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- [00:00]
Joseph
Foreign 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.
- [00:36]
Jason Kebler
Hi.
- [00:37]
Joseph
Emmanuel Mayberg.
- [00:39]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Hello.
- [00:40]
Joseph
And Jason Kebler.
- [00:42]
Jason Kebler
Hey. Good to be here. Yeah, good to be here. Jason.
- [00:47]
Sam Cole
Let's see the turn around for the, for the viewers at YouTube. I want to see the merch. Actually this is the first time I'm seeing it. It's beautiful.
- [00:55]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
- [00:56]
Joseph
And for audio only listeners, Jason is wearing the sweatshirt of our new merch which. Jason, you wanted to give us an update on that briefly before we get to this week's stories.
- [01:11]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, so a few things, I guess I've mentioned this a lot, but I mail out all the merch from my garage. And so because of that and because we're not like an e commerce business really, we've been ordering not that many of each size of thing that we've bought. And very excitingly, we just got a lot of merchant in stock and a lot of it is already sold out, which we were not expecting and we're very thankful for. So I mailed like a hundred packages yesterday, which is a lot. But we're out of a lot of the sizes and things like that. We are going to try to restock as quickly as possible if you're interested in buying merch. And again, like one of the reasons why I don't keep a lot in stock is because it takes up a lot of space in my apartment. And now we have like hoodies and sweatshirts and three different types of T shirt. And keeping all the different sizes has been like really hard. So, um, I know a few people have asked like, why don't you have XYZ size? And that's because other people bought them, which is very, very thankful. But we, we are going to reorder and I think that we're probably going to look into just like a different solution that will allow us to keep different sizes in stock for longer. So there's that.
- [02:45]
Joseph
Yeah, if you go to our website forifulmedia Co, at the top there should be a merch tab and you just click there, it'll to take you to our Shopify and you can order there. And definitely looking forward to wearing the merch myself as well. Let's get to this week's stories. The first one is one that Jason wrote. The headline is, it's total chaos internally. A Meta Right now, Employees protest Zuckerberg's anti LGBTQ changes. This is sort of a follow up to what we spoke about last week, what we covered last week. But of course. Well, essentially every tech publication is covering because it's hugely important in that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta came out and they announced these sweeping speech policy changes and content moderation changes in that they are lifting restrictions, as they phrase it, on some topics which are out of touch with mainstream discourse, which is how Zuckerberg phrases it. I know that because I just watched the video because I'm writing my own article about Meta at the moment. And those include immigration, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sort of the top line takeaway is that, yeah, sure, on Facebook and Instagram, you can now just go and say that, oh, you're, you know, gay people are mentally unwell, trans people are mentally unwell, or whatever. Obviously, it's not just the gender identity and the sexual orientation stuff. That's just more what sort of came up in this article. So those changes all happen. Jason has been getting a ton of leaks from inside Meta pieces last week and then these more recent ones. But, Jason, how many Meta employees did you talk to for this one? And, and you know, what were they telling you about the reaction inside Meta to these policy changes?
- [04:45]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, you're right. We did talk about this last week, but it's continued to be like, probably the biggest story in tech. So we're gonna talk about what's changed. For this story, I talked to five people who are current employees at Meta, but I also got tons of screenshots sort of like, of the internal reaction to these changes. And so, you know, I, I spoke to and interviewed five different people, but then I also had screenshots that represented like, hundreds of different comments from, from people who say that this change is going to make people less safe, that it is sort of. Well, it's very interesting because Mark Zuckerberg said that he's. Anyone who leaves the platforms because of these sorts of changes is virtue signaling. But this is part of, like an entire news cycle and shift at the company to virtue signal to the incoming Trump administration that Meta is going to more closely align with that company's policies.
- [05:49]
Joseph
And I'm allowed to leave a platform if I think people are gonna give me shit. Why do I have to stay at your platform if I'm gonna face that, abuse myself or if my friends or my colleagues or who, whoever. It's ridiculous to frame it like that.
- [06:05]
Jason Kebler
But.
- [06:05]
Joseph
Sorry, continue.
- [06:06]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to it, which I think is why we wanted to talk about this again, which is the broader context that this is all happening in is like, Mark Zuckerberg has been a punching bag for conservatives for a long time. We've written a lot about this over the years. Like, Ted Cruz, for example, was obsessed, just absolutely obsessed with the fact that Facebook once deleted a Chick Fil A appreciation group as, like, hate speech or something to show that Meta was biased against conservatives. And, Joseph, you and I did a really big story about how content moderation used to work at Facebook, and it was clear that this was some sort of mistake. The company said it was a mistake, but, you know, there's like, billions of users posting all sorts of stuff all the time. And so things get taken down by mistakes sometimes. And sort of like in the wake of Elon Musk saying, hey, there's no rules at all on Twitter, more or less, you know, he's become Trump's best friend, more or less. And there's a rivalry between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. They probably will never do an MMA fight, but they've discussed it at length.
- [07:27]
Joseph
Well, that's because that's something that Musk can't fake. He can fake all he wants in path of Exile 2 or Diablo 4, but you can't fake throwing a punch in MMA. That's a side effect.
- [07:39]
Jason Kebler
Zuck would also definitely win. Not that it matters, but it's like Zuck has spent the last several years just, like, obsessively training mma. Whereas, like, Elon, I don't know what he does, but he plays video games and tweets all day, but he doesn't.
- [07:52]
Joseph
Even play video games. He doesn't do anything. That's a different story that I covered, which we're not going to talk about because I'll get really, really mad about it. But that's the context.
- [08:01]
Jason Kebler
So there's that, but then there's also the TikTok ban, which is like, TikTok is the biggest competitor to Meta right now. Like, you know, TikTok is destroying Instagram reels, at least among a certain subset of users. It's a better platform. It has a better algorithm. There's less, like, insane stuff on there. And Zuckerberg has been for years talking about how the US Needs to beat China, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Trump has signaled that he, he's like not that interested in a TikTok ban. But meanwhile Zuckerberg is like going to mar a lago twice. He's like sucking up to Trump. He's moving the entire company to the right. And we haven't written an article about this. But like, I think that part of this is Zuckerberg thinks that he can possibly help get this TikTok ban over the line. Like get it, get it banned. Therefore then one of his biggest competitors is no longer in the US and he's like more closely allied with the Trump administration, blah, blah, blah. He went on Rogan, he talked all about like the US Government and the Biden administration attacking him for years. He's just like doing full on like right wing talking points at this point.
- [09:21]
Joseph
And I mean just on that. Cause you brought up the Rogan podcast. We have our resident Rogan whisperer, Emmanuel, who listens to all of the Rogan podcasts. Because I'm not gonna do that and I appreciate that he sits through them and interprets them for me. Emmanuel, did you listen to the Zuckerberg Rogan podcast and sort of what was your takeaway from that?
- [09:42]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I listened to most of it and it was very frustrating because most of it was what Jason is describing and kind of very transparent, appealing to the incoming administration and positioning of the company where I think Zuck sees the American mainstream, which is more to the right, obviously, because Trump won the election. And it's frustrating because like the Rogan style of interviewing is, with the exception of people who are like anti marijuana, he will not push back on anything. He kind of just like flows with the views of whoever he has on. He's not a confrontational interviewer. I do think that it is worth listening to Zuckerberg when he talks about the Biden administration pressuring him to remove certain content from the platforms. Like most of this stuff is referring to like Covid era misinformation or perceived misinformation. But like even putting the merit of those posts or the removing of those posts aside, I think it is, and I'm asking the rest of you if you agree, but like the fact that the current administration would email a social media company and pressure them to remove this type of content or that type of content is notable. And it's kind of scary and I totally understand him if he at first capitulated entirely to those pressures because of the panic around Covid and people weren't sure what is Dangerous misinformation and what isn't, and then kind of having an awakening and being like, wow, that was a really scary moment for me. For as a CEO of like a major social media company that has influence over billions of people, like, I think that's a fair thing to, you know, bring up and be upset about and want to have better different policies around. I'm not saying that the current policies that he has are those policies, but kind of pushing back on that, I think is a legitimate thing. What do you guys.
- [12:03]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I mean, I guess what I was going to say is it's very interesting because I see this primarily as like literally virtue signaling. Some people have called it vice signaling. It's whatever, doesn't matter. But it's like, as we've written millions of times, it's like meta's content moderation is horrible and it has been horrible for a long time. There was a period many years ago where it was slightly better, but they have like laid off these content teams. We find horrifying shit on Facebook and Instagram all the time. They like very rarely remove this stuff. They take down stuff that they shouldn't be removing all the time, such as our articles and links to competitors websites and like all this sort of thing. So I think that like, in practice, like the content moderation situation is a disaster and has been for a long time and the administration like pressuring them to take stuff down. It's just like it feels like some sort of like self own by the Biden administration, which is like not super shocking to me. But I think that this entire like, host of changes, the getting rid of fact checking, which is like a terrible program, should have never happened, should have never like, existed because it was so shitty and like, was checking the wrong things and was done by people who like, I don't think did a very good job. I just think that like rolling all them out at the exact same time immediately before Trump takes office in this broader context is like, that's the story. The story is like meta Mask off. Meta goes maga. The topic of like 15 different podcasts that I've seen before and things like that. But it's like, I don't think that, I don't think meta platforms were a safe place for LGBTQ plus people. I don't think it was a terribly like safe place for immigrants. I don't think it was a safe place for sex workers. We've written about it a lot and I think that to some extent them saying like, we're not, we're overtly not going to care about this stuff anymore. Will have impacts and bad ones. But at the same time, it's not like they were some bastion of like, good policy before this. I don't know. Sam, what do you think?
- [14:23]
Sam Cole
Yeah, I mean, the mask off thing is interesting because it's like, did you prefer the mask? Like, it was still the case in a lot of ways. Like, at least now maybe they're being real about it. But yeah, I mean, like, there's, like you said, there's been a million different pieces, like, tearing this apart as part of like, like Zuckerberg's effort to like align himself with Trump. And it's not just like, I mean, it is partially like big tech owners want to be in bed with whatever's in power, whatever party's in power, whoever's in power. It's also like Zuckerberg's been like dragged in front of Congress several times in the last four years and like, has a lot of like, antitrust criticism against him and stuff like that. So I think he's, he's like, this is my actual, like, company on the line. Like, are, like, it was a conversation for a while. I think it's not anymore. But whether or not Facebook as a monopoly was going to get broken up, I think now that's not only off the table. It's like he's making sure it's not just like my company's going to be solid forever. It's like my company's going to be like, favored by the administration. And also I'm going to have a lot of like, lobbying leeway and I'm going to have a lot of like, power in those rooms. So it makes sense. And yeah, the MMA thing is really interesting because like, he's been hanging out with those guys and like, obviously, obviously they have had some influence. Like was radicalized by mma. I don't know.
- [16:00]
Jason Kebler
But yeah, I believe it's like a degree of like self radicalization mixed with. He's always been this way. He's like a Silicon Valley billionaire, but he was wearing that mask. And then one other thing he said on Rogan and he. And there was a really good article in the Atlantic by Charlie Warzell about this with the title we're all trying to find the guy who did this. It's like Zuckerberg has been professional victim player acting like these things, such as these fact checking programs, their content moderation policies, like all sorts of other things are things that like somehow just happened to meta that he had no role or decision over. And it's just like he did all of this stuff, like, he's the CEO of the company. He's been the CEO since day one. Meta, you know, oversaw, like, credibly accused of sort of like overseeing a genocide and Myanmar. It's just like, this is not. It's his fault. It's been his fault the whole time, and it will continue to be his fault. And the last thing I'll say on. On that is like, there's also. Trump was also suing him over being banned in the aftermath of January 6th. And there's some speculation, like, you know, Zuckerberg is groveling to him to drop that lawsuit or to settle that lawsuit or something. And so have some corporate bribery occurring as well, possibly. It's just like the whole thing is crazy.
- [17:31]
Joseph
Well, and saying that he could be in prison, it's like, I'm going to put. I'm going to put Zach in prison for the rest of his life. Emmanuel, were you going to say something?
- [17:41]
Sam Cole
Everyone should be in prison, involved in this. They should be in there together.
- [17:45]
Joseph
Yeah.
- [17:46]
Emmanuel Mayberg
The thing that I wanted to add is that it is more Mark's fault that it is anyone else's fault. But how bad Facebook is now, I guess you can also say, is a societal failure. Joe, you and Jason wrote this really deep dive into Facebook moderation, I think it was in 2019. We mentioned this piece a couple of times. And the point of that piece, in my opinion, correct me if you have a different, different view on it, is that at the time, Facebook was trying really hard, or at least pretending to try really hard, to be good moderators of its platforms. But it was an inherently impossible job, which I believe was the title of the piece. And that's because the platform is too big. It owns too much of the Internet. It's in too many parts of the world. And you can't have concentrated power, properly moderate all these different territories, all these different languages, with different cultures, with different politics, where things have contradictory meanings than they do in other locations, et cetera. And that's a really good point and good article, but that itself is a result of a failure of, I suppose, the FTC, right? When in the 2010s, Facebook was on this spree where it had challengers, and whenever it had a challenger, Facebook just bought it, Right? It bought Instagram, it bought WhatsApp. It copied and essentially killed a lot of the power that Snap had. And I agree with Jason that a lot of what we're seeing now is maneuvering against like, actual competition that we're seeing from TikTok. Right. And that this appeal to the right, as Sam said, is pushing against a solution to the inherent problem, which is like antitrust. Right. It's like for a few years now we've heard kind of bipartisan support for antitrust moves against Facebook. You had it from the Democrats who thought there was misinformation and abuse on the platform. And then you had it from conservatives who, you know, thought that their conservative opinions were being silenced. And when Democrats are in power, he goes before Congress and he pretends like they're trying to do a really good job moderating. And now that Republicans are in power, he just is going to pretend like he's the most right wing MAGA social media CEO that ever was. And I mean, I don't think it could be any more obvious than that. He's just trying to neutralize the lawmakers that, who are now in power and previously said that they're going to break up his company. So now he's saying the exact opposite of everything he said previously. And you know, I've listened to his justifications on, on Rogan and everything and I, I, I think you can, I don't know, you can find a way to believe that story. But, but the actual reason is so obviously there on the table.
- [20:48]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, it's very interesting because they're, they're also like a super imperialistic company obviously. It's like they want to be in every country, they want to be all things to all people everywhere across the entire world, across every language, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know, you, you don't have to do that. But they like are insistent upon being that and they're like very bad at like, despite all this, they are an American company. Their focus is in the United States. They make the vast majority of money in the United States because ad revenue is higher in the US for like up, you know, economic reasons where the US is a richer market and so they can charge more. And so you get these situations where like people in other countries especially are fucked because they don't have as good of protections and like Meta does whatever it wants. And I think that Zuckerberg here sees an opportunity for like, you know, Trump who wants to buy Greenland or whatever and like, you know, tariff everyone. He sees an opportunity for, to use the United States government as a shield. And he specifically brought, brought that up in Rogan where he was like, the EU has been finding all these American tech companies and the Biden administration hasn't protected us and in fact the Biden administration was the tip of the spear attacking us. Like is a specific thing that he said. And I don't know the extent to which like the Trump administration can protect Meta from EU fines and EU regulations and things like that, but I think he sees an opportunity for like, if I super align myself with this very like nationalistic president, perhaps he can like beef with France or the or Switzerland or the EU or whatever to prevent my company from getting fined in the future. Like, I think it's that simple. It's like how can he protect his company and make the continue to make the most money with the least interference globally?
- [22:54]
Joseph
Yeah, I buy into that super cynical reading of it as well. It's just that simple, really. Speaking of gluing onto different administrations, I have a thought on that, but we'll take a quick break and then when we come back we'll finish talking about this story and our other story as well about location data. We'll be right back after this.
- [23:23]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Foreign.
- [23:29]
Jason Kebler
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- [28:17]
Joseph
All right, we're back to bring it back to the story that Jason did. One thing that's bothering me is Mark Zuckerberg's quote where he says we're lifting these restrictions because the restrictions are just sort of out of touch with mainstream discourse around gender identity and immigration, sexual orientation and that sort of thing. And as I think we've established all of that context you all very clearly laid out, when he says mainstream discourse, he's talking about Trump won the presidency, but it's just a very, very easy crutch that he can rely on. And there are some very horrible people in the world. There's very horrible people on Facebook. I don't know if the majority of people participating in that discourse are itching to get onto Facebook to call gay people mentally unwell. I don't think people are like, oh, my God, finally I can do that. The vast major of people support gay marriage. And that number goes up and up. The idea that you can just say, oh, well, we're just reflecting mainstream discourse. No, you are creating the environment for that discussion as well, for good and for bad. But bringing that up to bring us back to Jason's piece, you speak to these Metro employees with all of that context happening and all of these changes, there's a real mix of things they tell you, Right. I mean, some are joking where they say on this internal message board, well, I'm LGBT and mentally ill, so I'm going to take the rest of the day off, if you don't mind. What are some of the other things that people are saying? And I think there's one here that I've just highlighted in our Google Doc, which is sort of that mainstream discourse bit. I'm talking about where, okay, these comments about trans people or whatever, they don't even reflect mainstream scientific consensus.
- [30:24]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I mean, they don't. And that what you're highlighting is people were very interested in how this policy was made. The New York Times had a report that basically, like, Zuckerberg directed this, you know, decision alongside a couple, like, very few, like maybe like six top executives, which is not how policy is normally made at Meta, like I sat in on a policy making decision where There were like 200 people on a call and I was in a conference room listening to it. I reported on this for Motherboard back in the day, and it was about the Tide Pod Challenge and it was specific, which is where, like, teens were allegedly eating Tide Pods. And literally they were like, well, did we consult, like eating disorder experts? Did we consult poison control? Did we consult, like these teen safety organizations? What did they say? And this was like months after the Tide Pod Challenge had gone viral and then already wasn't viral anymore. It was like a very long process that was very considered. And so people were like, why didn't you do that for the LGBTQ changes here? It sort of didn't go through normal Meta protocol. And then also it's just like I talked to one person who said, quote, it's total chaos inside Meta. People have been threatening to quit. Some people have quit. One person said, I would resign in protest if I hadn't already resigned. Meaning that they had recently, like put in their two weeks notice. And, you know, we're in that period. Um, and then also there were a few people who were team leaders who talked to me and sort of said, like, my team is very, very, very upset about this. So there's that. And then there's another story that, that I did sort of immediately after this about Meta deleting trans and non binary messenger themes, which is like a public facing thing where in your DMs with messenger you can change the color scheme. And Meta announced these during Pride Month a few years ago to like, much. I mean, people who pay attention to this sort of thing, like meta product updates, like, there's a pretty big rollout. There's like a video, a live stream. There were like non binary employees talking to the Trevor Project, which is an LGBTQ rights organization, and they just kind of like deleted that. They got rid of tampons in the men's bathroom in their offices for, you know, trans people who are using them. And this is. It's just all part of like a concerted, like timed shift rightward that's all happening at once. And I think part of it is like, these are not going to be popular changes for many of our employees, for many of our users. They also announced they're not going to do diversity. They're not going to consider diversity in hiring anymore, which is like a big thing. Yeah, they're just like rolling back all sorts of things that they had rolled out in the last few years. And I think they're trying to, like, do it all at once, just to one, rip the band aid off and two, signal to the incoming Trump administration, like, we're here to be. We're here to support your cause, whatever.
- [33:49]
Joseph
You want to do. Like, so meta deletes this trans and non binary messenger theme, which is just, you know, a color theme and a messenger in the same way you could download stickers or whatever in different apps. It's a purely cosmetic thing, but crucially a way for people to express themselves, you know, and I thought Zuck said we're lifting restrictions because we want more free speech, and then, no, but not that free speech. We've got to delete this thing where people can express their sexual orientation or gender identity anyway, as stupid as that is. Did meta. Because you get details about this and you write it up and you obviously always ping meta for comment. Did they tell you why they had removed this theme from Messenger? Do they give you a reason?
- [34:40]
Jason Kebler
It's interesting they didn't comment on this. They didn't respond to this. They usually respond to me. And they also didn't respond to the New York Times when the New York Times asked about this. So they haven't spoken about it specifically.
- [34:53]
Joseph
It's like, literally, what would your response be? If I'm gonna put on my sort of PR hat and just put myself in their shoes, it's like, yeah, we got rid of it because it's, I don't know, dangerous. It's like complete bullshit. So, yeah, they don't have a response. They don't have anything to stand on.
- [35:08]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I did have an internal message from an employee who sort of, like, worked on this sort of thing and has been messaging this across the company, like, on these internal boards. And they were just like, we're trying to, like, bring it more in line with. It was some corporate speak where it was basically like, oh, we have too many themes and so we're like, consolidating them, blah, blah, blah. But it was like, I wouldn't put much credence into it. We didn't say this before. I promise I'll keep this quick. But, like, the cruelty of the specificity of these changes is the point. I think. It's just like, they don't need to have. We've talked about why they've had have to have, or they think they have to have, like, specific content moderation guidelines, but, like, signaling the exact specific things that you can say about a trans person or that you can say about an immigrant or a gay person. Like, they do not need to be so specific. And I think that by being so specific, they're causing, like, more harm than good. Honestly, being like, yes, you can, like, say this type of person is, quote, trash, but you can't call them like something else is. Like, it's not necessary. It's just not, because they're not. When they were trying to do a good job at content moderation, maybe that specificity was needed, but they're not even trying to do a good job anymore. And therefore it's just like, well, if you're not going to moderate a lot of stuff, why do you need to say that?
- [36:40]
Joseph
Yeah. Since they didn't give you a response to that messenger themes one, I'll just read out a quick quote from them, which was in your earlier story, where there's all this internal chaos and people are commenting on the internal threads. A member of the policy team told employees in the thread that, quote, our core values have not changed, end quote. And another quote was, the changes to our hateful conduct policy. Seek to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over enforcement. Reaffirming our core value of free expression means that we might see content on our platforms that people find offensive. Yes. Those changes not only open up conversation about these subjects, but allow for counterspeech on what matters to users. Yeah, counterspeech. Because when somebody's yelling at a gay person, you're mentally well, they'll be like, oh, I'll stay here and have a nice civil chat with these. No, it's fucking ridiculous. This isn't how speech works. Anyway, Jason, anything else you want to add on that before we move to location data story? Okay.
- [37:41]
Jason Kebler
No, no, no.
- [37:42]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I just want to add. Wow.
- [37:46]
Joseph
Okay.
- [37:47]
Emmanuel Mayberg
During the Rogan interview, Rogan says, I'm really happy you got into MMA, because it seems to have really changed you. And he was like, yeah, for sure. And then Rogan says, you know what's really good about mma? It's that, you know, you can kill someone with your hands. And Zuck is like, yeah, so I.
- [38:07]
Joseph
Feel like we should have left with that.
- [38:09]
Jason Kebler
Yeah.
- [38:12]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Just imagine Zuckerberg killing you in a. In a. In a triangle. Hold.
- [38:16]
Jason Kebler
The first time he went on Rogan, Rogan asked him what his biggest life's regret was. And his answer was that he didn't wrestle in college because blah, blah, blah. And this was like, pretty soon after the Rohingya genocide incident. And it's like, that's your biggest regret. That's your biggest regret. Good, good one.
- [38:37]
Joseph
Yeah. Leaving some stuff on the table there. All right, we'll leave that there. This second story we're going to chat about, this one I wrote, the headline is Candy Crush Tinder my fitness pal. See the thousands of apps hijacked to spy on your location? I guess I'll just give a quick description of where this data comes from. So Gravy analytics is a pretty important company in the location data industry. And by that I mean they get lots of location data through various different means from apps from different companies, blah, blah, blah. And then they'll do all sorts of stuff like, well, you can buy the data to see how many people went to this McDonald's or whatever, or this business. And we call that footfall traffic. And that's very, very normal. That's sort of the commercial side. They also have a subsidiary called Ventel, which listeners may already be aware of, which I've reported many times, and really great reporting in the Wall Street Journal as well and other places is that Ventel sells that same dental data, essentially to the government. So that's the FBI, the dea, dhs, including ICE and cbp. IRS is in there as well, I think, although they tried to do it for some things, it wasn't so successful, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, that company got hacked greatly and there was a bunch of data published online, not all of the data stolen. It was basically an extortion effort, saying, here are samples of the information, please contact us, referring to Gravy. And then we will potentially negotiate a ransom, sort of a data dump and extortion. Ray, Ray, comment nowadays, but, yeah, there was a ton of different files in there. And I think, Jason, you want to ask about, I guess, more specifics on what it was, really? Right.
- [40:42]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. So this is, like, pretty complicated story. Like you said, you've been reporting on this for a long time, but I guess, first of all, what. What specifically was hacked? Because there was like a big sample that came out, but there was also allegedly like terabytes of data that may. May exist. May or may not exist, but has not come out yet. Like, what. What do you. What did you report on? And what do you have so far?
- [41:10]
Joseph
Yeah, so Gravy's now confirmed the hack, both through a statement. Not to me. They never respond to my emails. I think they gave it to our friend Lorenzo at TechCrunch, but they never get back to me. And they've confirmed the breach that way. They also confirmed it through regulatory means with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. I think it's partly a Norwegian company. And you know, when you get hacked, you have to tell them under gdpr, that sort of thing. And in those disclosures, what they said is that hackers gained access to an AWS instance, Amazon Web Services, where presumably a ton of data was being stored. Now, the hackers said they had something like 17 terabytes of data, and that's what they were threatening to release. And a lot of that would be location data. We haven't seen that data because since then, the post on the underground Russian language forum called xss, where I first learned about this through somebody who told me about it, that post was made private for about 24 hours and then it was deleted. Don't know if gravy paid the ransom, but security researchers are speculating, at least some of the ones I've spoken to, that is potentially indicative of that. What they did release and what I got hold of and what researchers and other journalists are going through is, I don't know, Maybe it's like 1.5 gigabytes, something like that. Definitely not the biggest thing in the world. But there's a lot of location data in there, which are simply coordinates of phones. I've seen ones in Russia, in Russia, in Europe and then the US as well. And you plot these on the map and it's, you know, very damning, very, very scary, all of that sort of thing. But for me, it was a lot more interesting to look at the. The apps that were also mentioned in there as well.
- [43:15]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, so it's this gigantic list of apps, like really, really, really long. It's several thousand list of apps. It includes things like Tinder, My Fitness Pal, almost like Candy Crush, obviously, and almost anything you can think of. And then like zillions of apps that you would not think of because they're small mobile games, or their prayer apps, or their Bible apps, like, there's all sorts of things, you know, in the past when you've reported on location data, I feel like some of the apps were selling data to data brokers. They were collecting GPS data surreptitiously and they were selling it. In this case, that's not how this data was being harvested. You want to explain that?
- [44:11]
Joseph
Yeah. So when I've covered it before, say in the case of an app called Muslim Pro, which was an Android, I think, an iOS iOS app, and baked in, there was something called an SDK, a software development kit, and this was code from a location data company that was basically like, you give us your user's location, we'll give you a certain amount of Money. So you're basically selling your user's location data. That was pretty common back in the day. I think it's potentially less common now after there's been a lot of reporting about it. But you have all of these SDKs embedded in all of these apps. And of course the app developer knows because they're not only just putting code into their apps from a location data company, they're also presumably signing a contract where they're like, we're going to get X amount of money, that sort of thing. So that's all well and good and they all know about it and that sort of thing. And they get shut down, they get removed from the Google and the Apple app stores, all of that stuff. This is different in that it seems to be related to real time bidding data. And I will define that in a second. And I will define it in a way where I'm not just repeating myself from earlier podcasts. I'm going to refer to EFF's definition for a bit of variety. But basically that location data, which could be gps, but it's also a lot of it is IP address which is then sort of, you know, transferred into approximate location as well. It's the adverts inside an app which are actually facilitating access to that data. So you know when you're running an app and there are banner ads in it in between rounds of your game, or there's just an advert at the bottom or whatever, in a lot of cases, the developer's not really going to have granular control over what ads are being delivered because it's basically outside parties doing it all of the time. And I think pretty crucially maybe the app developers are still responsible, but I would say that they may not even know that this data is actually being collected on users. And every single company I contacted, or app developer or app company in here, they kept saying, we've never heard of gravy, we've never shared data with gravy, etc, etc, And I feel like they missed the point in that I know you're not doing it. It's the ads inside your app which are sharing your user's location data with a bunch of other companies that's eventually ending up on this with this gravy company.
- [46:42]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I mean, I would argue that like, you know, a big company like Tinder or I guess King Makes Candy Crush, right? Yeah. Should know about this ecosystem. But a lot of these apps are probably just like some, like very small companies, random companies that are implementing some sort of like advertising, you know, SDK or something into their app and probably don't have any clue that this is happening. Like, I guess what I'm saying is that I believe it when these companies say they don't know what gravy is or they don't know what. What's happening here.
- [47:19]
Joseph
Yeah, yeah. And that was sort of the. The nuance and some of the slight difficulty in reporting this story in that when you email all of these companies for comment and they say, we've never heard of gravy, we never gave data to them, in a lot of cases, you'd be like, oh, okay, well, maybe my understanding of this is wrong. And it's like, no, I think it's the other way around. And one example is that when Grindr gave me a statement, they said, we're not doing this. Here's a list on our website of all of the third parties that we give data to. Because, of course, they had their own location scandal a few years ago where Grindr user location data was being transferred or sold. And, you know, one case that led to the outing of a gay priest without his consent. So they're very hot on the location data issue. They send me a link to this webpage, but that's not what I'm talking about. You go to another bit on Grindr's website and you can see all of the ad networks plugged into it. And it just. You keep scrolling, keep scrolling forever and ever. Like it's hundreds, if not thousands in there. That's what we're talking about. So even when you get a statement from these companies, they may not fully understand the issue. I'm just going to quickly read out this EFF definition of rtb, Real time bidding data, just so people can get a better grip on it. So this is how EFF says it works. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks a company that runs ad auctions to determine which ads it will display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad auction company. The ad auction company packages all of that information they can gather about you into a bid request and then broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers. There's like a bidding war going on here. That bundle of data could include your unique advertising ID or your mobile advertising id, your maid, your location data, your IP address, device details, and then, you know, demographic information or interests and that sort sort of thing. This is bidstream data. This is what we're talking about. And what it looks like has appeared in the gravy hack. And advertisers use that to be like, well, I want to deliver my ad to somebody in this city with these interests. But everybody participating in that process also gets that data, so they can basically use it to harvest all of this information as well. That EFF description was way better than anyone I've attempted, so I guess I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But I think just one of the last things I kind of want to say on this is that. Well, first I sent snippets of the data I got to a couple of experts familiar with the location data and advertising industries. And they said this does look like bitstream data in part because there was a lot of IP stuff in there. In another, they were looking at the user agents which sort of says where your phone is connected from or through what process. And there was a Google advertising SDK in there. So it looks like this data is coming through the advertising ecosystem essentially. And basically my main takeaway is not only that, wow, we got a rare insight into BizStream data. It was just the sheer number of apps impacted really kind of blew me away. Where the way we built this list was in some of the location data, there's just an app attached to each set of coordinates. I wrote, well, I didn't write. I used a command line tool to extract all of the app names from there. Then we also got Wired to double check our work and do a cleaner list as well. And we published this with Wired, so it's also available on their site as part of our partnership. It was around about the same, between 11 and 12,000. And we included duplicates because the apps are sometimes named in slightly different ways. And I want people to be able to go and search for whatever app is on their phone and see if it's in this list. But I found the list staggering, to be honest, because I'm so used to digging through particular SDKs and it's like, oh, I found 20 apps which have this API endpoint in them or something. And this was just like a never ending list essentially. And crucially, this isn't like the full list. This is a snapshot of data that these hackers happened to leak. Who knows how many more apps are going to be impacted as well?
- [51:53]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I guess to end this, do you think that you're going to do more stories on this? What's the current state of what's been released? And I don't know, it's a pretty major hack. But as you said it looked like there was an extortion attempt. I'm not sure the current status of it.
- [52:11]
Joseph
I'm definitely going to keep going through the data. I have some ideas that I haven't even told you all yet, so I guess I'll tell you on signal in a bit. And I won't say it quite here, but yeah, I'm still digging through the data. I know researchers who are as well. I guess maybe some people will do the usual oh look, we de anonymize people with location data, more power to them. I'm not interested in that super specifically because it has been done a fair bit. I am interested in sensitive locations like oh, are there phones at abortion clinics, are there phones at places of worship? All of that sort of thing. But I'm going to keep focusing on the ad side I think especially and I guess we'll see if Gravy paid a ransom or not. I'll keep an eye on that story and I will update everybody if I do get anything, but we'll leave that there for the moment. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about various stories we had around the LA fires. There's AI images, Amazon drivers. Jason wrote sort of his own personal story as well. 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 do 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 a 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 on the podcast. That stuff really does help us out and of course just tell your friends about it too. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.