AI at School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Look Up Say More Safety Net Versus Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Beyond Flock itself, testimony raised harder questions about police accountability, data security and a decade-old industry. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . Flock Safety, the largest U.S. seller of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, continues to draw national scrutiny.

How we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border's "virtual wall" We analyzed whether nearly 4,000 migrant deaths occurred within sight of the US government's surveillance towers. Our investigation found people dying near border surveillance towers that promised faster responses to crossings. Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between and . To answer that question, we looked through thousands of pages of government documents, visited the border multiple times, and interviewed more than 45 people, including current and former White House advisors, presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies. The result of our investigation is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near border surveillance towers. Here's how we built it, what decisions we made along the way, and what the data can and can't tell us. The investigation relied on knowing where migrants have died and where and when US Customs and Border Protection towers were installed.

The proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people's Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased "NameTag" face recognition feature. A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image . The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people's photos without notice or consent. WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user's phone.

WIRED rebuilt Flock’s latest search tool from code the company sends to a police officer’s browser. Its AI can keep watch across multiple cameras for anyone fitting a written description.

Google Maps Now Shows'Lake America' Instead of Lake Ontario After Donald Trump's executive order demanding the name change, Google is the first major online maps provider to flip the switch. Lake Ontario is no more on Google Maps in the US. Google changed the name of easternmost of the Great Lakes to "Lake America" late Saturday, days after President Donald Trump ordered its rebranding in official government databases. Trump issued the executive order on Thursday as part of an ongoing feud over tariffs with Canada, whose capital province is called Ontario. It followed a similar order he issued in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as part of a fight with the US trading partner to the south.

I Asked 100 Companies for My Data. California residents have a legal right to access the data that companies collect about them. Actually exercising that right is a burdensome nightmare. I filed a request with McDonald's earlier this month to access all of the personal data the fast food company collected about me, and I received a stunning 515-page report a few days later that detailed my app interactions in granular detail and predicted I would never stop eating there. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, I have the legal right to request access to information from large companies that collect personal data.

The people-search tool ClarityCheck says its reverse image search service is "private and secure"--but it left a database containing more than 9 million image files exposed. When someone uploads a photo to the people-search tool ClarityCheck, the website has a clear message: "Your reverse image search is private and secure." New research, though, shows that the website left more than 9 million image files, including photographs of people's faces, publicly exposed . And a second misconfiguration publicly exposed people's email addresses and phone numbers. Overall, according to findings from independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, the exposed ClarityCheck database contained roughly 450 GB of images, including what appeared to be profile images, screenshots, and other photographs of adults, teenagers, and children.

Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series More than 4.6 million license plates appear in the website's collection of public Flock records. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Hub Versus Say More Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Flock just announced new default privacy settings. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Civil rights groups question the new policy shift. Controversial surveillance technology company Flock Safety has unveiled sweeping new privacy guardrails, seemingly intended to quell growing unrest over its devices' presence across the country. Days prior, CEO Garrett Langley went on a media run to convince the public that the company was not the latest cog in a dystopian surveillance state, but rather a purveyor of public safety.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have reportedly misused electronic databases to spy on family members, try to get dates and even provide intelligence to suspected drug traffickers, according to freedom of information (FOIA) files seen by Wired. Officers allegedly abused databases that can draw from sources like license plate readers, facial recognition and smartphone searches to violate the privacy of numerous individuals. A CBP officer is alleged to have used a government database to contact a flight attendant, and another was accused of using data from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. One employee provided border-crossing data to someone involved in a divorce, and another abused internal policies by tracking coworkers cellphones with ad-tech-derived location data. Of 300 incidents tracked by Wired, 138 were referred to CBP management and 78 assigned to criminal investigators, while 43 others weren't investigated.