Inlate January, Apple quietly rolled out an iPhone update that gave some users a privacy boost. One new feature stops cell carriers from collecting certain kinds of location information and sharing it with police or advertisers. With the feature turned on, cell providers will likely only be able to gather a general location, like the neighborhood the phone is in, Apple said.

While the update might be good news for those concerned about advertisers accessing their location, it won’t prevent police from getting relatively precise coordinates from cellphone providers. For years cops have been able to order the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile to provide what’s known as “E911” information. That’s the same location data that the carriers give to emergency responders, except cops can order it for non-emergency situations, typically with a search warrant. The data can be remarkably precise too, up to within five meters.

Apple explicitly states in its update that emergency location information will not be impacted—understandable, given that data can help save lives in getting first responders to a caller. However, cops’ use of this data may make it impossible for Apple to ever prevent police accessing precise locations of an iPhone in the U.S.

There are other loopholes. As it stands, the only iPhone users who can take advantage of the feature are those on Boost Mobile, a small network compared to more widely used carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile. That means most iPhone users won’t even be able to turn the feature on. Apple didn’t offer an explanation as to why.

Apple’s update also won’t prevent the government from determining a rough location from a “tower dump,” when investigators ask carriers to provide all phone numbers connecting to a cell tower near a crime scene within a given timeframe.

In a recent example of its use, the FBI asked providers to tell them all phones that connected to towers located near anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis. Agents were then able to check if phone numbers of people accused of stealing and damaging government property had connected to the towers.

THE BIG STORY:

French Law Enforcement Raid X Over Child Sexual Abuse Material

The Paris Public Prosecutors’ office has raided the French offices of Elon Musk’s X Corp over complaints about X’s AI chatbot Grok and its “dissemination of Holocaust denial content and sexually explicit deepfakes.” Musk’s business has found itself in the crosshairs of various national regulators after Grok’s AI began generating explicit images of minors.

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The FBI has been using facial recognition to identify people at anti-ICE Minneapolis protests who were accused of vandalizing and stealing from government vehicles, Forbes reports.

In a major slip up by the Department of Justice, it released photos of nude women in the Epstein files, a tranche of which were published online last week. The DOJ began removing them after disclosure by the New York Times.

Wired went inside a South East Asian pig butchering operation after a worker at a scam compound leaked information about the sprawling criminal business and then escaped. China recently executed 11 Myanmar nationals for running a similar compound.

Nominations are now open for Forbes AI 50. The eighth-annual list, with sponsoring partner Mayfield, will recognize the most promising startups deploying artificial intelligence in financing, scientific discovery, construction and more. The list is produced in collaboration with Sequoia and Meritech.

Winner of the Week

Google took out a botnet comprised of 9 million hijacked devices that were being used by cybercriminals as a “proxy network,” routing hackers’ internet traffic through consumer devices so they can hide malicious activity.

Loser of the Week

Google agreed to pay a $68 million settlement over allegations it secretly listened to people through their phones and then shared recordings with advertisers. Google said it denied all wrongdoing and sought to avoid further litigation by settling.