scraped

For more than decade, Rudy Serafin showed up to his makeshift office underneath the 10 Freeway as the sun came out and the roar of the morning commute shook the ground below his feet.With a generator, his cellphone and a portable toilet, the 49-year-old immigrant from Michoacán, Mexico, worked alongside a dozen others operating small businesses in spaces they rented between the concrete columns holding up the interstate. They were mechanics, truckers, garment suppliers, recyclers and pallet distributors, struggling to…

Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software used by at least 3,100 law enforcement agencies across the US, has scrapped more than 30 billion images from social media platforms like Facebook. CEO Hoan Ton-That shared the statistic in a recent interview with (via ) where he also said the company had run nearly 1 million searches for US police. Last March, Clearview its database featured more than 20 billion “publicly available” images, meaning the platform has grown by a staggering 50 percent over the past…

A hacker claims to have obtained partial data on 400 million Twitter accounts, with a sample released online including purported information from former prime minister Scott Morrison’s page.The data, which includes email addresses and some phone numbers linked to user accounts but not passwords, was posted just before Christmas on the same data forum that was used by the Optus hacker. This masthead has chosen not to name the site.Twitter has endured a chaotic period under Elon Musk.Credit:APIsraeli cybersecurity company…

Meta is taking legal action against two prolific data scrapers. On Tuesday, the company against a company called Octopus and an individual named Ekrem Ateş. According to Meta, the former is the US subsidiary of a Chinese multinational tech firm that offers data scraping-for-hire services to individuals and companies. Octopus also sells software people can use to carry out their own data collection campaigns. According to Meta, this program first compromises the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the user by providing…