🧹 A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

Plus: Elon Wants Some Twitter Help, The Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight Trackers, and more…

Today’s pick

A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook? They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of… (Eileen Guo / MIT Technology Review)

Eileen Guo @eileenguo

NEW FROM ME: I investigated the origins of 15 video stills taken from inside homes by robot vacuums and shared to social media—some featuring humans in VERY candid positions, faces clearly visible—and wrote abt the supply chain of data used to train AI.

technologyreview.comA Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?Robot vacuum companies say your images are safe, but a sprawling global supply chain for data from our devices creates risk.

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Elon Wants Some Twitter Help. Imagine taking the job! Yesterday Elon Musk tweeted a poll asking if he should step down as “head” of Twitter Inc.; 17.5 million people voted, and the results were 57.5% to 42.5% in favor of him stepping down. “I will abide by… (Matt Levine / Bloomberg)

Matt Levine @matt_levine

This newsletter must like pain a lot.

bloomberg.comBloomberg - Are you a robot?

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The best way to reach new readers is word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends.

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The Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight Trackers. I woke up Friday morning to the message I'd been expecting: “Your account, @Justin_Ling has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. ” Below was the offending tweet: a link to one of the few websites that provide real-time private… (Justin Ling / WIRED)

WIRED Science @WIREDScience

Elon Musk claims plane-tracking data is a risky privacy violation. But the world loses a lot if this information disappears—and that's already happening.

trib.alThe Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight TrackersElon Musk claims plane-tracking data is a risky privacy violation. But the world loses a lot if this information disappears—and that’s already happening.

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How to spot AI-generated text. In an already polarized, politically fraught online world, these AI tools could further distort the information we consume. If they are rolled out into the real world in real products, the consequences could be devastating. We're in desperate need… (Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review)

Melissa Heikkilä @Melissahei

ChatGPT has the AI community enthralled, and it's clear the internet is increasingly being flooded with AI-generated text. In my latest story for @techreview, I look at how we can differentiate this kind of text from human-written words. (Hint: typos help!)

technologyreview.comHow to spot AI-generated textThe internet is increasingly awash with text written by AI software. We need new tools to detect it.

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Opinion | The Stanford Guide to Acceptable Words. Parodists have it rough these days, since so much of modern life and culture resembles the Babylon Bee. The latest evidence is that Stanford University administrators in May published an index of forbidden words to be eliminated from the school's… (The Editorial Board / Wall Street Journal)

Elliot Kaufman @ElliotKaufman6

WSJ editorial: Call yourself an “American”? Please don’t. It’s on Stanford’s new index of forbidden words.

wsj.comOpinion | The Stanford Guide to Acceptable WordsBehold the school’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.

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