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This episode is sponsored by hpe. Today's networks must evolve from simply providing connectivity to harnessing AI to deliver exceptional connected experiences. At the break, HPE's Rami Rahim shares how self driving networks can make that happen.
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Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Friday, July 17th. I'm Imani Moiz for the Wall Street Journal. Security experts say not to give your passwords to a chatbot, but AI agents can't do much without access to accounts. We're test driving a new feature from a popular password manager that lets Anthropic's CLAUDE log in securely. But should you hand over your credentials? Then routine background checks are starting to dig deeper. With the help of AI, we'll explain how technology is changing the way employers vet job candidates and why you shouldn't be surprised if your bachelor party photos come up in a job interview. It all starts with a secret handshake. A new integration from Password Manager 1Password lets Claude AI agents access your accounts without revealing your passwords. Here's how it works. When Claude needs to log into one of your online accounts, it asks 1Password to handle the sign in. After a biometric authentication, 1Password fills in your credentials without exposing your password to the chatbot or anthropic servers. But just because you can grant access to your accounts doesn't necessarily mean you should. WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen put this new feature to the test and is here to explain how it went and which accounts she would think twice about connecting. Nicole, how did you feel in the moment that you gave Claude access to your passwords?
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Very nervous, I think I was. I felt some sweat forming, you know, because I've been covering hacks for a long time and also I've been testing AI agents for over a year now and I've seen how they do things that are unpredictable. The CTO of 1Password, who I talked to, Nancy Wang, said that agents act like humans, but they work like machines. And by that she means they're making decisions like a human. But like a machine, it can go on forever. We clock out at the end of the day, but an agent does not. And so it is persistent. And if it's not satisfied with how it's finished the task, it will keep going and going and going, and sometimes that has very unintended consequences.
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So which tasks did Sharing Access allow you to offload and what was the process like?
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So I started with some low stakes stuff because I was afraid of giving Claude access. I knew that 1Password wasn't going to share my password with Claude. But Claude still got into my accounts and could see into those accounts and could take action in those accounts. So I wanted to be careful. So first I just had it do simple stuff like renew my library books. Okay, simple enough. Then I had it log into WSJ.com and find our staff's June fiction book recommendations and add those to my read later list, which it did totally fine. So I was like, okay, let's ratchet it up a little. I found a flight I liked on Google Flights and had Claude log into my Chase account to see how much that flight would cost in credit card points. And turns out credit card points weren't worth it. And, you know, that's something that I would have done anyway, but Claude spared me the 10 minutes or whatever of trying to navigate Chase's travel portal. And so it. It did. Okay. And then I, you know, for the purposes of content, I wanted to see, like, with a sensitive account, how Claude would behave. And so I gave it access to my credentials and one password to my 401k account. And I don't recommend you give an AI agent access to your life savings, but it did tell me that my investment election for my 401k was costing me over $400 annually in fees and proposed a new fund mix that would cost me $15 a year. And I haven't taken action on that yet. But I thought, like, this is pretty useful, and I'm glad that I gave it access one time. But I think ultimately there are some jobs that are better left to humans.
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It sounds like you're probably least comfortable sharing access to your 401k account, but are there steps that people should take before connecting more sensitive accounts like healthcare portals or bank accounts to these services?
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At this point, I wouldn't necessarily give an agent access to those sensitive accounts just because sending money to the wrong person or changing your insurance type could have catastrophic consequences. Think of an agent in your personal life as a young intern assistant who can take care of the menial, mundane stuff that you hate to do and leave the high stakes stuff to yourself so that you have more time for that more meaningful or more sensitive work. So I'm talking things like online grocery shopping, or if you like to review your utilities bill every month to make sure your energy or water usage isn't spiking. Let an agent do that instead of things like banking or investing or messaging your doctor.
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That was WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen speaking of AI. A quick reminder. We want to hear from you. Have you seen an AI generated post that you thought was real? Shoot us an email to tnbsj.com or leave us a voicemail at 212-416-2236. That's 212-416-2236. Or if you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment. Coming up, AI knows what you've been up to online and it might be telling prospective employers. That's after the break.
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Here's Rami Rahim Hpe, Executive Vice President, President and General Manager of networking.
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A self driving network is a network that essentially configures itself. And what used to take months, maybe up to a year to deploy can now take weeks, if not days. A network that optimizes itself and very importantly, a network that heals itself.
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Potential employers are looking beyond your LinkedIn profile. Many businesses are turning to AI to dig deeper into candidates online histories. And most of us leave more digital breadcrumbs than we realize. That means employers today can piece together a much more detailed picture of job candidates than ever before, sometimes photo by photo. WSJ career columnist Callum Borchers joins us now to break down how your digital footprint can have real professional consequences and how to clean yours up. Callum a lot of people know that employers look them up online before a job interview, but what's changing now that AI is involved?
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Couple things. I mean, AI makes it easier, faster and deeper than the traditional just quick Google search, right? So I think traditionally businesses might just do a quick search to see if there's any glaring red flag there. The other thing that's noted notable too is that traditionally some of the deeper digital background searches were kind of reserved for more senior level roles. They're thinking if I hire this person and the public cares about who's in that role, is there going to be some skeleton in the closet that comes out and embarrasses the company? One thing that's shifted now is some of the searches are going lower down the totem pole to where anybody who might be in a customer facing role could get the same kind of digital background scrub. And this is because we know this right? When we have a business meeting with somebody for the first time, often one of the first things we do is look them up. And businesses want to know, hey, if a client looks up my new customer facing associate, are they going to find anything unseemly? They'd like to know about it in advance.
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What technology in particular is being used here?
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I think facial recognition is a big one to be aware of. I talked to A company called Ferretly, which is a third party business that other companies hire to do this digital background searching. And they warned that, you know, the AI facial recognition detection is getting pretty good. And an example was maybe you're one of the many people in recent years who has opened an OnlyFans account, let's say, and maybe you're careful about using a screen name and you keep any explicit photos and videos behind a paywall so they remain private. But your profile photo could be public. And if facial recognition can match that profile photo to another image on the Internet, it's going to get flagged. And oh, by the way, Ferretly, for example, uses a 70% confidence threshold, so they don't even have to be 100% sure that it's you. At 70% confidence, they're at least going to tell your employer, hey, this is Bill. Hey, this is Susie. At least we 70% think it is. We're not going to tell you what to do about that, but you might want to ask the person, hey, what's the deal here?
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That's a great point. AI definitely isn't perfect. What happens if these tools mistakenly connect you to someone else's online activity or take something out of context?
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Ideally, you'd have an opportunity to explain yourself. I think sometimes though, when you're applying for a job, you don't always know what's going on behind the scenes. Right? So, I mean, if you apply for a job and you end up not getting an offer, not getting the interview, you don't always know what happened. Right. So it could be because another candidate was more qualified. In fact, that's probably the most likely reason. But it also could be that one of these background searches turned up something that a business didn't like and you might never know about it. And just to give people a little bit of a sense of comfort, it's not that every, you know, sort of standard college party photo is going to be like disqualifying. Right. What happens sometimes, and what I'm told happens sometimes is businesses will say, hey, look, we like you, you're qualified for this role, we want to hire you, but could you please take down those bachelor party picks? Because we don't want a client to look you up and find that we think it's unfair, professional. So sometimes there's kind of a gray area there. Well, they'll, they're not going to like throw you out or fire you, but they're going to ask you to clean up that digital history a little bit.
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Are there Any legal protections that job candidates have? Or is it just another area that hasn't yet caught up to fast changing technology?
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Well, that's a great point. I mean, some of the businesses that do this kind of digital background checking, at least the ones that kind of operate above board in general, they limit their searches to what is in the public domain. But again, sometimes what you think is private maybe isn't as private as you think. If people are good at covering their tracks online, they probably can maintain some anonymity. But we've seen already, for example, some people run into trouble for placing bets on polymarket or Cal Sheet using information that they gleaned through their workplaces. And it's like, how did anybody figure out who they were? Well, maybe you recycled a screen name that you used on some other social media platform. Oops. It's sort of easy to figure out who that is. Or, or maybe you're using a crypto wallet that is publicly identified with you somewhere else on the Internet. So I think the thing to understand is that these companies that do these digital background checks, they're cross referencing information on dozens and dozens of platforms. So what looks anonymous in a vacuum? In one location, you could sort of inadvertently unmask yourself because of a breadcrumb you left someplace else on the Internet.
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So suppose someone out there is listening and thinking to themselves, uh oh, what's the first thing they should do?
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A good first step is to kind of assess what your risk is like, right? So, I mean, that could start with Googling yourself, but don't stop there. I mean, you know, prompt ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to look you up, see what comes back. Right? I mean, you kind of want to know, do you have an old MySpace account that you forgot about, and is there something that you kind of want to clean up a little bit or maybe change some privacy settings? My only caution with that, though, is you can go too far because you don't want to look like somebody who has something to hide or look like a bot. So you can go overboard. You don't want to clean up so much of your digital history that now all of a sudden you look like a bad actor who's trying to surreptitiously get hired as a spy or something.
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That was WSJ columnist Callum Borchers. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bienname. I'm your host, Imani Moiz. Additional support this week from Anthony Banci, Jessica Fenton and Michael Lavalle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson, our development producer is Aisha Al Muslim, and Chris Sinsley is the Deputy editor of Audio for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
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Here again is HPE's Rami Rahim to explain why it's critical for modern enterprises to use AI powered self driving networks.
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Gone are the days where humans can keep up with the complexity and overcoming the cyber attacks that are happening using elbow grease. You must leverage agents and artificial intelligence in order to deliver a seamless connectivity experience to everyone and everything. It's not just people that are connected to the network today, it's AI agents. It's billions of things in fact. You can't do this manually. It must be done using artificial intelligence. And everything from the deployment of the network or speed matters to the identification of issues that inevitably happen to the remediation of those issues needs to be done without human intervention.
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Find out how a self driving network can help you deliver exceptional user experiences@hpe.com.