The recent federal raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson isn’t merely an attack by the Trump administration on the free press. It’s also a warning to anyone with a smartphone.
Included in the search and seizure warrant for the raid on Natanson’s home is a section titled “Biometric Unlock,” which explicitly authorized law enforcement personnel to obtain Natanson’s phone and both hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics: the convenient shortcuts that let you unlock your phone by scanning your fingerprint or face.
Tiktok’s new TOS explicitly states that by using the platform, you grant them a permanent liscense to use your face, your voice, etc, for anything they want.
Training LLM models, selling your biometric data to anybody, anything.
People were right that its a form of invasive spyware, all corpo social media apps are, including dating apps obviously.
But uh, its ‘ours’ now, its our ‘panopticon in your pocket’ killer app, so… now its good or something.