The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)
from 404 Media
Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably Training AI
Episode Notes
/Transcript
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/R8cf5jfTroo
Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 40 4 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:I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are 404 Media co founders, Sam Cole.
Sam:Hey.
Joseph:Amazing timing on that. Emmanuel may I
Sam:know. Right?
Joseph:Hello. Hello. And Jason Cutter will also be with us, but he's gonna call in remotely for the 2nd segment. That was like a dub horn. That was great.
Sam:It was great in front of my apartment, literally, as you introduced me. And now it's gone. So that was nice.
Joseph:Alright. Let's keep going. These first couple of stories that Sam wrote all about blue sky and scraping and data and privacy. The one you've just published, the headline is your blue sky posts are probably in a bunch of datasets now. Let's go back in time though.
Joseph:Where does this start? It starts with a database of 1,000,000 blue sky posts. Right?
Sam:Yeah. Yeah. So last week, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, which is this platform that's for, like, open source, primarily machine learning datasets and research data and things like that where people post these things, posted on Blue Sky that he was releasing a dataset made up of a 1000000 Blue Sky posts, and they included everything that was basically, like, attached to the post. So, like, the, the person who posted's ID, like, their their handle or whatever, whatever they call it, a blue sky. I don't even know.
Sam:Their, time stamp, any kind of, like, images that were included would say whether there were imagery, and all of that, and, of course, the content of the post. And, people freaked out. People really lost their shit. Like, I'm not exaggerating. People were like, this man should be thrown in jail, and worse.
Sam:People were I
Joseph:mean, quite quite literally.
Sam:Comparing it to, like, rape. Yeah. It was really crazy.
Joseph:Yeah. I I think just to add one other bit of context. You say they're from Hugging Face. What did they say that this database of 1,000,000 blue sky post they made, what did they say that was for exactly?
Sam:They said it was for machine learning research, which could mean a lot of things. Right? Like, datasets from social media are compiled all the time. It's not usually something that people compile in a nonanonymized way, so that definitely made this different. And, yeah, it was, just kinda put on huggy face just to be like, hey.
Sam:Here's this dataset that I made to play around with different you know, like, you could make an LLM with it in theory. You could do, like, anthropological research on the users of Blue Sky if you wanted to. Like, you can make a bot. I mean, there's just, like, lots of ways that you could use that kind of data that people do, you know, use social media data for all the time. But I think partially because it was not anonymous and you could track people's IDs back to their posts, and because people were leaving Twitter in part because they were protesting the the scraping of their data, their user data to build LLMs.
Joseph:Right. Well, e Elon Musk or rather x had come out and said, we reserve the right to scrape and to use whatever you post onto x, and we're gonna use that for our own machine learning. They have their little chatbot called Grok. Right? Which is supposed to be like a a woke chat GPT or something stupid.
Joseph:But, people don't want to contribute to that, so they go to Blue Sky, and then somebody else is scraping all of their, posts as well. I mean, I I guess we should say this up top just so it's obvious. Like, we know public data is gonna be scraped. Lots of Blue Sky users know that as well. Why do you think people reacted to this so aggressively?
Joseph:Because we see the data set, you cover it, that brings more attention to it, and then people, voice their opinions against this person who, who who made the data set. Why do you think the reaction was like that?
Sam:I mean, I think in general, I think people when people find out and we've seen this happen with other platforms too. When people find out that their data is being used in ways that they didn't realize or didn't consent to or didn't look into or didn't occur to them that it could be, they get pissed off. Like, that's the case across pretty much any platform. So it's, like, not some kind of, like, special phenomenon that's happening with Blue Sky that people are mad that their stuff is being used without their consent. I think it is a little bit special to Blue Sky and that people like I said, people are very anti, this sort of scraping in general.
Sam:They're, by and large, at least in the in the worlds that I'm following, and I'm still somewhat new to Blue Sky. People are very anti generative AI, anti AI generally, anti machine learning. I mean, it's just it's it kinda reaches. And I wrote about this a little bit in my behind the blog last week, but, like, it kinda reaches this point where people are just sort of dog piling. It's like they see something that they can jump into and say, hey.
Sam:Fuck this. And they just, you know, type, hey. Fuck this. Fuck you. And then hit reply and then move on.
Sam:And that accumulated into, like I don't know. It was, like, 800 different replies, people saying, that they did not like this. And then the guy eventually, I mean, not event not even eventually. It was, like, within, like, a couple hours, took it down, and said, you know, hey. I hadn't considered the ramifications of this, whether those ramifications were getting into trouble or actually, you know, use of people's data without their consent, he didn't really elaborate on.
Sam:But he took it down, which I think people were pleased to see. And he was like, okay. I get it. I'm standing down. You know?
Sam:It's gone from Huggy Face. It's gone from his boost. Io page, all that. So yeah.
Joseph:Well, he took his one down, but in the same way, though, was a response with the, people who were angry or upset on Blue Sky. There was a sort of other set of reactions, which is now other people have made even more larger datasets. I mean, what are some of the ones that have been made in response, and what sort of the the trolling going on here? Because it's not just like, oh, hey. Here's research.
Joseph:It's like, some of these people are making datasets specifically to piss off Blue Sky users at least.
Sam:Yeah. So this reaction to this one guy's post and dataset went so viral on Blue Sky that it broke out of those usual, like, containment zones where people are, like, anti generative AI and bled into Twitter, basically, is kind of how I saw it happening because a lot of people are still on both. It's not like an either or for most people. If you're on Twitter, you're probably also on Blue Sky vice versa, or you you're likely to be. So, yeah, people saw this going viral on, on Blue Sky.
Sam:And on Twitter, they they started posting about it there too, which turned into, more people making more datasets and even bigger datasets. There was a 2,000,001. There was an 8 the 2,000,001 was super popular, by the way, and had a lot of downloads. There's 8,000,001. There's, almost 300 1,000,001, I think is how much it was.
Sam:Right? It's like
Joseph:Yeah. 298
Sam:or something. Crazy amount of posts. But, like, this is still probably, like, a fraction of, like, the post total on on Blue Sky. And we know this because the fire hose that, Blue Sky is set up to kind of, like, make public contains all of this data, and it is public. So it's very easy to just kind of put it all in a dataset as a lot of people did.
Sam:And, yeah, like you said, like, they're trolling. They're like I think one of the, the the 300,000,000 one was, like, had this, like, weird, like, rant in the description that was, like, addressing people saying that they didn't want to be scraped and kinda saying, you know, if you if you don't wanna be scraped, basically, don't post to social media, period. Log off or start a blog, which I thought was hilarious because we have started a blog and we still deal with scraping.
Joseph:Every day. Yep.
Sam:Every day. And it's like that's not really it's not a solution, and it's also, wrong and dumb, but, like, it's
Joseph:Well, it's almost like the ran
Sam:on their okay.
Joseph:Yeah. It's almost like the complete opposite reaction. On one side, you may have people who and I don't think anybody really believes this, but it's sort of a straw man in the on one side, you may have people who are just like, what? You can scrape on the public Internet? That's outrageous.
Joseph:That sort of thing. And on the other side, there's these people saying, they're almost being defeatist about it. Or even more than that, they're actually enabling it and performing that scraping themselves. And you seem to have both sides of that spectrum here. When it come and and you touched on this because Blue Sky is open.
Joseph:There is a fire hose of data that people can access. You can't do that really on Twitter anymore. You have to pay for API access. Right? And then the extortionate fee to the point where researchers don't even do it anymore.
Joseph:I used to scrape Twitter for various purposes, and it was pretty easy to spin up a hyphen script to be able to do that, because the API was available. So that openness about Blue Sky, you you touched on it in the piece and you call it like a double edged sword. What what what do you mean by that?
Sam:Yeah. I mean, the way what makes Blue Sky different from Twitter or threads or Facebook or any of these others is that it's decentralized and, it's built on this protocol that's open and you can port your content around. You cut you you own, like, your following. You own, like, what happens on there, in a way that you might not on Twitter or threads or some of these others. So that's that's what's appealing about Blue Sky to people in a lot of ways.
Sam:If you care about that sort of thing, that's, that's the reason why a lot of people are on it. And that's also the reason why it's vulnerable to this kind of, like, dataset collection. And, yeah, I mean, it's it's definitely there definitely are, like, 2 very passionate sides. It's where, you know, like you said, it's like some people are just, like, never ever fuck no. And then other people are like, well, someone's gonna do it eventually, and it might as well be me, I think, is, like, the attitude that people have always had, especially with, like, not just tech, but, like, it's really prevalent in, like, machine learning and AI in those communities where people are like, well, events like, we sell this with deepfakes.
Sam:We do this with all kinds of harms. What have that have to do with generative AI? It's like, someone's gonna do it. Someone's gonna have this idea eventually, so I might as well do it.
Joseph:Do you see that mentality across different things? You mentioned deepfakes then. And, like, you know this, and Emmanuel knows this as well better than me. But, like, was that part of the thinking? Not necessarily the the person who first coined the term deepfakes and started doing that, but was the idea that, well, somebody's gonna do this.
Joseph:It might as well be me. And I I almost don't quite follow the logic. And it was that part of the sentiment?
Sam:It's not super logical. It's mostly kind of an excuse, in my opinion, to do the thing. Yeah. I mean, that's that's almost verbatim what a lot of people who have developed deep fake deep fake type tools, have said to us in the past and keep saying. It's just this kind of I think people are in, like, a free for all grab as much as you can while the legal gray area is still gray.
Sam:Whether or not these datasets are even, like, legal under, like, GDPR and copyright and things like that, it's like it's all still being decided because these are problems that we hadn't had before or, you know, they not at this scale. You know? These are problems that have always existed.
Joseph:With AI.
Sam:Not with AI. Not when we're talking about machine learning. So, yeah, it's, it's something that's still being, like, litigated literally right now. So I think it's just kind of a mess. Like, it's people just don't know what ground we're standing on ever when it comes to whether this stuff is, like, not just putting aside, like, moral, ethical, safe.
Sam:Like, it's really not very safe to scrape, like, nonanonymous data into a dataset like this. There's a lot of, like, personal information out there that people are scraping in these datasets. But even, like, legal, I think, is, like, what everyone's kinda waiting on. And we see this in all kinds of industries. It's just something I touched on in this story.
Sam:But, yeah, it's just right now, it's, like, get it while you can kind of attitude in the industry.
Joseph:Yeah. And, again, these are independent individuals, for lack of a better way of putting it. And it's not Blue Sky itself taking user data and training AI or doing machine learning or anything like that. Just to pull it into this conversation, what is Blue Sky's stance on scraping and training AI with user data itself? What's what's their stance?
Sam:So Blue Sky has said in the past that they are not gonna, you know, train a train AI on user data, which, again, sets them apart from, like, Twitter or threads or, any of these others that are actively using user data to train their own LLMs and things like that. But, they said they won't, but there's really nothing and they've said this also publicly, like, not verbatim, but, like, in a nutshell. It's, like, there's nothing stopping anyone else from doing that because of the nature of the thing. And I think they're, like, they've I think they're gonna end up being forced to and, also, like, they've said publicly, that they are thinking about how to address this because people are so put off by it. They're thinking about how to work better, consent tools, basically, into the platform so that this sort of thing doesn't happen if you don't want it to.
Sam:There's no there's you can't have a private account on Blue Sky, which is a big problem for a lot of people, and that also opens you up to scraping if you don't have a private account. Yeah. They're they've they're working on it. It's kinda their response. But I don't think you know what there is to do.
Sam:You know? Yeah.
Emanuel:I don't
Joseph:know what you would do because as you say, it's open, and the only way you could stop somebody scraping is by blocking the specific account which is viewing your profile. But, I mean, you don't know what account that's going to be. Presumably, it's not gonna be an account that says, hey, I'm a big scraper. I'm just getting all of your posts. And also, presumably, I think you could probably actually scrape it and we'll without an account potentially as well.
Joseph:You know, you can view Mhmm. Summer Blue Sky while you're not logged in. So there isn't really anything users can do. Is it more people just have to wait to see what the company does, if anything?
Sam:I guess. I'm not, like, I'm again, it's like I'm not really sure if it's on the platform or users to do this. It's like it's, again, it's like, it's this problem of, like, the people doing the bad need to stop doing the bad. Like, it's like they Yeah.
Joseph:Cut out.
Sam:They just like, there's it's hard to, like, build you can only build so many walls against this kind of thing. It's just something that, like, we agree, generally. I think that taking people's content without their consent is usually bad, not nice, at least, but it's not illegal. So, like, is it ethical? Is it moral to do that?
Sam:You know, it's like that's kinda where the argument is. So, like, this guy should have known better who did it originally. The people who are doing it again probably should like, are doing it for the trolling and for to get people more pissed off, which is very classic Internet behavior. So I don't know how much you can tell them to cut it out. It's just, like, we need to, like, socially agree that this is shitty if that's the way this is gonna go.
Sam:You know? Or we agree that it's fine and whatever and, you know, take the data and go nuts. I don't know. I'm sure there's some kind of middle ground that we can figure out. And, like, this is something that researchers have been doing for a long time too is using datasets and, like, anonymizing them and giving people the chance to opt out, which is part of, like, the law in, like, the EU and UK.
Sam:People should get a chance to say, I don't want this. I don't wanna be part of this dataset. And I don't like, I think it should be anonymized at the very least, like, the the bare minimum. People's, like, usernames should be attached to it because, again, sensitive information. And, also, deleted posts are in these datasets.
Sam:You know, it's just you don't know what you're getting in there. It's like the the 300,000,000 one is like there's, like, a thing on the description that's like is it not safe for work? Yeah. For sure. There's probably, like, foreign in there.
Sam:There's definitely a hole in there. Like, you know, whatever.
Joseph:Ever been on Blue Sky before? Like, that's literally half the website.
Sam:Yeah. Then, like, I don't think it should be on the users to stop posting whole. That's kind of the it's the ethos that we've always followed here.
Joseph:We've always followed, or yeah. We don't need to get into that about our our potential earlier names beyond 4 zero four media. Don't say it. Maybe we'll save that for subscribers. Maybe we've already mentioned it.
Joseph:Alright. We will leave that there. When we come back, we'll hear from Jason about Redbox and, I guess, the Redbox removal team. We'll be right back after this. Alright.
Joseph:And we are back with Jason calling in remotely. Jason
Jason:Can you hear me? I've been here the whole time
Joseph:just listening. I appreciate it. Like this voice from from nowhere. You've done a couple of stories on Red Bull. A few at this point on Red Bull.
Joseph:This latest one is called the Red Bull, a few at this point on Red Bull, where you went on a trip with some people liberating these boxes. Step back a little bit and, you know, because I wasn't familiar with this. Can you just explain, for those who don't know, what is Redbox and what happened to the company?
Jason:Redbox are these DVD rental kiosks that popped up all over like, the outsides of grocery stores, Walgreens, CVS, Dollar General. And it's sort of I feel like it replaced Blockbuster kind of as a physical location that you could go and rent a DVD from. And I think for a while, they also did video games. The big thing about Redbox was that there was essentially no overhead. So it's like Netflix came and essentially killed Blockbuster, but Netflix was a mail service for a while, and so it would take a day or 2 to get your Netflix, rental in the mail.
Jason:Whereas with Redbox, it was at, you know, a convenience store around the corner from your house. So if you were deciding kind of last minute to rent a movie, you could just go there, rent it. I believe for a while, it was just a dollar a day, which was a selling big selling point. And I remember this being quite popular. Like, my family used them all the time.
Jason:And in a kind of amazing turn of events about maybe, like, 2 or 3 years ago, I don't know the exact timeline, Red Box was sold to a company called Chicken for the Soup Entertainment, which was the entertainment conglomerate arm of the Chicken Soup for the Soul self help books. Uh-huh. Like, are you aware of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Joseph?
Sam:I'm a new fan.
Jason:Or is it an American thing?
Joseph:I've had I have no idea what you're talking about. And I'm but but I'm glad Sam does. I mean, Sam, what's what what do you mean you're a big fan? We're a big fan.
Sam:Dude, chicken soup for the soul? I was a a very wholesome teenager, so I had chicken soup for the teenage soul. There's, like, a chicken soup for every soul. You can chicken soup for the cat lover soul. It's like it goes on forever.
Jason:Go to to the dog lover soul.
Sam:Yeah.
Jason:There's there's surely other types of souls that there's there's, like, hundreds of these books, Joseph, and they they were, like, all over Borders and Barnes and Noble and perhaps sometimes grocery stores themselves. And it was one of the rather than go to therapy, what we did in the United States was you bought one of these books for your, like, troubled teen. I never had one. Emmanuel, are you aware of this?
Emanuel:I have definitely heard the name, but I don't really know what it is other than, like, a series of of books. I I I was gonna say it's like, what is, like, the not miss America. Like, it's like a series
Sam:of American Girls Girls.
Emanuel:American Girls
Sam:Yeah.
Emanuel:Something. Yeah. I was gonna compare it to that.
Jason:The thing that I would compare it to is, for dummies, the for dummies series. It's like, mental health for dummies, tailored directly to you. Because they all have the same cover. They all and there's, like, 500 different versions of them. So, anyways, this company, Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment, purchased Redbox because they briefly got into trying to have a streaming service and trying to do movies.
Jason:And, stalker, this did not work. And so Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment went bankrupt earlier this year, and they didn't go chapter 11 bankrupt. They went chapter 7 bankrupt, which is where
Joseph:it's gone.
Jason:It's the bad one. It's where you go fully you have no money, and you basically go to court. You say like, hey. We're fucked. We're out.
Jason:Goodbye. And what happened was there's something like 20,000 of these kiosks all over the country, and, you know, they were servicing these for a while, stocking them with DVDs, fixing them when they were broken, and they were paying rent to these convenience stores that had contracts with them. And they filed for bankruptcy, and they were like, we're out. Goodbye. Like, we're not paying you any money.
Jason:We're just done. And so these, like, 6 or 700 pound devices, like these big red steel, they seem like they're made of steel to me, Kiosks have just been totally abandoned. But the really interesting thing is that they still work. Like, a lot of them still work. And so what people have been doing is they have been going and, quote, unquote, renting DVDs and just keeping them.
Jason:And then there was this whole community of people who decided, wait, why rent all the DVDs when I can just bring my pickup truck and an angle grinder and I can, like, because they're all, like, bolted to the ground. And so they they get permission from the store and they take them home, and they've been reverse engineering them. There's, like, 2 or 3000 people in a Discord right now who are reverse engineering these things, figuring out how they work, figuring out the different problems with them, and taking them home. And I wrote one article about them, but then there's this other part of it where there is a company called Junk Luggers, and there's a few other ones that are essentially taking these to these giant kiosks and taking them to recycling centers and, like, trashing them, more or
Joseph:less. Right. Just before we get to them and sort of your your your trip out in the field getting one of these boxes, You said that this community who reverse engineering them, they go to the store, the the Walgreens or whatever. They get permission and then they take the box away. But wasn't there some sort of tension around, was it Walgreens corporate learned of this and then stops giving permission?
Joseph:Like, what happened there?
Jason:Yeah. So I think for a while, I I have not gotten, internal Walgreens communications with managers, but it seemed like in the first few weeks after Redbox went bankrupt, Walgreens was like, oh, we need to get rid of these. And so individual store managers were just telling whoever wanted them that they could take them home. And I believe that Walgreens corporate eventually learned about this and said, please don't do that. And I I have to assume that the reason is because they're, like, 700 pound devices that are bolted to the ground, and they're connected to not just like a regular power plug, but they're, like, connected directly to outside power in a scary, like, you can get electrocuted to death kind of way.
Jason:And the community of people who are doing this have figured out how to do this safely, but it's entirely possible that someone could hurt themselves doing this, and I assume that they don't want that risk. And so they like, Walgreens, Walmart, Dollar General, like, random convenience stores that are regional that I hadn't heard of, like, there's one in upstate New York, so on and so forth, have signed contracts with these junk removal companies. And so they are sending their teams out all over the country picking these things up, and then, you know, I don't think this is happening with junk loggers, but I've seen some of them end up on Facebook Marketplace. I have seen people, in the Discord say, I've got a junk removal guy that I've now bought 5 of these from, because they're essentially just selling them for scrap metal at this point. And they're taking them to recycling centers, and we don't need to get into it, but it's like it's better if someone takes this to their house and uses it for many years to come versus it going to a recycling center and being shredded down into, like, little bits.
Jason:It's like there's a ton of there's a lot of metal here. Not all of it can be reused. It's not like a great outcome, more or less. It's like huge pieces of e waste at this point.
Joseph:Yeah. So who who did you tag along exactly and sort of what was the what was the purpose of that?
Jason:Yeah. It's very funny that you say I took a trip because it was like 20 minutes from my house. I, like, got in my car and drove to a Dollar General. But I interviewed the CEO of this junk luggers corporation, which is like a franchised out, they do a lot of, like, hoarders. Like, they clean out the homes of hoarders, is what the people told me.
Jason:And I just said, hey. I wanna see what this looks like when you, you know, remove one of these. And so I met them at a Dollar General in Southern California. They had a big truck, a big trailer, and there was 3 people there. And they basically, like, they disconnected the power, and then they started using an angle grinder, which is essentially like a big saw.
Jason:And they started sawing through bolts that were you know, they couldn't access with their wrenches and things like that. And it was really funny because they were, like, unable to get this final bolt because you need to open the Redbox machine to remove that bolt, and they didn't have the key because Redbox has the key and Redbox is bankrupt. And so they, like, started bashing you with a hammer. They tried to break the lock. They tried to pick the lock.
Jason:They tried to angle grind the lock. They had a crowbar that they were, like, prying the machine open with, and they just, like, couldn't get into it for maybe 20 minutes. And then literally one of the guys just pushes it over because there was only one bolt left. He just, like, shoved it, and it broke the bolt, and then they were able to to clear it away, which was
Joseph:Did did that not break the machine this whole, pushing it over?
Jason:I mean, the machine is going to go get shredded into a 1,000,000 pieces anyways. And so they were not really they were very professional. Like, this is not to to talk negatively about these people, but they weren't taking care to make sure that the machine was going to be in one piece.
Joseph:Yeah. They, they weren't taking it home to then, you know, deliver DVDs themselves whenever they wanted. I mean, just super briefly on on that before I just ask my last question. What was the deal with Twister and copies of Twister? The DVD could not get taken out of the machine because of a software issue or something?
Jason:Yeah. That's something that, this community of, like, hackers and reverse engineers learned is that, the machine would error out if you tried to rent Twister, the first movie that came out in, like, 1996, which was incidentally one of the first DVDs ever. And now it was, like, this last DVD that was stuck in this, you know, red box machine. And it was just a software error that had something to do with, you know, the the film not being able to be rented out after a certain date that was hard coded into it. And so, eventually, someone did solve this, like, in the last couple days.
Jason:Someone was able to look at the source code and they figure out what what was wrong with it, and then they filmed a YouTube video of themselves renting Twister, and this was a big moment for the Redbox reverse engineering community on Discord. But it is funny that you mentioned it. Like, a lot of people are taking this home. They're putting it in their man cave or whatever. They're putting their own DVDs into it.
Jason:And then when they say, oh, like, I wanna rent a DVD or I wanna watch a movie, They're going and renting it from themselves in, like, their garage.
Joseph:That's sick.
Jason:It's sick. It's it's pretty cute.
Joseph:So there's all of that. But what does this show us? I was gonna say about lost media, but I don't think that really applies here. I I guess, what does this show us about electronics and recycling and the business around that? I mean, sort of what's your takeaway of this whole episode?
Jason:Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting thing is this happens to a lot of different devices. In this case, these devices were public and very large. And so the size and weight of them makes a big difference, but there are so many, like, smart devices that and like Internet of Things devices that companies launch, the company goes bankrupt, the devices become bricked, and then they have to be destroyed. And I think it's just a very sort of public reminder about the fact that we just consume so much stuff.
Jason:We consume so many devices. All of this has an ecological and environmental cost. You know, Redbox was around for something like 15 years, maybe longer than that. And so I'm not saying that this is some horrible disaster, but it does show that when companies just randomly go bankrupt, like, someone has to clean up that mess on the other side. And there is an ecosystem that does that.
Jason:I mean, I think that e waste and electronics recycling and the people who manage that and work in those fields are super interesting and I've written about them a handful of times. And I've been to electronics recycling centers and they're incredibly fascinating places. I don't know if anyone will ever get a chance to to go, any of our listeners, but if you do, please go. It's very, very interesting. Like, some municipalities have days where they open up their recycling center and it's super fascinating just to see, like, the end of life of all of these sorts of devices.
Jason:And I guess last thing I'll say is if you work in any of these, hit me up because I'm super interested in sort of what happens to our stuff after we get rid of it.
Joseph:Yeah. For sure. Please do that if you're in a position to talk about that. And I do recommend that listeners go read Jason's piece because, you know, there's a lot of visual material in there. And, of course, you can see what we're talking about.
Joseph:But we'll leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you're paying for a full media subscriber, we're gonna talk about a bunch of action the US government just took against data brokers. There's location data. There's credit header stuff that cyber criminals use to docs and harass people.
Joseph:For some reason, it all landed at one day. I'm not really sure why. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright.
Joseph:And we are back in the subscribers only section. This is just a couple of quick pieces I wrote. The first one and I'm I'm sorry. It's gonna get a little technical. And I'll try to keep it, I don't know, pleasant and and and not boring.
Joseph:But the first one, FTC bans location data company that powers the surveillance ecosystem. I guess let me just explain what Ventell is and then, Emanuel, if you wanna jump in with some questions. But the FTC comes out today when we're recording this on Tuesday. And it said it's taking action against 3 different companies, Ventel, Gravy Analytics, and Mobile Waller. I'm only really gonna talk about of Ventel and Gravy.
Joseph:But if you followed our reporting about how, you know, the Secret Service can track people without a warrant, ICE does that, CBP, DEA, FBI, all of that sort of thing. We did that piece on a on a tool called LocateX, where we got leaked video showing it can be used to track people and phones at abortion clinics. The company underpinning all of that, or at least a very large amount of it, is this company called Ventel. They get data from, sort of apps installed on people's phones or through the advertising ecosystem. They then get that data by buying it from others.
Joseph:They collate it. They they clean it up. And then they sell it to the government directly or, to these other companies that then sell it to the government, as well. So this is very significant that they have been targeted at all, for reasons I'll get into, into a bit.
Emanuel:Sorry. I just wanna follow-up on the first thing you said about it being significant. Do you mean that is because they sell to government agencies?
Joseph:That's part of it. Yeah. I think it's significant in that Ventel is such a big player in the space. And I should just clarify, Gravy, the other company I mentioned, is the parent company of Ventel. So actually, it's Gravy that gets all of the data.
Joseph:They sell it for marketing purposes. Oh, you can see how many people went to this McDonald's and that sort of thing, how busy the McDonald's is. They then give it to Ventel, which is basically a subsidiary, and they sell it to, government agencies. So it's just the size of this dataset and sort of their position in the market. But absolutely what you suggest, which is the yeah.
Joseph:The fact it was the fact that the FTC, a US government agency, is trying to regulate a company which is providing data to another part of the US government, you know, and Right. That could get messy and interesting.
Emanuel:Yeah. So what are the lines exactly that the FTC is trying to draw here? Like, is Venetel still able to operate? What what what what did the FTC do exactly?
Joseph:Yeah. So as is it has happened before with location data companies, we wrote about one called X Mode, where we're on Motherboard, where there was getting data from a Muslim prayer app. In that case, the FTC said, hey, you have got to stop collecting location data on sensitive locations, like mosques, like synagogues, places of worship, or health clinics, that sort of thing. And, basically, the FTC has done the same thing now for Gravy and Ventil. But, I'm gonna pronounce that that that name differently every time, whatever.
Joseph:But it's expanded a little bit in that this is the longest list of sensitive locations I've seen in an FTC sort of ruling. There was medical facilities, religious organizations, correctional facilities, labor union offices, schools and childcare facilities, domestic abuse and homeless support centers. And I think very interestingly, and important for the incoming administration, they're threatening mass deportations, shelters for for refugee or immigrant populations as well. So the FTC is basically saying, you can't do anything. You can't sell the data.
Joseph:You can't collect the data. You can't transfer the data. If it's to do with any of those, locations, there's that. And I I kind of I read this sentence over and over, in the press release and the announcement the f from the FTC, because I feel like it's almost too broad. But I basically wrote it for basically the article.
Joseph:The FTC also demands that the companies delete all historic location data. So what? They just have to delete all their data now? That that's wild to me. But, that's what it says.
Emanuel:Yeah. You also have to wonder about the FTC doing this in the last minute before the end of the administration and whether the new administration can roll this back. I mean, we don't know exactly how this will play out or if it even will be a serious attempt, but worry to actually want to actually want to deport millions of people, this type of data would be extremely useful. And I don't know. You can easily imagine the Trump administration wanting to leverage it.
Emanuel:So, I mean, I wonder if this stuff will stick, come January.
Joseph:Yeah. And I I I see that when I post it in Blue Sky, Twitter, and I there's a few replies saying, yes, you know, if it they'll do this if it survives the Trump administration. And I'm like, yeah. But like, JD Vance is pretty anti tech, almost. And I feel like he's actually supported the FTC.
Joseph:So I don't know. Maybe this weirdly actually lines up. But as you say, then the immigration stuff comes in. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a mess.
Emanuel:Shall we move on to this other piece of news?
Joseph:Yeah. So this second one, which also came out the same day, well, I I guess that kinda relates to what you just said, Emmanuel. Like, are they trying to cram this all in at the end? And I don't know.
Emanuel:I feel like this one has been brewing though. We kinda heard murmurs that the agency was going to do something about this. And, also, I mean, just to set it up a bit more, before we launched 44 Media, we had a discussion about, like, what stories that we're going we're going to launch with, like, what what are the biggest stories we can publish to get some attention. And this is circling back to your first story, and and what you were talking about, which is how credit header data can be used to docs people, and kind of, like, the whole ecosystem that enables that. And it seems basically that the government is trying to finally do something more serious about it.
Emanuel:Is that right?
Joseph:Yeah. So the headline of this piece is US government tries to stop data brokers that help docs people through credit data. I know that's a little bit complicated, but it's all accurate. And I feel like you kinda need all of the context of every single word in that headline. But, yeah, to go back and you mentioned the piece that we launched with, and I still think, like, it's my favorite one I've written for the site.
Joseph:And that was called something like the secret weapon hackers can use to dox anyone in America for $15. And that all centers around, as you say, credit header data. So basically, when you go and open a credit card at a financial institution, you give them your name, your date of birth, your address, your phone number, you know, pretty standard personal information. But if it fell in the wrong hands for certain people, it could be, like, quite bad. The bank then gives that data to the Freebrig credit bureaus.
Joseph:That's TransUnion Expi no. So whenever I list these, I know I've done this multiple times on the podcast. Whenever I list these, I accidentally say Expedia.
Jason:Equifax. TransUnion.
Sam:TransUnion.
Joseph:It sounds like Jason's yelling it from, like, the bathroom. We'll say he's, like, in the middle of peeing. He's, like, Jesus Christ. Joseph's going wrong. Yeah.
Joseph:Yeah. Okay. So those 3. I was gonna say, I just always actually say Expedia, which is the travel booking website, and this always comes up. But so you you open a credit card, you give your data to the banks.
Joseph:The banks give it to the credit bureaus. The credit bureaus then give it to a bunch of other companies, some of which have legitimate uses. You know, there'll be companies who need to give you insurance. I presume it plays a role in mortgages as as well. Landlords doing background checks on tenants.
Joseph:I mean, you can agree or disagree with that, but that's seen as one of the legitimate uses of this data. But it also goes a little bit further than that. You know, it can it can end up in the hands of PIs. It can end up with a bunch of other companies that if you looked at their websites, you would go, holy shit. I don't want them looking after my data because this looks like a piece of crap.
Joseph:And it could be popped or hacked like any minute. And that is basically what happens, which where the cyber criminals I follow or or did follow recently, they will get into these companies, tap themselves into this data supply chain, and they will then use that data themselves to dox people, to harass people, rob people, threaten them. And I've seen done to journalists, cyber security researchers, celebrities, all that sort of thing. And some of them even repurpose it into these incredibly powerful Telegram bots, where you enter somebody's name and their state. You send $15 in Bitcoin or whatever, and you'll basically instantly get their full docs.
Joseph:Their again, their address, their phone number, email addresses, even stuff about their phone lines sometimes. Like, oh, they use Vodafone or or whatever. And that's very powerful, information. We actually tested out one of those bots when we first covered, the sort of data supply chain. So it's very very convoluted bits.
Joseph:Basically, banks, bureaus, companies, hackers. Yeah.
Emanuel:So what agency is taking action here and what are they trying to do?
Joseph:Yeah. So this is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB. I imagine not many people have actually heard of this agency until recently. And, I mean, we'll get into that. And I think, Emmanuel, you'll have more to add on that because it's kind of above my head.
Joseph:But CFPB and, as you said, they've been looking into this for a while. They do a lot of stuff around financial privacy, that sort of thing. And, basically, what they're trying to do is widen the restrictions which are in place by a law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act, FCRA. And, basically, all that says is that if you are transferring credit information, like somebody's credit report, you are a consumer reporting agency and that means you can only transfer it for certain use cases. You know, you can only do it for insurance.
Joseph:You can only do it for legitimate business needs. You can't do it for marketing purposes and all of that sort of thing. So they're just trying to expand the law, really, and make it apply to more people. Now does that directly stop the hackers I follow getting this data? No.
Joseph:I also don't think the hackers care. They're not gonna be like, oh, no. The CFPB issued a new rule. I'm not gonna do the crimes. They're too busy doing some very, very serious violent crimes.
Joseph:But what it might do is that it means the data flows to fewer or less of these kind of garbage companies. And one that people may know is, what was it called, US public data, not national public data that was hacked, and that was dumped online, and that basically had everybody's SSN in, that sort of thing. Hopefully, it would stop the flow of data to, those sorts of companies.
Emanuel:Or there or there would be more accountability, so they would have to tighten up their protections to make sure it's not getting into the wrong hands.
Joseph:Hopefully. But, also, I would I think it would be the because I'm maybe it's just because I'm jaded. I I don't know. But I kinda wish there was just an extra bit in there that was, like, some sort of cybersecurity mandate where it's, like, you can't handle this data unless you're taking your security seriously.
Emanuel:Right. I think it's also worth noting that your reporting and the people in the government who care about this are coming at this from pretty different directions. Right? It's like, I I what I hear from you often when you report about this is that there's always this talk about, like, national security, and it's like China can use this information and that's dangerous for somebody who wants to hang a weapons company or whatever. But, really, what we see in reality in the wild is, like, young hackers using this data to enact real world violence on on people, their enemies, people they're trying to harass, and so on.
Emanuel:Do you have any sense if, the CFPB is getting wise to that fact, or it just so happens that they're enacting these protections for their own reasons and maybe it will have, like, good good, consequences for the reasons that you care about.
Joseph:I think both in the earlier example of the location data companies and the CFPB one, I think both of those agencies have maybe latched on as too strong, but emphasized the threat to military personnel because it's just like such an easy thing to talk about. Right? It's like democrat or republican or whatever party, you're not gonna go, oh, yeah, I'm fine with soldiers being vulnerable to blackmail from China or Russia or intelligence officials or whatever. Like, that'll be insane. Nobody's ever gonna say that.
Joseph:So I think it's very, very useful for that. When it comes to my particular use case, when it's following sort of young hackers using this data, I do think it will impact them in some form. And, actually, there was a there was a call with reporters before this became public. And I asked I can't remember exactly why I asked. I think I think I was asking, is this a narrow rule?
Joseph:Or do you think it's gonna be broadened that? And they said something along the lines of I'm paraphrasing a CFPB official. But it was something like, yes, it's it's targeting credit header data in one way, but we think it will have a broader impact, including on the issues that you report referring to me. Because there were a few reporters on the call who have obviously covered, this issue. But we'll wait and see.
Joseph:You know, I don't think it means that hackers will just stop and then be like, oh, okay. Well, we can't get this data anymore. There will be, other ways, you know. But that is all to say, if CFPB still exists, I mean, or is still an effective agency, can you, Emmanuel, explain is it Marc Andreessen, the the the VC guy? How does he play in into this?
Emanuel:Yeah. So you mentioned that most people probably haven't heard of this agency, and I think that's probably true because most people probably have not heard of most US agencies because there's a lot of agencies and they have a lot of obscure responsibilities. But to give everyone, like, a recent history lesson, right, there was the huge disastrous financial crisis in 0 7, 0 8 because of the financialization of the housing market. And, you know, not a lot of heads rolled because of that. You know?
Emanuel:Wall Street bankers just kept on getting their bonuses and kept their jobs. But one of the things that did happen is the formation of this agency. And the whole point of the agency is to protect consumers from, like, corporate shady, nasty things that, can happen in the financial sector. And that seems like a very important, role for the government to play, especially since it, like, completely collapsed our economy because the financial sector was going wild without supervision, without restriction, and so on. The reason that, the Marc Andreesens of the world and the Elon Musk of the world are currently, like, very upset about the agency and talk about how it is illegal and should go away is, Marc Andreessen, who is half of Andreessen Horowitz, otherwise known as, a 16 z, which is a hugely influential Silicon Valley investor, went on Joe Rogan's podcast, which he frequents now.
Emanuel:And he kind of as an aside, you know, it's a 3 hour conversation, but he just went on this tangent just like, hey, by the way, do you know that, the CFPB and Liz Warren and other people in the government debanked a bunch of, people in Silicon Valley because of crypto? And he he just mentioned this offhand. And since he said that, other people have come out on Twitter and basically blamed the failure of this or that crypto initiative on the government blacklisting them or debanking them or otherwise, just discriminating against them because they're trying to work in crypto, which will be eventually an alternative to financial institutions and the dollar even, and so on. I don't wanna get too deep into it, because I do actually wanna dig into those claims and report them out. If you're an expert on this subject, please reach out to me.
Emanuel:I'd love to hear from you. But what it sounds like to me is that in most of those cases, somebody is applying for a loan or is trying to do, you know, business with a bank and then you have to investigate their financials and people see that they're in crypto and they're like, this seems quite volatile as a business. I don't wanna do business with you. And they have compared that to being debanked or, discriminated against. All of this in order to say the incoming administration very much influenced by Andreessen, Musk, and so on, and they're talking about wanting to completely abolish this agency as they talk about abolishing other agencies.
Emanuel:Right? But this one seems quite personal because it hits them, in their wallet.
Joseph:Yeah. Musk says, trying to find the quote, delete CFPB. I think that's how it works, but the the sentiment, is there. Alright. Let's leave that there.
Joseph:Again, if you are an expert, in that area, definitely reach out to Emmanuel, because I'd love to hear more about that. And with that, I will play us out. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported 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.
Joseph:You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. 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. Also, just tell a friend to get them listening as well. That stuff really does help.
Joseph:This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.