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Plus: North Korean hackers get into generative AI, a phone surveillance tool that can monitor billions of devices gets exposed, and ambient light sensors pose a new privacy risk.

US spy agencies purchased Americans’ phone location data and internet metadata without a warrant but only admitted it after a US senator blocked the appointment of a new NSA director.

The Amazon-owned home surveillance company says it is shuttering a feature in its Neighbors app that allows police to request footage from users. But it’s not shutting out the cops entirely.

Plus: Microsoft says attackers accessed employee emails, Walmart fails to stop gift card fraud, “pig butchering” scams fuel violence in Myanmar, and more.

A new report from Chainalysis finds that stablecoins like Tether, tied to the value of the US dollar, were used in the vast majority of crypto-based scam transactions and sanctions evasion in 2023.

Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.

The FTC forced a data broker to stop selling “sensitive location data.” But most companies can avoid such scrutiny by doing the bare minimum, exposing the lack of protections Americans truly have.

Plus: Russia hacks surveillance cameras as new details emerge of its attack on a Ukrainian telecom, a Google contractor pays for videos of kids to train AI, and more.

Being fully anonymous is next to impossible—but you can significantly limit what the internet knows about you by sticking to a few basic rules.