Podcast
Lock and Code
Hosted by Malwarebytes · EN
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.
27episodes
Episodes
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Payment apps are watching what you say (feat. Rainey Reitman)
6d ago00:40:19Tap to summarizeIn the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes, like funding terrorism, engaging in money laundering, or violating sanctions.Sensible, right? Well, you can also face financial ruin for teaching poetry.That’s what seemingly happened to a Persian poetry teacher from Detroit whose accounts were flagged for “sanctions violations” because his students wrote “Persian classes” in their Venmo memos. There’s also the story about the naked yoga practitioners who lost their payment processor for 60 days, forced to rebuild a subscriber list from scratch. And we can’t forget the San Diego cannabis journalist cut off from Stripe—and from a paid Substack newsletter—because of the payment platform’s rules that prohibit the promotion of the sale of cannabis.This is “financial censorship,” and it often happens when a bank, credit card provider, or payment app decides that a customer is too risky to serve. But “risky” doesn’t always mean “illegal,” and when a major financial institution errs towards caution about what a customer is saying, advocating for, representing, or publishing, a lot of innocent people can be hurt in the process.That’s what the digital rights activist Rainey Reitman learned in writing “Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech.” As Reitman explained about these hugely impactful decisions:“Even if they are well-intentioned, the financial systems can end up pulling in a lot of people that are not the actual target… Sometimes we talk about this as dolphins in the fishing lines.”These decisions are difficult to fight, frustratingly opaque, and nearly impossible to reverse. Compounding the problem is that that there aren’t enough alternatives available for the financially censored to easily regain their freedom.The reality for hundreds of millions of people in this country is that about a dozen companies control all their finances. People mostly bank with Chase, or Bank of America, or Citigroup, or Wells Fargo. They mostly use credit cards assigned by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Capital One. And they mostly send money to one another and to small businesses using services like PayPal, Venmo, Cash app, and Square.For most people, these companies are supposed to operate in the background of their lives, providing reliable, secure financing to sustain and manage their livelihoods.In reality, these companies can become quite interested in what you say online, what payments you receive each month, and the locations those payments arrived from.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Reitman—who is also the president and a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—about the real stories of those who have been financially censored, why financial companies cut off customers for legal speech, and how a single company’s decision can create cascading consequences that feel impossible to fight.“They’d be locked out of Venmo, then they’d be locked out of PayPal—which is connected to Venmo—and then they’d suddenly lose their Chase Bank account. You could see that in a lot of instances, losing one form of access to the financial system, it could result in a pattern where they would be losing access repeatedly.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →AI is distorting the Holocaust (feat. Clara Mansfeld)
3w ago00:35:21Tap to summarizeIn May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the Holocaust. The people in said images were sometimes real—with real names, birthplaces, and stories of deportation that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum itself had shared before. They had real faces captured in real surviving photographs, which were likely abused to generate the false images.In other words, someone, or some team of people online, was deepfaking the Holocaust.As the Auschwitz museum wrote online:“These are not real photos of the victims. They are digital inventions, often stylized or sanitized, that risk turning remembrance into fictionalized performance. The history of Auschwitz is a well-documented story. Altering its visual record with AI imagery introduces distortion, no matter the intent.”Months later, the public found out what that intent was: money.A BBC investigation found an international network of Facebook accounts posting AI-generated images to earn money from those images’ potential virality. It’s a problem sometimes referred to as “AI slop” but it comes with a major incentive. When accounts that make these kinds of images are invited to Facebook’s content monetization program, they can make $1,000 a month for posting anything that gets clicks.And on Facebook, the BBC found, that means several accounts posting AI-generated images about the Holocaust. As the BBC reported:“AI spammers have posted fake images purporting to be from inside [Auschwitz], such as a prisoner playing a violin or lovers meeting at the boundaries of fences—attracting tens of thousands of likes and shares.”The economics of lying are concrete today. People can use AI to make fake images that make people feel good about terrible things or feel scared about untrue things, and they can make money until shut down by the Big Tech platforms themselves, which, in this case, only happened because of the BBC’s investigation. In fact, it’s that type of inaction from social media platforms that compelled the German government and multiple Holocaust memorial institutions to send an open letter earlier this year that asked for better controls and restrictions against this type of content.As the signatories warned in their letter, the economic appeal for these accounts to distort history is too high a risk to allow. You can read the full letter here.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Clara Mansfeld, a historian working on digital communications at one of the institutions signed onto the open letter—the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centers Commemorating the Victims of Nazi Crimes. In their conversation, Mansfeld discusses digital access to history, the manipulation of factual records through AI-generated imagery, and the threat that society faces when it becomes harder to evaluate the truth.“What happens when the first thought we have with every historical image is, ‘Is that even real or is that AI?’ I don’t think we have really grasped what that means for us as a society.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →Cyberattacks are raising your prices (feat. Eva Velasquez)
May 300:40:31Tap to summarizeYour prices could be going up because of a little something that one group has started calling the “cyber tax.”Not a “tax” in any regulatory sense of the word, this newly named “cyber tax” is instead a consequence of the growing number of cyberattacks on small businesses. According to the latest research from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 81% of small- and medium-sized businesses suffered a data breach, a security breach, or both, within the past year. And of those businesses, more than 50% of lost more than $250,000.According to the most recent data from the US Federal Reserve, the median American family has just $8,000 in savings, meaning that a hit of $250,000 could bankrupt a family and turn their lives upside down. But there’s an interesting layer within this data—the median American family is quite similar to the median American business. In fact, they’re often the exact same person.The local grocer, the nearby HVAC repair service, the avid cyclist who just opened a bike shop, and the tax professional, and physical therapist helping out neighbors are everyday individuals and family members. They do not have multimillion dollar corporations at their backs, supporting them with legal teams, insurance policies, and dedicated IT support teams.A loss of $250,000, then, is a potential loss of their business. And to stay afloat, the Identity Theft Resource Center found, for the first time ever, that 38% decided to raise their prices.“It was near 40% said ‘We actually had to raise prices—we had to pass this cost onto our customers,’” said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “We’re now really seeing the long-term downstream effects of cyberattacks.”As frustrating as the cyber tax can be, small businesses themselves are also facing a new wave of cyberattacks, from AI-powered phishing emails so convincing that small business owners can’t tell the legitimate from the illegitimate, to deepfake calls that impersonate the CEO of a three-person company, to supply-chain attacks that target small companies as a way to reach bigger ones.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Velasquez about cybercrime’s impact on small businesses, the new threats being deployed because of AI, and what is necessary to protect business owners and their consumers.“Great businesses with great protocols in place can still have a vulnerability exploited because this is what the cyber bad guys are doing all day long. They only have to be right once, whereas small business owners have to be right 100% of the time.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →Big Tech can stop scams. They just don’t (feat. Marti DeLiema)
Apr 1900:41:02Tap to summarizeA dreadful thing happens far too often whenever an older adult falls for a scam: They get blamed for it. Not the scammers who lied and cheated their victim out of money. Not law enforcement for failing to recover funds. Not even the Big Tech companies that could have the most important role in protecting people online—and which, it turns out, knowingly bring in revenue every year from fraud.Instead, it is the older adults themselves whose stories are often shirked aside because of a mix of ageism and denial. Allegedly left behind by technology, only an octogenarian would hand their password over in a phishing scheme, or open an email attachment from a stranger, or send money to a fake charity online. Everyone else, everyone else believes, is too savvy for the same.The data disagrees.When Malwarebytes studied this last year, it found that, depending on the type of scam—especially for things like “sextortion”—younger individuals were far more likely to report falling victim. Further, digging into data from the US Federal Trade Commission revealed entirely separate patterns. For example, while Americans between the ages of 80 and 89 reported the highest median loss due to fraud in 2024, they also made up the smallest share of their population to report a loss at all. And in 2025, that same group represented the smallest share of reported identity theft, a crime far more likely to be reported by people between 30 and 39.Questions about who reports what crimes at what rate are valid to explore, but it’s important to see the big picture: Americans lost at least $15.9 billion to fraud last year. Protecting older adults is actually about protecting everyone, and that’s because modern scams don’t arrive only where people over 70 spend time. They arrive where we all are, which is online. They come through endless text messages, they slide into social media DMs, and they prey on things any of us can be—a widow, a divorcee, or simply a lonely person.According to Marti DeLiema, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work, scams and fraud are now the most common form of organized crime globally, rivaling weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and sex trafficking. In 2024 alone, she said, the FTC estimated that older adults in the US had as much as $81.5 billion stolen from them. And the tools meant to fight back—broad consumer awareness campaigns, embedded warning messages at the point of transaction, the training of bank tellers and retail clerks—are nowhere near keeping pace.So what actually works? And who, if anyone, is doing the work?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with DeLiema about who is really susceptible to financial fraud, why victims often describe a scam as a form of betrayal trauma, and why the companies best positioned to stop scam messages from reaching consumers may be the ones least motivated to do so.“This is not a technical capability problem at all. This is a conflict of incentives.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →Killer robots are here. Now what? (feat. Peter Asaro)
Apr 500:42:32Tap to summarizeBig news: Lock and Code is nominated for a Webby Award! You can help us win the People’s Voice Award by voting here.---We have to talk about killer robots. No, not the Terminator, and not some Boston Dynamics robot run amok. We have to talk instead about a technological reality that is very much already here.In late February, the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic made a perhaps surprising statement for those who are only familiar with its helpful chatbot tool Claude: The company would not allow the government to use its technology to kill people without proper safety controls.Hold on… what?Despite Anthropic’s reputation amongst most everyday people as the creator of a collaborative AI-powered assistant for coding, writing, and searching, the company had already deployed Claude across the US government for strategic military needs. According to Anthropic, Claude was used by the US Department of Defense and other national security agencies for “mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.”But behind the scenes, the US government was asking for even more applications, and it wrapped all of its requests under a broad, vague term: “Any lawful use.” Anthropic bristled at the government’s request, defining two use-cases that were simply off limits: Mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons—or, put another way, the powering of independent killer robots.As Anthropic said in its statement:“Frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.”Sure, the guardrails may not exist today, but do they—can they—exist at all?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Peter Asaro, chair of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, about what a killer robot actually is, how close we are to seeing them deployed, and what some of the hidden consequences are to rolling out impossibly-quick, decision-making technology into a landscape where deescalation requires time, space, and human judgment.”This mass proliferation of targets, it just accelerates the speed of destruction and the intensity of destruction of warfare, and it doesn’t necessarily give you any kind of military or political advantage.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →This is all it takes to stop a train (feat. Rachel Swan)
Mar 2200:35:42Tap to summarizeForget the runaway train thrillingly shot in Buster Keaton’s 1926 film “The General,” and never mind the charging locomotive rescued by actors Denzel Washington and Chris Pine in the 2010 film “Unstoppable,” as there’s a far more frequent (and far less heart-pounding) railcar drama happening across California’s Bay Area: The repeated breakdown of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, all because of a few networking errors.Opened in 1972, BART today carries about 175,000 people every weekday on five separate lines to 50 different stations placed across dozens of cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Daly City, Fremont, Richmond, and more. Its tracks and railcars travel both above ground and below, and it is one of the only public transit systems in the US that goes underwater—traveling through what is called the TransBay tube. It is likely the region’s largest public project, spanning 131 miles of track, with a fleet of more than 700 cars, proving vital to workers and residents everywhere, and on May 9, 2025, it all came grinding to a halt, due to what BART officials called a “computer networking problem.”At the Glen Park station in San Francisco, would-be travelers found yellow caution tape at the entry gates. At the El Cerrito Plaza station, BART staff and police informed visitors that the system was down. And at the Rockridge station in Oakland, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle witnessed a small group of people sprinting up the stairs to try and catch a train that never came.It was the kind of meltdown for public infrastructure that puts an entire system in peril.And it happened again just months later.In September, a network crash brought BART to a halt, repeating almost the exact same frustrations and delays for travelers left without transportation to work.That’s the end of it, right? Wrong. In February 2026, another computer failure caused another outage.So, in one of the wealthiest regions in America, the subway doesn’t always run, its network is prone to crash, and any money for technology often goes elsewhere. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with San Francisco Chronicle transportation report Rachel Swan about what the BART outages revealed about the state of the system’s aging technology, why public infrastructure so often struggles to modernize, and what exactly went wrong in the three prior outages.“One piece of equipment—and again, this is old equipment—one piece breaks down and they completely lose visibility, so they don’t know where any of the trains are.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →Won't you see my neighbor? (feat. Matt Guariglia)
Mar 800:31:47Tap to summarizeOn February 8, during the Super Bowl in the United States, countless owners of one of the most popular smart products today got a bit of a wakeup call: Their Ring doorbells could be used to see a whole lot more than they knew.In a commercial that was broadcast to one of most reliably enormous audiences in the country, Amazon, which owns the company Ring, promoted a new feature for its smart doorbells called “Search Party.” By scouring the footage of individual Ring cameras across a specific region, “Search Party” can implement AI-powered image recognition technology to find, as the commercial portrayed it, a lost dog. But immediately after the commercial aired, people began wondering what else their Ring cameras could be used to find.As US Senator Ed Markey wrote on social media:“Ring’s Super Bowl ad exposed a scary truth: the technology in its doorbell cameras could be used to hunt down a lost pet…or a person. Amazon must discontinue its dystopian monitoring features.”These “dystopian monitoring features” aren’t entirely new, but that’s not to say that most Ring owners knew what they were allowing when they originally bought their devices.Bought by Amazon in 2018, Ring is the most popular manufacturer of a product that, as of 15 years ago, didn’t really exist. And while other “smart” innovations failed, smart doorbells have become a fixture of American neighborhoods, providing a mixture of convenience and security. For instance, a Ring owner away from home can verify and buzz in their mailman dropping off a package behind a gated entrance. Or, a Ring owner can see on their phone that the person knocking at their door is a salesman and choose to avoid talking to them. Or, a Ring owner can help police who are investigating a crime in their area by handing over relevant footage. Even the presence of a Ring doorbell, and its variety of motion-detecting alerts, could possibly serve as a deterrent to crime.What has seemingly upset so many of those same owners, then, is learning exactly how their personal devices might be used for a company’s gains.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation, about Ring’s long history of partnering with—and sometimes even speaking directly for—police, who can access Ring doorbell footage both inside the company and outside it, and what people really open themselves up to when purchasing a Ring device.”There’s this impression, a myth practically, that ‘I buy a ring doorbell to put on my house, I control the footage… But there is [an] entire secondary use of this device, which is by police that you don’t really get a lot of say in.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →What can't you say on TikTok?
Feb 2200:43:02Tap to summarizeA funny thing happened on TikTok last month, and its brought allegations of censorship, manipulation, and control.It was the week of January 22, and after a long legal battle, TikTok had finally—for the first time in its company history—moved its ownership to new, American stewards. But with the American restructuring, TikTok users immediately reported that something had changed: videos would sometimes fail to record any views, and even direct messages would fail to send. But, according to user complaints, the flaws weren’t random. Instead, they befell users who spoke openly about topics that have become political lightning rods in the US, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the actions of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.To some aggrieved users, the flaws looked like censorship. But, according to TikTok, the error messages and missing video count tallies were part of a larger power outage.“Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” TikTok wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). “We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”While TikTok has reportedly more than 200 million users in the US alone, it’s far from a universal app. But the changes made to TikTok hint at a bigger sea change in social media and the internet today, in which online spaces are increasingly being altered, shut down, or even controlled—if not through government plot then certainly through corporate influence.Oddly, the ownership change of TikTok was supposed to solve many of these problems.Since TikTok’s 2017 founding in China, American lawmakers and government officials claimed that American users were vulnerable to Chinese surveillance. All the data that Americans hand over when using TikTok—their names and email addresses, but also their viewing habits, interests, behaviors, political inclinations, and approximate locations—all of that, the argument went, should not belong in the hands of a foreign power.As FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2022, the risk of TikTok was:“The possibility that the Chinese government could use [TikTok] to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.”But the rocky start to the new American TikTok has only drawn renewed scrutiny: Have the past concerns about foreign manipulation now become current concerns about domestic manipulation?Today on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Zach Hinkle, senior social media manager for Malwarebytes, and MinJi Pae, social media content creator for Malwarebytes, about what they personally experienced during TikTok’s transition to American owners, why the changes matter for the delivery of news and information, and how the internet appears to be shrinking from its earlier promises.As Hinkle said on the podcast:“ The idea of the internet being a private, free space that was ingrained in its creation, and every platform since then sort of carried that spirit with it… those spaces are disappearing.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →Is your phone listening to you? (feat. Lena Cohen) (re-air)
Feb 800:42:17Tap to summarizeIn January, Google settled a lawsuit that pricked up a few ears: It agreed to pay $68 million to a wide array of people who sued the company together, alleging that Google’s voice-activated smart assistant had secretly recorded their conversations, which were then sent to advertisers to target them with promotions.Google denied any admission of wrongdoing in the settlement agreement, but the fact stands that one of the largest phone makers in the world decided to forego a trial against some potentially explosive surveillance allegations. It’s a decision that the public has already seen in the past, when Apple agreed to pay $95 million last year to settle similar legal claims against its smart assistant, Siri.Back-to-back, the stories raise a question that just seems to never go away: Are our phones listening to us?This week, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit an episode from last year in which we tried to find the answer. In speaking to Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Lena Cohen about mobile tracking overall, it becomes clear that, even if our phones aren’t literally listening to our conversations, the devices are stuffed with so many novel forms of surveillance that we need not say something out loud to be predictably targeted with ads for it.“Companies are collecting so much information about us and in such covert ways that it really feels like they’re listening to us.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →One privacy change for 2026
Jan 2500:18:14Tap to summarizeWhen you hear the words “data privacy,” what do you first imagine?Maybe you picture going into your social media apps and setting your profile and posts to private. Maybe you think about who you’ve shared your location with and deciding to revoke some of that access. Maybe you want to remove a few apps entirely from your smartphone, maybe you want to try a new web browser, maybe you even want to skirt the type of street-level surveillance provided by Automated License Plate Readers, which can record your car model, license plate number, and location on your morning drive to work.Importantly, all of these are “data privacy,” but trying to do all of these things at once can feel impossible.That’s why, this year, for Data Privacy Day, Malwarebytes Senior Privacy Advocate (and Lock and Code host) David Ruiz is sharing the one thing he’s doing different to improve his privacy. And it’s this: He’s given up Google Search entirely.When Ruiz requested the data that Google had collected about him last year, he saw that the company had recorded an eye-popping 8,000 searches in just the span of 18 months. And those 8,000 searches didn’t just reveal what he was thinking about on any given day—including his shopping interests, his home improvement projects, and his late-night medical concerns—they also revealed when he clicked on an ad based on the words he searched. This type of data, which connects a person’s searches to the likelihood of engaging with an online ad, is vital to Google’s revenue, and it’s the type of thing that Ruiz is seeking to finally cut off.So, for 2026, he has switched to a new search engine, Brave Search.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, Ruiz explains why he made the switch, what he values about Brave Search, and why he also refused to switch to any of the major AI platforms in replacing Google.Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Transcribe →