Websites Collected Driver’s License Photos to Check Ages. Craig Says 150 Million Were Stolen.

Jim came into the segment from a morning on Flock license-plate cameras, and Craig took it one step wider. The technology is old and the courts have ruled on it for years; his discomfort is with how much of our information is collected at all. Websites that must verify your age now ask for a photo of your driver’s license or passport, so Facebook “or whomever” holds government ID for millions of people. Craig said 150 million of those records have been stolen. “So now what are they going to do? How am I going to prove who I am when other people have a copy of all of my information?” It is Willie Sutton’s answer to why he robbed banks: that’s where the money was.

He added the version everyone recognizes: if you aren’t paying for the app, you are what’s being sold. His example was people in hospital emergency rooms getting ads for personal-injury lawyers, bought on their phone’s location. A warrant and a case number is a legitimate path to the data, Craig agreed, but “the gathering of the information itself is what starts this snowball rolling down the mountain.”

The second half was AI regulation. Jim suspected the AI companies want rules to lock out competitors, and Craig walked through why he agrees: Amazon and online sales tax across more than 9,000 U.S. taxing jurisdictions, the four big beef processors, two of them foreign-owned, and what he found when he read the investigations into the AI “escapes” at Hugging Face and Google. The controls that would have stopped them had been removed. In Google’s case one was left on, and it stopped the model from continuing to guess passwords.

Also in this segment:

• Jim: “Believe it or not, Jim, who’s been listening to you for over a decade, actually learned something.”
• A company can file your sales taxes for you, but when the state’s letter arrives, “it’s still your butt in the sling”
• Publisher versus platform liability, and the AI company that allegedly knew its product was being used to plan an attack
• Craig’s software that shows what is vulnerable on your computer, and Jim’s pitch to business listeners who need IT and security help

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