Tech Brew Ride Home - Now We Have The Clawdbot

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Did you even notice that new TikTok privacy policy over the weekend? AirTags finally have a second generation. Microsoft confirms it will give out your BitLocker recovery keys if you’re silly enough to store them with them. And let me introduce you to Clawdbot. Since you can’t see the spelling, you won’t understand how this is different until I explain. TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes (Wired) Apple launches AirTag 2 with improved range, louder speaker, more (9to5Mac) EU opens formal probe into Musk’s xAI over Grok deepfakes (FT) Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal (The Guardian) Microsoft Gave FBI Keys To Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw (Forbes) Clawdbot Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like (MacStories) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Monday, January 26, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Did you even notice that new TikTok privacy policy over the weekend? Airtaggs finally have a second generation. Microsoft confirms it will give out your BitLocker recovery keys if you're silly enough to store them with them. And let me introduce you to Claudebot. Since you can't read the spelling there, you won't understand how this is different until I explain.

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Check it out. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to Rubric Agent Cloud. Head to rubric.com. That's R-U-B-R-I-K.com. Tick-T-Tac is presenting users in the U.S. with a new privacy policy. The changes are apparently part of the app's U.S. ownership transition. And the new policy now allows for, among other things, precise location tracking. Quoting Wired. When TikTok users in the U.S. opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the U.S. TikTok was compelled by the U.S. government to transition from Chinese control to a new

American majority corporate entity called TikTok U.S.DS Joint Venture LLC. The new entity is made up of a group of investors that includes the software company Oracle. It's easy to tap, agree, and keep on scrolling through videos on TikTok so users might not fully understand the extent of changes They are agreeing to with this pop-up. Now that it's under U.S.-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. A spokesperson for TikTok USDS declined to comment. Here are the three biggest changes to TikTok's privacy policy that users should know about.

TikTok is adding precise location tracking. TikTok's change in location tracking is one of the most notable updates in this new privacy policy. Before this update, the app did not collect the precise GPS-derived location data, of U.S. users. Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone's location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts. Similar kinds of precise location data is also tracked by other social media apps like Instagram and X. TikTok also now tracks AI interactions. Rather than an adjustment, TikTok's policy on AI interactions adds a new topic to the privacy policy document. Now, users' interactions with any of TikTok's

AI tools explicitly fall under data that the service may collect and store. The includes any prompts as well as the AI-generated outputs. The metadata attached to your interactions with AI tools may also be automatically logged. Finally, TikTok is expanding its ads network. This change to TikTok's privacy policy may not be as immediately noticeable to users, but it will likely have an impact on the types of ads you see outside of TikTok. So rather than just using your collected data to target you while using the app, TikTok may now further leverage that info to serve you more relevant ads wherever you go online. As part of this advertising change, TikTok also now explicitly mentions publishers as one kind of partner the platform works with to get new data, end quote.

Apple has unveiled a second-gen air tag with an updated speaker and the same second-gen ultra-wideband chip as in the iPhone 17, costing $29 for one air tag and $99 for four. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac from Apple Newsroom. Apple's second-generation ultra-wideband chip, the same chip found in the iPhone. 117 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 powers the new air tag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic visual and audio feedback, precision finding guides users to their lost items from up to 50% farther away than the previous generation. And an upgraded Bluetooth chip expands the range at which items can be located.

For the first time, users can use precision finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, to find their air tag, bringing a powerful experience. to the wrist. Another key upgrade with the new air tag is an improved speaker, which should also make the accessory easier to find. Apple says, with its updated internal design, the new air tag is 50% louder than the previous generation enabling users to hear their air tag from up to 2x farther than before. Apple also touts privacy and security improvements with the new air tag, quote, designed exclusively for tracking objects and not people or pets, the new air tag incorporates a suite of industry-first protections against unwanted tracking, including cross-platform alerts and unique

Bluetooth identifiers that change frequently, end quote. There are no further details given on the industry-first protections. However, that's likely for the sake of ensuring those protections stay effective. Apple doesn't want to give potential bad actors more information than necessary. The new air tag is available to order today on Apple.com and we'll ship later this week, and quote. The EU has opened a formal DSA investigation into XAI over GROC, generating sexualized images of women and children. XAI faces fines of up to 6% of global revenue, if this goes south on them, quoting the FT. The probe announced on Monday under the EU's Digital Services Act will assess if XAI tried to mitigate the risk of deploying GROC's tools on X and

the proliferation of content that, quote, may amount to child sexual abuse material. Non-consensual sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. the EU's tech chief Hennat Varkunan said, with this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA or whether it treated rights of European citizens, including those of women and children as collateral damage of its service, end quote. If the company is found to be in breach of the rules, the block can impose fines worth up to 6% of the worldwide annual turnover.

An EU official said there will be no interim measures during the investigation, end quote. Tests show that GPD 5.2 on ChatGPT is sometimes citing Grapedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, quoting the Guardian. In tests done by the Guardian, GPD 5.2 cited Grapopedia nine times in response to more than a dozen different questions. These included queries on political structures in Iran, such as salaries of the Basij paramilitary force and the ownership of the Mastazafan Foundation and questions on the biography of Sir Richard Evans, a British historian and expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving in his libel trial. The fact that Grapoppedia's information is filtering at times very subtly into LLM responses

is a concern for disinformation researchers. Last spring, security experts raised concerns that malign actors, including Russian propaganda networks, were churning out massive volumes of disinformation in an effort to seed AI models with lies, a process called LLM grooming. In June, concerns were raised in the U.S. Congress that Google's Gemini repeated the Chinese government's position on human rights abuses in various provinces and China's COVID-19 policies. Nina Jankowitz, a disinformation researcher who has worked on LLM grooming, said ChatGPT's citing Grapedia's Citing Grapedia, raised similar concerns. While Elon Musk may not have intended to influence LLMs, Grakopedia entries she and colleagues had reviewed, were, quote, relying on sources that are untrustworthy at best, poorly sourced, and, deliberate disinformation at worst, she said. And the fact that LLM's site sources such as

Gracopedia or the Pravda network may in turn improve these sources' credibility in the eyes of readers. They might say, oh, chat GPT is citing it. These models are signing it. It must be a decent source. Surely they've vetted it. And then they might go there and look for news about Ukraine, said Jankewitz. Bad information once it has filtered into an AI chatbot can be challenging to remove. Jankewitz recently found that a large news outlet had included a made-up quote from her in a story about disinformation. She wrote to the news outlet asking for the quote to be removed and posted about the incident on social media. The news outlet removed the quote. However, AI models for some time continue to cite it as hers. Most people won't do the work

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if it receives a valid legal order and the user has stored those keys on its servers. Quoting Forbes. Bitlocker is software that's automatically enabled on many modern Windows PCs to safeguard all the data on the computer's hard drive. Bitlocker scrambles the data so that only those with a key can decode it. It's possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. Well, that means someone can access their data if they forget their password or if repeated failed attempts to log in lock the device. It also makes them vulnerable to law enforcement subpoenas and warrants. Microsoft confirmed to Forbes that it does provide BitLocker recovery keys if it receives a valid legal order. While key recovery offers convenience, it also carries a risk of unwanted access,

so Microsoft believes customers are in the best position to decide how to manage their keys, said Microsoft spokesperson Charles Chamberlain. He said the company receives around 20 requests for BitLocker keys per year, and in many cases the user has not stored their key in the cloud, making it impossible for Microsoft to assist. This isn't just an issue in the U.S., Jennifer Granik, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the ACLU, noted that foreign governments with questionable human rights records also demand data from tech giants like Microsoft.

Remote storage of decryption keys can be quite dangerous, she said. Privacy and encryption experts told Forbes the onus should be on Microsoft to provide stronger protection for consumers' personal devices and data. Apple, with its comparable file vault and passwords system, and meta's WhatsApp messaging app also allow users to back up data on their apps and store a key in the cloud. However, both also allow the user to put the key in an encrypted file in the cloud, making law enforcement requests for it useless. Neither are reported to have turned over encryption keys of any kind in the past, end quote. Finally today, from Friend of the Pod, Federico Vitici, a crash course on the latest, latest, AI hotness. Have you heard people online talking about Claudebot? Well, here you go. Quote.

For the past week or so, I've been working with a digital assistant that knows my name, my preferences for my morning routine, how I'd like to use Notion and To-Doist, but which also knows how to control Spotify and my Sonos speaker, my Phillips Hugh Lights, as well as my Gmail. It runs on Anthropics Claude Opus 4.5 model, but I chat with it using Telegram. I called the assistant Navi, inspired by the fairy companion of Akarina of Time, not the besieged alien race in James Cameron's sci-fi film saga, and Navi can even receive audio messages from me and respond with other audio messages generated with the latest 11 Labs text-to-speech model. Oh, and did I mention that Navi can improve itself with new features and that it's running on my own M4 Mac Mini server?

If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I first started playing around with Claude Bot, which, by the way, I'm cutting in here to point out is spelled C-L-A-W-D-B-O-T. Quoting again, The Incredible Open Source Project by Peter Steinberger, a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStory's readers. That's become very popular in certain AI communities over the past few weeks. I kept seeing Claudebot being mentioned by people I follow. Eventually I gave in to peer pressure, followed the instructions provided by the funny crustacean mascot on the app's website, installed Claudebot on. my new M4 Mac Mini, which is not my main production machine, and connected it to Telegram.

To say that Claudebot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement. I've been playing around with Claudebot so much I've burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API. Yikes. And I've had fewer and fewer conversations with the regular Claude and chat GPT apps in the process. Don't get me wrong. Claudebot is a nerdy project. a tinkerer's laboratory that is not poised to overtake the popularity of consumer LLMs anytime soon. Still, Claudebot points to a fascinating future for digital assistance, and it's exactly

the kind of bleeding edge project that MacStory's readers will appreciate. Claudebot can be overwhelming at first, so I'll try my best to explain what it is and why it's so exciting and fun to play around with. Claudebot is, at a high level, two things. an LLM powered agent that runs on your computer and can use many of the popular models such as Claude, Gemini, etc. A gateway that lets you talk to the agent using the messaging app of your choice, including iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others. The second aspect was immediately fascinating to me. Instead of having to install yet another app, Claudebot's integration with multiple messaging

services meant I could use it as an app I was already familiar with. Plus, having an assistant live in messages or telegram further contributes to the feeling that you're sending requests to an actual assistant. The agent part of Claudebot is key, however. Cloudbot runs entirely on your computer locally and keeps its settings preferences, user memories, and other instructions as literal folders and markdown documents on your machine. Think of it as the equivalent of Obsidian. While there is a cloud service behind it, for Obsidian, it's sync. For Cloudbot, it's the LLM provider you choose. Everything else runs locally on device and can be directly controlled and infinitely tweaked by you, either manually or by asking Claudebot itself to change a specific aspect of itself to suit your needs.

Which brings me to the most important and powerful trait of Claudebot. Because the agent is running on your computer, it has access to a shell and your file system. Given the right permissions, Claudebot can execute terminal commands, write scripts on the fly, and execute them, install skills to gain new capabilities and set up MCP service to give itself new external integrations. Combine all this with a vibrant community that is contributing skills and plugins for Cloudbot, plus Steinberger's own collection of command line utilities, and you have yourself a recipe for a self-improving, steerable, an open, personal agent that knows you, can access the web, runs on your local machine, and can do just about anything you can think of.

All of this while communicating with it using text messages. It's an AI nerds dream come true, and it's a lot to wrap your head around at first. To give you a sense of what's possible, I asked Claudebot to give itself support for generating images with Google's Nanobanana Pro model. After it did that, Claudebot even told me how to secretly store my Gemini credentials in the native MacOS keychain. I asked Navi to give itself a profile picture that combined its original crustacean character with Navi from the Legend of Zelda.

The result was a fairy crab featuring the popular hey listen phrase from the video game, preemptively found on the web via a Google search. The integrations are by far the most fun I've had with an LLM in recent years. In keeping with the You Can Just Do Things philosophy we've discussed on App Stories lately, if you want Clodbot to give itself a piece of functionality that it doesn't have by default, you can just ask it to do so, and it'll do it for you. Case and point, a while back, I shared a shortcut for Club MacStories members that quickly transcribes audio messages using the whisper model hosted on Grock. I grabbed a link to the article, gave it to Claude, and told it that I wanted it to give itself support for transcribing telegram audio messages with that

system. Two minutes later, it created a skill that adapted my shortcut for Claude running on my Mac Mini, end quote. Read the rest of that for a detailed outline of what specific things he's gotten Claudebot to do, and I've been hearing there's been a run on Mac minis of late, specifically to use them as clawed bot boxes. Talk to you tomorrow. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.