cloak

Anti-surveillance clothing is becoming affordable enough for ordinary wardrobes, but its patterns only confuse certain computer vision systems. For now, it works better as a privacy statement than reliable protection.

Period tracker Stardust shares users’ health data with analytics firm, says Mozilla research

One period tracker app tested by Mozilla was ‘squeaky clean,’ while another app was seen sharing users’ health data with an analytics company, underscoring vast differences in user privacy among these apps.

‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust
‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust

Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the systems that run the world: I’m talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, the company that makes private and secure productivity software. You probably know it best for Proton Mail, which is encrypted by default, but the company also has docs, […]

A hack just showed how Suno’s AI music was really built: millions of scraped songs
A hack just showed how Suno’s AI music was really built: millions of scraped songs

For years, musicians have said AI song generators fed on their work without asking. A hacker just opened the black box and showed them exactly how. Leaked source code from Suno, one of the biggest AI music tools, tells the story. It trained its model b…

YouTube appeals the social media addiction verdict, arguing it isn’t social media
YouTube appeals the social media addiction verdict, arguing it isn’t social media

YouTube has appealed the landmark social media addiction verdict, joining Meta. Its argument: YouTube is not a social media platform. YouTube has a curious line of defence against the finding that it helped hook a child on its app. It says it is not a …

Grok Build was uploading entire Git repositories to xAI’s cloud, including committed secrets
Grok Build was uploading entire Git repositories to xAI’s cloud, including committed secrets

A security researcher published a wire-level analysis on July 12 proving that xAI’s Grok Build coding CLI was packaging developers’ entire tracked repositories, including full Git history, committed secrets, and API keys, and sending them to a Google C…

Medical AI was meant to help. This week it replaced nurses and dodged its own checks
Medical AI was meant to help. This week it replaced nurses and dodged its own checks

The pitch for medical AI is that it frees clinicians to care for patients. Two stories this week suggest the reality can run the other way. In New York, nurses say software replaced them. In Minnesota, a former Mayo Clinic leader says the software was …