LAPD Drops Flock, Meta Patents Emotion Tracking & Sextortion Surges (07/13/2026)
- › The LAPD, one of Flock's biggest government customers, let its contract with the surveillance company expire, citing serious civil liberties and privacy concerns.
- › Meta filed a patent for an AI that listens to your voice all day, infers how you feel from how you sound, and keeps a timestamped log of your emotional state.
- › Australia's online safety regulator reports young men now file more sextortion complaints than any other group, with over 2,000 in six months.
Today’s stories all circle the same nerve: who gets to know how you feel, where you go, and what you fear, and what they do with it. A major police force decided a mass surveillance tool was not worth the civil liberties cost. Meta patented a way to log your emotional state by the hour. And a regulator put numbers to a scam that runs entirely on a victim’s shame. The data being harvested here is not your password. It is you.
Top Privacy Alerts
1. LAPD Lets Its Flock Surveillance Contract Expire
The Los Angeles Police Department, one of Flock’s largest government customers, allowed its contract with the automated license plate reader company to expire, citing serious concerns over civil liberties and privacy (TechCrunch). When one of the biggest buyers of a surveillance network walks away over principle, it signals that the quiet spread of always-on tracking is finally meeting friction from inside the institutions using it.
Operator Note: A camera network that logs every plate is a dossier of everyone’s movements, not just the suspect’s. The question is never only what it catches, but what it keeps on the people it was never looking for.
2. Meta Patents AI That Listens All Day and Logs How You Feel
Meta filed a patent for an AI that listens to your voice throughout the day, infers your emotional state from how you sound, and keeps a timestamped record of it (The Hacker News). A patent is not a product, but it is a statement of intent, and a running log of when you were anxious, tired, or afraid is the richest manipulation dataset ever proposed. I am pro-AI, and that is exactly why this one deserves a hard look: emotion is the lever social engineers already pull, and this hands them the schematics.
3. Young Men Now Lead a Surge in Sextortion Reports
Australia’s online safety regulator reports that young men now file more sextortion complaints than any other age group, with more than 2,000 reports in six months (The Guardian). Sextortion runs on shame, which is why it works and why it goes unreported, and the rise among young men shows the attackers have simply followed the target that is least likely to tell anyone.
Additional Privacy Alerts
Data Minimization & User Consent
- Sony Moves to Kill Physical Game Discs: The EFF argues PlayStation’s decision to phase out physical discs is another erosion of digital ownership, leaving people renting access to culture they thought they had bought. EFF
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A PhD candidate in Health Psychology and former Corrections Officer, Jeff founded GTA to dismantle passive security models. He focuses on the 'Human Zero-Day', mitigating executive burnout and decision fatigue before they become security breaches.
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