News round up
Every now and again we'll round up what's been going on in the news about big tech and privacy.
We hope you enjoyed getting an inside look at brenetic's privacy tech stack in his post yesterday. Today's post is the first of our news roundup series: stuff that's caught our eye recently in the world of privacy and big tech.
Big tech cesspit
Here's what's been going on in the cesspit that is big tech.
Meta love that ad revenue from fraud
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/
Following our Meta tear-down in this blog post, the news that they limit their fraud team to only remove content up to a maximum 0.15% reduction of ad revenue - despite fraud scams bringing them $7 billion - is not a surprise. In the big tech cesspit, Meta are the worst.
Google replaces links in your Google Docs with tracked versions
Click the image to go to this Mastodon post
Because.... Google only make spyware.
Google removes Israel human rights violation videos
Nikita Mazurov, Jonah Valdez
Because... big tech builds deathtech and loves the military-industrial complex.
X is proved to be far-right biased
You probably suspected Elon Musk was meddling in British politics, because his white supremacist ego compels him to, but now his bias is proved in this nice little experiment carried out by Sky News. To be clear this also flags a lot of extreme content coming from the far left, but overall it's skewed to the far right.
Josiah Mortimer
Also both X and Meta were flagged by a UK House of Commons report for skewing political discourse.
Because... big tech hates democracy.
Palantir's deadly creepiness revealed by ex-employee
Click the image to go to this Mastodon post and watch the videos
You need to know about Palantir, whose billionaire founder Peter Thiel wants to get rid of democracy (in 2009 he declared "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.") Palantir are very aggressive in seeking government contracts in the US, UK, Israel, and around the world.
Smart devices never really belong to you
A tech-savvy person altered their smart vacuum to block the data harvesting it was sending back to the manufacturer. So the manufacturer bricked it. You are susceptible to this with any internet connected device that auto-updates over the air. As Tesla owners have found out.
Because... unfortunately the surveillance economy is build into these companies' business models.
ICCL sues Microsoft over RTB fails
Johnny Ryan
Finally someone is bringing a big tech firm to account over how their use of the RTB system is not GDPR compliant. Or in other words it's a massive data free-for-all and betrays the trust of the public, whose private behavioural data is leaked by its use.
Age verification first breach fail
Jonny Evans
A service that Discord uses for age verification was hacked, exposing very sensitive information of tens of thousands of people.
So predictable... unless you're a politician who's been well paid by big tech.
UK pushes digital ID despite opposition
https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-digital-id-brit-card-petition-starmer-surveillance
Despite massive opposition to dystopian digital ID in the UK, the government is pushing ahead with it. Nothing to do with the tech minister having had a record number of meetings with big tech firms over the last year, honest.
Because... big tech and governments love control.
Big Money
Big tech uses Big Money to poison the world and get their way. Here's what's been going on with big money.
Ireland DPC appoints ex-Meta lobbyist as head
Johnny Ryan
The Irish Data Protection Commission has appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist as its top person - the commissioner! The Irish government's corrupt ties with big tech are so obvious, and it's a betrayal of not just the people of Ireland, but everyone in Europe. This is because Ireland is where the GDPR is regulated and enforced. Or not, as the case usually is. And certainly will be now.
How Google maintains its monopoly
Alexander Fanta
Follow the Money have produced another corker of an investigation. This time they reveal how Google evades anti-trust law despite so obviously being a monopoly. Spoiler alert - it involves a lot of money. Follow The Money are well worth supporting - their research is brutal and big tech hate them!
AI Bubble
News from the AI grift; it's not a bubble, honest.
Open AI just signalled that it would default on $1 trillion of debt
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-seeks-us-government-backing-145511835.html
You know it's a bubble when the main grifter, OpenAI, admits that it would need government backing for the mega debt it needs (to pedal its 'scale is everything' con).
'Big Short' investor shorts AI
Huileng Tan
The real life investor behind the Christian Bale character in The Big Short film has just shorted Nvidia (the AI chip maker) and Palantir (the AI data analytics and deathtech firm).
Because... the stock market is starting to think the AI grifters are full of shit.
Ed Zitron exclusive: the true costs of AI
This podcast, in Ed's classic irreverent style, lays out just how much it costs AI companies to run their game, and how big their losses are. He reveals that costs rise linearly with revenues, so they literally have no path to profitability. Which means they are just torching investors' money. And it's billions worth.
It's not all bad
Cheer up, there's a lot of good stuff going on too.
It was Media Liberation day on the 5th November
https://mediarevolution.org/media-liberation-day/
Our friends at Media Revolution have been building up to this day and played a blinder exposing the billionaire-owned press for what it is: biased.
My favourite aspect of it was Cover Story, where members of the public placed A4 printouts covering newspapers on news stands up and down the country, as reported here.
The Mo-Me app is launched - trustworthy news!
Welcome to Mo-Me
Media Revolution, in conjunction with NewsMast, have released a great new app where you can follow (and choose) trusted news sources. It comes pre-loaded with some great sources, and contains no trackers or billionaire-controlled algorithms.
When you 'sign up' to the app you are effectively creating a Mastodon account (because Mo-Me is effectively a Mastodon instance). So this is a great way to get into the Social Web (aka the Fediverse)!
Maria Ressa addresses the UN
Because... Maria Ressa is amazing. Please watch this (in the DuckDuckGo browser's Duck Player, of course, so Google can't track you) to restore your faith in common sense and human decency. And to remember that privacy is a human right.
The Big Tech Walkout 2025 is underway!
Patrick Leavy
Did you complete the steps for October? Some were quick and easy, but checking all your phone apps using https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/ takes time. So stick at it - privacy is a team sport! And if you haven't started yet, don't worry - you can easily cram October's steps into November if you try!
Ethical tech tip
This month's tip from our massive list of alternatives is:
AntennaPod - podcast app
This open source podcast app for Android is excellent. I use it exclusively now. I never thought I'd part with PocketCasts but Antennapod is open source so that's a win for transparency and zero trackers!
For iOS try https://rssrad.io/rssradio instead.
Get involved
Big Brother Watch campaign vs Digital ID
Sign this petition and donate to Big Brother Watch. We need to prevent Digital ID in the UK - it is big tech and government control overreach.
Big Brother campaign vs Facial Recognition software
We suggest you support this too, because... facial recognition is the road to a proper dystopia.
Book recommendation
An excellent way to understand how big tech has twisted the internet over the last 20 years is Reset by Ron Deibert. Ron Deibert founded the Citizen Lab, a research facility that can test computers and apps to discover what data they are transmitting. In the process they have uncovered all sorts of dodgy goings-on. A vital resource. Ron's book is written in plain language and really shows you just how far from acceptable big tech have herded us.
That was a lot! And that's just one month of news... we hope you enjoyed our news roundup!
Rebel Tech Alliance is a non-profit dedicated to getting as many people off big tech products as possible. Why? Because that reduces the surveillance economy, and reducing that is good for individuals and society.
