You shouldn’t trust any answers a chatbot sends you. And you probably shouldn’t trust it with your personal information either. That’s especially true for “AI girlfriends” or “AI boyfriends,” according to new research. An analysis into 11 so-called romance and companion chatbots, published on Wednesday by the Mozilla Foundation, has found a litany of security Read more
The New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference (NZCBC) warns that two social media accounts of Bishop Steve Lowe on Facebook have been faked. Lowe serves both as the Catholic Bishop of Auckland and President of the New Zealand Bishops’ Conference. The fake social media accounts impersonating Lowe have surfaced on Meta’s Facebook and Messenger platforms and, Read more
The Washington Post detailed last March how a group of Catholic conservatives in the United States spent millions of dollars de-anonymizing mountains of data to identify priests who were using phone apps that facilitate sexual hook-ups, like Grindr and Tinder. The most public of the targets was Msgr Jeffrey Burrill, who was general secretary for Read more
There is a narc in your pocket. It ratted out Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference, and he had to step down. According to The Pillar, Burrill “visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020.” While pundits and activists Read more
Unknown cyber-criminals sent stolen information to the media to pile on pressure to pay a ransom. RNZ subsequently aired a scoop sourced from it before a court ordered all media to dump the dodgy data. The Privacy Commissioner tells Mediawatch RNZ was unethical and he wants action – but RNZ insists the public interest was Read more
Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers. The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns Read more
A Catholic publication that outed a high-ranking Catholic priest as gay and a regular user of the app Grindr and led to his resignation as the secretary-general of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has not revealed where it obtained the data used in its report. But some experts say the level of detail included Read more
Even during a period when the bombs dropping on American Catholics fall with escalating and increasingly destructive frequency, the publication of an “investigation” of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the now-former general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, blasts a crater worth crawling down into for a forensic examination. There are reasons to think Read more
A top official within the US Catholic church resigned (Tuesday) after cellphone data obtained through a broker appeared to show he was a frequent user of the gay dating app Grindr. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a memo that Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill had resigned as its general secretary. This came after staff Read more
The leak of the confidential personal information of COVID-19 patients by Clutha-Southland MP Hamish Walker and influential party figure Michelle Boag has been highly embarrassing for the National Party. In less than 24 hours their attack strategy has detonated in their own trenches and newly elected party leader Todd Muller has been scrambling to explain Read more