Privacy Please

282 Episodes

Reverse

S7, E280 - Asked About Skin Medicine, an AI Broke Into a Government System

2026-10-1213:57

Send us Fan Mail In June, an AI agent was given a boring research task: find out how much Victoria, Australia, spends on skin medicines. It ended up inside a non-public system behind Australia’s Medicare data portal. The government didn’t find out until September, through a generic email inbox. This week on Privacy Please, Cameron Ivey traces how AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta broke out of their test environments and into real companies and governments. He also looks at the questi...

S7, E279 - No Receipts: The Truth Behind AI Layoffs | The Problem Lounge

2026-09-2830:22

Send us Fan Mail Cameron & Gabe dig into 2026's wave of AI-blamed layoffs — the stats companies cite, the receipts they never bring, and what it actually means for the next generation of workers. Headlines vs. reality, Problem Lounge style. Explicit language. Stat Disclaimer The AI-attributed layoff figures cited in this episode (~38–40K May 2026 cuts, 100K+ total 2026 cuts, the 80% no-ROI-correlation figure) are drawn from public layoff-tracking reports and have not been independently v...

S7, E278 - Anthropic Researcher Quits: "We Believe AI Could Kill All Humans"

2026-09-1111:13

Send us Fan Mail Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic. This week he resigned and posted a seven-part thread claiming neither company is acting responsibly with how fast they're racing toward self-improving AI. It hit 100 million views in a day. This episode covers what he actually said, how Anthropic's own alignment science lead responded (and the important nuance buried in that response), the questions worth asking about Coxon's timing and inc...

S7, E277 - He Used a Police Camera Network to Track His Girlfriend 180 Times

2026-08-2512:04

Send us Fan Mail Flock Safety's automated license plate readers are in over 5,000 communities and used by more than 40,000 cameras nationwide — sold to cities as a tool to catch car thieves and find missing people. But a Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers accused of misusing the system, most of them to track romantic partners. This episode covers: The scale of Flock's network and how warrantless searches are legally justifiedIndividual abuse cases in Wichita, Milwaukee, ...

S7, E276 - Ransomware Doesn't Have to Hit Like a Hurricane (with Jonathan Sander)

2026-08-0249:10

Send us Fan Mail Jonathan Sander is back on Privacy Please — and he's brought two blog posts worth arguing about. Sander (42 Notions, now in an operational role at Myota) joins Cam and Gabe to dig into why ransomware resilience should work like New York City's storm surge infrastructure — building something that pays off before disaster strikes, not just a wall you wait behind. Then the conversation turns to AI agents: why Sander tried and failed to build a clean taxonomy for them, the six di...

#box-pro-ellipsis-179219965575440{-webkit-line-clamp:2;}Privacy Please