404 Media – AI Work Slop is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable “A joint study by Stanford University researchers and a workplace performance consulting firm published in the Harvard Business Review details the plight of workers who have to fix their colleagues’ AI-generated “workslop,” which they describe as work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The research, based on a survey of 1,150 workers, is the latest analysis to suggest that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in some magic productivity boom and instead has just increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”

A team of researchers found that, by not encrypting the data broadcast by Tile tags, users could be vulnerable to having their location information exposed to malicious actors. Tile trackers, used to locate everything from lost keys to stolen pets, are used by more than 88 million people worldwide, according to Tile’s parent company, Life360. But researchers who examined the tracking technology have found design flaws that would let stalkers—or potentially the manufacturer itself—track the location of Tile users and their devices, contrary to claims the company has made about the security and privacy of its devices.

The researchers—Akshaya Kumar, Anna Raymaker, and Michael Specter of Georgia Institute of Technology—found that each tag broadcasts an unencrypted MAC address and unique ID that can be picked up by other Bluetooth devices or radio-frequency antennas in a tag’s vicinity to track the movements of the tag and its owner. The location of a tag, its MAC address, and unique ID also get sent unencrypted to Tile’s servers, where the researchers believe this information is stored in cleartext, giving Tile the ability to track the location of tags and their owners, even though the company claims it does not have this capability.

The researchers say this would give Tile the ability to conduct “mass surveillance” on its users and potentially provide that information to law enforcement and others.

The researchers also found that Tile’s anti-stalking protection can be easily undermined if a stalker enables an anti-theft feature that Tile offers with its tags. Additionally, someone could falsely frame a Tile owner for stalking by recording the unencrypted broadcasts their Tile device makes and replaying these broadcasts in the vicinity of another Tile user, making it seem like the former is stalking the latter.

Law enforcement could potentially use this to identify anyone in an area that has a Tile tag or Tile-enabled device. And because this location information seems likely to be stored unencrypted on Tile’s server, researchers say, Tile could also track the location of tags or share this information with any third party.

“These issues transform Tile’s infrastructure into a global tracking network,” the researchers claim in a paper they wrote about their findings.

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Filed: https://www.wired.com/category/security/