Category: 404 Media

I thought I would be a “cool” bride. I believed this because I never dreamed of my own wedding. When other girls daydreamed aloud about riding down the aisle on a pony, or gracefully officiated the union of a Princess Diana Beanie Baby and a Hot Wheels truck, I came ...

On Wednesday shareholders in Thomson Reuters demanded the company’s board launch an investigation into whether its products have contributed to human rights violations, specifically with regards to Thomson Reuters’ ongoing sale of peoples’ personal data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Thomson Reuters sells access to the CLEAR investigative database, ...

We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming message content can be stored in a phone’s internal notification database. After the break, Matthew tells us the latest about the data center pushback. Then in ...

📄 This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here. In ...

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy praised robots as the future of war in a Defense Industry Worker Day address on Monday. “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms—ground systems and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried ...

Thomson Reuters, the technology and content conglomerate that owns the Reuters media agency but also owns and operates the investigative CLEAR database, fired a longstanding employee after they spoke out about the company selling data products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday. The ...

An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s ...

An industry of tech companies is now selling AI-powered chatbot services to Airbnb hosts which reply to guests on their behalf. 404 Media started looking into the companies after one Airbnb host used AI to communicate with their guests, and when the guests seemingly realized, they tricked the chatbot into ...

WebinarTV, a site that scrapes Zoom webinars without permission, has downloaded and posted Zoom Webinars for anonymous addiction recovery meetings, support groups for caregivers and people who suffer from chronic illness, and a meeting of nudists. WebinarTV’s Michael Robertson told me that the company asks every single person for permission ...

Why does the internet feel like it’s getting worse every single day, and why does it feel like the political landscape is getting worse in response? The answer might seem obvious, especially if you read 404 Media on a regular basis, where we’ve been documenting this decline, but it’s important ...