{"podcast":{"title":"Lock and Code","slug":"lock-and-code-112850","podcast_index_feed_id":112850,"rss_url":"https://feeds.captivate.fm/lock-and-code/","website_url":"https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/category/podcast","image_url":"https://artwork.captivate.fm/3f215aa3-b1b3-45b6-8738-ac92b2482318/Lock-and-Code-Logo-2025-Refresh.png","author":"Malwarebytes","episode_count":161,"summary":"Lock and Code tells the human stories within cybersecurity, privacy, and technology. Rogue robot vacuums, hacked farm tractors, and catastrophic software vulnerabilities—it’s all here.","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lock-and-code-112850"},"episode":{"title":"Payment apps are watching what you say (feat. Rainey Reitman)","slug":"payment-apps-are-watching-what-you-say-feat-rainey-reitman","published_at":"2026-05-31T19:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lock-and-code-112850/payment-apps-are-watching-what-you-say-feat-rainey-reitman","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lock-and-code-112850","url":"https://lock-and-code.captivate.fm/episode/payment-apps-are-watching-what-you-say-feat-rainey-reitman","audio_url":"https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/a8b66e97-4c4c-4e41-be48-e2baea63f4b8.mp3","summary":"In the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes, like funding terrorism, engaging in money laundering, or violating sanctions. Sensible, right? Well, you can also face financial ruin for teaching poetry. That’s what seemingly happened to a Persian poetry teacher from Detroit whose accounts were flagged for “sanctions violations” because his students wrote “Persian classes” in their Venmo memos. There’s also the story about the naked yoga practitioners who lost their payment processor for 60 days, forced to rebuild a subscriber list from scratch. And we can’t forget the San Diego cannabis journalist cut off from Stripe—and from a paid Substack newsletter—because of the payment platform’s rules that prohibit the promotion of the sale of cannabis. This is “financial censorship,” and it often happens when a bank, credit card provider, or payment app decides that a customer is too risky to serve. But “risky” doesn’t always mean “illegal,” and when a major financial institution errs towards caution about what a customer is saying, advocating for, representing, or publishing, a lot of innocent people can be hurt in the process. That’s what the digital rights activist Rainey Reitman learned in writing “Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech.” As Reitman explained about these hugely impactful decisions: “Even if they are well-intentioned, the financial systems can end up pulling in a lot of people that are not the actual target… Sometimes we talk about this as dolphins in the fishing lines.” These decisions are difficult to fight, frustratingly opaque, and nearly impossible to reverse. Compounding the problem is that that there aren’t enough alternatives a…","meta_description":"In the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes,…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2419,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/lock-and-code-112850/episodes/payment-apps-are-watching-what-you-say-feat-rainey-reitman/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/lock-and-code-112850/payment-apps-are-watching-what-you-say-feat-rainey-reitman.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}