What the Hack?

Your holiday wish list has cameras, microphones, and more pointed right at you, and you might not even know it. Jen Caltrider explains why smart glasses top her do-not-buy list and why the best gift this year might come from a thrift store.
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A mom posts a video of herself singing in the car with her daughter. Under it, Meta AI suggests a question: ‘Who’s the child passenger?’ One tap later: names, birthdays, and photos of Kalie Robins' daughter she says she’d deleted.
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Chris Parr, A.K.A Chris the Producer, asked the five biggest data brokers for his file. They refused. So he started an LLC, built a website, and bought his own data for nine dollars, which was enough to predict the baby he and his partner are expecting in December.
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Rochester broker "J-Man" explains how scammers impersonate owners, why AI-made rental listings are multiplying, and one thing owners and renters can do this week to stay safe.
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Congrats, you're the perfect candidate! (You're not. You're the mark.) Jay Jones "The Profiler" has taken down more than 58,000 fake job postings. Learn how scammers turn a job hunt into open season on your data, your money, and, if they play it right, your identity.
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When she was 12, Ava Smithing's Instagram algorithim led her from bikini ads to eating disorder content. Meta settled for $17 billion recently, but what's actually changed? Not enough. Oh and the new rules mean sharing even more personal information. 

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Worried about AI? Don't trust Flock Security? You might get on a law enforcement list for that. Investigative reporter Daniel Boguslaw explains Big Tech's push to re-label anti-surveillance camera activists and AI skeptics alike as threats to national security.

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A driver's license breach didn't just leak data—threat actors now have access to a universal key to every identity verification system that relies on state-issued identification. DeleteMe's Rob Shavell joins us to explain what happens when the document designed to prove you’re you can no longer be trusted.

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As technology is integrated deeper into classrooms, the lines between education and data privacy have been destroyed by for-profit data miners. This week, privacy advocate Shannon Edwards reveals how educational apps harvest sensitive information from children, commodify their data, and what parents can do to fight it.
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Same store, same day, different price. David Dayen takes us on a deep dive into the murky cyberscape of surveillance pricing, we enlist young people to prove it's real, and Grace Gedye lays out a future law that might actually stop it.
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Fictitious discounts. payday markups. AI setting airfares in real time. Investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, Grace Gedye (Consumer Reports) are joined byDavid Dayen to expose the algorithms that decide if you pay more or less than your neighbor for the exact same thing.
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Welcome to the infuriating world of surveillance pricing. Chris "the Producer" Parr created a digital nobody to find out whether companies would charge the new him less. What he found was stranger. So how much does what companies know about you affect what you pay?

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Benn Jordan—musician, acoustic scientist, and one of the sharpest minds on surveillance technology—joins 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and the ACLU’s Jay Stanley to trace how surveillance went ambient— and what it means when everyone’s being watched.

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A stranger showed up at Anna Nasset's art gallery with a painting called "Marry Me." She said no. He did not get the message — for 15 years. Now Anna trains law enforcement on stalking, because someone has to explain that "she should be killed" is a red flag.
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Coco Berthmann sold a survival story. Amanda Riley sold a cancer battle. Both were lies that raided communities, wallets, and trust. Journalists Sarah Ganim, Karen Given, and Charlie Webster tell the stories; cognitive scientist Daniel Simons explains why we get taken in.
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Fake screenshots. Burner numbers. Forged emails. A stalker who somehow always knew what a 15-year-old was wearing. Blogger Cathy Holman thought she knew everyone in her tiny Wyoming town—so who's been terrorizing her family?
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Aaron Parnas is the Walter Cronkite of Substack. He has millions of followers who follow him on every platform to get his just-the-facts reporting, but even the most trusted voice on TikTok has some thoughts when it comes to our collective privacy.

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Cybercrime expert Gary Warner joins to discuss Nigerian confraternities, the "campus cults" rooted in idealism that morphed into a multi-billion dollar transnational organized crime network. Learn about the "money blessing," the coded language and insider access, and the elite thug playbook for exploiting trust.
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Ethan Merritt is an WTH alum, but the last time he was on the pod he was the target. This time, he asked for it: Find four flags using only publicly viewable data. Social media posts, podcasts, leaked passwords, a cat-tree video. Listen to hear how we did.
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A teenager rage-hacks a Tetris leaderboard and becomes a millionaire by 18. Now Tal Kollender breaks into companies for a living—and fixes whatever made that possible. We talk about that and Anthropic's Mythos, which is a cyber idyll for our time.
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Marketing visionary Seth Godin explains how the Internet got hijacked by an attention-stealing spam economy that keeps us in an endless loop of badly targeted marketing. Godin's anti-spam playbook: demand companies earn your attention with awesomeness, and break the digital slop loop that broke the Internet.

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A retired Army Colonel becomes the unwitting face of thousands of romance scams. Bryan Denny has been breaking the hearts of people he's never met for years. What do you do when hundreds of crime rings are using your face?

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She said her name was Clara Harper from Chase Bank. She argued with a police officer. She needed gift cards. Brian Ward shares the three times his 85-year-old father got scammed — and why the most unsettling thing wasn't the con. It was how reasonable it all sounded.
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Craig doesn't have Facebook. He's not a gamer. He builds things, fixes things, grows things, has an assortment of antique chainsaws. So why is his name, age, address, and phone number sitting on a website right now available to anyone who knows his name?
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A former military guy goes viral, but not in the way he'd hoped. With fake profiles popping up by the dozen using his photos to scam lonelyhearts out of money, Ethan Merritt did what we all fantasize about from time to time: he scammed the scammer.
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The ACLU's Nate Freed Wessler won Carpenter v. United States and changed how the Fourth Amendment applies to your phone. But data brokers found a workaround — and the IRS, the Pentagon, and ICE all bought in.

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Suveillance-for-profit bros say they can eliminate crime in America, but what about the Fourth Amendment? This week: a 1950s numbers racket and some real talk with Jason Koebler, Benn Jordan, GainSec, and the ACLU's Nate Freed Wessler.

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Online fraud isn't just getting smarter, it's getting personal. Becky Holmes, author of "The Future of Fraud," traces con artists from ancient Rome to AI-powered scam compounds, and asks a question for our post-breach reality: Is Trust dead?

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Sen. Ron Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the ACLU’s Kia Hamadanchy and Marcy Wheeler explain why the deadline to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA may be the most important privacy vote in a generation—and what you can do about it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Data as duh-duh. It's all is out there—indexed, sold, and weaponized. Open source intelligence turns public records into a hacker's playground, your LinkedIn profile is dangerous, but you can still claw back a little privacy before it's gone for good.

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The whisper: A downed U.S. pilot was located by tracking his heartbeat from 40 miles away. Real, or fake news to rattle Iran? Benn Jordan and physicist Chad Orzel help us separate the science fiction from the real threats we all face right now.

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You’ve heard how the compounds work. This week we go inside one—through the eyes of Small Q, an Ugandan musician who was trafficked in and got out—also: Erin West of Operation Shamrock on the bigger picture. 

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Christopher Anderson has spent thirty years in high-stakes situations—war zones, sinking boats, the current White House. What he’s learned about the information people don’t know they’re giving away is the privacy lesson you need to hear.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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One of Time Magazine’s Women of the Year and a vocal advocate for diversity in tech, Tracy Chou built Block Party after discovering firsthand that the platforms have no real incentive to protect you from the people who want to harm you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Jim Clemente built a career reading criminals. FBI special agent, behavioral profiler, Unabomber case, the hit series Criminal Minds. Then someone bought his debit card number on the dark web, linked it to a peer-to-peer finance app, and cleaned him out. 

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Flock Safety says their cameras have never been hacked. Benn Jordan and Jason Koebler watched themselves on one from their homes. This week: a deep dive into the vulnerabilities, the no-opt-out tracking, and a simple question: Does any of it makes us safer?

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No deep fake here. This week, Al Franken does his own impersonations of Bernie Sanders, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Sherrod Brown and Susan Collins in this mock Senate Hearing featuring Siri (played by the actual voice-over talent Susan Bennett) and Al’s fellow SNL alum Laraine Newman playing the part of Alexa.

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Benn Jordan—musician, acoustic scientist, and one of the sharpest minds on surveillance technology—joins 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and the ACLU’s Jay Stanley to trace how surveillance went ambient— and what it means when everyone’s being watched.

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Feeling watched? Join us as Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark breaks down the new reality of digital surveillance. From school apps to AI scams, we dive into how companies collect your data and how to take control of your online privacy. The war for privacy is real—and it's a fight you can't afford to lose.

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Online fraud isn’t just annoying. It’s a national crisis, one that may have drained $158 billion from the U.S. economy last year alone. In this episode, AARP’s Kathy Stokes joins us to explain how fraud has evolved into a sophisticated, global operation and why we’re still blaming the victims instead of stopping the crime.

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