Lock and Code

A funny thing happened on TikTok last month, and its brought allegations of censorship, manipulation, and control.
It was the week of January 22, and after a long legal battle, TikTok had finally—for the first time in its company history—moved its ownership to new, American stewards. But with the American restructuring, TikTok users immediately reported that something had changed: videos would sometimes fail to record any views, and even direct messages would fail to send. But, according to user complaints, the flaws weren’t random. Instead, they befell users who spoke openly about topics that have become political lightning rods in the US, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the actions of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
To some aggrieved users, the flaws looked like censorship. But, according to TikTok, the error messages and missing video count tallies were part of a larger power outage.
“Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” TikTok wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). “We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”
While TikTok has reportedly more than 200 million users in the US alone, it’s far from a universal app. But the changes made to TikTok hint at a bigger sea change in social media and the internet today, in which online spaces are increasingly being altered, shut down, or even controlled—if not through government plot then certainly through corporate influence.
Oddly, the ownership change of TikTok was supposed to solve many of these problems.
Since TikTok’s 2017 founding in China, American lawmakers and government officials claimed that American users were vulnerable to Chinese surveillance. All the data that Americans hand over when using TikTok—their names and email addresses, but also their viewing habits, interests, behaviors, political inclinations, and approximate locations—all of that, the argument went, should not belong in the hands of a foreign power.
As FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2022, the risk of TikTok was:
“The possibility that the Chinese government could use [TikTok] to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.”
But the rocky start to the new American TikTok has only drawn renewed scrutiny: Have the past concerns about foreign manipulation now become current concerns about domestic manipulation?
Today on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Zach Hinkle, senior social media manager for Malwarebytes, and MinJi Pae, social media content creator for Malwarebytes, about what they personally experienced during TikTok’s transition to American owners, why the changes matter for the delivery of news and information, and how the internet appears to be shrinking from its earlier promises.
As Hinkle said on the podcast:
“ The idea of the internet being a private, free space that was ingrained in its creation, and every platform since then sort of carried that spirit with it… those spaces are disappearing.”Tune in today.
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In January, Google settled a lawsuit that pricked up a few ears: It agreed to pay $68 million to a wide array of people who sued the company together, alleging that Google’s voice-activated smart assistant had secretly recorded their conversations, which were then sent to advertisers to target them with promotions.
Google denied any admission of wrongdoing in the settlement agreement, but the fact stands that one of the largest phone makers in the world decided to forego a trial against some potentially explosive surveillance allegations. It’s a decision that the public has already seen in the past, when Apple agreed to pay $95 million last year to settle similar legal claims against its smart assistant, Siri.
Back-to-back, the stories raise a question that just seems to never go away: Are our phones listening to us?
This week, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit an episode from last year in which we tried to find the answer. In speaking to Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Lena Cohen about mobile tracking overall, it becomes clear that, even if our phones aren’t literally listening to our conversations, the devices are stuffed with so many novel forms of surveillance that we need not say something out loud to be predictably targeted with ads for it.
“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 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
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When you hear the words “data privacy,” what do you first imagine?
Maybe you picture going into your social media apps and setting your profile and posts to private. Maybe you think about who you’ve shared your location with and deciding to revoke some of that access. Maybe you want to remove a few apps entirely from your smartphone, maybe you want to try a new web browser, maybe you even want to skirt the type of street-level surveillance provided by Automated License Plate Readers, which can record your car model, license plate number, and location on your morning drive to work.
Importantly, all of these are “data privacy,” but trying to do all of these things at once can feel impossible.
That’s why, this year, for Data Privacy Day, Malwarebytes Senior Privacy Advocate (and Lock and Code host) David Ruiz is sharing the one thing he’s doing different to improve his privacy. And it’s this: He’s given up Google Search entirely.
When Ruiz requested the data that Google had collected about him last year, he saw that the company had recorded an eye-popping 8,000 searches in just the span of 18 months. And those 8,000 searches didn’t just reveal what he was thinking about on any given day—including his shopping interests, his home improvement projects, and his late-night medical concerns—they also revealed when he clicked on an ad based on the words he searched. This type of data, which connects a person’s searches to the likelihood of engaging with an online ad, is vital to Google’s revenue, and it’s the type of thing that Ruiz is seeking to finally cut off.
So, for 2026, he has switched to a new search engine, Brave Search.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, Ruiz explains why he made the switch, what he values about Brave Search, and why he also refused to switch to any of the major AI platforms in replacing Google.
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 License
http://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.

There’s a bizarre thing happening online right now where everything is getting worse.
Your Google results have become so bad that you’ve likely typed what you’re looking for, plus the word “Reddit,” so you can find discussion from actual humans. If you didn’t take this route, you might get served AI results from Google Gemini, which once recommended that every person should eat “at least one small rock per day.” Your Amazon results are a slog, filled with products that have surreptitiously paid reviews. Your Facebook feed could be entirely irrelevant because the company decided years ago that you didn’t want to see what your friends posted, you wanted to see what brands posted, because brands pay Facebook, and you don’t, so brands are more important than your friends.
But, according to digital rights activist and award-winning author Cory Doctorow, this wave of online deterioration isn’t an accident—it’s a business strategy, and it can be summed up in a word he coined a couple of years ago: Enshittification.
Enshittification is the process by which an online platform—like Facebook, Google, or Amazon—harms its own services and products for short-term gain while managing to avoid any meaningful consequences, like the loss of customers or the impact of meaningful government regulation. It begins with an online platform treating new users with care, offering services, products, or connectivity that they may not find elsewhere. Then, the platform invites businesses on board that want to sell things to those users. This means businesses become the priority and the everyday user experience is hindered. But then, in the final stage, the platform also makes things worse for its business customers, making things better only for itself.
This is how a company like Amazon went from helping you find nearly anything you wanted to buy online to helping businesses sell you anything you wanted to buy online to making those businesses pay increasingly high fees to even be discovered online. Everyone, from buyers to sellers, is pretty much entrenched in the platform, so Amazon gets to dictate the terms.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Doctorow about enshittification’s fast damage across the internet, how to fight back, and where we can lay blame for where it all started.
”Once these laws were established, the tech companies were able to take advantage of them. And today we have a bunch of companies that aren’t tech companies that are nevertheless using technology to rig the game in ways that the tech companies pioneered.”Tune in today.

There’s an entire surveillance network popping up across the United States that has likely already captured your information, all for the non-suspicion of driving a car.
Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, are AI-powered cameras that scan and store an image of every single vehicle that passes their view. They are mounted onto street lights, installed under bridges, disguised in water barrels, and affixed onto telephone poles, lampposts, parking signs, and even cop cars.
Once installed, these cameras capture a vehicle’s license plate number, along with its make, model, and color, and any identifying features, like a bumper sticker, or damage, or even sport trim options. Because nearly every ALPR camera has an associated location, these devices can reveal where a car was headed, and at what time, and by linking data from multiple ALPRs, it’s easy to determine a car’s daylong route and, by proxy, it’s owner’s daily routine.
This deeply sensitive information has been exposed in recent history.
In 2024, the US Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency discovered seven vulnerabilities in cameras made by Motorola Solutions, and at the start of 2025, the outlet Wired reported that more than 150 ALPR cameras were leaking their live streams.
But there’s another concern with ALPRs besides data security and potential vulnerability exploits, and that’s with what they store and how they’re accessed.
ALPRs are almost uniformly purchased and used by law enforcement. These devices have been used to help solve crime, but their databases can be accessed by police who do not live in your city, or county, or even state, and who do not need a warrant before making a search.
In fact, when police access the databases managed by one major ALPR manufacturer, named Flock, one of the few guardrails those police encounter is needing to type a single word in a basic text box. When Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzed 12 million searches made by police in Flock’s systems, they learned that police sometimes filled that text box with the word “protest,” meaning that police were potentially investigating activity that is protected by the First Amendment.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Will Freeman, founder of the ALRP-tracking project DeFlock Me, about this growing tide of neighborhood surveillance and the flimsy protections afforded to everyday people.
“License plate readers are a hundred percent used to circumvent the Fourth Amendment because [police] don’t have to see a judge. They don’t have to find probable cause. According to the policies of most police departments, they don’t even have to have reasonable suspicion.”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...