OSINT-y Goodness, №24 — Artifact
InfoSecSherpa: Your Guide Up a Mountain of Information!
What is it?
A news aggregation app from the co-founders of Instagram. (source)
When did it launch?
January 31, 2023 (source)
Details
I took screen shots while I set up my Artifact account. I’ll walk you through that here.
- Choose Your Content
Artifact has you start by selecting at least 10 topics to follow. Although there’s a large number of topics listed, there’s actually nothing specifically for cybersecurity or even technology. The closest match is Tech Companies. So, that was a disappointment from the start. Next, it cleverly has you indicate your subscriptions and it will push that content further to the top for you. This is a good and bad thing, in my opinion, because it could highlight an article just because you have a subscription even though it might not be the best article for that topic.
2. Setting Up Your Profile
This app only uses your phone number to set up. It immediately asks to add your contacts. Notice the read circle where you can skip this step. I almost missed it at first and thought I couldn’t proceed without sharing your contacts, which I assume the UX/UI is designed that way on purpose. When I thought that might be the case, I was about to abandon it altogether. Then, I saw the skip prompt and avoided it.
3. Account Stuff
This app is big on gamification. Under “Insights” on the first panel, you’ll see icons of padlocks. At first, I thought that was an “in-app purchase” feature, but it’s actually based on your app usage. The more you use it, the more features it unlocks. It has the Duolingo sort of streak count as well. What I want to draw your attention to is under Privacy & Security. See Discoverability. I couldn’t get that to turn off. Knowing that there are social elements to this app, I guess I’m not surprised. But it’s kind of annoying from a privacy standpoint that you don’t have control over that. Or maybe it’s just not working for me. Regardless, if you don’t want to be found do check out that setting.
4. Content
This is what the content looks like, based on those 10 categories I chose when setting up the app. Keeping with the gamification features of Artifact, you’ll see in the third panel that clicking on one story moved me up to Learner status. When I hit 10 reads, I will be a Seeker with the ability to utilize some of those locked features. It’s probably best if you blow through those articles when you first set up the app so that you can just dig right in and use all the features at once.
5. Other Content
I mentioned previously that Cybersecurity isn’t its own category, so I had to search for it manually. I did not see a way to save that search, but it does show recent searches. That could become cumbersome if you are heavily using the custom search feature. Since this app also seems to want to cultivate community, under the Discuss tab are ways to contribute to conversations about specific articles. This could have some beneficial applications, perhaps if you wanted to gauge public interest (or outrage?) about an article or evaluate what MDM (Mis-Dis-Mal-Information) is being spread associated with certain posts.
6. Sharing
As expected, there are several ways to share news items you found on the app. Below is an example of what it looks like to send an article to Twitter, and then how it appears after being posted. The share function for this app isn’t different than most others. Several options to share. Be sure to check your notification settings for this app. It appears that every time someone interacts with the Artifact app post you shared, you receive an alert. This could become very annoying, very quickly. So, check those settings.
7. The Summary Function
Perhaps the biggest feature of the Artifact app is this ability to summarize articles using Artificial Intelligence. It does provide a disclaimer about A.I. being used. This leaves me with questions of how to correct if something is wrong, and how quickly is something like that fixed? While I do think this could be a very useful feature, I do have concerns about accuracy and inadvertent spreading of wrong information because the A.I. got it wrong. Use with caution.
My Overall Assessment
On the one hand, there are so many news aggregator products available today. To me, that just means more opportunities for a user just to be fed information rather than explore and discern for themselves. There is an abundance of news items out in the world and it’s difficult to capture everything, so a tool like an aggregator can be helpful. Just like anything digital and anything A.I., understand the power of the tool and how to use the tool in order to get the most value out of it. Rely on a variety of sources and perhaps use an app like Artifact for one specific topic?
I still need to test drive this app a little more but I can see some potential of getting interesting usage out of it. I now need to read more articles in order to unlock those other features. What I did not see in this app were articles in non-English languages. So, that’s something to investigate further.
At present, their website is not interactive, and their access is only available for iOS or Android apps.
