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- [00:01]
Sam Cole
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet.
- [00:07]
Joseph
Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more.
- [00:12]
Sam Cole
Sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.
- [00:27]
Joseph
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 404 Media Co 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 404 Media co. I'm your host Joseph and with me are 404 Media co founders Sam Cole.
- [00:58]
Sam Cole
Hey.
- [00:59]
Joseph
Emmanuel Mayberg.
- [01:01]
Sam Cole
Hello.
- [01:01]
Joseph
And Jason Kebler.
- [01:03]
Jason Kebler
What's up? What's up?
- [01:05]
Joseph
Very brief bit of housekeeping. We are running our latest FOIA forum. This is a livestream event where me and Jason teach you how to file freedom of information requests, public record requests. This is, you know, local, state and federal agencies. We do these whenever we can. The last one was about court records. This one's going back to FOIA and I think especially about the federal government. Just with a new administration coming in, I think there are a lot of things that people may want to find out about. So we're going to talk about how to get records related to the federal government. Even if you might, foia, a state or a local agency. Enough of that ramble. The timing is Thursday 23rd of January at. Oh my God. I gotta say the right time. Is it 1pm Eastern? Give me one second. 1pm Eastern on Thursday, 23rd of January. If you're a paying subscriber, I'm going to email out the live stream link. It's actually already paywalled on the site, but I'm going to email it out on the morning of. So if you're listening to this and you're not already paying and you think that'd be something you would like to join, please try to sign up. Sign up as soon as possible just because it might get a little bit messy trying to get the live stream link, you know, on the day. But if for whatever reason you're hearing this later or you can't make it, it will be recorded and it will be archived onto the website. We have a ton of stuff to talk about for that. We Have a ton of foyers to do as well, so. Really looking forward to that. All right, let's get into the news. The first story, Jason wrote this, and it's broadly about the TikTok ban and everything that happened there. Basically the biggest story in tech, decentralized social media is the only alternative to the tech oligarchy. Super quickly, Jason, do you want to run us through the TikTok ban? And I mean super quick, because could you go all the way back to when Trump initially really wanted this ban because K pop Stans were basically mocking him on the platform. Can you go from there and we'll run through why he got banned?
- [03:28]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I will try to speed run it. I think back in 2017, maybe 2018, Trump issued an executive order that was trying to ban TikTok for the reasons you said, more or less. There's sort of been a bipartisan political agreement that the Chinese government is using TikTok in some form to either influence youth and or spy on Americans. But they have not made really any of this public whatsoever. But the Biden administration picked up the idea of potentially doing a ban last year, and then it was pushed through Congress in a very interesting way, which is there wasn't enough support to kind of push it through, like on its own, more or less. And so it got added to a budget bill, I believe it was the Defense Reauthorization act, which funds the military. I think that one, yeah, it was tacked on. And that's kind of how Congress does legislation these days, where many, many, many laws get jammed into one specific law, which is usually a budget bill. And it passed both houses of government. And it essentially put this deadline for ByteDance to disinvest from TikTok in the United States or to face a band. And that deadline was January 19, which was the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated. So Saturday, the 19th comes around and the everyone starts panicking. The Biden administration says that they are not going to enforce this law. Trump sort of starts saying that he doesn't want to enforce the law. Shu Chu, who is the CEO of TikTok, says that he's working with the Trump administration to figure out how to keep TikTok online. And meanwhile, as some of. As part of some of the earlier threats to ban TikTok, ByteDance put American data into Oracle servers in this big thing called Project Texas, where basically, like Americans, data is hosted in on Oracle servers and then also is mirrored in Singapore. And so Oracle at some point says that they are not willing to risk running afoul of this law. And so TikTok, like ByteDance, shuts down TikTok on Saturday evening. Then Sunday rolls around, Sunday morning rolls around. Yeah, go ahead.
- [06:26]
Joseph
Just before we get into that. So it's banned. And look, I know that Some people think TikTok is a silly app. I don't know if many of our listeners think that, but plenty of lawmakers or just other members of the public think that, oh, it's just this silly little thing. Even if it poses a theoretical threat from China, it's not even really a big deal. But there are tons of businesses on there, small American business owners. As you go into the piece a little bit, Jason, I know people who have found communities and people they can really relate to on the app and they just can't do that necessarily on other social media platforms or discovery platforms. TikTok is much more about discovering sort of small creators that you just wouldn't on Instagram or elsewhere. So I just wanted to ask, like, when it's banned on that day and we all know it comes back, but when it was banned, what were you seeing? Because you know, the people I know who enjoy that app perhaps more than others, I mean, they were devastated, right?
- [07:35]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. Well, a peek behind the curtain. I was drunk at a bar when this occurred.
- [07:39]
Joseph
No way.
- [07:40]
Jason Kebler
Yeah way. But I was, I mean, I was scrolling through and you got, basically got this pop up saying, you know, TikTok is, has taken down the United States and we're working with the administration to get it back online, which was very quickly replaced by where President Trump has indicated that he is potentially willing to work with us to get TikTok back online. And it was offline, I believe, for like 13 hours or so. It was not offline for that long. I will say that I've spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out where people would go. I think that the obvious answer is Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, more or less, and that that's what a lot of TikTok creators were telling people to go do. I will say, as we've talked about before, these places are cesspools and they're disasters. And I think One reason why TikTok does feel more human and different is because whatever ByteDance is doing with the algorithm is keeping out a lot of like obvious spam type stuff. It's not perfect, but I was scrolling YouTube shorts and Instagram reels on Sunday morning hungover as I might scroll TikTok while I was banned. And it was just horrifying. The Stuff I was seeing, I mean, it was nothing that was even remotely related to my interest. Nothing that I would have wanted, possibly wanted to see. But anyways, TikTok more or less seems to have cut a deal with the Trump administration. And the Trump administration seems like they are willing to basically look the other way in the short term. And so TikTok is back online now.
- [09:26]
Joseph
Yeah. And to sort of bring it back to the piece that you just wrote. Again, it's more talking about the need almost to move away from all of these. Right. And you touched on it there, that some of these other platforms have turned into complete cesspools, basically. You mentioned Meta, you mentioned Twitter X, just very briefly, sort of. What are the problems with that, that they are bending to whatever coming administration is? What's your issues with them in the context of this piece?
- [10:00]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I mean, you look at the inauguration on Monday and you have Mark Zuckerberg there, you have Sundar Pichai there, you have Xuchu there, you have Jeff Bezos there, Tim Cook is also there. And you sort of had this, you know, tech oligarchy that we've been talking about for months at this point. And all of these platforms, every major corporate social media platform is now beholden to the Trump administration in some way. You have TikTok, whose existence in this country literally depends on them staying in Donald Trump's good graces. You have Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has made a shift. Right. Because Trump once threatened to put him in jail. You have X, which is literally being run by someone who's now in the administration because Elon Musk is part of this Doge group, which is now formally a real ish organization within the federal government. And I think this is a drum that we've been beating for a while. But if you are making a living on any of these social media platforms, which includes YouTube, you need to find ways to have some resiliency and to make sure that your audience can find you elsewhere. And that doesn't just mean for journalists and for creators, it also means for like, your friends and family and stuff like that, for the average user, in my opinion. And we're actually in this situation now where there are technologies and there has been groundwork laid that is allowing for resilient, decentralized social media platforms. And that's a long way of saying that Blue sky and Mastodon exists. They are working social media platforms. They're very small when compared to TikTok or to Twitter or to Facebook or Instagram, but they're getting bigger they're getting more usable, they're getting more interoperable. And I think that's, that's a very good thing. And that's something that creators who are worried about suddenly losing their platform overnight should definitely be thinking about.
- [12:12]
Joseph
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of stuff with YouTube where this was kind of before my time when it came to content moderation. And it wasn't so much the platform shut down or anything, because obviously YouTube is still there. But, you know, there's been the adpocalypse and stuff where advertisers have pulled money out and lots of creators, either rightly or wrongly, it really depends on the individual creator and the content. Right. But they suddenly have a massive slice of their revenue gone overnight or whatever. And that's very, very similar here, just in that the very existence of the entire platform now rests on whether Trump basically feels like or not. Or of course, there are the legal stuff as well. We don't fully know how the executive order actually is really going to gel with, like the law that banned it in the first place.
- [13:01]
Sam Cole
But you.
- [13:02]
Jason Kebler
I think that the future of TikTok is still very much in the up, up in there Apple. Like it's not on either app store anymore. So if there's some sort of problem with it where it needs to be updated, you know, the current version could start degrading. It's not clear whether Trump is going to continue to fight for this. And ByteDance has made no indication that it actually wants to sell. And so in the past when there have been ban threats, the national conversation has just kind of changed. And TikTok has continued to be able to exist. But now there's a deadline again. I feel like everyone is probably sick of talking about this. I. I know that other journalists who cover TikTok are really, they're just saying, ban it or don't ban it. Like, I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of the back and forth. And I think that that is actually a fair thing to think because you have this platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use that is being used as a political football in a lot of ways. And it's being used as a scapegoat when something like Luigi Mangioni happens and Republicans can point to TikTok and say, look, they're celebrating this person who killed a CEO. Or TikTok was being used by a lot of leftists and young people to talk about, you know, free Palestine and things like that. And that was being used by lobbyists in D.C. as a reason that it should be banned. So it wasn't just that it's a Chinese app, it's also that it is like more or less poisoning the minds of the youth, which I wholeheartedly disagree with that take and think that it's sort of an unconstitutional take despite, you know, this going through it, this the Supreme Court. I don't think that the proper. I don't think that the. I think that the people whose speech is being limited here are Americans who use the platform and who are being, you know, pushed to these other platforms at the same time. I think that putting all of your eggs in the tick tock basket thinking that this is now over is a big mistake.
- [15:12]
Joseph
Yeah. So you do have these alternatives. Blue Sky, Mastodon, there's a suffer one. What's it? Is it Pixel.
- [15:20]
Jason Kebler
Pixelfed and that.
- [15:22]
Joseph
Is that based on Blue sky or something? I haven't followed that.
- [15:25]
Jason Kebler
Pixelfed is based on Activity Pub, which is what Macedon runs on. And it's an Instagram competitor. It's incredibly small. But yes, it's notable because links to it were being blocked by Facebook which led to, you know, a Streisand effect where even more people were going to download it. And then Blue sky has said that it's going to launch an Instagram competitor soon. So I think that it's like as well. Yeah, I think that it's very early and I think that One thing that TikTok and Instagram have is that they have straightforward ways for people to have businesses on these platforms, whereas the decentralized social media ecosystem doesn't really have advertisements. A lot of the people who are there are, you know, anti advertisements, anti surveillance capitalism for reasons that I totally understand and, and broadly support. But like on TikTok, if you go viral, you can get direct payments through a creator's program. You can, I keep getting ads for this gum, this chewing gum company that sells its products directly and only on TikTok shop. You know, on Instagram it's like clothes companies are able to buy ads there and then you can kind of launch a whole business there. And that's not really an ecosystem that exists on the decentralized social media world. But I think that nonetheless people need to start building platforms elsewhere. And I guess very quickly to explain what this all means for it to be decentralized. It means that you can create an account on Macedon or on Blue sky and the dream is not fully here yet, but like, let's say that Blue Sky Corporate does something really shitty. You can take Your followers port them over to another instance of Blue sky run by a different company or a different server, a different person, and that won't really affect your day to day life. You will be able to take those followers directly with you and continue posting because the underlying protocol can't be easily censored and it, it's not going to be controlled by just one entity. So it makes doing things like banning a technology very hard or banning a company or social media platform very hard. But it also protects people in case the owner of it becomes, you know, like initiatifies it to a point where you don't feel comfortable being there anymore.
- [18:09]
Sam Cole
One of the reasons we picked Ghost as a platform for ourselves as well, just the idea that if Ghost makes some disastrous decision, the technology is such that we can pick it up and leave with our business and take it somewhere else.
- [18:29]
Joseph
Do you just want to explain that briefly, Emmanuel, Especially when it comes to distribution, why do we have so much of an emphasis on email? That's almost like, I know it's not quite the same, but that's almost like our protocol that we're relying on because we don't necessarily have to deal with the sort of, you know, a social website, a social media network shutting down overnight, that sort of thing at least as much. Like, why do you just talk about that a bit? Like why?
- [18:55]
Sam Cole
I mean, I think it is, it is very similar. Like one of the most valuable things we have as a business, maybe the most valuable thing we have is being able to contact our readers directly without going through one of these platforms. And that's via email. And that's one of the things that we can take with us if we leave Ghost and decide to build our own website or go to a different service. Which is obviously not something you can do if you're on TikTok. Right? It's like if you have 3 million followers on TikTok and that's your livelihood and they shut down TikTok as they did over the weekend, then that's it, it's over. You can beg people to follow you and they might, or some portion of them might, but you, you can't just take your audience with you. And I think this is one of the main things Jason says we should pursue. And I agree. And it's definitely something that we practically, you know, totally separate from this TikTok question. Just as practically thinking about how to run a business. We were, we said we have to own this audience, we have to have more control over our business than I don't know, a substack would give us, for example.
- [20:13]
Joseph
Yeah. Or just even throwing back to the years old when all of these new media companies were posting onto Facebook and we're going to put all of our resources there. And then it turns out that the Facebook pivot to video thing was just an entire grift based on fake numbers basically. Right. And they just kind of screwed with that. So I think. Well, it's just harder though, right? Because if, if you're then a TikTok creator or something and you need to then pivot to email, I mean, it's not straightforward. But I agree with everything Jason says that it's worthwhile doing, I guess just to, well, not wrap it up. Because then I have another question for Jason. But just one thing I want to say about like the risk and the TikTok band. It's still important to remember that TikTok has done some weird stuff like it did spy on journalists. Forbes did some really good reporting on this and the reporter there has a book coming out. It followed their location through IP addresses, that sort of thing. But there is no evidence of what is alleged and what is sort of the theoretical fear, which is that China is going to turn the app into a massive propaganda machine pushing what it wants to tens of millions of users and SW public opinion in the US And I think a really good post about this came from Kevin Collier, NBC News, and he posted the bluesky presumably other decentralized networks as well. I just happened to see it on Bluesky. He said just before the ban. This TikTok ban Eve. It's worth remembering how much the Biden administration declassified on foreign bad actors. There was Russia's plans on Ukraine, RT funding conservative influencers, Russia today, the Russian channel, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean hacking operations. It makes it even more striking. It never gave evidence of TikTok being a PII suck or a propaganda machine. It basically was a theoretical risk. And there is the risk there. But I think many people would agree that you don't ban an entire social media platform and app and violate the constitutional rights of tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans because of a theoretical threat. But just to wrap this up, Jason, you actually wrote a piece way back in March, back when this sort of ban was going through the motions. And you had a piece called the US wants to ban TikTok for the sins of every social media company. And maybe I'll try to paraphrase this, but you said the situation is an untenable mess. A ban will have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does. We highlight again the using mainstream social media platforms run by corporations do not actually own their followers or their audiences, et cetera, et cetera, including for businesses. That was in March 2024. Do you think that all played out?
- [23:19]
Jason Kebler
I mean, I think that is very much the case where I have not seen anything like this happen in the United States before. I think it is without precedent. Besides Sam's reporting on what's happening with pornhub in several states, a third of the United States now. But having a platform that was accessible one minute and then inaccessible to, you know, Americans the next minute is, I think, pretty chilling and I think pretty scary. And we can make fun of the influencers who were crying about losing their platforms and losing their. Their monetization and saying, like, they're taking it too seriously. But it's pretty crazy that this happened. I think, even though it was only for a few minutes. I think that we are used as Americans to being able to access pretty much anything on the Internet. And I call this an untenable mess. And I think I was talking about the uncertainty surrounding this. But I will also say that the ban itself, while it was enacted, was really interesting in that a VPN couldn't get around it. It wasn't something where you could just turn on a VPN and access TikTok if you were in the United States. It seemed to have something to do with where your account was created. It had like a little. Some metadata that suggested you were. Were an American user, meaning a friend that I have in Japan was locked out, for example. You can also tie accounts to Apple IDs, which is not as easy to circumvent. You can tie it to phone numbers and things like that. So I think that this did show that there's various ways that Internet censorship can occur and that it's not always. It's not as easy as turn on a VPN to circumvent it. And I think that the technical details of how this ban was implemented are pretty interesting.
- [25:30]
Joseph
Yeah. And I didn't have a fully enough time to dig into it before TikTok came back. But we should definitely look into that more to see if it does get banned again or if they start banning other platforms, who knows? All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back, we're going to talk about a story I wrote about a new AI tool that can geolocate photos in seconds and it's being marketed to law enforcement. We'll be right back after this.
- [26:12]
Jason Kebler
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- [27:56]
Joseph
We'Re back.
- [27:57]
Sam Cole
This next story is from Joe. The headline is the powerful AI tool that cops or stalkers can use to geolocate photos in seconds. Joe, maybe very quickly geolocate. Let's explain what we do it a lot, but maybe to readers who don't know what that is. What is geolocating?
- [28:17]
Joseph
Yeah, so it's when you'll take a photo and maybe on clues inside it such as, huh, there's a road sign. I imagine it's at this intersection. Or maybe there's very distinctive architecture and you get a sense of what country it's in or the vegetation or then even more advanced ones where the open source collective organization Bellingcat, they'll look at shadows and then figure out the exact point where American journalists were beheaded by isis. All of that sort of thing. There's a massive spectrum of techniques and sophistication, but it's basically using clues inside a photo to figure out where and potentially when it was taken as well. I mean, you say we do it a lot like I do it to I think, find where criminals maybe and that and that sort of thing. Is that what you're thinking? Yeah.
- [29:14]
Sam Cole
Whenever there is a viral video or just something that we want to report on that starts with a video on social media and you want to figure out, is this real? When did it take place? You start looking at the image and trying to see where it took place, when it took place, and so on. It's. It is one of the techniques, as you say, that fall under the umbrella of open source intelligence. And to simplify it even further, we'll circle back around to this. But I'm sure people have seen the very viral GeoGuessr Champ Rainbolt. When you watch him do his thing, he's geolocating, that's what he's doing. But this company, Geospy, how did you first hear about it and maybe tell us what it does?
- [30:00]
Joseph
Yeah, so I heard about geospy actually months ago and it was sort of on the back burner and. Oh, I'll cover that later. That sounds interesting. I saw people posting on, I think Twitter and definitely LinkedIn and that was the recent sort of impetus to kick me into gear to finally write about it. So geospy is this company that basically automates that geolocation process. So instead of a human looking at the soil, the architecture, the buildings, that sort of thing, it's an AI doing it. And rather than open source intelligence investigator or journalist or researcher or whoever spending months or years building up sort of the muscle necessary to quickly identify photos, this AI obviously built on a massive data set of millions of images. We don't know exactly what images, but millions of images. It can do that in seconds, which is obviously very interesting if you don't have the capability to do it yourself. And the thing that finally pushed me over the edge to finally write about it was that I saw they were more explicitly, at least than I remember, more explicitly marketing to law enforcement and governments. And when an AI tool pivots from consumer access, which is you can just sign up, until very recently, just start using geospy. Lots of people are doing that. When any company pivots from consumer to law enforcement, I'm obviously going to be interested.
- [31:40]
Sam Cole
What are some examples that you saw of people? How did they use geospy? And also, as someone who has geolocated images the old fashioned way, what is your assessment of how well it works? Are you impressed with the results?
- [31:56]
Joseph
Yeah, I Guess the first, I'll say the examples I did first, which is that I went to geospy AI, I made a free account and at the time it allows you to do five or six lookups a day and you upload a photo, it thinks for a few seconds, does its thing and then it provides a Google Maps style interface of where it believes that photo was taken or approximately where that photo was taken. And then a. A description of how it's analyzed the photo as well. So one, I took a photo from a story that Sam wrote several months ago about a man who was harassing a woman in a Waymo like jumping in front of it and not letting the autonomous vehicle pass. We know that's in San Francisco just through the nature of writing that article, but I just wanted to see like, huh, this photo of a guy standing in front of a car. Will geospy be able to pick up on that? And they uploaded it and it replies with this particular motel sign is in the background, so it indicates it's in San Francisco. The architecture of the buildings is very similar, all of that sort of thing. I think the ultimate location to put on the map was not one to one it was in that area, but it wasn't exactly on the intersection, but it still picked out, you know, a missable landmark in the background. And if you were doing this manually, if you had this photo and you're trying to figure out where it was, this is exactly what you'd be doing. You're looking for a business or something in the background that you could then figure out. So there's that and that's kind of on the lower end. I uploaded some inside public transit systems as well. It's still got those based on like the style of the chairs and that sort of thing. Jason gave me one from the LA wildfires which he took, which is interesting because that's obviously a very, very current event and it's not going to be the same as Google Image reverse image search where you upload that. It's just going to send you photos of other fires, not necessarily this fire, although it could do depending on timing, but it's not going to tell you where it is probably. And this said huh, Based on the architecture of the buildings, this looks like, I think it said Huntington beach or something, which is actually south of la. It's not perfect, but it's clearly looking at the content of the image and giving it context, which I found quite amazing. And then just the last couple of ones I'll say is that I went into the geospy community Discord, and the founder there had uploaded examples that he apparently run. And it was stuff like, oh, these cobblestones are very distinctive to Boston, or these trees are very distinctive to Boston as well. And the way he phrased it was something like, well, you've gone from the entire world where this photo could be, and now you've narrowed it down to just a few kilometers, essentially. Now, I don't think anybody would disagree with the fact that that just saved a bunch of time for sort of anybody using it.
- [35:13]
Sam Cole
Yeah, there's another example in the story that I thought was the most impressive, and it's not one that we uploaded. I think it's something you found in the community and it's just a dirt road, like a rural dirt road, and it was able to identify that. I think it's in Thailand, which, I mean, is obviously a big country. It's not a very specific location, but there's really no landmark. It's just dirt and trees. And the fact the AI is able to narrow it down to a country even I thought was really impressive and also very similar. If you watch Rainbow play, he'll see an image and be like, oh, that dirt, that's Iceland, you know what I mean? This tree, that's Hawaii. So it's doing something very similar. And it's one of those AI things where it's at once mind blowing. You can't believe that the AI can do this. But then you think about the data and you're like, oh, well, obviously somebody built this, and obviously it works pretty well. And you can imagine Google, for example, that has all the Street View data and every Street View image is pinpointed to a geographical location. They could probably build something like this fairly easy and much more accurate.
- [36:27]
Jason Kebler
One thing I wanted to say about the geoguessr and Rainbow being able to see some dirt and say, oh, this is Mongolia or whatever. One thing I learned that maybe listeners know, maybe they don't, is that there are a lot of tells in that game where they're not necessarily identifying that that dirt could be from Botswana, but there are essentially like eras of Street View cameras that maybe they had a certain resolution and you would then know based on, based on something in the image that Google was serving the continent of Africa during the era when this like image artifact would be in there. So it's a mix of people both knowing a lot about geography, but also a lot about Google Street View in particular.
- [37:20]
Sam Cole
Yeah, sometimes it's a specific car in front of the Google car. And he's like, oh, I know what road this is exactly. Just because of something specific like that.
- [37:28]
Joseph
Super briefly. Just because you bring that up, Jason. And I didn't know that. That's really interesting. But I did also uplo float to geospy the CCTV footage of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. I mean, we all know that was in New York City. That's not the point. It's just like I wanted to see if the geospy AI system would know that. And yes, it did, based on the vehicles and the street and that sort of thing. But it did say this appears to be CCTV footage. So it's picking up, not to the same degree as sort of your geoguessr like Google Street View artifacts, but it is picking up something about, oh, what sort of photo this is as well.
- [38:06]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I bring that up not just because I find it to be very interesting, but also because the AI may be picking up specific metadata in addition to analyzing what it sees in the images. Perhaps.
- [38:24]
Sam Cole
So why does this exist? Who made this and how?
- [38:29]
Joseph
Sure. So Daniel Heinen is the founder of Greylark Technologies. That's the company behind it that then made geospy and didn't respond to my requests for comment. Unfortunately, I'm always interested in hearing directly from the people who develop these tools. So I went and I found a really interesting YouTube video where he's speaking to the head of another company called the Social Proxy, which nobody steal this, but we should probably look into them as well because they facilitate the scraping for AI companies, which I find very interesting. And they seem to have some sort of relationship based on that YouTube video. But in there, Daniel Heinen explains that initially they were building a tool more around profile photos and trying to do something with that. They don't specify what exactly, but scraping a bunch of profile photos, because often people will, in their profile photo, it'll be a location that's important to them. Maybe it's in their city or something like that. But what they were finding is that those photos often have the metadata removed. As many people know, when you take a photo on an iPhone or an Android or whatever, it will often be coupled with the geolocation data. If you upload that file raw to your computer and you go in the command line or use the tool to look at the metadata, it will still contain the GPS coordinates. Probably if you upload it to Twitter or, I presume, several other social media sites, the site removes that metadata. So they were kind of stumped, like, well, it's removed this useful information. So what are we going to do? So Heinen then says the team came across this research paper talking about picking out important things from the photo itself. They decided to build a proof of concept to say, hey, look, this is what's possible by sort of implementing that research. And that's how you end up with geospy, picking up on the soil, picking up on the architecture, the space between buildings, all of this sort of thing. And I don't know exactly when he made it, but last year at some point he quit his job to then work on it full time and selling it as an enterprise and a pro product with the free access stuff until very recently. And it's definitely. Maybe popular is not the right word. They said they had a million unique visitors at some point on the site, but it's been getting more and more attention and at least maybe I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I believe he said something like they were surprised by how popular it became.
- [41:25]
Sam Cole
So one way it's getting popular is it has a discord where this guy who made geospy is in Daniel. And then, I don't know, you would assume maybe potential customers who are interested in it, but then also just a bunch of people who are playing with it. What did you see them do with geospy when they could still use it?
- [41:49]
Joseph
Yeah. So you go into the discord and Heinen's in there talking about product stuff, giving updates, what you would expect from any sort of AI project that uses Discord. Exceptionally common. I then started searching for evidence of what people were using the tool for or wanted to use the tool for. And in a handful of cases, I found people uploading a photo of a house that belong to a specific YouTuber. And in one case, you know, it's a group of like three young women. I'm not familiar with the YouTuber, but I looked at their channel and it looks like it's free young women. And this person was asking for help trying to find that house. So obviously they're trying to stalk this person in some capacity. And I found multiple examples of that. I should say that they immediately got shot down. Like there wasn't anybody going, oh yeah, I'm going to help you stalk. They were making jokes like, did you get lost? You're clearly in the wrong server. And the founder, Heinen as well, pushes back when somebody says they're getting a job or a job interview at a PI firm, maybe they'll be paid to stalk people soon. He's like, bro, what the fuck? Not in my server. All of that being said, you can still push back against stuff while facilitating stuff or potentially facilitating it as well. And I guess as for what else appears in that server, often YouTubers. Well, over the past several months, lots and lots of YouTubers have been making videos about Geospy. Either because they're marveling at the technology and I look at this, or maybe they're saying this is creepy or some will use it to test it against professional geoguesses. So there was one YouTuber who is very, very good at geolocating photos and he looks at something and say, oh, I think it's in this country. He then tries out geospy and it gets it immediately. So there's been a lot of social media hype about this tool and then Heinen will take those videos and then paste them into the discord because I mean it shows how powerful and effective the tool is, you know, So I.
- [44:00]
Sam Cole
Can'T think of a legitimate use case for this unless you're the police trying to get information about a crime or a suspect or something like this. How are they marketing it to police? And also, do they have any other industry or client in mind for this?
- [44:25]
Joseph
Yeah, so we've been dancing around this, but I guess I'll just say that when I reached out to GeoSpy for comment, the first was via, I think the contact form on Greylark Technologies website. And then I DM'd the founder, Daniel Heinen, never got a response. But the day after that they closed public access to the tool, whereas you supposed to just sign up and as I said, do five or six lookups per day. That got closed off. I saw people complaining in the discord saying, whoa, what the hell, there's no more free geospy. I don't have a clear explanation on why exactly it was closed. Obviously I've asked, I haven't received a response. So people could use this. Obviously the YouTubers were doing it. As I just said, they were doing all these demo videos and stuff. Right. But now it's closed and you have to request access. And it says it's open only to I think specific enterprises or government and law enforcement agencies. And if you go on the website and after seeing this, this is what made me decide to finally cover it. It says for government and law enforcement, GeoSpy Pro is an advanced AI platform integrating powerful AI location models for your city or country, delivering up to meter level accuracy, state of the art computer vision models, all in an easy to use interface for government and enterprise. So obviously marketing it to the cops. I can think of other use cases. Let's say you're the New York Times Visual Investigations desk with some very, very good people there and you want to use this tool. I can see them paying for it and presumably they will responsible with it. At least you would hope so. I can also see why the police would want it. Absolutely. Another sort of area using it is I spoke to, or rather I just shot some emails with Christopher Alberg who is the CEO of Recorder Future and they're a cybersecurity threat intelligence company. Lots of different stuff like scraping dark web, also directly interfacing with threat actors, all of that sort of thing. And they invested into GeoSpy. So obviously just take any comments with a normal grain of salt with that in mind. But they said the tool is amazing, they use it and it gets passed to their customers as well. So there's not just government, there's sort of private investigative companies as well is what I would say. Yeah, but I don't know if any police are buying this yet. I didn't see any federal contracts, at least initially. But I guess we'll wait and see, you know.
- [47:06]
Sam Cole
Yeah, I don't know if we'll hear a ton more about geospy. We might, but this strikes me as one of those ideas that is too appealing and the cat is out of the bag and someone will build this. Maybe it's another company, maybe people make something that is open source, but I think it's too compelling of an idea to not be available to people in some way.
- [47:36]
Joseph
Yeah, I mean it happened with facial recognition as well. We had Clearview for the cops and then we have is it PIM eyes for normal people and all that sort of thing. All right, thank you for grilling me about my article, Emmanuel. 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 are a paying 404Media subscriber, Sam is going to tell us all about these incredible images from the phone maker Nokia. We're going to scroll through them, laugh, cry, maybe other various motions showing all of their early designs. There's some really, really wild stuff in there. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. 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 404 Media co. 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 the bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. Leave some more of those and I will read them out at the end. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.