Big tech cesspit

Deathtech

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/watched-tracked-targeted-israel-surveillance-gaza.html

This is a first hand account of fleeing Gaza earlier in 2025. It shows in terrifying detail what it's like to live in a deadly surveillance state (drones in your bedroom? Yes that happened). It's a warning to all of us what happens when surveillance tech, such as facial recognition, becomes normalised and your government goes rogue. As we keep saying, ask yourself "can I trust my next government, or the one after that?". There's no way to know, so don't allow these technologies to gain more traction.

Your phone is now bossware

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/12/03/google-starts-sharing-all-your-text-messages-with-your-employer/ Google extends RCS & SMS spying to work phones. On work-managed devices all text messages will be visible to your employer. Google claim it as a benefit (a text archival service) but it's just more creepy spying.

Surveillance camera in your bedroom

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/1pv71pq/google_flagged_one_of_my_photos/ Intimate photos flagged and pulled by Google human staff 🤦‍♂️. This person's experience shows that by using Google's services you are allowing big tech to literally see your most intimate moments. In this case it was like having a surveillance camera in the bedroom. This is why you should use a files and photo storage service that has E2EE, e.g. Ente, Proton or Filen.

End to end encraption

https://www.404media.co/kohlers-smart-toilet-camera-not-actually-end-to-end-encrypted/ This is an example of the scope creep of 'smart devices'. This tech is literally in the cesspit - your loo! And they don't understand E2EE, claiming that it is but it actually isn't. You should avoid smart devices anyway, since they're just more spyware sensors to help leak data about you.

Big tech vs democracy

https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/elon-musk-calls-abolition-of-eu-after-twitter-fine-818203-20251207 X fined under DSA law in EU (for deceptive practices with its blue tick system) and Musk throws a tantrum - calling for the abolition of EU. As if he hasn't meddled in politics enough. As I write this the UK government is considering banning X because GrokAI is letting people 'undress' people (including children) digitally. I'm amazed that anyone still uses X any more.

https://www.itv.com/news/2025-12-18/whistleblowers-raise-extreme-concern-about-security-of-governments-digital-id UK digital ID is predictably insecure. Everyone in the privacy community said so, and it is so.

https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-parliament-online-safety-act-expansion-censorship-vpns-ai The UK government rejects a giant petition to repeal the OSA. They did have the debate, but they clearly do not really get the arguments made by the majority of the population - that law causes more problems than it solves.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/09/inside-the-tony-blair-institute This article exposes the Tony Blair Institute's ties to the current UK government and to Oracle. Blair is an AI booster and has been meddling in middle eastern affairs since he green-lit the invasion of Iraq with George W Bush. The TBI has been involved in Gaza in 2025, and has a roll in 'rebuilding' Gaza with Trump. Blair + Big Tech + Big Corruption doing some billionaire empire building. Great.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-us-sanctions-lock-international-criminal-court-judge-out-of-daily-life/ The Trump administration's ties to big tech are made very clear as an ICC judge in the Hague is locked out of tech accounts due to judgements she as passed. Big tech-enabled gangster politics.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/12/24/washington-targets-thierry-breton-and-other-europeans-for-their-role-in-tech-regulation_6748799_13.html Even worse than the last story, but in the same vein, the US sanctions French politicians who want tech regulation. It's so brazen and corrupt. Europe is now seeing what dependence on the US for anything, including security and tech, really means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lYsO4k7OIY Palantir and Nvidia have hooked up. If you're already subscribed to this blog then you don't need to be told how worrying that is. For the rest, suffice it to say that the worlds most valuable company (who make GPUs) collaborating with the worlds most bloodthirsty surveillance deathtech company will only be a bad thing.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2026/01/02/world/ai-gets-good-at-political-persuasion/ Parmy Olsen shows how AI bots can persuade us frighteningly well - politically. We've seen since Cambridge Analytica, and the Trump and Brexit votes in 2016, that information contamination can swing elections. Parmy Olsen is a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and an author (she wrote Supremacy - highly recommended) and a good person to see how AI supercharges the problem of digital persuasion.

http://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media The US goes full-on surveillance mad with new border proposal to demand '5 years of social media' and 'all contact details used in last 5 years' and biometrics, plus mandatory use of new app to prove departure. Many warned that inputting all your thoughts and opinions into big tech walled garden commercial social media might backfire at some point, and that point is now. The 'surveillance' that we and all other privacy campaigners have been talking about for years suddenly isn't about ads any more. As we always say: "targeting is targeting, ads today, people tomorrow".

Facial wreck

Facial recognition software is the bedrock of a police surveillance state. Here are examples of its scope creep.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/axon-tests-face-recognition-body-worn-cameras Axon, makers of tasers, body cameras and law enforcement software) are trialling FRT with Canadian police (on their body-worn cameras). Can Canadians trust their future governments not to misuse it?

https://www.404media.co/how-a-us-citizen-was-scanned-with-ices-facial-recognition-tech/ This is an example of ICE using facial recognition as 'definitive proof of citizenship' - on a random person just because they are dark skinned. Too late for Americans.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyx2wk6yw1o UK police are rolling out more LFR (Live Facial Recognition) after a London trial. Can we trust future governments not to misuse it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxwpr2kllqo Southampton roll out LFR van - but can we trust future police to not misuse the "watchlist" approach?

AI bubble

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/ Ed Zitron has written this comprehensive tear down of not just AI hype, but the finance sector propping it up. This is a long read, but I strongly encourage you to block out an hour and read the whole thing. You'll feel like Michael Burry from the film The Big Short afterwards - like you've seen how a bubble's going to pop way before the Wall Street chumps have.

https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-spotify-brett-michael-dadig-indictment-harassment-stalking/ ChatGPT, now just another cesspit big tech product pushing engagement over ethics, is happy to encourage stalkers. It's old school Silicon Valley "get users locked in then exploit them". Don't fall for it.

https://www.404media.co/scientists-are-increasingly-worried-ai-will-sway-elections/ Study finds that AI models can sway voters much more than political ads and disinformation - THREAT TO DEMOCRACY! This is why America wants to lead the way in AI development. Couple this with the Palmy Olson article in the Big Tech vs Democracy section above.... and our Threat to Democracy page on our website is looking like an understatement.

https://www.404media.co/nuclear-rian-bahran-iaea-international-symposium-on-artificial-intelligence/ AI wants nuclear power plants, and wants to speed up building them by using AI, and then to 'man' them using AI.... what could possibly go wrong?

https://youtu.be/675d_6WGPbo?si=Cv1FZGjH-5RyOl3w Tristan Harris on the daily show - AI companies aretrying to own the world economy. Be afraid, be very afraid. Tristan Harris is a former tech employee who now campaigns against them. He features in the documentary The Social Dilemma (highly recommended).

https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/uk-health-service-ai-tool-false-diagnoses-patient-screening-nhs-anima-health-annie/ In England's NHS the AI tool used at a GP practice hallucinated a diagnosis for someone. The young man received a letter saying he had diabetes and linked it to "angina due to coronary artery disease". The AI tool (from AI company Anima) didn't stop there, it also made up a hospital visit to back up its bullshit diagnosis, and even made up a hospital to go with it! Worst of all is that the NHS blamed this on 'human error' because the GP did not check closely enough. No blame for the flawed tech being used? Hallucinations (which would be better termed 'deceptions') are built into the design of LLMs and cannot be eradicated.

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats \ Anthropic From June 2025, but worth seeing again - Anthropic shows that AI is devious. This reinforces what we're saying above about hallucinations.

https://www.404media.co/ice-contracts-company-making-bounty-hunter-ai-agents/ Seen the Matrix film? Then you'll recognise these AI sentinel bots that are going to be used by ICE. Agressive surveillance trackerbots make the jump from science fiction to reality.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/ AI inventing academic papers, which are being then being cited. The 'deceptions' from hallucinations are bad enough on their own, but when they infect academia so deeply that the fake papers are being cited by others, then we've got a problem. And so we've got a problem. My personal opinion is that this is deliberate. AI companies (i.e. big tech) want you to only go to their chatbots to find 'truth', not academics, so they're happy to infect academia so it can be discredited and weakened.

It's not all bad!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/08/giant-teddybears/ X fined for blue tick fail. This is Cory Doctorow's take on the €120m fine from the EU. He liken's Musk's widening of the blue tick scheme to funfairs where they let some people win the giant teddybear easily so others see them walking around with it. Expected behaviour from a billionaire con man.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/four-ways-ai-is-being-used-to-strengthen-democracies-worldwide.html Ways that AI could be used to strengthen democracy, not weaken it. This is refreshing to read, especially in light of the fact that our regular 'Big Tech vs democracy' section of these newsletters keeps getting longer and longer. This is a good precursor to Bruce Schneier's book that's just come out, Rewiring Democracy.

https://cppa.ca.gov/announcements/2025/20251217.html The state of California enacts DROP from 1st January. Data brokers have to register and opt out will be easy. This is great news and I hope more states and countries follow suit. Read this short page for more info on data brokers.

https://www.thenerdreich.com/tech-billionaires-threaten-to-flee-california-again/ The state of California is proposing a billionaire tax. This is great news but predictably the billionaires are talking about leaving the state. Instead of just, you know, sharing some of their already crazy levels of wealth with the people of the state they live in. For a detailed look at tech billionaires read our blog article on the 'billionaire mind virus'.

http://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5715/clearview-and-long-arm-law Clearview, a company that scraped the entire web for publicly available (i.e. social media) photos of people, and then selling surveillance to law enforcement, has been banned from scraping images in UK. The UK has been on a losing streak lately with tech-related legislation so this is a rare bit of good news.

Summary

In the cesspit in December we saw how big tech happily enables a surveillance state in Gaza. The US and Israeli tech firms, and their governments, use these sort of horrific oppression situations to try out and refine their death tech. We also saw how Google is enabling bossware-style spying on work android phones. Not content with just that, they were also shown to be actively scanning your photos in Google Drive - by human workers. And a smart device in your loo? No one I know would buy that, but plenty do still buy smart devices, even though they are pure spyware.

In the anti-democracy zone we saw X failing hard, and its billionaire owner throwing a tantrum. The UK's Digital ID is proved to be a security fail, and the UK government showed they are uninterested in repealing the OSA. Tony Blair has re-surfaced as the leader of a dark money think tank allied with Oracle's billionaire owner Larry Ellison. They are involved in the rebuild project in Gaza.

The US government and big tech continue their love-in by sanctioning EU officials, and as if it couldn't get any worse, Palantir have hooked up with Nvidia for a death tech collab. If it's not out killing people, AI is back home persuading people to vote differently. Or if that's not scary enough for you, ICE have hired some full-on 'Matrix sentinel droid' software to track down people. The US is living in a police surveillance state. Everyone else is next if you don't speak out against it.

Facial recognition continues its rise, but governments are doing that more quietly via the police. There are shops that are starting to use it though. Drip, drip, drip towards a surveillance state.

The AI bubble has gone mainstream and Ed Zitron exposes it for what it is: a bunch of hot air and circular 'promise' deals. OpenAI encourages stalkers, prove to be much better at persuasion than political ads and disinformation, and their creators want to use the models to build and then run nuclear power plants. According to Tristan Harris, the AI companies want to go further and own the world economy, and in the UK some GPs are using it to make (fake) diagnoses. Anthropic's own research shows that the models display persistent deceptive behaviour, and Rolling Stone did a piece on how AI is infecting and degrading the academic paper sphere.

If that all sounds depressing then we saw that at least the EU fine X for their blue tick scam, and Bruce Schneier has pointed out that AI could actually strengthen democracy if used in the right way. California has rolled out an official way to opt out of data brokers, and they're proposing a billionaire tax. Finally, the UK has stepped in to ban Clearview from scraping public photos of citizens to build surveillance profiles on them.

Tech tip of the week

For sending files between your devices at home in your local network, stop 'bouncing' them off a cloud service and use LocalSend instead. It's a really neat, light and open source bit of software. Install it on all the devices, and you can instantly send files between them at lightening speed! Find this and other miscellaneous Alts on this page of our website.

Book recommendation

The AI Con by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna. Emily is a professor of linguistics so we can trust her judgement on how the 'language' in 'large language models' should work, and the authors easily debunk AIs demented hype. AI is a useful technology, for certain narrow use cases, used in a very careful way, by people who know its limitations - it is not the general-purpose solve-all tech that the hype is pushing.

Blog recommendation

Pluralistic - Cory Doctorow's excellent blog. He is a prolific and talented writer, and I read almost everything he puts out. Pro tip: you can subscribe to his site via your RSS reader as a nice way to get this excellent content.

Film recommendation

Mountainhead by Jesse Armstrong. Funny and disturbing at the same time, this film perfectly captures the voices of billionaire tech bros.

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.