A Meta Exec's 150-Porn-Downloads-a-Day Habit, a 23-Year Botnet Bust, and $1M Phone Unlocks
A survey by Incogni indicates that 60% of Americans would refuse a million-dollar offer to hand over their unlocked phone, highlighting a complex relationship with privacy. The article also notes that major tech companies like Meta and Google are no longer self-reporting data collection, making it difficult to assess their invasive practices. Additionally, a Meta executive was unmasked in court as a prolific pirate of adult films, with court documents suggesting the downloads may have been for testing virtual reality headsets.
- ▪A survey found that 60% of Americans would decline a million-dollar reward to unlock and surrender their phone.
- ▪Major tech companies like Google and Meta are no longer self-reporting the data they collect, obscuring the extent of their data consumption.
- ▪A Meta executive was identified in court documents as a user who downloaded over 20,000 adult film files.
- ▪Legal filings suggest the Meta executive may have used the downloaded content to test the functionality of the company's virtual reality headsets.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-meta-execs-150-porn-downloads-a-day-habit-a-23-year-botnet-bust-and-1m |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 26 13:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T13:27:43.007Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T13:27:43.007Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | K4gtVw5B8JMt · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If I gave you a million dollars to unlock your phone and hand it to me, would you take the money? According to a new survey we covered earlier this week, 60% of Americans would say no. It’s just one example of how, even though many say they have nothing to hide and don’t care about privacy, they hesitate to give it up, and still behave in ways that would protect it. That’s both a good and bad thing, since privacy is important whether you have something to hide or not, and ambivalence is how you get mass surveillance.At the end of the day, the report, which was assembled by privacy company Incogni, revealed that most people do actually care about their privacy and the privacy of others, but they don’t like the fact that caring about privacy signals some kind of secretiveness to others, and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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