Lock and Code

Jan 26 2025 126 ep. 40 mins 328
Lock and Code Podcast artwork

Lock and Code tells the human stories within cybersecurity, privacy, and technology. Rogue robot vacuums, hacked farm tractors, and catastrophic software vulnerabilities—it’s all here.

  Technology  News
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Three privacy rules for 2025

Jan 26 2025 37 mins  
It’s Data Privacy Week right now, and that means, for the most part, that you’re going to see a lot of well-intentioned but clumsy information online about how to protect your data privacy. You’ll see articles about iPhone settings. You’ll hear acronyms for varying state laws. And you’ll probably see ads for a variety of apps, plug-ins, and online tools that can be diffic

The new rules for AI and encrypted messaging, with Mallory Knodel

Jan 12 2025 47 mins  
The era of artificial intelligence everything is here, and with it, come everyday surprises into exactly where the next AI tools might pop up.There are major corporations pushing customer support functions onto AI chatbots, Big Tech platforms offering AI image generation for social media posts, and even Google has defaulted to include AI-powered overviews into everyday se

Is nowhere safe from AI slop?

Dec 29 2024 38 mins  
You can see it on X. You can see on Instagram. It’s flooding community pages on Facebook and filling up channels on YouTube. It’s called “AI slop” and it’s the fastest, laziest way to drive engagement.Like “click bait” before it (“You won’t believe what happens next,” reads the trickster headline), AI slop can be understood as the latest online tactic in getting

A day in the life of a privacy pro, with Ron de Jesus

Dec 15 2024 33 mins  
Privacy is many things for many people.For the teenager suffering from a bad breakup, privacy is the ability to stop sharing her location and to block her ex on social media. For the political dissident advocating against an oppressive government, privacy is the protection that comes from secure, digital communications. And for the California resident who wants to know exactly how

These cars want to know about your sex life (re-air) (Lock and Code S05E25)

Dec 01 2024 45 mins  
Two weeks ago, the Lock and Code podcast shared three stories about home products that requested, collected, or exposed sensitive data online.There were the air fryers that asked users to record audio through their smartphones. There was the smart ring maker that, even with privacy controls put into place, published data about users’ stress levels and heart rates. And t

An air fryer, a ring, and a vacuum get brought into a home. What they take out is your data

Nov 17 2024 26 mins  
The month, a consumer rights group out of the UK posed a question to the public that they’d likely never considered: Were their air fryers spying on them?By analyzing the associated Android apps for three separate air fryer models from three different companies, a group of researchers learned that these kitchen devices didn’t just promise to make crispier mozzarella sticks, cru

Why your vote can’t be “hacked,” with Cait Conley of CISA

Nov 03 2024 39 mins  
The US presidential election is upon the American public, and with it come fears of “election interference.”But “election interference” is a broad term. It can mean the now-regular and expected foreign disinformation campaigns that are launched to sow political discord or to erode trust in American democracy. It can include domestic campaigns to disenfranchise voters in bat

This industry profits from knowing you have cancer, explains Cody Venzke

Oct 20 2024 35 mins  
On the internet, you can be shown an online ad because of your age, your address, your purchase history, your politics, your religion, and even your likelihood of having cancer.This is because of the largely unchecked “data broker” industry.Data brokers are analytics and marketing companies that collect every conceivable data point that exists about you, packaging it all into p

Exposing the Facebook funeral livestream scam

Oct 06 2024 36 mins  
Online scammers were seen this August stooping to a new low—abusing local funerals to steal from bereaved family and friends.Cybercrime has never been a job of morals (calling it a “job” is already lending it too much credit), but, for many years, scams wavered between clever and brusque. Take the “Nigerian prince” email scam which has plagued victims for close to two dec

San Francisco’s fight against deepfake porn, with City Attorney David Chiu

Sep 22 2024 20 mins  
On August 15, the city of San Francisco launched an entirely new fight against the world of deepfake porn—it sued the websites that make the abusive material so easy to create.“Deepfakes,” as they’re often called, are fake images and videos that utilize artificial intelligence to swap the face of one person onto the body of another. The technology went viral in the late 201