Our lat­est model, Claude Opus 4.7, is now gen­er­ally avail­able. Opus 4.7 is a no­table im­prove­ment on Opus 4.6 in ad­vanced soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing, with par­tic­u­lar gains on the most dif­fi­cult tasks. Users re­port be­ing able to hand off their hard­est cod­ing work—the kind that pre­vi­ously needed close su­per­vi­sion—to Opus 4.7 with con­fi­dence. Opus 4.7 han­dles com­plex, long-run­ning tasks with rigor and con­sis­tency, pays pre­cise at­ten­tion to in­struc­tions, and de­vises ways to ver­ify its own out­puts be­fore re­port­ing back.The model also has sub­stan­tially bet­ter vi­sion: it can see im­ages in greater res­o­lu­tion. It’s more taste­ful and cre­ative when com­plet­ing pro­fes­sional tasks, pro­duc­ing higher-qual­ity in­ter­faces, slides, and docs. And—although it is less broadly ca­pa­ble than our most pow­er­ful model, Claude Mythos Preview—it shows bet­ter re­sults than Opus 4.6 across a range of bench­marks:Last week we an­nounced Project Glasswing, high­light­ing the risks—and ben­e­fits—of AI mod­els for cy­ber­se­cu­rity. We stated that we would keep Claude Mythos Preview’s re­lease lim­ited and test new cy­ber safe­guards on less ca­pa­ble mod­els first. Opus 4.7 is the first such model: its cy­ber ca­pa­bil­i­ties are not as ad­vanced as those of Mythos Preview (indeed, dur­ing its train­ing we ex­per­i­mented with ef­forts to dif­fer­en­tially re­duce these ca­pa­bil­i­ties). We are re­leas­ing Opus 4.7 with safe­guards that au­to­mat­i­cally de­tect and block re­quests that in­di­cate pro­hib­ited or high-risk cy­ber­se­cu­rity uses. What we learn from the real-world de­ploy­ment of these safe­guards will help us work to­wards our even­tual goal of a broad re­lease of Mythos-class mod­els.Se­cu­rity pro­fes­sion­als who wish to use Opus 4.7 for le­git­i­mate cy­ber­se­cu­rity pur­poses (such as vul­ner­a­bil­ity re­search, pen­e­tra­tion test­ing, and red-team­ing) are in­vited to join our new Cyber Verification Program.Opus 4.7 is avail­able to­day across all Claude prod­ucts and our API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Pricing re­mains the same as Opus 4.6: $5 per mil­lion in­put to­kens and $25 per mil­lion out­put to­kens. Developers can use claude-opus-4-7 via the Claude API.Claude Opus 4.7 has gar­nered strong feed­back from our early-ac­cess testers:In early test­ing, we’re see­ing the po­ten­tial for a sig­nif­i­cant leap for our de­vel­op­ers with Claude Opus 4.7. It catches its own log­i­cal faults dur­ing the plan­ning phase and ac­cel­er­ates ex­e­cu­tion, far be­yond pre­vi­ous Claude mod­els. As a fi­nan­cial tech­nol­ogy plat­form serv­ing mil­lions of con­sumers and busi­nesses at sig­nif­i­cant scale, this com­bi­na­tion of speed and pre­ci­sion could be game-chang­ing: ac­cel­er­at­ing de­vel­op­ment ve­loc­ity for faster de­liv­ery of the trusted fi­nan­cial so­lu­tions our cus­tomers rely on every day.An­thropic has al­ready set the stan­dard for cod­ing mod­els, and Claude Opus 4.7 pushes that fur­ther in a mean­ing­ful way as the state-of-the-art model on the mar­ket. In our in­ter­nal evals, it stands out not just for raw ca­pa­bil­ity, but for how well it han­dles real-world async work­flows—au­toma­tions, CI/CD, and long-run­ning tasks. It also thinks more deeply about prob­lems and brings a more opin­ion­ated per­spec­tive, rather than sim­ply agree­ing with the user.Claude Opus 4.7 is the strongest model Hex has eval­u­ated. It cor­rectly re­ports when data is miss­ing in­stead of pro­vid­ing plau­si­ble-but-in­cor­rect fall­backs, and it re­sists dis­so­nant-data traps that even Opus 4.6 falls for. It’s a more in­tel­li­gent, more ef­fi­cient Opus 4.6: low-ef­fort Opus 4.7 is roughly equiv­a­lent to medium-ef­fort Opus 4.6.On our 93-task cod­ing bench­mark, Claude Opus 4.7 lifted res­o­lu­tion by 13% over Opus 4.6, in­clud­ing four tasks nei­ther Opus 4.6 nor Sonnet 4.6 could solve. Combined with faster me­dian la­tency and strict in­struc­tion fol­low­ing, it’s par­tic­u­larly mean­ing­ful for com­plex, long-run­ning cod­ing work­flows. It cuts the fric­tion from those multi-step tasks so de­vel­op­ers can stay in the flow and fo­cus on build­ing.Based on our in­ter­nal re­search-agent bench­mark, Claude Opus 4.7 has the strongest ef­fi­ciency base­line we’ve seen for multi-step work. It tied for the top over­all score across our six mod­ules at 0.715 and de­liv­ered the most con­sis­tent long-con­text per­for­mance of any model we tested. On General Finance—our largest mod­ule—it im­proved mean­ing­fully on Opus 4.6, scor­ing 0.813 ver­sus 0.767, while also show­ing the best dis­clo­sure and data dis­ci­pline in the group. And on de­duc­tive logic, an area where Opus 4.6 strug­gled, Opus 4.7 is solid.Claude Opus 4.7 ex­tends the limit of what mod­els can do to in­ves­ti­gate and get tasks done. Anthropic has clearly op­ti­mized for sus­tained rea­son­ing over long runs, and it shows with mar­ket-lead­ing per­for­mance. As en­gi­neers shift from work­ing 1:1 with agents to man­ag­ing them in par­al­lel, this is ex­actly the kind of fron­tier ca­pa­bil­ity that un­locks new work­flows.We’re see­ing ma­jor im­prove­ments in Claude Opus 4.7’s mul­ti­modal un­der­stand­ing, from read­ing chem­i­cal struc­tures to in­ter­pret­ing com­plex tech­ni­cal di­a­grams. The higher res­o­lu­tion sup­port is help­ing Solve Intelligence build best-in-class tools for life sci­ences patent work­flows, from draft­ing and pros­e­cu­tion to in­fringe­ment de­tec­tion and in­va­lid­ity chart­ing.Claude Opus 4.7 takes long-hori­zon au­ton­omy to a new level in Devin. It works co­her­ently for hours, pushes through hard prob­lems rather than giv­ing up, and un­locks a class of deep in­ves­ti­ga­tion work we could­n’t re­li­ably run be­fore.For Replit, Claude Opus 4.7 was an easy up­grade de­ci­sion. For the work our users do every day, we ob­served it achiev­ing the same qual­ity at lower cost—more ef­fi­cient and pre­cise at tasks like an­a­lyz­ing logs and traces, find­ing bugs, and propos­ing fixes. Personally, I love how it pushes back dur­ing tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sions to help me make bet­ter de­ci­sions. It re­ally feels like a bet­ter coworker.Claude Opus 4.7 demon­strates strong sub­stan­tive ac­cu­racy on BigLaw Bench for Harvey, scor­ing 90.9% at high ef­fort with bet­ter rea­son­ing cal­i­bra­tion on re­view ta­bles and no­tice­ably smarter han­dling of am­bigu­ous doc­u­ment edit­ing tasks. It cor­rectly dis­tin­guishes as­sign­ment pro­vi­sions from change-of-con­trol pro­vi­sions, a task that has his­tor­i­cally chal­lenged fron­tier mod­els. Substance was con­sis­tently rated as a strength across our eval­u­a­tions: cor­rect, thor­ough, and well-cited.Claude Opus 4.7 is a very im­pres­sive cod­ing model, par­tic­u­larly for its au­ton­omy and more cre­ative rea­son­ing. On CursorBench, Opus 4.7 is a mean­ing­ful jump in ca­pa­bil­i­ties, clear­ing 70% ver­sus Opus 4.6 at 58%.For com­plex multi-step work­flows, Claude Opus 4.7 is a clear step up: plus 14% over Opus 4.6 at fewer to­kens and a third of the tool er­rors. It’s the first model to pass our im­plicit-need tests, and it keeps ex­e­cut­ing through tool fail­ures that used to stop Opus cold. This is the re­li­a­bil­ity jump that makes Notion Agent feel like a true team­mate.In our evals, we saw a dou­ble-digit jump in ac­cu­racy of tool calls and plan­ning in our core or­ches­tra­tor agents. As users lever­age Hebbia to plan and ex­e­cute on use cases like re­trieval, slide cre­ation, or doc­u­ment gen­er­a­tion, Claude Opus 4.7 shows the po­ten­tial to im­prove agent de­ci­sion-mak­ing in these work­flows.On Rakuten-SWE-Bench, Claude Opus 4.7 re­solves 3x more pro­duc­tion tasks than Opus 4.6, with dou­ble-digit gains in Code Quality and Test Quality. This is a mean­ing­ful lift and a clear up­grade for the en­gi­neer­ing work our teams are ship­ping every day.For CodeRabbit’s code re­view work­loads, Claude Opus 4.7 is the sharpest model we’ve tested. Recall im­proved by over 10%, sur­fac­ing some of the most dif­fi­cult-to-de­tect bugs in our most com­plex PRs, while pre­ci­sion re­mained sta­ble de­spite the in­creased cov­er­age. It’s a bit faster than GPT-5.4 xhigh on our har­ness, and we’re lin­ing it up for our heav­i­est re­view work at launch.For Genspark’s Super Agent, Claude Opus 4.7 nails the three pro­duc­tion dif­fer­en­tia­tors that mat­ter most: loop re­sis­tance, con­sis­tency, and grace­ful er­ror re­cov­ery. Loop re­sis­tance is the most crit­i­cal. A model that loops in­def­i­nitely on 1 in 18 queries wastes com­pute and blocks users. Lower vari­ance means fewer sur­prises in prod. And Opus 4.7 achieves the high­est qual­ity-per-tool-call ra­tio we’ve mea­sured.Claude Opus 4.7 is a mean­ing­ful step up for Warp. Opus 4.6 is one of the best mod­els out there for de­vel­op­ers, and this model is mea­sur­ably more thor­ough on top of that. It passed Terminal Bench tasks that prior Claude mod­els had failed, and worked through a tricky con­cur­rency bug Opus 4.6 could­n’t crack. For us, that’s the sig­nal.Claude Opus 4.7 is the best model in the world for build­ing dash­boards and data-rich in­ter­faces. The de­sign taste is gen­uinely sur­pris­ing—it makes choices I’d ac­tu­ally ship. It’s my de­fault daily dri­ver now.Claude Opus 4.7 is the most ca­pa­ble model we’ve tested at Quantium. Evaluated against lead­ing AI mod­els through our pro­pri­etary bench­mark­ing so­lu­tion, the biggest gains showed up where they mat­ter most: rea­son­ing depth, struc­tured prob­lem-fram­ing, and com­plex tech­ni­cal work. Fewer cor­rec­tions, faster it­er­a­tions, and stronger out­puts to solve the hard­est prob­lems our clients bring us.Claude Opus 4.7 feels like a real step up in in­tel­li­gence. Code qual­ity is no­tice­ably im­proved, it’s cut­ting out the mean­ing­less wrap­per func­tions and fall­back scaf­fold­ing that used to pile up, and fixes its own code as it goes. It’s the clean­est jump we’ve seen since the move from Sonnet 3.7 to the Claude 4 se­ries.For the com­puter-use work that sits at the heart of XBOW’s au­tonomous pen­e­tra­tion test­ing, the new Claude Opus 4.7 is a step change: 98.5% on our vi­sual-acu­ity bench­mark ver­sus 54.5% for Opus 4.6. Our sin­gle biggest Opus pain point ef­fec­tively dis­ap­peared, and that un­locks its use for a whole class of work where we could­n’t use it be­fore.Claude Opus 4.7 is a solid up­grade with no re­gres­sions for Vercel. It’s phe­nom­e­nal on one-shot cod­ing tasks, more cor­rect and com­plete than Opus 4.6, and no­tice­ably more hon­est about its own lim­its. It even does proofs on sys­tems code be­fore start­ing work, which is new be­hav­ior we haven’t seen from ear­lier Claude mod­els.Claude Opus 4.7 is very strong and out­per­forms Opus 4.6 with a 10% to 15% lift in task suc­cess for Factory Droids, with fewer tool er­rors and more re­li­able fol­low-through on val­i­da­tion steps. It car­ries work all the way through in­stead of stop­ping halfway, which is ex­actly what en­ter­prise en­gi­neer­ing teams need.Claude Opus 4.7 au­tonomously built a com­plete Rust text-to-speech en­gine from scratch—neural model, SIMD ker­nels, browser demo—then fed its own out­put through a speech rec­og­nizer to ver­ify it matched the Python ref­er­ence. Months of se­nior en­gi­neer­ing, de­liv­ered au­tonomously. The step up from Opus 4.6 is clear, and the code­base is pub­lic.Claude Opus 4.7 passed three TBench tasks that prior Claude mod­els could­n’t, and it’s land­ing fixes our pre­vi­ous best model missed, in­clud­ing a race con­di­tion. It demon­strates strong pre­ci­sion in iden­ti­fy­ing real is­sues, and sur­faces im­por­tant find­ings that other mod­els ei­ther gave up on or did­n’t re­solve. In Qodo’s real-world code re­view bench­mark, we ob­served top-tier pre­ci­sion.On Databricks’ OfficeQA Pro, Claude Opus 4.7 shows mean­ing­fully stronger doc­u­ment rea­son­ing, with 21% fewer er­rors than Opus 4.6 when work­ing with source in­for­ma­tion. Across our agen­tic rea­son­ing over data bench­marks, it is the best-per­form­ing Claude model for en­ter­prise doc­u­ment analy­sis.For Ramp, Claude Opus 4.7 stands out in agent-team work­flows. We’re see­ing stronger role fi­delity, in­struc­tion-fol­low­ing, co­or­di­na­tion, and com­plex rea­son­ing, es­pe­cially on en­gi­neer­ing tasks that span tools, code­bases, and de­bug­ging con­text. Compared with Opus 4.6, it needs much less step-by-step guid­ance, help­ing us scale the in­ter­nal agent work­flows our en­gi­neer­ing teams run.Claude Opus 4.7 is mea­sur­ably bet­ter than Opus 4.6 for Bolt’s longer-run­ning app-build­ing work, up to 10% bet­ter in the best cases, with­out the re­gres­sions we’ve come to ex­pect from very agen­tic mod­els. It pushes the ceil­ing on what our users can ship in a sin­gle ses­sion.Be­low are some high­lights and notes from our early test­ing of Opus 4.7:Instruction fol­low­ing. Opus 4.7 is sub­stan­tially bet­ter at fol­low­ing in­struc­tions. Interestingly, this means that prompts writ­ten for ear­lier mod­els can some­times now pro­duce un­ex­pected re­sults: where pre­vi­ous mod­els in­ter­preted in­struc­tions loosely or skipped parts en­tirely, Opus 4.7 takes the in­struc­tions lit­er­ally. Users should re-tune their prompts and har­nesses ac­cord­ingly.Im­proved mul­ti­modal sup­port. Opus 4.7 has bet­ter vi­sion for high-res­o­lu­tion im­ages: it can ac­cept im­ages up to 2,576 pix­els on the long edge (~3.75 megapix­els), more than three times as many as prior Claude mod­els. This opens up a wealth of mul­ti­modal uses that de­pend on fine vi­sual de­tail: com­puter-use agents read­ing dense screen­shots, data ex­trac­tions from com­plex di­a­grams, and work that needs pixel-per­fect ref­er­ences.1Real-world work. As well as its state-of-the-art score on the Finance Agent eval­u­a­tion (see table above), our in­ter­nal test­ing showed Opus 4.7 to be a more ef­fec­tive fi­nance an­a­lyst than Opus 4.6, pro­duc­ing rig­or­ous analy­ses and mod­els, more pro­fes­sional pre­sen­ta­tions, and tighter in­te­gra­tion across tasks. Opus 4.7 is also state-of-the-art on GDPval-AA, a third-party eval­u­a­tion of eco­nom­i­cally valu­able knowl­edge work across fi­nance, le­gal, and other do­mains.Mem­ory. Opus 4.7 is bet­ter at us­ing file sys­tem-based mem­ory. It re­mem­bers im­por­tant notes across long, multi-ses­sion work, and uses them to move on to new tasks that, as a re­sult, need less up-front con­text.The charts be­low dis­play more eval­u­a­tion re­sults from our pre-re­lease test­ing, across a range of dif­fer­ent do­mains:Over­all, Opus 4.7 shows a sim­i­lar safety pro­file to Opus 4.6: our eval­u­a­tions show low rates of con­cern­ing be­hav­ior such as de­cep­tion, syco­phancy, and co­op­er­a­tion with mis­use. On some mea­sures, such as hon­esty and re­sis­tance to ma­li­cious “prompt in­jec­tion” at­tacks, Opus 4.7 is an im­prove­ment on Opus 4.6; in oth­ers (such as its ten­dency to give overly de­tailed harm-re­duc­tion ad­vice on con­trolled sub­stances), Opus 4.7 is mod­estly weaker. Our align­ment as­sess­ment con­cluded that the model is “largely well-aligned and trust­wor­thy, though not fully ideal in its be­hav­ior”. Note that Mythos Preview re­mains the best-aligned model we’ve trained ac­cord­ing to our eval­u­a­tions. Our safety eval­u­a­tions are dis­cussed in full in the Claude Opus 4.7 System Card.Overall mis­aligned be­hav­ior score from our au­to­mated be­hav­ioral au­dit. On this eval­u­a­tion, Opus 4.7 is a mod­est im­prove­ment on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, but Mythos Preview still shows the low­est rates of mis­aligned be­hav­ior.In ad­di­tion to Claude Opus 4.7 it­self, we’re launch­ing the fol­low­ing up­dates:More ef­fort con­trol: Opus 4.7 in­tro­duces a new xhigh (“extra high”) ef­fort level be­tween high and max, giv­ing users finer con­trol over the trade­off be­tween rea­son­ing and la­tency on hard prob­lems. In Claude Code, we’ve raised the de­fault ef­fort level to xhigh for all plans. When test­ing Opus 4.7 for cod­ing and agen­tic use cases, we rec­om­mend start­ing with high or xhigh ef­fort.On the Claude Platform (API): as well as sup­port for higher-res­o­lu­tion im­ages, we’re also launch­ing task bud­gets in pub­lic beta, giv­ing de­vel­op­ers a way to guide Claude’s to­ken spend so it can pri­or­i­tize work across longer runs.In Claude Code: The new /ultrareview slash com­mand pro­duces a ded­i­cated re­view ses­sion that reads through changes and flags bugs and de­sign is­sues that a care­ful re­viewer would catch. We’re giv­ing Pro and Max Claude Code users three free ul­tra­reviews to try it out. In ad­di­tion, we’ve ex­tended auto mode to Max users. Auto mode is a new per­mis­sions op­tion where Claude makes de­ci­sions on your be­half, mean­ing that you can run longer tasks with fewer in­ter­rup­tions—and with less risk than if you had cho­sen to skip all per­mis­sions.Opus 4.7 is a di­rect up­grade to Opus 4.6, but two changes are worth plan­ning for be­cause they af­fect to­ken us­age. First, Opus 4.7 uses an up­dated to­k­enizer that im­proves how the model processes text. The trade­off is that the same in­put can map to more to­kens—roughly 1.0–1.35× de­pend­ing on the con­tent type. Second, Opus 4.7 thinks more at higher ef­fort lev­els, par­tic­u­larly on later turns in agen­tic set­tings. This im­proves its re­li­a­bil­ity on hard prob­lems, but it does mean it pro­duces more out­put to­kens. Users can con­trol to­ken us­age in var­i­ous ways: by us­ing the ef­fort pa­ra­me­ter, ad­just­ing their task bud­gets, or prompt­ing the model to be more con­cise. In our own test­ing, the net ef­fect is fa­vor­able—to­ken us­age across all ef­fort lev­els is im­proved on an in­ter­nal cod­ing eval­u­a­tion, as shown be­low—but we rec­om­mend mea­sur­ing the dif­fer­ence on real traf­fic. We’ve writ­ten a mi­gra­tion guide that pro­vides fur­ther ad­vice on up­grad­ing from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7.Score on an in­ter­nal agen­tic cod­ing eval­u­a­tion as a func­tion of to­ken us­age at each ef­fort level. In this eval­u­a­tion, the model works au­tonomously from a sin­gle user prompt, and re­sults may not be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of to­ken us­age in in­ter­ac­tive cod­ing. See the mi­gra­tion guide for more on tun­ing ef­fort lev­els.

In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph. D. candidate study­ing in the U.S. on a stu­dent visa when he briefly at­tended a pro-Pales­tin­ian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an ad­min­is­tra­tive sub­poena re­quest­ing his data. The next month, Google gave Thomas-Johnson’s information to ICE with­out giv­ing him the chance to chal­lenge the sub­poena, break­ing a nearly decade-long promise to no­tify users be­fore hand­ing their data to law en­force­ment.

Google names a hand­ful of ex­cep­tions to this promise (such as if Google re­ceives a gag or­der from a court) that do not ap­ply to Thomas-Johnson’s case. While ICE “requested” that Google not no­tify Thomas-Johnson, the re­quest was not en­force­able or man­dated by a court. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent com­plaints to the California and New York Attorneys General ask­ing them to in­ves­ti­gate Google for de­cep­tive trade prac­tices for break­ing that promise. You can read about the com­plaints here. Below is Thomas-Johnson’s ac­count of his or­deal.

I thought my or­deal with U. S. immigration au­thor­i­ties was over a year ago, when I left the coun­try, cross­ing into Canada at Ni­a­gara Falls.

By that point, the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion had ef­fec­tively turned fed­eral power against in­ter­na­tional stu­dents like me. After I attended a pro-Palestine protest at Cornell University—for all of five min­utes—the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s rhetoric about crack­ing down on stu­dents protest­ing what we saw as geno­cide forced me into hid­ing for three months. Federal agents came to my home look­ing for me. A friend was de­tained at an air­port in Tampa and in­ter­ro­gated about my where­abouts.

I’m currently a Ph. D. stu­dent. Before that, I was a re­porter. I’m a dual British and Trinadad and Tobago cit­i­zen. I have not been ac­cused of any crime.

I be­lieved that once I left U. S. territory, I had also left the reach of its au­thor­i­ties. I was wrong.

Weeks later, in Geneva, Switzerland, I re­ceived what looked like a rou­tine email from Google. It in­formed me that the com­pany had al­ready handed over my ac­count data to the Department of Homeland Security.

At first, I wasn’t alarmed. I had seen some­thing sim­i­lar be­fore. An as­so­ci­ate of mine, Momodou Taal, had re­ceived ad­vance no­tice from Google and Facebook that his data had been re­quested. He was given ad­vanced no­tice of the sub­poe­nas, and law en­force­ment even­tu­ally with­drew them be­fore the com­pa­nies turned over his data.

Google had al­ready dis­closed my data with­out telling me.

I as­sumed I would be given the same op­por­tu­nity. But the lan­guage in my email was dif­fer­ent. It was fi­nal: “Google has re­ceived and re­sponded to le­gal process from a law en­force­ment au­thor­ity com­pelling the re­lease of in­for­ma­tion re­lated to your Google Account.”

Google had al­ready dis­closed my data with­out telling me. There was no op­por­tu­nity to con­test it.

To be clear, this should not have hap­pened this way. Google promises that it will no­tify users be­fore their data is handed over in re­sponse to le­gal processes, in­clud­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive sub­poe­nas. That no­tice is meant to pro­vide a chance to chal­lenge the re­quest. In my case, that safe­guard was by­passed. My data was handed over with­out warn­ing—at the re­quest of an ad­min­is­tra­tion tar­get­ing stu­dents en­gaged in pro­tected po­lit­i­cal speech.

Months later, my lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained the sub­poena it­self. On pa­per, the re­quest fo­cused largely on sub­scriber in­for­ma­tion: IP ad­dresses, phys­i­cal ad­dress, other iden­ti­fiers, and ses­sion times and du­ra­tions.

But taken to­gether, these frag­ments form some­thing far more pow­er­ful—a de­tailed sur­veil­lance pro­file. IP logs can be used to ap­prox­i­mate lo­ca­tion. Phys­i­cal ad­dresses show where you sleep. Ses­sion times would show when you were com­mu­ni­cat­ing with friends or fam­ily. Even with­out mes­sage con­tent, the pic­ture that emerges is in­ti­mate and in­va­sive.

What this ex­pe­ri­ence has made clear is that any­one can be tar­geted by law en­force­ment. And with their mas­sive stores of data, tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies can fa­cil­i­tate those ar­bi­trary in­ves­ti­ga­tions. Together, they can com­bine state power, cor­po­rate data, and al­go­rith­mic in­fer­ence in ways that are dif­fi­cult to see—and even harder to chal­lenge.

The con­se­quences of what hap­pened to me are not ab­stract. I left the United States. But I do not feel that I have left its reach. Being in­ves­ti­gated by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is in­tim­i­dat­ing. Questions run through your head. Am I now a marked in­di­vid­ual? Will I face height­ened scrutiny if I con­tinue my re­port­ing? Can I travel safely to see fam­ily in the Caribbean?

Who, ex­actly, can I hold ac­count­able?

Update: This post has been up­dated to in­clude more in­for­ma­tion about Google’s ex­cep­tions to their no­ti­fi­ca­tion pol­icy, none of which ap­plied to the sub­poena tar­get­ing Thomas-Johnson.

Last week, I wrote about catch­ing a sup­ply chain at­tack on a WordPress plu­gin called Widget Logic. A trusted name, ac­quired by a new owner, turned into some­thing ma­li­cious. It hap­pened again. This time at a much larger scale.

Ricky from Improve & Grow emailed us about an alert he saw in the WordPress dash­board for a client site. The no­tice was from the WordPress.org Plugins Team, warn­ing that a plu­gin called Countdown Timer Ultimate con­tained code that could al­low unau­tho­rized third-party ac­cess.

I ran a full se­cu­rity au­dit on the site. The plu­gin it­self had al­ready been force-up­dated by WordPress.org to ver­sion 2.6.9.1, which was sup­posed to clean things up. But the dam­age was al­ready done.

The plug­in’s wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule had phoned home to an­a­lyt­ics.es­sen­tialplu­gin.com, down­loaded a back­door file called wp-com­ments-posts.php (designed to look like the core file wp-com­ments-post.php), and used it to in­ject a mas­sive block of PHP into wp-con­fig.php.

The in­jected code was so­phis­ti­cated. It fetched spam links, redi­rects, and fake pages from a com­mand-and-con­trol server. It only showed the spam to Googlebot, mak­ing it in­vis­i­ble to site own­ers. And here is the wildest part. It re­solved its C2 do­main through an Ethereum smart con­tract, query­ing pub­lic blockchain RPC end­points. Traditional do­main take­downs would not work be­cause the at­tacker could up­date the smart con­tract to point to a new do­main at any time.

CaptainCore keeps daily restic back­ups. I ex­tracted wp-con­fig.php from 8 dif­fer­ent backup dates and com­pared file sizes. Binary search style.

The in­jec­tion hap­pened on April 6, 2026, be­tween 04:22 and 11:06 UTC. A 6-hour 44-minute win­dow.

I traced the plug­in’s his­tory through 939 quick­save snap­shots. The plu­gin had been on the site since January 2019. The wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule was al­ways there, func­tion­ing as a le­git­i­mate an­a­lyt­ics opt-in sys­tem for years.

Then came ver­sion 2.6.7, re­leased August 8, 2025. The changelog said, “Check com­pat­i­bil­ity with WordPress ver­sion 6.8.2.” What it ac­tu­ally did was add 191 lines of code, in­clud­ing a PHP de­se­ri­al­iza­tion back­door. The class-anylc-ad­min.php file grew from 473 to 664 lines.

The new code in­tro­duced three things:

A fetch_ver_info() method that calls file_get_­con­tents() on the at­tack­er’s server and passes the re­sponse to @unserialize()

A ver­sion_in­fo_­clean() method that ex­e­cutes @$clean($this->version_cache, $this->changelog) where all three val­ues come from the un­se­ri­al­ized re­mote data

That is a text­book ar­bi­trary func­tion call. The re­mote server con­trols the func­tion name, the ar­gu­ments, every­thing. It sat dor­mant for 8 months be­fore be­ing ac­ti­vated on April 5-6, 2026.

This is where it gets in­ter­est­ing. The orig­i­nal plu­gin was built by Minesh Shah, Anoop Ranawat, and Pratik Jain. An India-based team that op­er­ated un­der “WP Online Support” start­ing around 2015. They later re­branded to “Essential Plugin” and grew the port­fo­lio to 30+ free plu­g­ins with pre­mium ver­sions.

By late 2024, rev­enue had de­clined 35-45%. Minesh listed the en­tire busi­ness on Flippa. A buyer iden­ti­fied only as “Kris,” with a back­ground in SEO, crypto, and on­line gam­bling mar­ket­ing, pur­chased every­thing for six fig­ures. Flippa even pub­lished a case study about the sale in July 2025.

The buy­er’s very first SVN com­mit was the back­door.

On April 7, 2026, the WordPress.org Plugins Team per­ma­nently closed every plu­gin from the Essential Plugin au­thor. At least 30 plu­g­ins, all on the same day. Here are the ones I con­firmed:

* SlidersPack — All in One Image Sliders — slid­er­spack-all-in-one-im­age-slid­ers

All per­ma­nently closed. The au­thor search on WordPress.org re­turns zero re­sults. The an­a­lyt­ics.es­sen­tialplu­gin.com end­point now re­turns {“message”:“closed”}.

In 2017, a buyer us­ing the alias “Daley Tias” pur­chased the Display Widgets plu­gin (200,000 in­stalls) for $15,000 and in­jected pay­day loan spam. That buyer went on to com­pro­mise at least 9 plu­g­ins the same way.

The Essential Plugin case is the same play­book at a larger scale. 30+ plu­g­ins. Hundreds of thou­sands of ac­tive in­stal­la­tions. A le­git­i­mate 8-year-old busi­ness ac­quired through a pub­lic mar­ket­place and weaponized within months.

WordPress.org’s forced up­date added re­turn; state­ments to dis­able the phone-home func­tions. That is a band-aid. The wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule is still there with all its code. I built patched ver­sions with the en­tire back­door mod­ule stripped out.

I scanned my en­tire fleet and found 12 of the 26 Essential Plugin plu­g­ins in­stalled across 22 cus­tomer sites. I patched 10 of them (one had no back­door mod­ule, one was a dif­fer­ent “pro” fork by the orig­i­nal au­thors). Here are the patched ver­sions, hosted per­ma­nently on B2:

# Countdown Timer Ultimate

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​count­down-timer-ul­ti­mate-2.6.9.1-patched.zip –force

# Popup Anything on Click

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​popup-any­thing-on-click-2.9.1.1-patched.zip –force

# WP Testimonial with Widget

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​wp-tes­ti­mo­nial-with-wid­get-3.5.1-patched.zip –force

# WP Team Showcase and Slider

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​wp-team-show­case-and-slider-2.8.6.1-patched.zip –force

# WP FAQ (sp-faq)

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​sp-faq-3.9.5.1-patched.zip –force

# Timeline and History Slider

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​time­line-and-his­tory-slider-2.4.5.1-patched.zip –force

# Album and Image Gallery plus Lightbox

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​al­bum-and-im­age-gallery-plus-light­box-2.1.8.1-patched.zip –force

# SP News and Widget

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​sp-news-and-wid­get-5.0.6-patched.zip –force

# WP Blog and Widgets

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​wp-blog-and-wid­gets-2.6.6.1-patched.zip –force

# Featured Post Creative

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​fea­tured-post-cre­ative-1.5.7-patched.zip –force

# Post Grid and Filter Ultimate

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​post-grid-and-fil­ter-ul­ti­mate-1.7.4-patched.zip –force

Each patched ver­sion re­moves the en­tire wpos-an­a­lyt­ics di­rec­tory, deletes the loader func­tion from the main plu­gin file, and bumps the ver­sion to -patched. The plu­gin it­self con­tin­ues to work nor­mally.

The process is straight­for­ward with Claude Code. Point it at this ar­ti­cle for con­text, tell it which plu­gin you need patched, and it can strip the wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule the same way I did. The pat­tern is iden­ti­cal across all of the Essential Plugin plu­g­ins:

Delete the wpos-an­a­lyt­ics/ di­rec­tory from the plu­gin

Remove the loader func­tion block in the main plu­gin PHP file (search for “Plugin Wpos Analytics Data Starts” or wpos_­an­a­lyt­ic­s_anl)

Two sup­ply chain at­tacks in two weeks. Both fol­lowed the same pat­tern. Buy a trusted plu­gin with an es­tab­lished in­stall base, in­herit the WordPress.org com­mit ac­cess, and in­ject ma­li­cious code. The Flippa list­ing for Essential Plugin was pub­lic. The buy­er’s back­ground in SEO and gam­bling mar­ket­ing was pub­lic. And yet the ac­qui­si­tion sailed through with­out any re­view from WordPress.org.

WordPress.org has no mech­a­nism to flag or re­view plu­gin own­er­ship trans­fers. There is no “change of con­trol” no­ti­fi­ca­tion to users. No ad­di­tional code re­view trig­gered by a new com­mit­ter. The Plugins Team re­sponded quickly once the at­tack was dis­cov­ered. But 8 months passed be­tween the back­door be­ing planted and be­ing caught.

If you man­age WordPress sites, search your fleet for any of the 26 plu­gin slugs listed above. If you find one, patch it or re­move it. And check wp-con­fig.php.

Today, we’re launch­ing Claude Design, a new Anthropic Labs prod­uct that lets you col­lab­o­rate with Claude to cre­ate pol­ished vi­sual work like de­signs, pro­to­types, slides, one-pagers, and more.

Claude Design is pow­ered by our most ca­pa­ble vi­sion model, Claude Opus 4.7, and is avail­able in re­search pre­view for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise sub­scribers. We’re rolling out to users grad­u­ally through­out the day.

Even ex­pe­ri­enced de­sign­ers have to ra­tion ex­plo­ration—there’s rarely time to pro­to­type a dozen di­rec­tions, so you limit your­self to a few. And for founders, prod­uct man­agers, and mar­keters with an idea but not a de­sign back­ground, cre­at­ing and shar­ing those ideas can be daunt­ing.

Claude Design gives de­sign­ers room to ex­plore widely and every­one else a way to pro­duce vi­sual work. Describe what you need and Claude builds a first ver­sion. From there, you re­fine through con­ver­sa­tion, in­line com­ments, di­rect ed­its, or cus­tom slid­ers (made by Claude) un­til it’s right. When given ac­cess, Claude can also ap­ply your team’s de­sign sys­tem to every pro­ject au­to­mat­i­cally, so the out­put is con­sis­tent with the rest of your com­pa­ny’s de­signs.

Teams have been us­ing Claude Design for:

* Realistic pro­to­types: Designers can turn sta­tic mock­ups into eas­ily-share­able in­ter­ac­tive pro­to­types to gather feed­back and user-test, with­out code re­view or PRs.

* Product wire­frames and mock­ups: Product Managers can sketch out fea­ture flows and hand them off to Claude Code for im­ple­men­ta­tion, or share them with de­sign­ers to re­fine fur­ther.

* Design ex­plo­rations: Designers can quickly cre­ate a wide range of di­rec­tions to ex­plore.

* Pitch decks and pre­sen­ta­tions: Founders and Account Executives can go from a rough out­line to a com­plete, on-brand deck in min­utes, and then ex­port as a PPTX or send to Canva.

* Marketing col­lat­eral: Marketers can cre­ate land­ing pages, so­cial me­dia as­sets, and cam­paign vi­su­als, then loop in de­sign­ers to pol­ish.

* Frontier de­sign: Anyone can build code-pow­ered pro­to­types with voice, video, shaders, 3D and built-in AI.

Your brand, built in. During on­board­ing, Claude builds a de­sign sys­tem for your team by read­ing your code­base and de­sign files. Every pro­ject af­ter that uses your col­ors, ty­pog­ra­phy, and com­po­nents au­to­mat­i­cally. You can re­fine the sys­tem over time, and teams can main­tain more than one.

Import from any­where. Start from a text prompt, up­load im­ages and doc­u­ments (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), or point Claude at your code­base. You can also use the web cap­ture tool to grab el­e­ments di­rectly from your web­site so pro­to­types look like the real prod­uct.

Refine with fine-grained con­trols. Comment in­line on spe­cific el­e­ments, edit text di­rectly, or use ad­just­ment knobs to tweak spac­ing, color, and lay­out live. Then ask Claude to ap­ply your changes across the full de­sign.

Collaborate. Designs have or­ga­ni­za­tion-scoped shar­ing. You can keep a doc­u­ment pri­vate, share it so any­one in your or­ga­ni­za­tion with the link can view it, or grant edit ac­cess so col­leagues can mod­ify the de­sign and chat with Claude to­gether in a group con­ver­sa­tion.

Export any­where. Share de­signs as an in­ter­nal URL within your or­ga­ni­za­tion, save as a folder, or ex­port to Canva, PDF, PPTX, or stand­alone HTML files.

Handoff to Claude Code. When a de­sign is ready to build, Claude pack­ages every­thing into a hand­off bun­dle that you can pass to Claude Code with a sin­gle in­struc­tion.

Over the com­ing weeks, we’ll make it eas­ier to build in­te­gra­tions with Claude Design, so you can con­nect it to more of the tools your team al­ready uses.

Claude Design is avail­able for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise sub­scribers. Access is in­cluded with your plan and uses your sub­scrip­tion lim­its, with the op­tion to con­tinue be­yond those lim­its by en­abling ex­tra us­age.

For Enterprise or­ga­ni­za­tions, Claude Design is off by de­fault. Admins can en­able it in Organization set­tings.

TLDR: Despite claim­ing to backup all your data, Backblaze qui­etly stopped back­ing up OneDrive and Dropbox fold­ers - along with po­ten­tially many other things.

For ten years I have been us­ing Backblaze for my per­sonal com­puter backup. Before 2015 I would backup files to one of two large ex­ter­nal hard discs. I then ro­tated these dri­ves be­tween, first my fa­ther’s house, and af­ter I moved to the UK, my of­fice draw­ers.

In 2015 Backblaze seemed like a good bet. Unlike Crashplan their soft­ware was­n’t a bloated Java app, but they did have un­lim­ited stor­age. If you could cram it into your PC they would back it up. With their yearly Hard Drive re­views mak­ing good press, a lot of per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tions from my friends and col­leagues, their ser­vice sounded great. I in­stalled the soft­ware, ran it for sev­eral weeks, and sure enough my data was safely stored in their cloud.

I had fur­ther rea­son to be im­pressed when sev­eral years later one of my hard dri­ves failed. I made use of their “send me a hard drive with my stuff on it ser­vice”. A drive turned up filled with my pre­cious data. That for me was proof that this sys­tem worked, and that it worked well.

And so I rec­om­mended Backblaze for years. What do you do for backup? I would ex­toll the virtues of Backblaze, and they made many sales from such rec­om­men­da­tions.

There were a few things I did­n’t like. The app, could use a lot of mem­ory, es­pe­cially af­ter do­ing a large im­port of pho­tographs. The web­site, which I of­ten used to re­store sin­gle files or fold­ers, was slow and clunky to use. The win­dows app in par­tic­u­lar was clunky with an early 2000s aes­thetic and cramped lists. There was the time they leaked all your file­names to Facebook, but they prob­a­bly fixed that.

But no mat­ter, small prob­lems for the peace of mind of hav­ing all my files backed up.

Backup soft­ware is meant to back up your files. Which files? Well the files you need. Given every­one is dif­fer­ent, with dif­fer­ent work­flows and file­types, the ideal thing is to back up all your files. No backup provider knows what I will need in the fu­ture. The provider must plan ac­cord­ingly.

My first trou­bling dis­cov­ery was in 2025, when I made sev­eral er­rors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git his­tory for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of changes was. No prob­lem I thought, I’ll just re­store this from Backblaze. Sadly it was not to be. At some point Backblaze had started to ig­nore .git fold­ers.

This an­noyed me. Firstly I needed that folder and Backblaze had let me down. Secondly within the Backblaze pref­er­ences I could find no way to re-en­able this. In fact look­ing at the list of ex­clu­sions I could find no men­tion of .git what­so­ever.

This made me won­der - I had checked the ex­clu­sions list when I in­stalled Backblaze 9 years be­fore, had I missed it? Had I missed any­thing else?

Well les­son learned I guess, but then a week ago I came across this thread on red­dit: “Doesn’t back up Dropbox folder??”. A user was sur­prised to find their Dropbox folder no longer be­ing backed up. Alarmed I logged into Backblaze, and lo and be­hold, my OneDrive folder was miss­ing.

Backblaze has one job, and ap­par­ently they are un­able to do that job. Back up my stuff. But they have de­cided not to.

Lets take an aside.

A rea­son­able per­son might point out those files on OneDrive are al­ready be­ing backed up - by OneDrive! No. Dropbox and OneDrive are for file sync­ing - sync­ing your files to the cloud. They of­fer lim­ited pro­tec­tion. OneDrive and Dropbox only re­tain deleted files for one month. Backblaze has one year file re­ten­tion, or if you pay per GB, un­lim­ited re­ten­tion. While OneDrive re­tains ver­sion changes for longer, Dropbox only re­tains ver­sion changes for a month - again un­less you pay for more. Your files are less se­cure and less backed up when you stick them in a cloud stor­age provider folder com­pared to just be­ing on your desk­top.

And that’s as­sum­ing your cloud provider is play­ing ball. If Microsoft or Dropbox bans your ac­count you may find your­self with no backup what­so­ever.

For me the larger is­sue is they never told us. My OneDrive folder sits at 383GB. You would think that hav­ing de­cided to no longer back this up I might get an email, and alert or some other no­ti­fi­ca­tion. Of course not.

Nestled into their re­lease notes un­der “Improvements” we see:

The Backup Client now ex­cludes pop­u­lar cloud stor­age providers from backup, in­clud­ing both mount points and cache di­rec­to­ries. This pre­vents per­for­mance is­sues, ex­ces­sive data us­age, and un­in­tended up­loads from ser­vices like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and oth­ers. This change aligns with Backblaze’s pol­icy to back up only lo­cal and di­rectly con­nected stor­age.

First, I would hardly call this change in pol­icy an im­prove­ment, its hard to imag­ine any­one read­ing this as any­thing other than a down­grade in ser­vice. Secondly does Backblaze be­lieve most of its users are read­ing their re­lease notes?

And if you joined to­day and looked at their list of file ex­clu­sions you would find no ref­er­ence to Dropbox or OneDrive. No men­tion of Git ei­ther.

Here’s the thing, to­day they don’t back up Git or OneDrive. Who’s to say to­mor­row they wont add to the list. Maybe some ob­scure file for­mat that’s crit­i­cal to your work flow. Or they will ig­nore a file ex­ten­sion that just hap­pens be the same as one used by your DAW or 3D Modelling soft­ware. And they won’t tell you this. They wont even list it on their site.

By de­cid­ing not to back up every­thing, Backblaze has made it as if they are back­ing up noth­ing.

But re­ally this feels like a promise bro­ken. Back in 2015 their web­site proudly pro­claimed:

All user data in­cluded by de­fault No re­stric­tions on file type or size

Protect the dig­i­tal mem­o­ries and files that mat­ter most to you.

File backup is a mat­ter of trust. You are pay­ing a monthly fee so that if and when things go wrong you can get your data back. By silently chang­ing the rules, Backblaze has not sim­ply eroded my trust, but swept it away.

I wrote this to warn you - Backblaze is no longer do­ing their part, they are no longer back­ing up your data. Some of your data sure, but not all of it.

Finally let me leave you with Backblaze’s own words from 2015:

They promised to sim­plify backup. They suc­ceeded - they don’t even do the backup part any­more.

The Photo page brings Hollywood’s most ad­vanced color tools to still pho­tog­ra­phy for the first time! Whether you’re a pro­fes­sional col­orist look­ing to ap­ply your skills to fash­ion shoots and wed­dings, or a pho­tog­ra­pher who wants to work be­yond the lim­its of tra­di­tional photo ap­pli­ca­tions, the Photo page un­locks the tools you need. Start with fa­mil­iar photo tools in­clud­ing white bal­ance, ex­po­sure and pri­mary color ad­just­ments, then switch to the Color page for ac­cess to the full DaVinci color grad­ing toolset trusted by Hollywood’s best col­orists! You can use DaVinci’s AI toolset as well as Resolve FX and Fusion FX. GPU acceleration lets you ex­port faster than ever be­fore!

For pho­tog­ra­phers, the Photo page of­fers a fa­mil­iar set of tools along­side DaVinci’s pow­er­ful color grad­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties. It includes na­tive RAW sup­port for Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sony and even iPhone ProRAW. All image pro­cess­ing takes place at source res­o­lu­tion up to 32K, or over 400 megapix­els, so you’re never lim­ited to pro­ject res­o­lu­tion. Familiar ba­sic ad­just­ments in­clud­ing white bal­ance, ex­po­sure, color and sat­u­ra­tion give you a com­fort­able start­ing point. With non-de­struc­tive pro­cess­ing you can re­frame, crop and re-in­ter­pret your orig­i­nal sen­sor data at any time. And with GPU ac­cel­er­a­tion, en­tire al­bums can be processed dra­mat­i­cally faster than con­ven­tional photo ap­pli­ca­tions!

The Photo page Inspector gives you pre­cise con­trol over the trans­form and crop­ping pa­ra­me­ters of your im­ages. Reframe and crop non-de­struc­tively at the orig­i­nal source res­o­lu­tion and as­pect ra­tio, so you’re never re­stricted to a fixed time­line size! Zoom, po­si­tion, ro­tate and flip im­ages with full trans­form con­trols and use the crop­ping pa­ra­me­ters to trim the edges of any im­age with pre­ci­sion. Reframe a shot to im­prove com­po­si­tion, ad­just for a spe­cific ra­tio for print or so­cial me­dia use, or sim­ply re­move un­wanted el­e­ments from the edges of a frame. All adjustments can be re­fined or re­set at any time with­out ever af­fect­ing the orig­i­nal source file!

DaVinci Resolve is the world’s only post pro­duc­tion soft­ware that lets every­one work to­gether on the same pro­ject at the same time! Built on a pow­er­ful cloud based work­flow, you can share al­bums, all as­so­ci­ated meta­data and tags, as well as grades and ef­fects with col­orists, pho­tog­ra­phers and re­touch­ers any­where in the world. Blackmagic Cloud sync­ing keeps every col­lab­o­ra­tor with the lat­est ver­sion of your im­age li­brary in real time, and re­mote re­view­ers can ap­prove grades off­site with­out need­ing to be in the same room. Hollywood col­orists can even grade live fash­ion shoots re­motely, all while the pho­tog­ra­pher is still on set!

The Photo page gives you every­thing you need to man­age your en­tire im­age li­brary from im­port to com­ple­tion. You can im­port pho­tos di­rectly, from your Apple Photos li­brary or Lightroom, and or­ga­nize them with tags, rat­ings, fa­vorites and key­words for fast, flex­i­ble man­age­ment of even the largest li­braries. It supports all stan­dard RAW files and im­age types. AI IntelliSearch lets you in­stantly search across your en­tire pro­ject to find ex­actly what you’re look­ing for, from ob­jects to peo­ple to an­i­mals! Albums al­low you to build and man­age col­lec­tions for any pro­ject and with a sin­gle click you can switch be­tween your photo li­brary and your color grad­ing work­flow!

Albums are a pow­er­ful way to build and man­age photo col­lec­tions di­rectly in DaVinci Resolve. You can add im­ages man­u­ally to each al­bum or or­ga­nize by date, cam­era, star rat­ing, EXIF data and more. Powerful fil­ter and sort tools give you to­tal con­trol over how your col­lec­tion is arranged. The thumbnail view dis­plays each im­age’s graded ver­sion along­side its file name and source clip for­mat so you can see your grades at a glance. Create mul­ti­ple grade ver­sions of any im­age, all ref­er­enc­ing the orig­i­nal source file, so you can ex­plore dif­fer­ent looks with­out ever du­pli­cat­ing a file. Plus, grades ap­plied to one photo can be in­stantly copied across oth­ers in the al­bum for a fast, con­sis­tent look!

Connect Sony or Canon cam­eras di­rectly to DaVinci Resolve for teth­ered shoot­ing with full live view! Adjust cam­era set­tings in­clud­ing ISO, ex­po­sure and white bal­ance with­out leav­ing the page and save im­age cap­ture pre­sets to es­tab­lish a con­sis­tent look be­fore you shoot. Images can be cap­tured di­rectly into an al­bum, with al­bums cre­ated au­to­mat­i­cally dur­ing cap­ture so your li­brary is per­fectly or­ga­nized from the mo­ment you start shoot­ing. Grade im­ages as they ar­rive us­ing DaVinci Resolve’s ex­ten­sive color toolset and use a hard­ware panel for hands-on cre­ative con­trol in a col­lab­o­ra­tive shoot. That means you can cap­ture, grade and or­ga­nize an en­tire shoot with­out leav­ing DaVinci Resolve!

The Photo page gives you ac­cess to over 100 GPU and CPU ac­cel­er­ated Resolve FX and spe­cialty AI tools for still im­age work. They’re or­ga­nized by cat­e­gory in the Open FX li­brary and cover every­thing from color ef­fects, blurs and glows to im­age re­pair, skin re­fine­ment and cin­e­matic light­ing tools. These are the same tools used by Hollywood col­orists and VFX artists on the world’s biggest pro­duc­tions, now avail­able for still im­ages. To add an ef­fect, drag it to any node. Whether you’re mak­ing sub­tle beauty re­fine­ments for a fash­ion shoot or ap­ply­ing dra­matic film looks and at­mos­pheric light­ing ef­fects em­u­lat­ing the looks of a Hol­ly­wood fea­ture, the Photo page has the tools you need!

Magic Mask makes pre­cise se­lec­tions of sub­jects or back­grounds, while Depth Map gen­er­ates a 3D map of your scene to sep­a­rate fore­ground and back­ground with­out man­ual mask­ing. Use together to grade dif­fer­ent depths of an im­age in­de­pen­dently for re­sults that have never be­fore been pos­si­ble for stills!

Add a re­al­is­tic light source to any photo af­ter cap­ture with Relight FX. Relight an­a­lyzes the sur­faces of faces and ob­jects to re­flect light nat­u­rally across the im­age. Combine with Magic Mask to light a sub­ject in­de­pen­dently from the back­ground, turn­ing flat por­traits into stun­ning fash­ion im­ages!

Face re­fine­ment au­to­mat­i­cally masks dif­fer­ent parts of a face, sav­ing count­less hours of man­ual work. Sharpen eyes, re­move dark cir­cles, smooth skin, and color lips. Ultra Beauty sep­a­rates skin tex­ture from color for nat­ural, high end re­sults, while AI Blemish Removal han­dles fast skin re­pair!

The Film Look Creator lets you add cin­e­matic looks that repli­cate film prop­er­ties like ha­la­tion, bloom, grain and vi­gnetting. Adjust ex­po­sure in stops and use sub­trac­tive sat­u­ra­tion, rich­ness and split tone con­trols to achieve looks usu­ally found on the big screen, now for your still im­ages!

AI SuperScale uses the DaVinci AI Neural Engine to up­scale low res­o­lu­tion im­ages with ex­cep­tional qual­ity. The enhanced mode is specif­i­cally de­signed to re­move com­pres­sion ar­ti­facts, mak­ing it the per­fect tool for rescal­ing low qual­ity pho­tos or frame grabs up to 4x their orig­i­nal res­o­lu­tion!

UltraNR is a DaVinci AI Neural Engine dri­ven de­noise mode in the Color page’s spa­tial noise re­duc­tion palette. Use it to dra­mat­i­cally re­duce dig­i­tal noise from an im­age while main­tain­ing im­age clar­ity. Use with spa­tial noise re­duc­tion to smooth out dig­i­tal grain or scan­ner noise while keep­ing fine hair and eye edges sharp.

Sample an area of a scene to quickly cover up un­wanted el­e­ments, like ob­jects or even blem­ishes on a face. The patch re­placer has a fan­tas­tic auto grad­ing fea­ture that will seam­lessly blend the cov­ered area with the sur­round­ing color data. Perfect for re­mov­ing sen­sor dust.

The Quick Export op­tion makes it fast and easy to de­liver fin­ished im­ages in a wide range of com­mon for­mats in­clud­ing JPEG, PNG, HEIF and TIFF. Export ei­ther an en­tire al­bum or just se­lected pho­tos pro­vid­ing flex­i­bil­ity to meet your spe­cific de­liv­ery needs. You can set the res­o­lu­tion, bit depth, qual­ity and com­pres­sion to en­sure your im­ages are op­ti­mized for their in­tended use. Whether you’re ex­port­ing stand­alone im­ages for print, shar­ing on so­cial me­dia plat­forms or de­liv­er­ing graded files to a client, Quick Export has you cov­ered. All exports pre­serve your orig­i­nal photo EXIF meta­data, so cam­era set­tings, lo­ca­tion data and other im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion al­ways trav­els with your files.

The Photo page uses GPU ac­cel­er­ated pro­cess­ing to de­liver fast, ac­cu­rate re­sults across your en­tire work­flow. Process hun­dreds of RAW files in sec­onds with GPU ac­cel­er­ated de­cod­ing and ap­ply Resolve FX to your im­ages in real time. GPU acceleration also means batch ex­ports and con­ver­sions are dra­mat­i­cally faster than con­ven­tional photo ap­pli­ca­tions. On Mac, DaVinci Resolve is op­ti­mized for Metal and Apple Silicon, tak­ing full ad­van­tage of the lat­est hard­ware. On Windows and Linux, you get CUDA sup­port for NVIDIA GPUs, while the Windows ver­sion also fea­tures full OpenCL sup­port for AMD, Intel and Qualcomm GPUs. All this en­sures you get high per­for­mance re­sults on any sys­tem!

Hollywood col­orists have al­ways re­lied on hard­ware pan­els to work faster and more cre­atively and now pho­tog­ra­phers can too! The DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel is the per­fect com­pan­ion for photo grad­ing as it is com­pact enough to sit next to a lap­top and portable enough to take on lo­ca­tion for shoots. It features three high qual­ity track­balls for lift, gamma and gain ad­just­ments, 12 pri­mary cor­rec­tion knobs for con­trast, sat­u­ra­tion, hue, tem­per­a­ture and more. It even has a built in recharge­able bat­tery! DaVinci Resolve color pan­els let you ad­just mul­ti­ple pa­ra­me­ters at once, so you can cre­ate looks that are sim­ply im­pos­si­ble with a mouse and key­board.

Hollywood’s most pop­u­lar so­lu­tion for edit­ing, vi­sual ef­fects, mo­tion graph­ics, color cor­rec­tion and au­dio post pro­duc­tion, for Mac, Windows and Linux. Now supports Blackmagic Cloud for col­lab­o­ra­tion!

The most pow­er­ful DaVinci Resolve adds DaVinci Neural Engine for au­to­matic AI re­gion track­ing, stereo­scopic tools, more Resolve FX fil­ters, more Fairlight FX au­dio plu­g­ins and ad­vanced HDR grading.

Includes large search dial in a de­sign that in­cludes only the spe­cific keys needed for edit­ing. Includes Bluetooth with bat­tery for wire­less use so it’s more portable than a full sized key­board!

Editor panel specif­i­cally de­signed for multi-cam edit­ing for news cut­ting and live sports re­play. Includes but­tons to make cam­era se­lec­tion and edit­ing ex­tremely fast! Connects via Bluetooth or USB‑C.

Full sized tra­di­tional QWERTY ed­i­tor key­board in a pre­mium metal de­sign. Featuring a metal search dial with clutch, plus ex­tra edit, trim and time­code keys. Can be in­stalled in­set for flush mount­ing.

Powerful color panel gives you all the con­trol you need to cre­ate cin­e­matic im­ages. Includes con­trols for re­fined color grad­ing in­clud­ing adding win­dows. Connects via Bluetooth or USB‑C.

Portable DaVinci color panel with 3 high res­o­lu­tion track­balls, 12 pri­mary cor­rec­tor knobs and LCDs with menus and but­tons for switch­ing tools, adding color nodes, HDR and sec­ondary grad­ing and more!

Designed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with pro­fes­sional Hollywood col­orists, the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel fea­tures a mas­sive num­ber of con­trols for di­rect ac­cess to every DaVinci color cor­rec­tion fea­ture.

Portable au­dio con­trol sur­face in­cludes 12 pre­mium touch sen­si­tive fly­ing faders, chan­nel LCDs for ad­vanced pro­cess­ing, au­toma­tion and trans­port con­trols plus HDMI for an ex­ter­nal graph­ics dis­play.

Get in­cred­i­bly fast au­dio edit­ing for sound en­gi­neers work­ing on tight dead­lines! Includes LCD screen, touch sen­si­tive con­trol knobs, built in search dial and full key­board with multi func­tion keys.

Used by Hollywood and broad­cast­ers, these large con­soles make it easy to mix large pro­jects with a mas­sive num­ber of chan­nels and tracks. Modular de­sign al­lows cus­tomiz­ing 2, 3, 4, or 5 bay consoles!

Fairlight stu­dio con­sole legs at 0º an­gle for when you re­quire a flat work­ing sur­face. Required for all Fairlight Studio Consoles.

Fairlight stu­dio con­sole legs at 8º angle for when you re­quire a slightly an­gled work­ing sur­face. Required for all Fairlight Studio Consoles.

Features 12 mo­tor­ized faders, ro­tary con­trol knobs il­lu­mi­nated but­tons for pan, solo, mute and call, plus bank se­lect but­tons.

12 groups of touch sen­si­tive ro­tary con­trol knobs and il­lu­mi­nated but­tons, as­sign­a­ble to fader strips, sin­gle chan­nel or mas­ter bus.

Get quick ac­cess to vir­tu­ally every Fairlight fea­ture! Includes a 12” LCD, graph­i­cal key­board, macro keys, trans­port con­trols and more.

Features HDMI, SDI in­puts for video and com­puter mon­i­tor­ing and Ethernet for graph­ics dis­play of chan­nel sta­tus and me­ters.

Empty 2 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Empty 3 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Empty 4 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Empty 5 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Use al­ter­na­tive HDMI or SDI tele­vi­sions and mon­i­tors when build­ing a Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 2 bay Fairlight console.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 3 bay Fairlight console.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 4 bay Fairlight console.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 5 bay Fairlight console.

Side arm kit mounts into Fairlight con­sole mount­ing bar and holds each fader, chan­nel con­trol and LCD mon­i­tor mod­ule.

Blank 1/3rd wide bay for build­ing a cus­tom con­sole with the ex­tra 1/3rd sec­tion. Includes blank in­fill pan­els.

Allows mount­ing stan­dard 19 inch rack mount equip­ment in the chan­nel con­trol area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Blank panel to fill in the chan­nel con­trol area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Blank panel to fill in the LCD mon­i­tor area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole when you’re not us­ing the stan­dard Fairlight LCD monitor.

Blank panel to fill in the fader con­trol area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Adds 3 MADI I/O con­nec­tions to the sin­gle MADI on the ac­cel­er­a­tor card, for a to­tal of 256 inputs and out­puts at 24 bit and 48kHz.

Add up to 2,000 tracks with real time pro­cess­ing of EQ, dy­nam­ics, 6 plug‑ins per track, plus MADI for ex­tra 64 inputs and out­puts.

Adds ana­log and dig­i­tal con­nec­tions, pre­amps for mics and in­stru­ments, sam­ple rate con­ver­sion and sync at any stan­dard frame rate.

Flock Safety mar­kets AI sur­veil­lance that goes far be­yond read­ing li­cense plates; color, bumper stick­ers, dents, and other fea­tures are used to build data­bases and iden­tify move­ment pat­terns. These sys­tems are spread­ing rapidly, of­ten with­out over­sight, and are ac­ces­si­ble to po­lice with­out a war­rant. They raise se­ri­ous pri­vacy and le­gal con­cerns, and con­tribute to a na­tion­wide trend to­ward mass sur­veil­lance.

While this and other sys­tems like it claim to re­duce crime, there is lit­tle ev­i­dence to sup­port that claim - and sig­nif­i­cant risk of abuse. Real pub­lic safety comes from in­vest­ing in com­mu­ni­ties, not stalk­ing them.

Flock Safety mar­kets AI sur­veil­lance that goes far be­yond read­ing li­cense plates; color, bumper stick­ers, dents, and other fea­tures are used to build data­bases and iden­tify move­ment pat­terns. These sys­tems are spread­ing rapidly, of­ten with­out over­sight, and are ac­ces­si­ble to po­lice with­out a war­rant. They raise se­ri­ous pri­vacy and le­gal con­cerns, and con­tribute to a na­tion­wide trend to­ward mass sur­veil­lance.

While this and other sys­tems like it claim to re­duce crime, there is lit­tle ev­i­dence to sup­port that claim - and sig­nif­i­cant risk of abuse. Real pub­lic safety comes from in­vest­ing in com­mu­ni­ties, not stalk­ing them.

Flock Safety mar­kets its de­vices as “AI-powered pre­ci­sion polic­ing tech­nol­ogy” - far be­yond ba­sic li­cense plate read­ers (ALPRs) (Flock Safety). The sys­tem uses AI to cre­ate a “Vehicle Fingerprint” - iden­ti­fy­ing cars not only by li­cense plate, but also by color, make and model, roof racks, dents/​dam­age, wheel type, and more. Even bumper sticker place­ment is an­a­lyzed. This lets law en­force­ment search for a “blue sedan with dam­age on the left side” even with­out a li­cense plate.

But the sur­veil­lance goes deeper. Using a fea­ture called “Convoy Analysis”, the sys­tem can de­tect ve­hi­cles that fre­quently ap­pear near each other - sug­gest­ing as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween dri­vers or ac­com­plices. The plat­form can also flag ve­hi­cles that rou­tinely travel to the same lo­ca­tions across time. Flock de­scribes this as a way to “identify sus­pect ve­hi­cles trav­el­ing to­gether” or “pinpoint as­so­ci­ates” - func­tion­al­ity con­firmed in both their mar­ket­ing and po­lice tes­ti­mo­ni­als (GovTech, ACLU).

The data is logged and made search­able across a na­tion­wide law en­force­ment net­work - which of­fi­cers in sub­scrib­ing agen­cies can ac­cess with­out a war­rant. According to Flock, the sys­tem can au­to­mat­i­cally flag a ve­hi­cle based on its his­tory, route, or pres­ence in mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions linked to a crime (Flock HOA Marketing).

While these tools may aid in lo­cat­ing stolen cars or miss­ing per­sons, they also cre­ate a de­tailed record of every­one’s move­ments, as­so­ci­a­tions, and rou­tines. That data has al­ready been mis­used - like when a Kansas po­lice chief used Flock cam­eras 228 times to stalk an ex-girl­friend and her new part­ner with­out cause (Local12).

The scope of this track­ing be­comes clear when you see real-world ex­am­ples. In 2025, a jour­nal­ist drove 300 miles across rural Virginia and was cap­tured by nearly 50 sur­veil­lance cam­eras op­er­ated by 15 dif­fer­ent law en­force­ment agen­cies. When he re­quested his own sur­veil­lance footage, he dis­cov­ered the cam­eras had doc­u­mented pat­terns that made his be­hav­ior “predictable to any­one look­ing at it.” Most trou­bling: while the jour­nal­ist could­n’t re­mem­ber spe­cific dates he’d made cer­tain trips, po­lice would know in­stantly - with­out any war­rant or sus­pi­cion of wrong­do­ing (Cardinal News).

See also:

EFF: How ALPRs Work,

The Secure Dad on Flock Cameras,

Compass IT: “Privacy Concerns with Flock”,

ACLU: Flock is build­ing a new AI-driven mass sur­veil­lance sys­tem,

Wikipedia: Flock Safety

How Widespread Are These Cameras?

Understanding what Flock cam­eras are leads to a nat­ural ques­tion: how com­mon are they in our com­mu­ni­ties?

The crowd­sourced map made avail­able on DeFlock.me cur­rently shows roughly half of the >100,000 Flock AI cam­eras na­tion­wide. Here are ex­am­ples from three ma­jor cities show­ing how per­va­sive this sur­veil­lance has be­come:

These sys­tems are ex­pand­ing rapidly, of­ten with lit­tle pub­lic de­bate or over­sight. The Atlas of Surveillance, main­tained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has doc­u­mented over 3,000 law en­force­ment and gov­ern­ment agen­cies us­ing Flock prod­ucts as of 2025 - a num­ber grow­ing monthly.

The Fourth Amendment was writ­ten in re­sponse to the British Crown’s “general war­rants” - broad au­tho­riza­tions to search any­one, any­where, any­time. Mass sur­veil­lance re­vives that threat in dig­i­tal form. Simply mov­ing freely in pub­lic should not re­quire that you be pro­filed and scru­ti­nized.

It is im­por­tant to point out that the courts have re­peat­edly ruled so-called “dragnet war­rants,” of­ten us­ing cell phone GPS lo­ca­tions, un­con­sti­tu­tional un­der the Fourth Amendment. But Flock’s sta­tus as a pri­vate com­pany means it can col­lect and sell data with fewer re­stric­tions, ex­ploit­ing a le­gal gray zone which courts have yet to fully ad­dress.

“If you’ve got noth­ing to hide, you’ve got noth­ing to fear” is a tempt­ing thought - un­til some­one mis­uses your in­for­ma­tion. Privacy is­n’t about hid­ing wrong­do­ing. It’s about au­ton­omy, dig­nity, and the abil­ity to live free from un­just scrutiny. “Saying you don’t care about pri­vacy be­cause you have noth­ing to hide is like say­ing you don’t care about free speech be­cause you have noth­ing to say.” - Edward Snowden

As one ob­server put it: “While to­day they are no threat to me…cir­cum­stances change, lead­er­ship changes, laws change. When you re­ally boil this down, what is this na­tion­wide sys­tem? What did Flock re­ally make? It’s a weapon. A silent weapon. Right now it tar­gets what many would agree are crim­i­nals. But with the flip of a switch this sys­tem can be used to tar­get or op­press any­body the peo­ple in power de­cide is a threat.”

We are fast ap­proach­ing a world in which go­ing about one’s busi­ness in pub­lic means be­ing en­tered into a law en­force­ment data­base. Automated li­cense plate read­ers col­lect lo­ca­tion data on mil­lions of peo­ple with no sus­pi­cion of wrong­do­ing, cre­at­ing vast data­bases of where we go and when.

Flock cam­eras and sim­i­lar sur­veil­lance tools raise se­ri­ous Fourth Amendment con­cerns by en­abling broad, war­rant­less track­ing of peo­ple’s move­ments. In 2024, a trial court held that the Flock net­work func­tioned as a “dragnet over the en­tire city.” The judge in the case equated it to plac­ing GPS track­ers on every ve­hi­cle - a prac­tice that the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled re­quires a war­rant (Virginia Mercury, The Virginian Pilot).

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warns that au­to­matic li­cense plate read­ers (ALPRs) are be­com­ing tools for rou­tine mass lo­ca­tion track­ing and sur­veil­lance, with too few rules gov­ern­ing their use. These sys­tems can col­lect and store data on mil­lions of in­no­cent dri­vers, cre­at­ing de­tailed records of peo­ple’s move­ments with­out their knowl­edge or con­sent. (ACLU)

Legal schol­ars have high­lighted the broader im­pli­ca­tions of such sur­veil­lance. Neil Richards, writ­ing in the Harvard Law Review, em­pha­sizes that sur­veil­lance can chill the ex­er­cise of civil lib­er­ties, par­tic­u­larly in­tel­lec­tual pri­vacy, and in­crease the risk of black­mail, co­er­cion, and dis­crim­i­na­tion. (Harvard Law Review)

Flock’s data fur­ther en­ables al­ready bi­ased en­force­ment. In Oak Park, Illinois, 84% of dri­vers stopped us­ing Flock cam­era alerts were Black - de­spite the town be­ing only 21% Black. (Freedom to Thrive).

See also:

ACLU on Unaccountable Surveillance Tech

Mass sur­veil­lance is­n’t just about polic­ing; there are ma­jor busi­ness in­ter­ests in­volved.

Flock Safety col­lab­o­rates with law en­force­ment agen­cies to pro­mote the adop­tion of its li­cense plate recog­ni­tion cam­eras by en­cour­ag­ing pri­vate en­ti­ties such as busi­nesses and HOAs to share their footage. This prac­tice broad­ens the sur­veil­lance net by grant­ing ac­cess to what would oth­er­wise have been pri­vate data (Flock Safety FAQ).

Instances have been re­ported where HOAs in­stalled Flock cam­eras on pub­lic roads, lead­ing to de­bates over the ex­tent of sur­veil­lance and the pri­vacy rights of res­i­dents and vis­i­tors (Oaklandside), (Forest Brooke HOA).

The ACLU has high­lighted that the ex­pan­sive reach of these sur­veil­lance net­works could en­able law en­force­ment to con­struct de­tailed pro­files of in­di­vid­u­als’ move­ments and as­so­ci­a­tions, un­der­scor­ing the need for trans­parency and over­sight (ACLU).

Additionally, Flock mar­kets its sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy to em­ploy­ers and re­tail es­tab­lish­ments, fur­ther blur­ring the lines be­tween pub­lic safety ini­tia­tives and profit-dri­ven sur­veil­lance. For ex­am­ple, ma­jor re­tail prop­erty own­ers have en­tered into agree­ments to share AI-powered sur­veil­lance feeds di­rectly with law en­force­ment, ex­pand­ing the scope of mon­i­tor­ing be­yond pub­lic spaces. (Forbes) [Mirror]

Lowe’s is a sig­nif­i­cant pri­vate client of Flock Safety, hav­ing im­ple­mented their sys­tems in nu­mer­ous lo­ca­tions to en­hance se­cu­rity and de­ter theft.

While Flock specif­i­cally does not of­fer fa­cial recog­ni­tion (today), Lowe’s has faced le­gal trou­bles over its use of fa­cial recog­ni­tion sys­tems from other ven­dors. In 2019, a class ac­tion law­suit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court, al­leg­ing that Lowe’s used fa­cial recog­ni­tion soft­ware to track cus­tomers’ move­ments with­out their con­sent, vi­o­lat­ing Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The law­suit claimed that Lowe’s col­lected and stored bio­met­ric data from cus­tomers and shared it with other re­tail­ers. (Security InfoWatch)

Some jus­tify these sys­tems as mak­ing us safer, but the re­al­ity is more com­pli­cated.

Flock ad­ver­tises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a cul­ture of mis­trust and pre­emp­tive sus­pi­cion. As the EFF warns, com­mu­ni­ties are be­ing sold a false promise of safety - at the ex­pense of civil rights*

(EFF).

A 2019 re­port by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund warned that pre­dic­tive polic­ing tools premised on bi­ased data will re­flect that bias, re­in­forc­ing ex­ist­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. These tools may ap­pear ob­jec­tive, but in­stead of­ten am­plify his­toric in­jus­tice un­der a ve­neer of sci­en­tific cred­i­bil­ity (NAACP LDF).

True safety comes from healthy, em­pow­ered com­mu­ni­ties; not au­to­mated sus­pi­cion. Community-led safety ini­tia­tives have demon­strated sig­nif­i­cant re­sults: North Lawndale saw a 58% de­crease in gun vi­o­lence af­ter READI Chicago be­gan im­ple­ment­ing their pro­gram there. In cities na­tion­wide, the pres­ence of lo­cal non­prof­its has been sta­tis­ti­cally linked to re­duc­tions in homi­cide, vi­o­lent crime, and prop­erty crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).

Zooming out, Flock is just one part of a larger move­ment to­ward ubiq­ui­tous sur­veil­lance.

Flock’s ex­pan­sion is part of a broader move­ment to­ward ubiq­ui­tous mass sur­veil­lance - where your as­so­ci­a­tions, on­line com­ments, pur­chases, move­ments, and more may be logged, in­dexed, an­a­lyzed by AI, and made eas­ily search­able by al­most any gov­ern­ment agency at any time.

This pro­gres­sion from data col­lec­tion to sur­veil­lance fol­lows a fa­mil­iar pat­tern in tech: tools sold for con­ve­nience of­ten evolve into tools of con­trol.

Bruce Schneier, a promi­nent cryp­tog­ra­pher and pri­vacy ad­vo­cate, put it sim­ply: “Surveillance is the busi­ness model of the Internet.” What be­gins as data col­lec­tion for con­ve­nience or se­cu­rity of­ten evolves into per­sis­tent mon­i­tor­ing, nor­mal­iza­tion of track­ing, and the loss of au­ton­omy.

As Edward Snowden warned: “A child born to­day will grow up with no con­cep­tion of pri­vacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a pri­vate mo­ment to them­selves - an un­recorded, un­an­a­lyzed thought.”

In Dunwoody, Georgia, drones are now dis­patched from Flock Safety “nests” to re­spond to 911 calls au­tonomously, of­ten ar­riv­ing in un­der 90 sec­onds (Axios).

In California, 480 high-tech cam­eras were re­cently in­stalled to sur­veil Oakland’s high­ways - track­ing li­cense plates, bumper stick­ers, and ve­hi­cle types - with alerts sent to law en­force­ment in real-time (AP News).

This sur­veil­lance in­fra­struc­ture ex­tends far be­yond law en­force­ment. The U. S. mil­i­tary has spent at least $3.5 mil­lion on a tool called “Augury” that mon­i­tors “93% of in­ter­net traf­fic,” cap­tur­ing brows­ing his­tory, email data, and sen­si­tive cook­ies from Americans - all “without in­formed con­sent.” Senator Ron Wyden has re­ceived whistle­blower com­plaints about this war­rant­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram (VICE).

Meanwhile, the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion is work­ing with Palantir Technologies to cre­ate what Ron Paul calls a “big ugly data­base” - a com­pre­hen­sive col­lec­tion of all in­for­ma­tion held by fed­eral agen­cies on all U.S. cit­i­zens. This would in­clude health records, ed­u­ca­tion records, tax re­turns, firearm pur­chases, and as­so­ci­a­tions with any groups la­beled “extremist.” Palantir, funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, is “literally the cre­ation of the sur­veil­lance state” (OC Register).

Even ba­sic tools we use daily are be­ing trans­formed into sur­veil­lance in­stru­ments. Recent court rul­ings now al­low the gov­ern­ment to or­der com­pa­nies like OpenAI to in­def­i­nitely pre­serve all ChatGPT con­ver­sa­tions. Users who thought they were hav­ing pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions - like “talking to a friend who can keep a se­cret” - dis­cov­ered this only through web fo­rums, not com­pany dis­clo­sure. The judge’s or­der en­ables what one user called a “nationwide mass sur­veil­lance pro­gram” dis­guised as a civil dis­cov­ery process (TechRadar).

This pat­tern re­peats through­out his­tory: peo­ple aban­don lib­erty for promises of safety. After 9/11, many sup­ported the PATRIOT Act. During COVID, many em­braced mask and vac­cine man­dates. After the 2008 fi­nan­cial cri­sis, many sup­ported bailouts be­cause lead­ers said they had to “abandon free-mar­ket prin­ci­ples to save the free-mar­ket sys­tem.” Today, some sup­port mass sur­veil­lance be­cause they be­lieve it will tar­get only “the right peo­ple” - but cir­cum­stances change, lead­er­ship changes, laws change.

See also:

Ars Technica: “AI Cameras to Ensure Good Behavior”,

Video: Predictive Surveillance Trends

So where is all of this head­ing? The tra­jec­tory is trou­bling.

Flock’s cam­eras cap­ture de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about the daily lives of any­one pass­ing by, with­out of­fer­ing a gen­uine opt-out mech­a­nism. Concurrently, Palantir Technologies has se­cured a $30 mil­lion con­tract with ICE, aim­ing to de­velop a sys­tem that con­sol­i­dates sen­si­tive per­sonal data such as bio­met­rics, ge­olo­ca­tion, and other per­sonal iden­ti­fiers from var­i­ous fed­eral agen­cies, fa­cil­i­tat­ing near real-time track­ing and cat­e­go­riza­tion of in­di­vid­u­als for im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment pur­poses (Wired). It should be no sur­prise that this will also not of­fer any mean­ing­ful opt-out mech­a­nism.

The in­te­gra­tion of sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies such as Flock Safety’s li­cense plate read­ers and Palantir’s ImmigrationOS plat­form sig­ni­fies a shift to­ward com­pre­hen­sive mon­i­tor­ing of in­di­vid­u­als’ move­ments and be­hav­iors. It is not dif­fi­cult to imag­ine the scope of such sys­tems’ us­age grow­ing with time.

These de­vel­op­ments raise con­cerns about the ero­sion of pri­vacy and the po­ten­tial for mis­use of ag­gre­gated data. The per­va­sive na­ture of such sur­veil­lance sys­tems means that in­di­vid­u­als are mon­i­tored with­out ex­plicit con­sent, and the data col­lected can be re­pur­posed be­yond its orig­i­nal in­tent. As these tech­nolo­gies be­come more en­trenched, the line be­tween pub­lic safety and in­va­sive over­sight blurs, prompt­ing crit­i­cal dis­cus­sions about the bal­ance be­tween se­cu­rity and in­di­vid­ual free­doms.

Some of the most chill­ing val­i­da­tions of mass sur­veil­lance come not from crit­ics - but from the very peo­ple pro­mot­ing it. These aren’t out-of-con­text slips; they are open en­dorse­ments of a world where pri­vacy is side­lined in fa­vor of con­trol, com­pli­ance, and con­ve­nient en­force­ment.

“Anything tech­nol­ogy they think, ‘Oh it’s a boogey­man. It’s Big Brother watch­ing you,’ … No, Big Brother is pro­tect­ing you.”

- Eric Adams, NYC Mayor (Politico, 2022)

New York’s mayor ca­su­ally re­brands Orwell’s au­thor­i­tar­ian icon as a guardian fig­ure. It’s a star­tling re­ver­sal - not a warn­ing about over­reach, but a de­fense of it.

“Instead of be­ing re­ac­tive, we are go­ing to be proac­tive… [we] use data to pre­dict where fu­ture crimes are likely to take place and who is likely to com­mit them… then deputies would find those peo­ple and take them out.”

- Chris Nocco, Pasco County Sheriff (Tampa Bay Times, 2020)

This “Minority Report”-style pro­gram led to ha­rass­ment of in­no­cent peo­ple - and was ul­ti­mately found un­con­sti­tu­tional in court (Institute for Justice). A rare win, but a stark ex­am­ple of where unchecked sur­veil­lance can go.

“The use of net flow data by NCIS does not re­quire a war­rant.”

- Charles E. Spirtos, Navy Office of Information (VICE, 2024)

The mil­i­tary’s po­si­tion on mon­i­tor­ing Americans’ in­ter­net traf­fic with­out ju­di­cial over­sight. This state­ment came af­ter a whistle­blower com­plained about war­rant­less sur­veil­lance ac­tiv­i­ties to Senator Ron Wyden’s of­fice.

“Tech firms should not de­velop their sys­tems and ser­vices, in­clud­ing end-to-end en­cryp­tion, in ways that em­power crim­i­nals or put vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple at risk.”

- Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary UK Govt, 2019, (Infosecurity Magazine)

The logic: pro­tect­ing every­one’s pri­vacy is dan­ger­ous. This kind of fram­ing jus­ti­fies back­doors into se­cure sys­tems - which in­evitably get abused.

“The risk [of built-in weak­nesses]… is ac­cept­able be­cause we are talk­ing about con­sumer prod­ucts… and not nu­clear launch codes.”

- William Barr, U. S. Attorney General (TechCrunch, 2019)

A clear “rules for thee but not for me” men­tal­ity. Your data, mes­sages, and de­vices don’t de­serve the same pro­tec­tions as the gov­ern­men­t’s - be­cause you’re just a civil­ian.

China ex­ploited a covert sur­veil­lance in­ter­face - orig­i­nally built for law­ful ac­cess by U.S. law en­force­ment - to tap into Americans’ pri­vate phone records, mes­sages, and ge­olo­ca­tion data. (CISA)

Telecom providers are re­quired by law to build these back­doors for law en­force­ment. The “Salt Typhoon” in­ci­dent shows the risk: once a back­door ex­ists, it can be dis­cov­ered and abused - and not just by “the good guys.” (EFF, Reason)

Large pull re­quests are hard to re­view, slow to merge, and prone to con­flicts. Reviewers lose con­text, feed­back qual­ity drops, and the whole team slows down. Stacked PRs solve this by break­ing big changes into a chain of small, fo­cused pull re­quests that build on each other — each one in­de­pen­dently re­view­able.

A stack is a se­ries of pull re­quests in the same repos­i­tory where each PR tar­gets the branch of the PR be­low it, form­ing an or­dered chain that ul­ti­mately lands on your main branch.

GitHub un­der­stands stacks end-to-end: the pull re­quest UI shows a stack map so re­view­ers can nav­i­gate be­tween lay­ers, branch pro­tec­tion rules are en­forced against the fi­nal tar­get branch (not just the di­rect base), and CI runs for every PR in the stack as if they were tar­get­ing the fi­nal branch.

While the gh stack CLI makes the lo­cal work­flow seam­less, it is en­tirely op­tional. You can cre­ate and man­age Stacked PRs di­rectly via the GitHub UI, the API, or your stan­dard Git work­flow. If you choose to use the CLI, it han­dles cre­at­ing branches, man­ag­ing re­bases, push­ing to GitHub, and cre­at­ing PRs with the cor­rect base branches. On GitHub, the PR UI gives re­view­ers the con­text they need — a stack map for nav­i­ga­tion, fo­cused diffs for each layer, and proper rules en­force­ment.

When you’re ready to merge, you can merge all or a part of the stack. Each PR can be merged di­rectly or through the merge queue. If you want to merge mul­ti­ple PRs at once (e.g., the bot­tom two PRs in a stack), sim­ply wait for CI to pass on those spe­cific lay­ers, and you can merge them in a sin­gle step. After a merge, the re­main­ing PRs in the stack are au­to­mat­i­cally re­based so the low­est un­merged PR tar­gets the up­dated base branch.

Ready to dive in? Start with the Quick Start guide or read the full overview.

Today, we are ex­pand­ing our spam poli­cies

to ad­dress a de­cep­tive prac­tice known as “back but­ton hi­jack­ing”, which will be­come an ex­plicit vi­o­la­tion of the “malicious prac­tices” of spam poli­cies, lead­ing to po­ten­tial spam ac­tions.

When a user clicks the “back” but­ton in the browser, they have a clear ex­pec­ta­tion: they want to re­turn to the pre­vi­ous page. Back but­ton hi­jack­ing breaks this fun­da­men­tal ex­pec­ta­tion. It oc­curs when a site in­ter­feres with a user’s browser nav­i­ga­tion and pre­vents them from us­ing their back but­ton to im­me­di­ately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never vis­ited be­fore, be pre­sented with un­so­licited rec­om­men­da­tions or ads, or are oth­er­wise just pre­vented from nor­mally brows­ing the web.

Why are we tak­ing ac­tion?

We be­lieve that the user ex­pe­ri­ence comes first. Back but­ton hi­jack­ing in­ter­feres with the browser’s func­tion­al­ity, breaks the ex­pected user jour­ney, and re­sults in user frus­tra­tion. People re­port feel­ing ma­nip­u­lated and even­tu­ally less will­ing to visit un­fa­mil­iar sites. As we’ve stated be­fore, in­sert­ing de­cep­tive or ma­nip­u­la­tive pages into a user’s browser his­tory has al­ways been against our Google Search Essentials.

We’ve seen a rise of this type of be­hav­ior, which is why we’re des­ig­nat­ing this an ex­plicit vi­o­la­tion of our ma­li­cious prac­tices

pol­icy, which says:

Malicious prac­tices cre­ate a mis­match be­tween user ex­pec­ta­tions and the ac­tual out­come,

lead­ing to a neg­a­tive and de­cep­tive user ex­pe­ri­ence, or com­pro­mised user se­cu­rity or pri­vacy.

Pages that are en­gag­ing in back but­ton hi­jack­ing may be sub­ject to man­ual spam ac­tions

or au­to­mated de­mo­tions, which can im­pact the site’s per­for­mance in Google Search re­sults. To give site own­ers time to make any needed changes, we’re pub­lish­ing this pol­icy two months in ad­vance of en­force­ment on June 15, 2026.

What should site own­ers do?

Ensure you are not do­ing any­thing to in­ter­fere with a user’s abil­ity to nav­i­gate their browser his­tory.

If you’re cur­rently us­ing any script or tech­nique that in­serts or re­places de­cep­tive or ma­nip­u­la­tive pages into a user’s browser his­tory that pre­vents them from us­ing their back but­ton to im­me­di­ately get back to the page they came from, you are ex­pected to re­move or dis­able it.

Notably, some in­stances of back but­ton hi­jack­ing may orig­i­nate from the site’s in­cluded li­braries or ad­ver­tis­ing plat­form. We en­cour­age site own­ers to thor­oughly re­view their tech­ni­cal im­ple­men­ta­tion and re­move or dis­able any code, im­ports or any con­fig­u­ra­tions that are re­spon­si­ble for back but­ton hi­jack­ing, to en­sure a help­ful and non-de­cep­tive ex­pe­ri­ence for users.

If your site has been im­pacted by a man­ual ac­tion and you have fixed the is­sue, you can al­ways let us know by sub­mit­ting a re­con­sid­er­a­tion re­quest

in Search Console. For ques­tions or feed­back, feel free to reach out on so­cial me­dia or dis­cuss in our help com­mu­nity.