Microsoft Copilot Continues To Be A Nightmare

Our top stories this week:

Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked
Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party
Android 17 QPR2 adds App lock to Pixel
A billion searches a year, now built in: Startpage comes to Firefox
‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators

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Updates from the Team

How To Make a Bitcoin Seed Phrase 🎲

Coinkite's Coldcard wallet recently suffered from a major, devastating flaw in its random number generation, exposing millions of dollars in Bitcoin held by their customers to attackers. We're going to show you how to generate a cryptocurrency seed phrase in the real world with only a 6-sided die, to guarantee our randomness isn't subject to an unknown software flaw.

News Briefs

This week was a busy week, with stories about how Microsoft is phasing out SMS 2FA in favor of passkeys, Meta's patent for facial recognition in their smart glasses, and of course our weekly data breach roundup.

Sources

Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked

While researching possible malicious uses of Microsoft Copilot, researchers at Varonis were able to eventually get Copilot to cough up the secret to autorunning commands. With this link, researchers were able to string together a series of malicious phishing attacks that should not have otherwise been possible. Microsoft has already patched the vulnerability, but it goes to show how AI agents can still be risky to use. X/Twitter's Grok was also subject to a similar attack, according to another set of researchers.

Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

Meta is on a quest to make their "pervert glasses" as dystopian as possible. A recently-filed patent shows how they want to add the capability for their glasses to detect actions of people nearby and turn them into social-media ready video clips. It's also designed to personalize information based on "user relationship data."

Android 17 QPR2 adds App lock to Pixel

Android 17 - which releases in December of this year - will add the ability to natively apps. Apps that are locked will not send notifications or show up as widgets or shortcuts. AI agents and services will still have access to the app data if you've allowed them in the past.

A billion searches a year, now built in: Startpage comes to Firefox

Starting in Firefox 154 (released this week), Startpage is now a built-in option for search engine for desktop users in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. Android and iOS are "coming soon." No word on if this will be expanded globally, but we hope so as Startpage is indeed one of our recommended search engines. On a Firefox-related note, some of our forum members have noted that Mozilla is an adding an optional ad-blocker based on EasyList for Firefox on iOS and iPadOS.

‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators

Last weekend, Apple sent out a wave of notifications to various iPhone users in 110 countries informing them that they may have been targeted by advanced spyware. This information is based on firms like Access Now and iVerify who report more people than usual seeking them out for help. Both organizations note that it's possible this increase is due to Apple having more effective methods for reaching impacted users, but also note there's likely more that aren't being reported to them for various reasons.

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Jonah is Privacy Guides' editor and Program Director. With over a decade of technical writing experience, his role includes researching and writing for Privacy Guides. He also runs Triplebit, a non-profit ISP behind many privacy-related tools.

Jordan is the creator and editor of many videos on Privacy Guides' channels. Previously working with Techlore, they have extensive experience in video editing, motion design, and photography.