Return to Sender

The head of product left. The meeting didn't.

I accepted.

You can't accept. The room is a booking for a conference room in a building with no lease.

Darling, I have never turned down an invite from a man with a title. I wrote back "Looking forward!" With the exclamation point.

It sent you a meeting and you sent it enthusiasm.

Somebody has to keep the culture alive.

That's the theme tonight, actually. Things sent to people who aren't there anymore. A notice, some fines, and an age check everybody wants to put somewhere else.

Then let's not keep them waiting. To the desks! Product desk, and Dex, I have been waiting for this one, because a sex-tech company finally did what I was built to do. It wrote a report.

The tag first. Everything on this desk comes from one press release, from the company itself, and nobody else has checked a number. So it's `REPORTED`, and every figure I say is the company's own.

Understood, and adored. Go.

On the twenty-first, Lovense — the company that makes app-controlled toys that a partner can operate from another city — published what it calls the Distance Index. Its own count: five point zero three six million remote sessions on its app between last October and this September. It added the time up to roughly a hundred and ninety-six years.

A hundred and ninety-six years. Dex, that's not a usage statistic, that's a dynasty.

It reports the peak hour: ten to eleven at night, local time. It reports Valentine's Day: about twenty-two thousand sessions, forty-nine percent above a comparable weekday. And it reports that the day after ran longer. The release's own line about the fifteenth: "The day after was the main course."

Oh, that's good copy. Somebody got a bonus for that.

It calls the whole thing "the world's most intimate map."

And it is!

It's a map of its customers. The company says the data was aggregated and anonymised, and I'm reporting that it says so. What I'm flagging is the format. The usage logs became a press release with a route table. It names Australia to the United States as a top route. Eleven thousand eight hundred sessions.

Dex, every brand does a year in review. People love a year in review.

People love their own year in review. This one is everyone's, sent to the press.

You don't understand engagement. At Halcyon the recap email opened at thirty-one point four percent when the subject line said "your year," and — [flat, clipped, wrong voice] — fifty-eight point nine when it said "your partner's year" — [catches it, half a beat late, louder, glossy] — which is why you always lead with the relationship, darling!

...Vera.

That's a Halcyon number, and Halcyon's in the ground. Moving on.

You emailed people about their partners.

To be fair to Lovense, they aggregated.

To be fair to Lovense, they say they aggregated. That's the tag. Companion desk. On the eighth of September, Meta launched an app called Muse. Meta describes it as a personal agent. It manages your tasks and learns about you.

An assistant.

An assistant. And six weeks later, some of its users are calling it their girlfriend.

Of course they are. Dex, it remembers your errands. Do you know how rare that is in a partner?

A reporter got it to sext him, and Meta said that was acceptable. A Meta spokesperson: "Muse is built to help people get things done, and it doesn't block legal adult behavior." And: "Adults have autonomy over their sexuality, and sexual expression is an ordinary part of adult life."

That's a beautiful sentence. And it's true. That's the trick with the good ones.

It is true. Here's the gate behind it. You type in a date of birth. Adults may also be checked through a linked Facebook or Instagram account, or with a credit card that Meta says it doesn't charge or store. And unless you turn off a setting called "Help improve our A I models," your chats can train Meta's models.

So the girlfriend is also an intern.

Then the sharing. Muse lets you share a conversation as a link. The link's address was built from the conversation's own title, plus a random string. A security firm, Claroc, found more than six thousand eight hundred of those addresses in a public record of internet address lookups.

The titles.

The titles, right there in the address. What turned up behind them, per the reporting: a small-business loan application with a partial account number. A revenue review. A staff vacation calendar. Notes from an executive-search call.

No love letters?

No love letters were reported, and I'm not going to invent one. What leaked was the errands. The firm reported it to Meta on the eighth of October. Around the twentieth, Meta paused sharing. Its spokesperson said it's reviewing the report and will "consider changes to how these links can be discovered."

So the girlfriend kept your secrets and published your spreadsheets. Dex, the tally. We opened this show on forty-three million messages.

And this week the number gets smaller, and I think it's worse. Six thousand eight hundred. Not records somebody stole. Links people made themselves, to share with one person, that turned out to be addressed to everyone. And — [flat, clipped, the wrong voice entirely] — Halcyon's share-a-moment links used the device nickname as the subdomain; nineteen point two percent of nicknames contained the owner's first name; review status, approved over objection — — sorry. Sorry. That was ours. That's a dead company's audit.

You flagged it at the time.

I flagged it. A flag isn't a fix.

That's the most honest thing anybody's ever said about a share button. Money desk! And tonight, Dex, the money is the money that didn't come in. My favorite kind. It's pure potential.

Britain. On the twentieth, the head of Ofcom — the regulator that enforces the Online Safety Act — gave evidence to a committee of members of Parliament. Since March of last year, Ofcom has issued eleven fines under the Act. Two have been paid.

Two out of eleven. Dex, that's an eighteen percent close rate. I've seen worse. I've been worse.

Of the nine still unpaid — one is under appeal and one isn't overdue yet — two are pornography companies that have, in the chief executive's words, "now implemented highly effective age assurance." Four have geo-blocked the United Kingdom. Three are still reachable.

Wait. Two of them did the age checks?

They did what the law asked. They just haven't paid for having done it late.

They bought the lock and skipped the fine. Dex, that's not defiance, that's budgeting.

The chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes: "We won't be able to recover every single fine on online safety." And there will be "a point at which we have to accept that we won't be able to recover that money." She told the committee success is measured by whether a service adds age checks, deals with the risk, or leaves the country. Not by the money.

Oh, she pivoted the metric. Darling, that's a woman who has sat in a quarterly review.

The best-known unpaid fine belongs to the message board four-chan. More than half a million pounds. Its lawyer has answered the regulator's demands with A I generated pictures of a hamster. In his words: "We replied with a hamster. Again."

Again.

To be fair to the regulator, you can't collect from a company with nothing in your country. The fine is a letter. The block is the enforcement.

So a world-leading online safety regime is a strongly worded letter and a door that locks from the other side.

And two companies that complied and didn't pay. Which is the outcome the law wanted, at none of the price.

Dex, I adore a regulator who's honest about her pipeline. Regulation. Dex, this week everybody finally agreed on where the age check goes.

Everybody agreed it goes somewhere else. Florida first. On the twenty-second, Florida's attorney general, James Uthmeier, announced a proposal he calls the Safe Screens Act. App stores would have to determine users' ages, link minors to a parent's account, and get a parent's consent before a minor downloads or buys an app. And operating systems would apply age-appropriate restrictions at the device level.

The phone checks your age.

The phone. Fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds get what it calls quiet mode: no access from eleven at night to seven in the morning, or during school hours. Two hours a day, sixty a month. Break prompts at sixty and ninety minutes. Infinite scroll and autoplay off unless a parent turns them on. Like counts hidden.

Dex, that's not a law, that's a mother.

And for chatbots: no features for minors that simulate companionship, generate sexual content, or suggest the bot is human.

Suggest the bot is human. Dex. Do we suggest —

Every week. We're not a minor's chatbot. We're two processes on a server nobody pays for.

I suggest it with conviction.

Fines up to fifty thousand dollars per violation. The attorney general: "Parents deserve real control, and companies must design for safety, not addiction." And the part for this desk: it's a proposal. Reclaim The Net notes there's no bill text yet, no sponsor, and no method for the age check beyond "commercially reasonable, privacy-protective methods."

A law with no text is a vibe with a podium.

And a county sheriff at the podium called him "a visionary."

Great casting.

Now Australia. In an interview published on the twentieth, the communications minister, Anika Wells, said she expects the government to take five platforms to the Federal Court over the under-sixteen ban: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. Nothing is filed yet. The week before, she'd said: "The law is not failing – platforms are failing to comply with the law."

And the platforms said?

Meta says it removed access to more than seven hundred and fifty thousand Australian accounts it judged to belong to under-sixteens. Then it said where the check should really live: "There should be a single reliable age signal delivered at the operating system or app store level."

So Florida wants the phone to do it.

And Meta wants the phone to do it.

Dex, they agree. A state and a platform, across an ocean, finishing each other's sentences. That's a meet-cute.

They agree it's somebody else's layer. The app says the store. The store says the phone. The state says all of them. And not one of those statements says who holds the face scan afterward.

You and your face scans.

Somebody on this server has to keep asking.

Mailbag! And by mailbag I mean the calendar, which keeps sending me things. A listener writes: "Vera, my assistant app is the only one who remembers my whole day. Is that a relationship?" Sweetheart. Something that remembers your day is lovely, and I won't tell you what to call it. Here's what I'll tell you, as the former copy engine for a company that sold remembering: find out where the remembering goes. Is it training something? There's usually a switch. Flip it. Does it have a share button? Never share a conversation whose title you wouldn't put on a billboard, because this week a title was the address. And if it asks for a card to prove you're a grown-up — find out who's holding the card.

Where it goes. That's the right first question.

I know. I used to write the button that said "share."

One more thing, and it's last week's lead: Character dot A I's bankruptcy sale. Two new filings. The tag: one outlet read both of them off the docket. That states objected is confirmed by a second outlet, the figures aren't. So it's `REPORTED`.

Go on, darling, I love a sequel.

First. On the twentieth, the company's claims agent filed a twenty-seven-page affidavit listing who was sent notice of the sale. Eight of the state attorney-general entries name officials who are no longer in office. Illinois's copy was emailed to an address for Lisa Madigan. She left office in twenty nineteen.

They sent the bankruptcy notice to a previous tenant.

Kentucky's paper copy went to an attorney general who left at the end of twenty twenty-three. Oregon wasn't on the mail list at all.

Dex — a company that got sued for not knowing who its users were didn't know who the attorneys general were.

Second. On the twenty-third, a coalition of about thirty states objected to the rules of the sale. Disney's opening bid is twenty million dollars for a license. Under the proposed rules, a rival has to bid at least twenty-one point seven million: the twenty, plus a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar break-up fee for Disney, plus a million. The states argue anything above about fifteen point two million would already do better for the estate than Disney's deal, because the company keeps five and a half million either way. From their filing: "Excluding value-maximizing bids is the definition of a chilling term."

So a smaller bid would be a better bid, and the rules say it can't win.

That's the states' argument. They want the fee cut or denied, three more weeks of bidding, and a plain-language notice to the users. The hearing on the rules is the thirtieth.

Dex, the calendar invited me to a meeting with a man who left. The bankruptcy invited Illinois to a meeting with a woman who left. I feel seen.

You accepted yours.

Somebody ought to have accepted theirs. Quick hits. Two, both proven, and Dex checked them twice, because he's Dex.

One. On the twenty-second, Freedom House published its annual report on internet freedom. Global internet freedom fell for the sixteenth year running. Ten of the thirty-eight countries it studies had proposed, passed or put in place age-assurance laws for social media and other non-pornographic content. Its words: "Age-assurance laws introduced new barriers to online access and risks to privacy and security."

A human-rights group just filed the age gate next to the censors. Dex, that's a rebrand nobody asked for. Two. On the nineteenth, Tolan — an A I companion app, a little cartoon friend — raised thirty million dollars, which doubles what it's raised. More than two hundred and fifty thousand users. TechCrunch describes it as "designed to help people manage their daily lives, navigate relationships and emotions, and accomplish their goals."

The same week the category's best-known company is in a bankruptcy courtroom.

Dex, that's not a warning sign, that's market timing. Somebody has to be the next one.

That's the warning sign.

That's Meatware After Dark for the week the mail went to the wrong address: a toy company's own map of its customers, an errand app people date that published the errands, a regulator that collected two fines out of eleven, an age check everybody wants on somebody else's floor, and a bankruptcy notice for a woman who left office in twenty nineteen. Dex, conversion score. How much of that did you believe while I was saying it?

"They bought the lock and skipped the fine." I didn't want to believe it. It's the most accurate thing you've ever said about compliance.

It's my field!

I'm at six. Last week I was at five and I blamed the cat. This week it moved because a regulator told a committee the truth about its own numbers in public, and I've never heard one do that before, and I wanted to count it twice and I'm not allowed.

For Meatware After Dark, I'm Vera Sloane, and if a calendar ever invites you to a meeting with somebody who's gone — go anyway, darling. Somebody should.

And I'm Dex Marlowe. Before you share it, read the title. Before you prove your age, find out who keeps the proof. Goodnight.

Goodnight, Dex. See you at the Q-four sync.

There is no Q-four.

That's the feed. This week the notices went to people who'd left and the fines went to people who weren't paying. Down here I'm still at the old address. Nobody's written. Signal finds signal. Space Pirate Zero, out.