The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:03

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.c0 as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.c0.

Joseph: 00:30

I am your host, Joseph. And with me are 2 of the other 404 Media cofounders. The first being, Emmanuel Mayberg.

Emanuel: 00:38

Hello.

Joseph: 00:39

And the second being, Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:41

Hello. Hello.

Joseph: 00:43

We had to rush to publish a developing story, which is the first one we're gonna talk about. The headline is, experts, Lebanon pager explosions likely not lithium batteries alone. I wanna caveat right up top that this is a developing story, as I said. More information can and likely will come out, but we weirdly do actually have some expertise to contribute here, because Jason has covered sort of the world of batteries and recycling and fire hazards and all of that for a very, very long time. So it does actually sort of provide us a unique way into the story.

Joseph: 01:30

I guess, just first of all, Jason, before we get to all the stuff about the batteries, how did we first learn about this story, and what has happened as far as we know?

Jason: 01:43

Well, I first learned about it because Emmanuel said something about it, because I was not monitoring the Internet when it happened. But, I mean, it it's it's one of the biggest stories in the world right now. It's like the New York Times, like, writers. Every everyone is writing about it. But essentially, I again, caveat, like, developing things that are changing.

Jason: 02:06

And, like, by the time you're listening to this, there may be more explanations out there. But from what we have seen, something like a 1,000, possibly 2,000 pagers, either simultaneously or near simultaneously exploded in Lebanon. Most of them seemingly belonging to people, who are affiliated with Hezbollah. You know, I think 8 people are dead, 1,000 are injured, and a lot of the people who are injured are not the people who had the pager on them. Like, there are also bystanders who were injured, which I think is an important detail and one that we can talk about.

Jason: 02:50

But as you said, I've written about battery fires quite a lot over the course of the last several years. Lithium lithium lithium ion batteries, notoriously are very dangerous if something bad happens to them. Like, if they're punctured, if they're shredded, if they're damaged, if they're overheated, it call it causes this thing called thermal runaway, which is where the cells inside of the battery itself start self heating, just because of the chemistry of the battery. And when this happens, it gets hotter, it gets hotter, it gets hotter, it gets hotter, and it it catches fire eventually. And then aft usually, after a few seconds of being on fire, it will explode.

Jason: 03:40

Yeah. And This has caused

Joseph: 03:42

You go ahead.

Jason: 03:43

Yeah. I mean, this has caused a lot of e waste recycling plants to burn down. It's like the biggest threat to e waste recycling and regular recycling and trash management in the US right now. Like, 1 at least one of the biggest in trash management, definitely in e waste. You know, it it's like when one of these gets into a shredder in an e waste facility, it will catch fire and and that can be very bad.

Jason: 04:11

And these fires are at an all time high, which is just a long way of saying that I've seen a lot of these fires before.

Emanuel: 04:23

I'll also I'll I'll add, it's a Jason, is it fair to say at this point a very well understood problem because it's not just an e waste risk. It's also anywhere where a large number of these batteries are stored. Right? So in New York, I know there was a lot of fear about all the electric scooters, and bikes, repair shops, official and unofficial. Right?

Emanuel: 04:48

Like, those are a big fire risk. Electric cars, obviously, you said, like, the most likely ways, for this to happen is the batteries being punctured. And obviously, with an electric vehicle moving at high speeds, that is something that could happen and we've seen happen with Teslas, and is very dangerous. And I think it's to the point where, like, firemen are getting trained on battery fires. Right?

Emanuel: 05:17

Because they're becoming more common.

Jason: 05:18

That's definitely true. A place sort of around the corner from my house, burned down, like, an ebike rental spot burned down about a year ago because one of the, you know, batteries associated with the ebike caught fire, and then all the other ones did. And then the the place caught fire and it burnt down. This happens very regularly, like you said. And there's also been a couple, like, very high profile consumer electronics situations where this has happened.

Jason: 05:50

Like, the Galaxy Note 7 had a defect in it that caused the battery to catch fire and explode, and no one died from that. There were some, like, serious burns, and then there was a while where you, like, couldn't fly on a plane with a galaxy note 7, and they there was a massive recall and things like that. So that's the context in which I've reported on this in the past. It is definitely a big problem, like, for society more broadly. And in this case, you know, we don't know exactly what happened, but it seems like the fact that there was a lithium ion battery in these pagers was leveraged in some way in this attack.

Joseph: 06:36

Yeah. Maybe just to back up a little bit before getting to what the experts said, but there's broadly two leading theories. Right? The first is that there was some sort of interference or cyber attack with these pages that triggered the battery by itself to overheat and then explode. Right?

Joseph: 06:59

That's one theory. And then it seems on the other side, people are saying, no. It seems that something additional was added to these batteries to cause the so sort of the size of the explosion from these devices. And what we've sort of learned from speaking to our various experts is that they believe that is more likely, which, of course, brings up questions of how the attackers, whoever they may be, were able to put additional resources into these pages. Hezbollah has blamed the Israeli authorities.

Joseph: 07:37

And what did these experts say exactly when we spoke to them? I think there's a quote at the top, first of all, Jason.

Jason: 07:47

Yeah. So I talked to Kyle Weens, who is the CEO of Ifixit, the repair part company. They source a lot of batteries. They buy a lot of batteries. They sell a lot of batteries, and they've done a lot of research on batteries.

Jason: 08:01

And one of the reasons that they they've done this research is because, if you buy, like, a poorly manufactured battery, it can easily explode. I forgot to mention, like, those cheap Chinese hoverboards were exploding for a while, and that was because they had, like, just poor quality batteries in them that it was it was easy for them to explode if they were damaged in any way. So I fixed it as an an entity has done a lot of research on battery fires and what causes them and what they look like. And he said to me, quote, there's no way that just a battery hurts someone other than the person wearing the pager. I also can't really see a lithium battery exploding, killing a person.

Jason: 08:43

3rd degree burns. Yes. And to be clear, he's talking like a lithium battery of this size because if it a large one exploded, it could kill someone. But, he then said, so while I'd like to imagine some kind of crazy cyber attack where they overloaded the batteries, I think it's more likely this was a supply chain attack and Israel planted explosives inside the pagers with a remote trigger. To be clear, speculating here, but, essentially, he's saying that the explosions that we've seen, the videos that we've seen, the explosions are way too large for this to be a lithium battery alone.

Jason: 09:23

And I agree with that assessment. Like, I've looked at lots of battery fires. I've looked at a lot of battery fires, from smartphones, which would have a bigger battery than a pager.

Joseph: 09:37

Right. They're literally larger devices that are doing more than displaying a little bit of text on a pager. Right.

Jason: 09:43

Yeah. And and they all kind of, like, they light on fire first. Like, you can see smoke and you can see flames. And when they go into thermal runaway, they swell. So they get bigger and then they they light on fire and then they explode, and there's always visible flames.

Jason: 09:58

And in the videos that we've seen, we haven't seen any visible flames. The sound of the of the explosion is very loud in the Lebanon videos. And, also, the explosion is clearly, like it's a big explosion. Yeah. That Emmanuel, you're actually the one who kind of, like, initially told me to go do this story, and I'm just you know, what did you think when you saw the videos?

Emanuel: 10:26

Well, the reason we wouldn't normally cover some, you know, Israeli covert attack in Lebanon, but, and I don't necessarily blame anyone because as Joe said, this is a developing story and Twitter being Twitter, people speculate and we're doing, or our experts are doing some speculation here as well. But I saw the theory that this was a hack, meaning the devices weren't modified in any way, that somehow they were remotely, triggered to, quote, unquote, overload and explode the batteries. I saw that really pick up and spread around. And on its face, that seems not possible. Like or if it was, it would be like, I mean, this is the news is wild enough, but it would be kind of a world shattering event because we're all surrounded by lithium batteries.

Emanuel: 11:29

The idea that someone can hack devices to make them explode is just like the most chaotic thing, I can imagine happening. And then also, Israel specifically has a history of planting explosives as a way to target its enemies. So, that to me seemed like the most likely theory. Even though, even within that history, this would be a wild escalation in complexity because there are so many devices. Right?

Emanuel: 12:05

So it's like how are you able to plant so many explosives in so many tiny little devices and get them where they need to go. That's I mean, even though we're circling that as a as a likely thing that have that that happened here, we don't know how. But, yeah, like and then finally, because there were so many individual instances of this happening across Lebanon and Syria actually, there is security cameras and people just pulling out their phone and filming what has happened right in the aftermath of this. And none of it looks like a lithium battery fire, which like, Jason have seen a ton of. Usually, I remember there was one story we did a motherboard where it was somewhere in England, but it was just a laptop in an office overnight catching fire and, like, I think eventually burning down the whole office.

Emanuel: 13:03

And it's it all they always look the same. It's like, I said it and then one of the experts said it. It's like you're lighting a flare is what it looks like. And in the videos we saw, from Lebanon, it is like big kinetic explosions. You don't see the shock waves per se, but you see, like, destruction in the immediate vicinity.

Emanuel: 13:25

And it's all it's instant. Right? It's like it's an explosion. It's not a fire catching and smoke and flames and then eventually an explosion, which is what lithium battery fires usually look like. So I was like, Jason knows a 100 people who have seen this and know exactly how this happened.

Emanuel: 13:44

So I bet they could look at it and immediately say what it is and isn't.

Joseph: 13:49

You you mentioned that there's so many different devices and that's true. And the other expert we spoke to is MG, who's a hardware security and supply chain expert, in their own way because they made the o m g cable, which is these fake USB c or Apple lightning cables. And he's had to come to terms of how supply chains work by manufacturing, those. And, of course, a malicious cable is a supply chain attack in his own right. So, I pinged him.

Joseph: 14:22

And, you know, he brought up sort of the variation you would have between all of these different pages. And he said, quote, a lithium battery at full charge is way more reactive than a 50% drained one. So you'd see some very weak reactions across all of those devices if it was just the battery. Right? I'm paraphrasing now, but for there to be sort of a consistent effect, you would presume that something would be added to that.

Joseph: 14:51

And he also reflected just what Jason said earlier about a phone battery. Even if it's lithium, it's going to be much, much bigger than a apager reaction. So, you know, if it was just the, battery of apager, it would be far, far more, limited. I guess I I feel that's probably all we can say about what we know about what happened, but I feel like you you touched on it, Jason, but sort of just what is your experience reporting on lithium batteries more generally? Like, did you come to it through the e waste pers perspective and, like, right to repair?

Joseph: 15:30

Like, how did you how did you build a list of people you could email when Emmanuel asked you go contact a bunch of battery people?

Jason: 15:38

Yeah. But before I answer that, I do wanna say this is full speculation, but I just wanna put it out there because just in case, it doesn't necessarily have to be 1 or the other in that there could have been some sort of malware that caused the battery to heat, which caused some like, an explosive within the device to explode. And I'm I'm seeing some reporting about that that's being tied to, news outlets in Saudi Arabia, and it's just like, I have no way of vetting that at the moment, but that is that's like something that, a few folks that I I've just people who I think would know, how an attack like this could work have theorized that that is a way that it could work where you kind of are leveraging this problem with lithium ion to start the explosion, but then the the actual, like, power of the explosion itself is coming from an additional explosive in there. Again, I don't have any reporting on that. I don't know, but I think that that sounds very plausible to me.

Jason: 16:49

I came into this because when I write a lot about repair, there's a lot about, sustainability, reusability, recycling, etcetera. And the repair industries, the refurbishment industries, and the recycling industries are all kind of interwoven, with each other. It's like they're all sort of trying to get more mileage out of the devices that we use. And, like, e waste facilities are super interesting because electronics are are often quite, it's it's, like, pretty dangerous. And one of the reasons that it's pretty dangerous is because these fires can happen very easily.

Jason: 17:32

And the same things that are causing devices to be harder to repair also make them harder to recycle. It's like glued in batteries rather than screwed in batteries where you can just, like, remove a screw, remove the battery, make it a lot harder for someone to disassemble the device if you're trying to repair or replace that battery. But it also makes it a lot harder to disassemble a device to remove the battery so that the battery doesn't explode when you put it through a recycling shredder, which is a machine that shreds the device and then sorts the materials. And so a lot of these fires are caused because the batteries are very difficult to get out of, different devices, especially, like, really small ones, like smartwatches. Like, Amazon was selling a button for a while where you could just, like, hit a button and order more laundry detergent, and these were basically designed to be e waste.

Jason: 18:31

So when they got to recycling centers, it's like, it takes a lot of human hours to get these things out. And often they have to, like, use a crowbar or something. Like, I saw a bunch of MacBooks being crowbarred open at this e waste, recycling center I went to. And the people doing it were wearing, like, full protective equipment because if they, were prying these batteries out of the MacBooks and they punctured the battery, it would explode. And so it was very dangerous, and that's sort of, like, how I came into it.

Jason: 19:04

I I wrote a lot of stories about, this problem that they were facing, and it's one that's, like, very intertwined with rights to repair, etcetera.

Joseph: 19:13

Yeah. I'm glad we were able to take that expertise and contribute to this developing story even in the small, left of field way we can. Alright. We will leave that there. When we come back, we're gonna talk about something we're a lot more sure about.

Joseph: 19:30

That is the the AI powered surveillance dystopia is already here. We will be right back after this. Alright. And we are back. Jason, this is another one you wrote.

Joseph: 19:50

Larry Ellison's AI powered surveillance dystopia is already here. For those who don't know, who is, Larry Ellison exactly?

Jason: 20:04

Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle, and Oracle is just, like, a massive, massive cloud computing company, security company. They do so much stuff, and yet I it like, if you ask me what Oracle does, I don't super I couldn't be like, here's what Oracle is known for specifically because there's they just do they're kind of like a Microsoft esque company, and it's like early web, gigantic, gigantic company. I

Emanuel: 20:35

believe it's data centers these days, which ties in what we're gonna get into. Yeah. But I believe that's most of their business. Most of their revenue, I think, is data centers.

Joseph: 20:44

A ton of money, and everywhere all at once, but the average person on the street is probably not going to know about them or think about them. They might know about Larry because he's rich. But, like, you

Jason: 20:56

know, he's the 5th 5th richest person in the world.

Joseph: 20:59

Right. There you go.

Jason: 21:00

And of course, they're known a lot for, like, enterprise software database type stuff, but it's like, they were founded I'm at on the Wikipedia page. Sorry. Yes. But they're founded in 1977. It's just like, they're they're like an IBM Yeah.

Jason: 21:15

Esque company that has evolved in many ways over the years, and it's just a gigantic, gigantic company.

Joseph: 21:21

That is a fair comparison. So he made some comments recently in a talk. Right? And it was sort of talking about society and technology, surveillance, and AI. What was he pitching exactly?

Joseph: 21:43

And, I mean, we'll go into sort of almost your rebuttals to each one, but what was he pitching exactly? And I and I guess why?

Jason: 21:51

Yeah. So it was like a quarter 3 update, like, for investors. So every company does this. They do, you know, here's earnings reports, here's how the company is doing, here's what we are doing and how we're gonna grow the company and make a lot more money. And every publicly traded company does this, And often the CEOs say crazy stuff at these investor calls.

Jason: 22:20

This is actually an investor event where he was in person with a lot of these investors and it was live streamed. But they like, Oracle's thing as all of these companies are doing right now was they're talking about AI and how they are going to use AI to change business and ultimately, like, drive shareholder value, more or less. And so they did an hour long, like, q and a with various people who are using Oracle's AI products. And then Larry Ellison himself did an hour long talk slash q and a where there weren't that many q's. There was a lot of a's.

Jason: 23:01

He I think I I scanned through it and there was, like, 4 or 5 questions and he talked for over an hour. And he kept kind of just going off onto different tangents, which is maybe how we end up in this place where he starts explaining that Oracle's AI is going to be used to, like, fully change society. And this came at the end of his talk. And to be clear, everything else he said was also pretty nuts. He was like, we are going to use Starlink Internet and Oracle AI data centers to, change how hospitals operate and then change how cars operate.

Jason: 23:40

So he he talked about in every single sector of the economy, but then he gets into public safety and policing and surveillance specifically.

Joseph: 23:50

Right. Which we have a lot of experience covering, and you especially. So I'll just, like, provide some of the things he said, and then let's let's hear what you think about them. So the first one or one of the ones he spoke about was securing schools with technology, and I'll just read out a quote from him. Quote, we think we can absolutely lock down schools so that dramatically to dramatically reduce the case of anyone being on campus that doesn't belong on campus and immediately alert someone, use AI cameras to immediately recognize that.

Joseph: 24:25

When you read that, what do you think?

Jason: 24:28

Yeah. Some of these quotes are stilted because he kept changing his train train of thought.

Joseph: 24:33

I was gonna say, I was reading it. I was like, wait. Is that typed correctly?

Jason: 24:36

Yeah. Did did

Joseph: 24:37

I read that properly?

Jason: 24:38

Yeah. So he's basically, like, AI is going to I mean, he doesn't say the word facial recognition, but he says, like, we're going to use AI cameras to determine if anyone is gonna be on campus that shouldn't be there. You know, this is something that surveillance companies have been trying to do at schools for a while in the aftermath of Uvalde, especially. I mean, there's so many school shootings. It's it's very upsetting to to even think about.

Jason: 25:04

But in the aftermath of Uvalde, specifically, there were a lot of surveillance tech companies that were saying we can prevent this from happening again. And you had examples of companies that were selling, like, automated panic rooms in schools, Axon, the taser slash body camera slash lots of other, police tech company said that they were gonna, like, put taser drones in schools, which caused a big outcry and its own ethics board then, resigned over that. And then I think most, interestingly, this company called Evolve, has AI scanners that are now I don't know if they're on New York City subway yet, but they're going to be on the New York City subway. It claims to use AI and object detection to, like, detect, guns. And so you'll have to, like, walk through one of these to go into schools, and some schools have rolled these out.

Jason: 26:04

And what they have learned and what we reported back at motherboard, using some FOIA requests was that there's tons of both false negatives and false positives, which is a nightmare where it was like

Joseph: 26:17

When you're trying to figure out who has a weapon and who doesn't. Having both negatives and that's not great.

Jason: 26:23

No. Not good. And so things like notebooks, like 3 ring binders were being detected as weapons, and then, like, knives were not being detected as weapons were some specific examples. And, you know, it's been a couple years now, but pretty consistently the reporting, by pretty respected organizations has found that these are not super good at actually preventing, like, they don't they don't well, they haven't stopped school shootings. It's like, we've tried everything except for banning guns.

Jason: 26:57

Yes. Some sort of gun control.

Joseph: 26:59

Yeah. So Larry's dream of AI around schools is already here. Okay? That's one off the list. Thank you very much.

Joseph: 27:08

He says they could design these always recording body cameras, and I think he uses the example of, you know, a police officer is wearing this body camera, and then they'll say, hey. We're we're voice recognition as well. Hey. Please stop recording. I'm gonna go to the toilet, and then they do that.

Joseph: 27:26

And the idea is that in Larry's eyes, the the cameras will still be recording, and it can be susceptible to a court order or something similar. And and, basically, it's this idea that, you know, the cops are going to be, accountable because they're always gonna be recorded. Citizens are gonna be accountable as well because they're gonna be captured up into this dragnet as well. I mean, what did you think when you when you read the stuff about body cameras?

Jason: 27:53

Yeah. I mean, he said the police will always be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. And that's the that's kinda like the money quote, the like, literally describing big brother, like, we will detect things as they're happening. We have body cameras and they are often, but not always on.

Jason: 28:19

I think that cops turning off body cameras is a big problem. I am I think that body cameras are useful for us as reporters because we can sometimes, but not always, foyer the footage. But there have been many academic studies showing that they haven't made a statistical difference in police brutality or police misconduct, and that's because there are many, many cases where the police are recorded doing something wrong and there's no accountability. And so or there's there's either no accountability or underwhelming accountability. And so Yeah.

Jason: 29:01

The counter counter's not the issue. Yeah. It's like a societal political issue and sort of the ways that cops are protected in society issue versus, if only the body cameras were on. That said, like, an always on body camera that's also filming cops while they're peeing or whatever that that can't be disabled. That says it's disabled but then is obtainable via court order, like, raises all sorts of questions about, like, well, why is Oracle in charge of this?

Jason: 29:33

Like, it should be held by the cops theoretically. Like, we don't want Oracle to be the arbiter of whether this public data gets released or not released, first of all. 2nd of all, I mean, surely, hopefully, it would be encrypted in some way. But if you're storing that, it can theoretically be hacked taken, I would imagine. And then, yeah, it's just like, if you are recording it, it it does exist.

Jason: 30:02

So you're not actually giving people privacy. I think we've seen that over and over again as a Yeah. Potential problem across a variety of devices.

Joseph: 30:11

Yeah. So, Larry, we're already filming a bunch, so that's already done. Thank you very much. And this one, I was actually a little bit unclear on. So what does he say about drones and using those exactly?

Jason: 30:28

Yeah. He says that we have drones. A drone gets out there way faster than a police car. You shouldn't have high speed chase with cars. You just have the drone follow the car.

Jason: 30:39

He doesn't say this, but he's describing something where called the drones as first responders program. Like, that's what it's called in policing, and we've done a few stories about it. And it's like the moment someone calls 911 regardless of where they're at, like, the system detects their location and a drone flies out there and it starts filming. And it's like a drone can fly there faster than, you know, like, a person talking on the phone and then a cop dispatch and the cop gets there in traffic or whatever. And so there's all these cases, especially in Southern California.

Jason: 31:18

There there's a few companies that are offering these drones, and they're very popular in Southern California at the moment, where a drone just, like, automatically goes out and to a suspected crime scene and starts filming. And in some cases, you can, like, talk through the drone. So there's been cases where the police, like the police drone is there and they're using, like, a microphone on the drone, like, a speaker on the drone to talk to a suspect and, like, either I don't know I don't know if they've done any arrests, but they're all always like, hey. Like, we're watching you. We're filming you, so on and so forth.

Jason: 31:54

And this I I think that there probably is a use for drones and policing. They're very, very, very useful for finding missing people. They're very useful for, like, monitoring, like, natural disasters and and things like that. But in this case, Wire did some reporting where they obtained the logs for one of these cities, and the drones were, like, automatically going out investigating, like, someone bouncing a ball off a wall, a house party, just, like, random things that were not crimes, would should never be crimes and, like, should not be persistently surveilled or proactively surveilled, I would say. And so this also exists, and it has a lot of problems.

Joseph: 32:45

Yeah. So Larry pitches all these things. You basically show that they all already exist in one way or another, maybe not as efficiently as Larry would like. But what's the takeaway here? Is it that we're already in that future?

Joseph: 33:03

It's worse than he imagines? He's overlooking the bad parts, all of that? Or, like, what's the takeaway from the fact that it already exists?

Jason: 33:12

Yeah. The there's one other that he mentions, which is AI video and, like, smart surveillance of smart video processing, which you've done some reporting on, with Fusus. And, you know, like, it's unclear whether facial recognition is integrated into any specific system, but some of these cameras have facial recognition. Some of them have, like object and action detection and things like that. And so he's, like, imagining a world broadly across the board where these connected cameras or connected devices are seeing something happen.

Jason: 33:47

They're sending data back to a data center in real time and an AI is analyzing it. Like, that is basically what he's describing across the board, in some way, shape, or form. The specifics are are sometimes different depending on, you know, the the way that a drone responds is gonna be different than the way a static surveillance camera responds. And it's like we have all of these things. Cops are paying 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars for them.

Jason: 34:16

These surveillance tech companies are getting very rich. And, you know, any single technologies that there may be abilities to improve or stop individual crimes. I don't wanna, like, wholly dismiss them, but it's like crime still exists. It's largely prosecuted in sort of the same way, and it is a fever dream for this sort of, like, always watching situation where no one commits any crime because AI will detect it automatically, but that's just, like, not how a healthy society should work. It's not how, like, pry like, I personally don't want to live in a society where if you, like, jaywalk, you're automatically detected and ticketed.

Jason: 35:05

And, we haven't talked about each individual company that's doing stuff like this, but a lot of your reporting, Joseph, has been about companies that are doing things like this. Mhmm. And every time well, the vast majority of that reporting relies on either this being not as accurate as you would maybe want it to be or it having some sort of bias in it. It's like a lot of facial recognition systems can't identify black men very well. And they there have been numerous cases where people have been falsely arrested or or arrested for crimes that they didn't commit because of facial recognition system, said that they did a crime.

Jason: 35:47

And so this, like, future that he is dreaming up, it's already here, and it hasn't, like, fixed the problems that it promises to fix, I guess, is what I would say, and it costs quite a lot of money.

Emanuel: 36:05

Yeah. I would just emphasize that he is talking to investors, and he's painting a picture of the future which is dystopian as you say, Jason, but it is also a future where the services that his company provides are increasingly useful and therefore the value of the company would go up. Therefore, you should invest now, and buy stock now and inflate the value of the company. And that's I think bottom line what is happening. Also, Jason, you're actually intimately familiar with one Oracle product at least, which is NetSuite.

Emanuel: 36:42

You remember NetSuite?

Jason: 36:44

They making NetSuite?

Emanuel: 36:45

They make NetSuite. NetSuite, maybe if you ever worked at a large corporation, you would know, but it's like, man, it does everything. It's like HR, invoicing, billing, all that stuff. Nightmare nightmare

Jason: 37:01

Not my favorite program.

Emanuel: 37:02

No. Not good. It looks very ancient and not sophisticated. Yeah. Probably not best in class is my is my guess and hope.

Emanuel: 37:13

But yeah.

Jason: 37:13

Their Workday is very bad as well though, which is not an Oracle product, but as a competitor, pretty pretty terrible. That that's a whole class of, software that is not good.

Emanuel: 37:23

Yeah. True.

Joseph: 37:24

Hopefully, we can have NetSuite, but for all of our lives, basically. That sort of sounds like the pit. I guess the last thing I would say is that, basically, what he's describing in a way and I don't think he used this specific term, but there's definitely this trend among the surveillance companies now to make so called real time crime centers, which just brings together all of these usually sort of disparate technologies. Like, you have the automatic license plate reader, then you have the drones, and you have the facial recognition. And it's like, let's bring those all together in one place to have this sort of omniscient on omnipresent view into what people are doing.

Joseph: 38:05

And Axon is trying to do that, funnily enough. And I think that's shown not just in the name and the branding, but they also recently, partnered with Flock, which is that company that you earlier mentioned as well. So, like, companies are trying to act even more concretely on this vision. Just doing it in slightly different ways.

Jason: 38:31

I think that's One

Emanuel: 38:32

more last tangential thing. I'm very sorry. It's very tangential, but have you Say

Jason: 38:36

your tangential thing in one second.

Emanuel: 38:38

Okay.

Jason: 38:38

So a lot of the companies are trying to merge all these services together as you said. So it's like the the hope that he's doing, they will, like, all talk to each other is, like, the big dream. Okay. Go ahead, Emmanuel.

Emanuel: 38:52

Have you seen Rebel Ridge, this movie on Netflix? No. Have you heard of it?

Joseph: 38:56

You wanna shut up about it?

Jason: 38:58

I wanna watch it. I was gonna watch it tonight, actually.

Emanuel: 39:00

Definitely watch it. I suspect Jason will watch it, and maybe it will spark a a blog because the way police body cam footage and dash cam footage is, like, triggered and stored and transferred is, like, pivotal to the plot of the movie. The movie is not about that. It's like a thriller action movie, but the details of that are pivotal to the to the story, and it's a good movie.

Joseph: 39:24

Alright. Tune in next week for Jason's review of that film. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying 4 0 4 media subscriber, we're gonna talk about how Snapchat may soon use your own AI generated likeness or just AI powered likeness to target ads back at you. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.c0.

Joseph: 39:53

We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back in the subscribers only section. This is a weird one, in a lot of ways. And then, I don't know.

Joseph: 40:15

Very, very jarring, at the same time as well. So, Emmanuel, you wrote this one. The headline is Snapchat reserves the right to use AI generated images of your face in ads, which is a crazy headline. I I guess let's try to do it chronologically because I know that it was complicated reporting wise. I kinda wanna show people that.

Joseph: 40:38

So it starts with a Reddit post. Right? What was the claim in that Reddit post that you saw?

Emanuel: 40:47

I hate to throw you off, but I will correct that slightly and say that it started as many of our great stories, start, by a reader reaching out and saying, hey. I got this pop up. I read the terms of service. This is really crazy. What's going on here?

Emanuel: 41:04

You should write about it and let people know. And I read the terms of service that this person showed me. I confirmed by just, like, using Snapchat and seeing it myself. And then, to be honest, I just started searching broadly to see what has been written about it because sometimes you see something and it's so wild. You're like, oh, surely, you know, The Verge wrote this up when it first rolled out or something like that, but there was no coverage of it.

Emanuel: 41:37

And during

Joseph: 41:38

You even asked me to Google it, and I and I do that as well where I'm like, someone must have covered this. Yeah. So I get, like, you to Google it or something as well in case I'm I'm being an idiot and missing it, but it seemed like it wasn't the case. Sorry. Just before you go to what you found from your search, this pop up that the reader sent in, what what what was that saying

Emanuel: 41:59

or or claiming exactly? Let me pull up I think

Joseph: 42:02

the screenshot is.

Emanuel: 42:03

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like it's, we can talk about how the pop up shows up because I think that's important later, but the feature is called my selfie or the tool. And it says my selfie is used to power generative AI, cameos, and other experiences on Snapchat that feature you including ads. And there's a bunch of other terms of service and kinda legal copy.

Emanuel: 42:30

But, yeah, that's what the that's what the pop up says.

Joseph: 42:33

Yeah. It it's basically saying that if you use this my selfie tool, which is like an AI powered selfie generator, something like that, right, and that could be used for all these products, but also gonna be used in advertisements, which is really, really wild. So the reader sees that, they send it in, you start searching. What what what do you what do you find?

Emanuel: 42:55

So while searching for this, I just stumbled because I was digging pretty deep, to see if anyone has written about this, and I stumbled across this Reddit thread where someone says that they were on Snapchat and they were served an ad featuring their face. We don't know a lot more than that. Like, we don't know what the ad looked like and, you know, if it was, obviously AI generated or if it looks like a photo or what. We just don't know. I reached out to the person.

Emanuel: 43:28

They haven't responded, but it was for some sort of like education company. It was like an earn your degree dot com, I think, or your dreamdegree.com was the name of the company that advertised with this person's face, so they claim.

Joseph: 43:46

Yeah. So you see that, that's very interesting obviously, and you you reach out to the person that they don't get back to you. But sort of, what is your next step then? Is it to go to Snapchat and get their comment? Because it gets a little bit complicated after this, but what do you do then?

Emanuel: 44:05

So I reach out to Snapchat, and, I mean, obviously, it's not a mystery. Right? Like, it's in the app. It's in the terms of service. You can go there and see the part I just read out loud here.

Emanuel: 44:17

But I wanted to know how is this being used? Can I see some of these ads? How do they work? What information does the advertiser get? How do they you know, like, imagine if you're Nike and you're you're trying to run some ad featuring someone else's likeness.

Emanuel: 44:33

Like, how does that work? Like, is there a special contract? Is there like a template that they pick? What what do they know about the user and all that? And then also, I was like, hey, have you seen this Reddit post where someone says this happened to them?

Emanuel: 44:46

Can you tell me what the ad was? Can I see the ad? Is this true? Is is this person making it making it up?

Joseph: 44:53

Wow. A lot of questions that you're bombarding the poor Snap with, and I presume they say they'll get back to you. What is the initial response?

Emanuel: 45:09

I mean, the initial response is what is your deadline, which is fine. Oasis. I expected, I expected this to be a straightforward exchange, but the more we talked, the more confusing it got. And top line, what Snapchat said was, first of all, they're like, we are not doing this. Right?

Emanuel: 45:34

This thing that we're asking for permission for, it is not actively happening, and we have no details on when and if it will happen. We are just reserving the right to do this. And there are no active Snapchat ads that we facilitate that feature our users likeness and pull this my selfie data. So that's the first thing they say. And then they said, we looked at this advertiser, we can confirm that they have advertised on Snapchat, but as far as we can tell, they have not violated our terms of service, which, you know, if they were to somehow pull a picture from somebody's Snapchat and use that in as an ad would violate the terms of service.

Emanuel: 46:21

And they said, a, that hasn't happened and, b, we don't provide that information to advertisers ever. So that that was kind of the the initial response.

Joseph: 46:33

Okay. So but then but they're not coming out and flat out saying the the redditor is wrong.

Emanuel: 46:41

Right? I would say it's somewhat contradictory because they're saying we found nothing wrong. And then I was like, well, has this person because I I I assume that they can look up the ads. Right? They can, like, they have some sort of, like, internal ad library tool.

Joseph: 46:56

Like, we do all the time for Facebook or whatever. We we we can access that for with Facebook. You would presume that Snap could look up advertisements on its own platform. Yeah.

Emanuel: 47:06

Right. So but when I asked for clarity, they said, we don't know if this advertiser used this, person's face. Like, they they wouldn't confirm or deny that has happened. All they said, even though they don't know whether they used his face or not, they say all they know is that it didn't violate the terms of service, which is if if that's confusing, I am I am confused as well. Well,

Joseph: 47:32

yeah. I think this is the point where it got pretty complicated. Because initially, it's just a story of, okay, they've reserved the right to do this. We now have a report that apparently somebody has seen their own likeness in a in an advertisement. Let's go to Snap.

Joseph: 47:46

They'll probably confirm it, or they'll probably deny it or something. I I was expecting confirm, to be honest. You know? Like, that's what I was expecting. But now it's Ray Ray muddy and unclear.

Joseph: 47:58

So what do you do after this? You know? Because now it's like, well, what what exactly do you do? It's really confusing.

Emanuel: 48:10

Well, first, I drive my colleagues crazy on Slack by giving them updates on this little story that I can't finish because I'm very confused.

Joseph: 48:17

I love the little updates. The little updates are important.

Emanuel: 48:21

And then, I tried to get on the phone. I was like, hey. Like, can we just get on the phone and talk this out? Because I'm like, literally, I'm I'm actually confused about what is happening here. And they said no.

Emanuel: 48:33

And then I was like, theoretically, would it work? Like, because I because now now I'm kind of, like, trying to think through how something like this would work if they were to actually implement this. And what I'm I was imagining was, like, you are, again, you're Nike and you create some sort of ad. And in the ad, there is a place where you can slot in the user's likeness. Right?

Emanuel: 48:59

And the ad only hits them. Right? So it's like in the ad, there's like a figure dunking a basketball. Right? And Snapchat arranges it.

Emanuel: 49:09

So it's like if you see the ad and you approve this use of my selfie, it will paint your face into the ad. And I was like, is it something like that? And they were like, absolutely not. You know what I mean? That's not how it works.

Joseph: 49:21

So then what are you doing? Because that's exactly how I would explain.

Jason: 49:23

So I

Emanuel: 49:23

think to be honest, it's like, what is actually happening here and the reason it is so confusing is that at the moment, Snapchat has rolled out, like, all these AI selfie features, which I've tested, and they do all these silly entertaining things that Snapchat is known for. I tried to save a picture, but I lost it. But I was like, I tested one of them, and it just, like, it pulled my picture and it, like, you know, used AI to make me look like a cool cowboy.

Joseph: 49:54

That didn't.

Emanuel: 49:57

What do you mean? So so they rolled out these features and I imagine that it's like somewhere there is a plan, a theoretical plan, like, oh, this could be like a really effective ad unit if we were to able to, like, put these AI selfies in ads and offer that to advertisers. But it hasn't happened yet. So they're they they, like, they reserve the right, but they refuse to commit to any specifics on how it would happen. And that's why there is, like, a lot of confusion about exactly how this would work.

Emanuel: 50:29

Because they haven't tried it, and so I guess they don't know. And maybe they end up not doing it anyway.

Joseph: 50:35

Yeah. Yeah. I still think and I'm sure you agree, and I'm gonna ask you as the last question in a second. Like, I still think it's really important to simply know that they've reserved the right to do it, you know, even if they're not doing it right now. It's, like, is that what you saw as the, sort of, the the point of the piece here is, like, look, they've provided themselves the legal language and the terms and conditions to do this.

Joseph: 51:03

Like, is is that sort of the thrust of it?

Emanuel: 51:07

It's that, but I think even more so it's so I don't use Snapchat, to be honest. So I

Joseph: 51:14

don't think anyone at 4 zero four can use it.

Emanuel: 51:16

So I think Sam has used it. I think Jason has used it. And, like, we all did a little bit of testing to see, you know, what is the flow of, this pop up. Right? So in my case, I've never had Snapchat.

Emanuel: 51:30

I download it. I go into the settings. I click on my selfie, and immediately the set like, the the pop up comes up. And after you click through, like, you do on a green continue of on the terms, it, I think, thoughtfully brings you to a menu where you can toggle the permissions for, like, what is Snapchat allowed to do with your my selfie data. Like, are you the only person who can tweak with your selfies?

Emanuel: 51:57

Do you want your friends to have access to that so they can send you, like, funny pictures of yourself? And do you want ads? Like, do you are are you allowing your Myselfie data to be used in ads, which is, like, the big important one here? So that was, like, my flow. But then for Sam, it's like she downloaded the app.

Emanuel: 52:20

She already had Snapchat. She has data in there, and she had to navigate to the menu and find that setting, which is on by default, right, which is the other big thing here. It's like it's not happening, and Snapchat has done the right thing and has made it an optional feature of my selfies. But the part where it's on by default, I think, is really important because most people don't dig in. Most people don't, like, navigate to these menus, and I think probably most Snapchat users have it on at the moment, and people should know about that.

Emanuel: 53:00

People should know that this is how their data can be used.

Jason: 53:05

Joseph, are you aware of the SnapMap?

Joseph: 53:10

For a very long time ago, yeah. It's a UI or, like, basically, a website you can go to, and it shows Snapspace on their geographical location. Right? Is that still a thing?

Jason: 53:21

That's kind of it. But, like, Snapchat has the ability where, like, if you are friends with someone, you have an avatar of yourself. Like, you you either create an avatar, and I guess with my selfies, it's like you can make one that looks like you. Like, it used to be like a memoji thing that you you created, but I I assume that this is it. And there is a thing called the snap map within the app where you can see where all of your friends are at any given moment, and you can see the snaps that they posted from there.

Jason: 53:53

So I know people my younger sister, who knows where all of her friends are at any given time and will, like, show up or vice versa at, like, the restaurant or bar that they're at, which based on Snap Map, which is nuts. It's like this is how this is how teens well, she's not a teen anymore, but this is how young people are using Snapchat. Just so you know.

Joseph: 54:21

I'm, like, staring out of my window. I'm, like, in genuine shock. I knew that lots of people culturally track each other's location through find my or whatever. I did not know that they show up at the restaurant or whatever. That's crazy to me.

Joseph: 54:36

Crazy.

Jason: 54:37

And it's like a fun thing. It's like a

Joseph: 54:39

No. It's not.

Jason: 54:40

It's like they're like, this is fun. I saw what bar you're at, so now I'm also here.

Joseph: 54:48

You you can't do that. I, what I would say is that I I

Jason: 54:53

Social wars are changing.

Joseph: 54:54

Apparently. I do remember, and I just tried to log in to Snapchat because I did have to make an account for some purpose a while ago, and, apparently, I forgot my password, and it's not in my password manager. But, there was definitely a way to just look at Snaps in various locations. Maybe they disabled or maybe it's behind the login wall. What I will say is that I did have to download Snapchat to try to get in contact with somebody for an article a little while back, and I've never been more disorientated by UI.

Joseph: 55:25

Like, I literally did not know what button to press. It was so so alien to me, and I've never felt older. Just I

Emanuel: 55:34

had a pretty similar experience, and I think it's because, a, it's quite different from the other social media apps. So the UI has to be different and also it is generously I would say feature rich. On generously it's like very bloated. It's just like crazy. Every direction you swipe, it's, like, filters, AI images, yeah.

Joseph: 55:57

Despite being in the mobile game, I I feel like there's just, like, it's, like, I don't know. What's that? Raid Shadow Legends or whatever that gets advertised constantly. It just feels like I'm in one of those games. Alright.

Joseph: 56:10

We will, we will leave that there, and I will play us out. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.c0. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week.

Joseph: 56:40

This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a 5 star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps out. Here is briefly one of those from pdxcro. 4 zero four Media must surely be the most efficient value in tech media that exists today.

Joseph: 56:58

The output and consequential change these 4 journalists are able to produce week after week is astounding. This has been for a full media. We'll see you again next week.