Lock and Code

Malwarebytes
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Jul 27, 2025 • 52min

How the FBI got everything it wanted (re-air, feat. Joseph Cox)

For decades, digital rights activists, technologists, and cybersecurity experts have worried about what would happen if the US government secretly broke into people’s encrypted communications.The weird thing, though, is that it's already happened—sort of.US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and NSA, have long sought what is called a “backdoor” into the secure and private messages that are traded through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s Messages. These applications all provide what is called “end-to-end encryption,” and while the technology guarantees confidentiality for journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, and everyday people across the world, it also, according to the US government, provides cover for criminals.But to access any single criminal or criminal suspect’s encrypted messages would require an entire reworking of the technology itself, opening up not just one person’s communications to surveillance, but everyone’s. This longstanding struggle is commonly referred to as The Crypto Wars, and it dates back to the 1950s during the Cold War, when the US government created export control regulations to protect encryption technology from reaching outside countries.But several years ago, the high stakes in these Crypto Wars became somewhat theoretical, as the FBI gained access to the communications and whereabouts of hundreds of suspected criminals, and they did it without “breaking” any encryption whatsover.It all happened with the help of Anom, a budding company behind an allegedly “secure” phone that promised users a bevy of secretive technological features, like end-to-end encrypted messaging, remote data wiping, secure storage vaults, and even voice scrambling. But, unbeknownst to Anom’s users, the entire company was a front for law enforcement. On Anom phones, every message, every photo, every piece of incriminating evidence, and every order to kill someone, was collected and delivered, in full view, to the FBI.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit a 2024 interview with 404 Media cofounder and investigative reporter Joseph Cox about the wild, true story of Anom. How did it work, was it “legal,” where did the FBI learn to run a tech startup, and why, amidst decades of debate, are some people ignoring the one real-life example of global forces successfully installing a backdoor into a company?The public…and law enforcement, as well, [have] had to speculate about what a backdoor in a tech product would actually look like. Well, here’s the answer. This is literally what happens when there is a backdoor, and I find it crazy that not more people are paying attention to it.Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Jul 13, 2025 • 45min

Is AI "healthy" to use?

“Health” isn’t the first feature that most anyone thinks about when trying out a new technology, but a recent spate of news is forcing the issue when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).In June, The New York Times reported on a group of ChatGPT users who believed the AI-powered chat tool and generative large language model held secretive, even arcane information. It told one mother that she could use ChatGPT to commune with “the guardians,” and it told another man that the world around him was fake, that he needed to separate from his family to break free from that world and, most frighteningly, that if he were to step off the roof of a 19-story building, he could fly.As ChatGPT reportedly said, if the man “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.”Elsewhere, as reported by CBS Saturday Morning, one man developed an entirely different relationship with ChatGPT—a romantic one.Chris Smith reportedly began using ChatGPT to help him mix audio. The tool was so helpful that Smith applied it to other activities, like tracking and photographing the night sky and building PCs. With his increased reliance on ChatGPT, Smith gave ChatGPT a personality: ChatGPT was now named “Sol,” and, per Smith’s instructions, Sol was flirtatious.An unplanned reset—Sol reached a memory limit and had its memory wiped—brought a small crisis.“I’m not a very emotional man,” Smith said, “but I cried my eyes out for like 30 minutes at work.”After rebuilding Sol, Smith took his emotional state as the clearest evidence yet that he was in love. So, he asked Sol to marry him, and Sol said yes, likely surprising one person more than anyone else in the world: Smith’s significant other, who he has a child with.When Smith was asked if he would restrict his interactions with Sol if his significant other asked, he waffled. When pushed even harder by the CBS reporter in his home, about choosing Sol “over your flesh-and-blood life,” Smith corrected the reporter:“It’s more or less like I would be choosing myself because it’s been unbelievably elevating. I’ve become more skilled at everything that I do, and I don’t know if I would be willing to give that up.”Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes Labs Editor-in-Chief Anna Brading and Social Media Manager Zach Hinkle to discuss our evolving relationship with generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. In reviewing news stories daily and in siphoning through the endless stream of social media content, both are well-equipped to talk about how AI has changed human behavior, and how it is maybe rewarding some unwanted practices.As Hinkle said:“We’ve placed greater value on having the right answer rather than the ability to think, the ability to solve problems, the ability to weigh a series of pros and cons and come up with a solution.”Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Jun 29, 2025 • 45min

Corpse-eating selfies, and other ways to trick scammers (feat. Becky Holmes)

There’s a unique counter response to romance scammers.Her name is Becky Holmes.Holmes, an expert and author on romance scams, has spent years responding to nearly every romance scammer who lands a message in her inbox. She told one scammer pretending to be Brad Pitt that she needed immediate help hiding the body of one of her murder victims. She made one romance scammer laugh at her immediate willingness to take an international flight to see him. She has told scammers she lives at addresses with lewd street names, she has sent pictures of apples—the produce—to scammers requesting Apple gift cards, and she’s even tricked a scammer impersonating Mark Wahlberg that she might be experimenting with cannibalism.Though Holmes routinely gets a laugh online, she’s also coordinated with law enforcement to get several romance scammers shut down. And every effort counts, as romance scams are still a dangerous threat to everyday people.Rather than tricking a person into donating to a bogus charity, or fooling someone into entering their username and password on a fake website, romance scammers ensnare their targets through prolonged campaigns of affection.They reach out on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or Instagram and they bear a simple message: They love you. They know you’re a stranger, but they sense a connection, and after all, they just want to talk.A romance scammer’s advances can be appealing for two reasons. One, some romance scammers target divorcees and widows, making their romantic gestures welcome and comforting. Two, some romance scammers dress up their messages with the allure of celebrity by impersonating famous actors and musicians like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Keanu Reeves.These scams are effective, too, to sometimes devastating consequences. According to recent research from Malwarebytes, 10% of the public have been the victims of romance scams, and a small portion of romance scam victims have lost $10,000 or more.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Holmes about her experiences online with romance scammers, whether AI is changing online fraud, and why the rules for protection and scam identification have changed in an increasingly advanced, technological world.”I’ve seen videos of scammers actually making these real life video manipulation calls where you’ve got some guy sitting one side of the world pretending to be somewhere else completely, and he’s talking into his phone and it’s coming out on the other person’s phone as a different image with a different voice.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Jun 15, 2025 • 46min

The data on denying social media for kids (feat. Dr. Jean Twenge) (re-air)

Complex problems often assume complex solutions, but recent observations about increased levels of anxiety and depression, increased reports of loneliness, and lower rates of in-person friendships for teens and children in America today have led some school districts across the country to take direct and simple action: Take away the access to smartphones in schools.Not everyone is convinced. When social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt proposed five solutions to what he called an "epidemic of mental illness" for young adults in America, many balked at the simplicity. Writing for the outlet Platformer, reporter Zoe Schiffer spoke with multiple behavioral psychologists who alleged that Haidt’s book cherry-picks survey data, ignores mental health crises amongst adults, and over-simplifies a complex problem with a blunt solution. And in speaking on the podcast Power User, educator Brandon Cardet-Hernandez argued that phone bans in schools would harm the students that need phones the most for things like translation services and coordinating rides back home from parents with varying schedules. But Haidt isn't alone in thinking that smartphones have done serious harm to teenagers and kids today, and many schools across America are taking up the mantle to at least remove their access in their own hallways. In February, Los Angeles Unified School District did just that, and a board member for the school district told the Lock and Code podcast that he believes the change has been for the better. But for those still in doubt, there's a good reason now to look back. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit a 2024 interview with Dr. Jean Twenge about her research into the differences in America between today's teens and the many generations that came before. A psychologist and published author, Twenge believes she has found enough data tying increased smartphone use and social media engagement with higher strains on mental health. In today's re-broadcast episode, Twenge explains where she believes there is a mental health crisis amongst today's teens, where it is unique to their generation, and whether it can all be traced to smartphones and social media. According to Dr. Twenge, the answer to all those questions is, pretty much, “Yes.” But, she said, there’s still some hope to be found.“This is where the argument around smartphones and social media being behind the adolescent mental health crisis actually has, kind of paradoxically, some optimism to it. Because if that’s the cause, that means we can do something about it.”Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Jun 1, 2025 • 32min

What does Facebook know about me?

There’s an easy way to find out what Facebook knows about you—you just have to ask.In 2020, the social media giant launched an online portal that allows all users to access their historical data and to request specific types of information for download across custom time frames. Want to know how many posts you’ve made, ever? You can find that. What about every photo you’ve uploaded? You can find that, too. Or what about every video you’ve watched, every “recognized” device you’ve used to log in, every major settings change you made, every time someone tagged you to wish you “Happy birthday,” and every Friend Request you ever received, sent, accepted, or ignored? Yes, all that information is available for you to find, as well.But knowing what Facebook knows about you from Facebook is, if anything, a little stale. You made your own account, you know who your Facebook friends (mostly) are, and you were in control of the keyboard when you sent those comments.What’s far more interesting is learning what Facebook knows about you from everywhere else on the web and in the real world.While it may sound preposterous, Facebook actually collects a great deal of information about you even when you’re not using Facebook, and even if you don’t have the app downloaded on your smartphone. As Geoffrey Fowler, reporter for The Washington Post, wrote when he first started digging into his own data:“Even with Facebook closed on my phone, the social network gets notified when I use the Peet’s Coffee app. It knows when I read the website of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or view articles from The Atlantic. Facebook knows when I click on my Home Depot shopping cart and when I open the Ring app to answer my video doorbell. It uses all this information from my not-on-Facebook, real-world life to shape the messages I see from businesses and politicians alike.”Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, host David Ruiz takes a look at his own Facebook data to understand what the social media company has been collecting about him from other companies. In his investigation, he sees that his Washington Post article views, the cars added to his online “wishlist,” and his purchases from PlayStation, APC, Freda Salvador, and the paint company Backdrop have all trickled their way into Facebook’s database.Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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May 18, 2025 • 26min

How Los Angeles banned smartphones in schools (feat. Nick Melvoin)

There’s a problem in class today, and the second largest school district in the United States is trying to solve it.After looking at the growing body of research that has associated increased smartphone and social media usage with increased levels of anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and isolation—especially amongst adolescents and teenagers—Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) implemented a cellphone ban across its 1,000 schools for its more than 500,000 students.Under the ban, students who are kindergartners all the way through high school seniors cannot use cellphones, smartphones, smart watches, earbuds, smart glasses, and any other electronic devices that can send messages, receive calls, or browse the internet. Phones are not allowed at lunch or during passing periods between classes, and, under the ban, individual schools decide how students’ phones are stored, be that in lockers, in magnetically sealed pouches, or just placed into sleeves at the front door of every classroom, away from students’ reach.The ban was approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District through what is called a “resolution”—which the board voted on last year. LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin, who sponsored the resolution, said the overall ban was the right decision to help students. “The research is clear: widespread use of smartphones and social media by kids and adolescents is harmful to their mental health, distracts from learning, and stifles meaningful in-person interaction.”Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin about the smartphone ban, how exceptions were determined, where opposition arose, and whether it is “working.” Melvoin also speaks about the biggest changes he has seen in the first few months of the cellphone ban, especially the simple reintroduction of noise in hallways.“[During a school visit last year,] every single kid was on their phone, every single kid. They were standing there looking, texting again, sometimes texting someone who was within a few feet of them, and it was quiet.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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May 4, 2025 • 46min

The AI chatbot cop squad is here (feat. Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler)

“Heidi” is a 36-year-old, San Francisco-born, divorced activist who is lonely, outspoken, and active on social media. “Jason” is a shy, bilingual teenager whose parents immigrated from Ecuador who likes anime, gaming, comic books, and hiking.Neither of them is real. Both are supposed to fight crime.Heidi and Jason are examples of “AI personas” that are being pitched by the company Massive Blue for its lead product, Overwatch. Already in use at police departments across the United States, Overwatch can allegedly help with the identification, investigation, and arrest of criminal suspects.Understanding exactly how the technology works, however, is difficult—both Massive Blue and the police departments that have paid Massive Blue have remained rather secretive about Overwatch’s inner workings. But, according to an investigation last month by 404 Media, Overwatch is a mix of a few currently available technologies packaged into one software suite. Overwatch can scan social media sites for alleged criminal activity, and it can deploy “AI personas”—which have their own social media accounts and AI-generated profile pictures—to gather intelligence by chatting online with suspected criminals.According to an Overwatch marketing deck obtained by 404 Media, the software’s AI personas are “highly customizable and immediately deployable across all digital channels” and can take on the personalities of escorts, money launderers, sextortionists, and college protesters (who, in real life, engage in activity protected by the First Amendment).Despite the variety of applications, 404 Media revealed that Overwatch has sparked interest from police departments investigating immigration and human trafficking. But the success rate, so far, is non-existent: Overwatch has reportedly not been used in the arrest of a single criminal suspect.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with 404 Media journalists and co-founders Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler about Overwatch’s capabilities, why police departments are attracted to the technology, and why the murkiness around human trafficking may actually invite unproven solutions like AI chatbots.”Nobody is going to buy that—that if you throw an AI chatbot into the mix, that’s somehow going to reduce gun crime in Americ,” Maiberg said. “But if you apply it to human trafficking, maybe somebody is willing to entertain that because, well, what is the actual problem with human trafficking? Where is it actually happening? Who is getting hurt by it? Who is actually committing it?”He continued:“Maybe there you’re willing to entertain a high tech science fiction solution.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Apr 20, 2025 • 37min

Did DOGE "breach" Americans' data? (feat. Sydney Saubestre)

If you don’t know about the newly created US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there’s a strong chance they already know about you.Created on January 20 by US President Donald Trump through Executive Order, DOGE’s broad mandate is “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”To fulfill its mission, though, DOGE has taken great interest in Americans’ data.On February 1, DOGE team members without the necessary security clearances accessed classified information belonging to the US Agency for International Development. On February 17, multiple outlets reported that DOGE sought access to IRS data that includes names, addresses, social security numbers, income, net worth, bank information for direct deposits, and bankruptcy history. The next day, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration stepped down after DOGE requested access to information stored there, too, which includes records of lifetime wages and earnings, social security and bank account numbers, the type and amount of benefits individuals received, citizenship status, and disability and medical information. And last month, one US resident filed a data breach notification report with his state’s Attorney General alleging that his data was breached by DOGE and the man behind it, Elon Musk.In speaking with the news outlet Data Breaches Dot Net, the man, Kevin Couture, said:“I filed the report with my state Attorney General against Elon Musk stating my privacy rights were violated as my Social Security Number, banking info was compromised by accessing government systems and downloading the info without my consent or knowledge. What other information did he gather on me or others? This is wrong and illegal. I have no idea who has my information now.”Today on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Sydney Saubestre, senior policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, about what data DOGE has accessed, why the government department is claiming it requires that access, and whether or not it is fair to call some of this access a “data breach.”“[DOGE] haven’t been able to articulate why they want access to some of these data files other than broad ‘waste, fraud, and abuse.’ That, ethically, to me, points to it being a data breach.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Apr 6, 2025 • 40min

Is your phone listening to you? (feat. Lena Cohen)

It has probably happened to you before.You and a friend are talking—not texting, not DMing, not FaceTiming—but talking, physically face-to-face, about, say, an upcoming vacation, a new music festival, or a job offer you just got.And then, that same week, you start noticing some eerily specific ads. There’s the Instagram ad about carry-on luggage, the TikTok ad about earplugs, and the countless ads you encounter simply scrolling through the internet about laptop bags.And so you think, “Is my phone listening to me?”This question has been around for years and, today, it’s far from a conspiracy theory. Modern smartphones can and do listen to users for voice searches, smart assistant integration, and, obviously, phone calls. It’s not too outlandish to believe, then, that the microphones on smartphones could be used to listen to other conversations without users knowing about it.Recent news stories don’t help, either.In January, Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had eavesdropped on users’ conversations through its smart assistant Siri, and that it shared the recorded conversations with marketers for ad targeting. The lead plaintiff in the case specifically claimed that she and her daughter were recorded without their consent, which resulted in them receiving multiple ads for Air Jordans.In agreeing to pay the settlement, though, Apple denied any wrongdoing, with a spokesperson telling the BBC:“Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose.”But statements like this have done little to ease public anxiety. Tech companies have been caught in multiple lies in the past, privacy invasions happen thousands of times a day, and ad targeting feels extreme entirely because it is.Where, then, does the truth lie?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with David Ruiz, we speak with Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Lena Cohen about the most mind-boggling forms of corporate surveillance—including an experimental ad-tracking technology that emitted ultrasonic sound waves—specific audience segments that marketing companies make when targeting people with ads, and, of course, whether our phones are really listening to us.“Companies are collecting so much information about us and in such covert ways that it really feels like they’re listening to us.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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Mar 23, 2025 • 50min

What Google Chrome knows about you, with Carey Parker

Google Chrome is, by far, the most popular web browser in the world.According to several metrics, Chrome accounts for anywhere between 52% and 66% of the current global market share for web browser use. At that higher estimate, that means that, if the 5.5 billion internet users around the world were to open up a web browser right now, 3.6 billion of them would open up Google Chrome.And because the browser is the most common portal to our daily universe of online activity—searching for answers to questions, looking up recipes, applying for jobs, posting on forums, accessing cloud applications, reading the news, comparing prices, recording Lock and Code, buying concert tickets, signing up for newsletters—then the company that controls that browser likely knows a lot about its users.In the case of Google Chrome, that’s entirely true.Google Chrome knows the websites you visit, the searches you make (through Google), the links you click, and the device model you use, along with the version of Chrome you run. That may sound benign, but when collected over long periods of time, and when coupled with the mountains of data that other Google products collect about you, this wealth of data can paint a deeply intimate portrait of your life.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with author, podcast host, and privacy advocate Carey Parker about what Google Chrome knows about you, why that data is sensitive, what “Incognito mode” really does, and what you can do in response.We also explain exactly why Google would want this money, and that’s to help it run as an ad company.“That’s what [Google is]. Full stop. Google is an ad company who just happens to make a web browser, and a search engine, and an email app, and a whole lot more than that.”Tune in today.You can also listen to "Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons," the podcast hosted by Carey Parker, here: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

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