You're listening to Tech Beat, your daily look at technology and the people it touches.
A jury has found Facebook liable for deceiving users in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, a verdict that could carry significant financial consequences for Meta. It's a rare moment of courtroom accountability for a company that has long argued its data practices were misunderstood, not malicious.
Turning to a story with serious civil liberties implications, a Florida woman spent thirteen days in jail after law enforcement relied on a single piece of data from a Flock license plate camera to link her to a vehicular homicide. She was innocent. The case is now a lawsuit, and it raises hard questions about how much weight automated surveillance data should carry in a criminal investigation.
And in a striking security story, a researcher going by Hacktron chained together a heap overflow in a library called libheif, routed through ImageMagick on OpenAI's Discourse forum, and briefly seized control of employee accounts including access to ChatGPT and Codex. What made it stranger still, an XKCD comic from two thousand twenty actually named ImageMagick as the dependency most likely to one day break the internet. Sometimes the jokes age a little too well.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
