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Big Tech News Articles

The world’s biggest tech companies are becoming more powerful than most countries. Yet too often, corporate profits are prioritized over environmental and human rights.
Explore our comprehensive news index on a wide variety of fascinating topics.
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Palmer Luckey says Anduril is working on AI weapons that 'give us the ability to swiftly win any war'
2024-03-28, Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/palmer-luckey-says-anduril-is-workin...

A Silicon Valley defense tech startup is working on products that could have as great an impact on warfare as the atomic bomb, its founder Palmer Luckey said. "We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter," he [said]. The Anduril founder didn't elaborate on what impact AI weaponry would have. But asked if it would be as decisive as the atomic bomb to the outcome of World War II he replied: "We have ideas for what they are. We are working on them." In 2022, Anduril won a contract worth almost $1 billion with the Special Operations Command to support its counter-unmanned systems. Anduril's products include autonomous sentry towers along the Mexican border [and] Altius-600M attack drones supplied to Ukraine. All of Anduril's tech operates autonomously and runs on its AI platform called Lattice that can easily be updated. The success of Anduril has given hope to other smaller players aiming to break into the defense sector. As an escalating number of global conflicts has increased demand for AI-driven weaponry, venture capitalists have put more than $100 billion into defense tech since 2021, according to Pitchbook data. The rising demand has sparked a fresh wave of startups lining up to compete with industry "primes" such as Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) for a slice of the $842 billion US defense budget.

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.


End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
2024-03-13, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartph...

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent. Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. There’s an important backstory, beginning ... when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck. Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry.

Note: The author of this article is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and ethics professor who's been on the frontlines investigating the youth mental health crisis. He is the co-founder of LetGrow.org, an organization that provides inspiring solutions and ideas to help families and schools support children's well-being and foster childhood independence. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on mental health.


Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars From New York City's Public Hospitals
2026-02-15, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2026/02/15/palantir-contract-new-york-city-health-ho...

New York City's public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir, the controversial ICE and military contractor. Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that's now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show. It's Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE's Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, “plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success,” according to federal contracting documents. Palantir's contract with New York's public health care system allows the company to work with patients' protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Google Says Biden Admin Pressured Company To Remove Content
2025-09-24, Yahoo News
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-says-biden-admin-pressured-1530018...

Senior officials in the Biden administration, including some White House officials, "conducted repeated and sustained outreach" and "pressed" Google- and YouTube parent-company Alphabet "regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate [Alphabet's] policies," the company revealed yesterday. While Alphabet "continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press [Alphabet] to remove non-violative user-generated content," a lawyer for Alphabet wrote in a September 23 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Administration officials including Biden "created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions" of private tech platforms regarding the moderation of misinformation. This is what has come to be known as "jawboning," and the fact that it doesn't involve direct censorship may make it even more insidious. Direct censorship can be challenged in court. This sort of wink-and-nod regulation of speech leaves companies and their users with little recourse. What's more, each time authorities stray from the spirit of the First Amendment, it makes it that much easier for future authorities to do so. And each time Democrats (or Republicans) use government power to try and suppress free speech, it gives them even less standing to say it's wrong when their opponents do that.

Note: Read more about the sprawling federal censorship enterprise that took shape during the Biden administration. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and government corruption.


The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy
2025-08-08, MIT Press Reader
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-secret-history-of-tor-how-a-military-p...

Tor is mostly known as the Dark Web or Dark Net, seen as an online Wild West where crime runs rampant. Yet it’s partly funded by the U.S. government, and the BBC and Facebook both have Tor-only versions to allow users in authoritarian countries to reach them. At its simplest, Tor is a distributed digital infrastructure that makes you anonymous online. It is a network of servers spread around the world, accessed using a browser called the Tor Browser, which you can download for free from the Tor Project website. When you use the Tor Browser, your signals are encrypted and bounced around the world before they reach the service you’re trying to access. This makes it difficult for governments to trace your activity or block access, as the network just routes you through a country where that access isn’t restricted. But, because you can’t protect yourself from digital crime without also protecting yourself from mass surveillance by the state, these technologies are the site of constant battles between security and law enforcement interests. The state’s claim to protect the vulnerable often masks efforts to exert control. In fact, robust, well-funded, value-driven and democratically accountable content moderation — by well-paid workers with good conditions — is a far better solution than magical tech fixes to social problems ... or surveillance tools. As more of our online lives are funneled into the centralized AI infrastructures ... tools like Tor are becoming ever more important.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


U.S. Spy Agencies Are Getting a One-Stop Shop to Buy Your Most Sensitive Personal Data
2025-05-22, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-data-portal-privacy/

The U.S. intelligence community is now buying up vast volumes of sensitive information that would have previously required a court order, essentially bypassing the Fourth Amendment. But the surveillance state has encountered a problem: There’s simply too much data on sale from too many corporations and brokers. So the government has a plan for a one-stop shop. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.” The “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a “data marketplace” for purchasing “the best data at the best price,” faster than ever before. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.


Concern over Google ending ban on AI weapons
2025-02-05, BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy081nqx2zjo

Alphabet has rewritten its guidelines on how it will use AI, dropping a section which previously ruled out applications that were "likely to cause harm". Human Rights Watch has criticised the decision, telling the BBC that AI can "complicate accountability" for battlefield decisions that "may have life or death consequences." Experts say AI could be widely deployed on the battlefield - though there are fears about its use too, particularly with regard to autonomous weapons systems. "For a global industry leader to abandon red lines it set for itself signals a concerning shift, at a time when we need responsible leadership in AI more than ever," said Anna Bacciarelli, senior AI researcher at Human Rights Watch. The "unilateral" decision showed also showed "why voluntary principles are not an adequate substitute for regulation and binding law" she added. In January, MP's argued that the conflict in Ukraine had shown the technology "offers serious military advantage on the battlefield." As AI becomes more widespread and sophisticated it would "change the way defence works, from the back office to the frontline," Emma Lewell-Buck MP ... wrote. Concern is greatest over the potential for AI-powered weapons capable of taking lethal action autonomously, with campaigners arguing controls are urgently needed. The Doomsday Clock - which symbolises how near humanity is to destruction - cited that concern in its latest assessment of the dangers mankind faces.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.


Texas AG wins $1.4B settlement from Facebook parent Meta over facial-capture charges
2024-07-30, NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/texas-ag-wins-1point4-billion-...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has won a $1.4 billion settlement from Facebook parent Meta over charges that it captured users' facial and biometric data without properly informing them it was doing so. Paxton said that starting in 2011, Meta, then known as Facebook, rolled out a “tag” feature that involved software that learned how to recognize and sort faces in photos. In doing so, it automatically turned on the feature without explaining how it worked, Paxton said — something that violated a 2009 state statute governing the use of biometric data, as well as running afoul of the state's deceptive trade practices act. "Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted," he said in a statement. As part of the settlement, Meta did not admit to wrongdoing. Facebook discontinued how it had previously used face-recognition technology in 2021, in the process deleting the face-scan data of more than one billion users. The settlement amount, which Paxton said is the largest ever obtained by a single state against a business, will be paid out over five years. “This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights," Paxton said.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


‘You feel like you’re in prison’: workers claim Amazon’s surveillance violates labor law
2024-05-21, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/amazon-surveillance-l...

Amazon has been accused of using “intrusive algorithms” as part of a sweeping surveillance program to monitor and deter union organizing activities. Workers at a warehouse run by the technology giant on the outskirts of St Louis, Missouri, are today filing an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A copy of the charge ... alleges that Amazon has “maintained intrusive algorithms and other workplace controls and surveillance which interfere with Section 7 rights of employees to engage in protected concerted activity”. There have been several reports of Amazon surveilling workers over union organizing and activism, including human resources monitoring employee message boards, software to track union threats and job listings for intelligence analysts to monitor “labor organizing threats”. Artificial intelligence can be used by warehouse employers like Amazon “to essentially have 24/7 unregulated and algorithmically processed and recorded video, and often audio data of what their workers are doing all the time”, said Seema N Patel ... at Stanford Law School. “It enables employers to control, record, monitor and use that data to discipline hundreds of thousands of workers in a way that no human manager or group of managers could even do.” The National Labor Relations Board issued a memo in 2022 announcing its intent to protect workers from AI-enabled monitoring of labor organizing activities.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Elon Musk speaks out on ‘Twitter Files’ release detailing platform’s inner workings
2022-12-04, CNN News
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/04/business/elon-musk-twitter-files-comments/inde...

Twitter owner Elon Musk spoke out on Saturday evening about the so-called “Twitter Files,” a long tweet thread posted by journalist Matt Taibbi, who had been provided with details about behind-the-scenes discussions on Twitter’s content moderation decision-making, including the call to suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. During a two-hour long Twitter Spaces session, Musk said a second “Twitter Files” drop will again involve Taibbi, along with journalist Bari Weiss, but did not give an exact date for when that would be released. Musk – who claims to have not read the released files himself – said the impetus for the original tweet thread was about what happened in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election and “how much government influence was there.” Taibbi’s first thread reaffirmed how, in the initial hours after the Post story about Hunter Biden went live, Twitter employees grappled with fears that it could have been the result of a Russian hacking operation. It showed employees on several Twitter teams debating over whether to restrict the article under the company’s hacked materials policy, weeks before the 2020 election. The emails Taibbi obtained are consistent with what former Twitter site integrity head Yoel Roth told journalist Kara Swisher in an onstage interview last week. Taibbi said the contact from political parties happened more frequently from Democrats, but provided no internal documents to back up his assertion.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.


Secretive Bilderberg group just met – but who knows what global elite said?
2026-04-14, The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/14/politicians-bilderberg-meeting

The 72nd meeting of the Bilderberg group, the elite and secretive policy conference that is the longtime subject of endless conspiracy theories, was held at the weekend in Washington DC. A security cordon went up around the opulent Salamander hotel for the notoriously media-shy summit, which was packed as ever with prime ministers, military leaders, tech billionaires and the heads of giant investment companies. Bilderberg, which since the 1950s has been the intellectual engine room of Nato, took place this year at a time of immense crisis and uncertainty. Away from Trump’s bluster, and for all his rhetoric about abandoning Nato, there were no signs that the Americans are withdrawing from Bilderberg. Far from it – the Americans were there in force. Wall Street titans, including the CEOs of KKR and Lazard, and the heads of huge corporations like Pfizer, met behind closed doors with a delegation of senior politicians close to the president. Big business lobbying in private is Bilderberg’s speciality, and this secretive mix of the private and public sectors fits perfectly with Trump’s brand of crony-capitalism. This year’s conference had a wartime flavour: with the “Future of Warfare” on the agenda, and a participant list including the four-star admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command. From the private sector there was a healthy contingent of military contractors and drone manufacturers.

Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read more about the shadowy history of the Bilderberg secret society.


Informant told FBI that Jeffrey Epstein had a ‘personal hacker’
2026-01-30, TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/30/informant-told-fbi-that-jeffrey-epstein-had...

A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday. The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them. According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States. The informant told the FBI that Epstein’s hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid him with “a trunk of cash.” Per the informant, the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.” It’s important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so it’s unclear how trustworthy the information and allegations are.

Note: A zero-day hack is when attackers secretly exploit a software flaw before the company even knows the flaw exists or has time to fix it. Don't miss Part 1 and Part 2 of our in-depth investigative series on this massive elite crime ring now coming to light in the documents being made public. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring.


Jonathan Haidt Brings New Evidence to the Battle Against Social Media
2026-01-16, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/podcasts/jonathan-haidt-new-evidence.html

Jonathan Haidt did not expect to become the face of a global movement against social media. As Haidt’s influence has grown, so, too, have objections from critics. At issue is his central claim that smartphones and social media are causing a mental health epidemic in young people. In research released this week, Haidt and his co-author, Zachary Rausch, claim to demonstrate causal links between social media platforms and the harms they say they are doing to children. Not just harms like anxiety and depression, but also frequent sexual harassment and cyberbullying. "The biggest, clearest one, I think, is sextortion," [said Haidt]. "That’s the one that just stands out like a sore thumb. Kids, if they’re on social media, they can get sextorted. If they’re not, they can’t, really. And the kids who get sextorted are deeply shamed. They shared a picture of themselves — teenage boys usually — and then their lives are ruined, and some of them commit suicide. So I’m just saying that there are so many different mechanisms by which kids are getting harmed. Depression and anxiety are just two of the pathways. What parents want to know and what legislators want to know is: Is this consumer product, which all kids are consuming massive quantities of, is this consumer product hurting kids? And guess what? We have seven different lines of evidence saying, “Yes, it’s hurting kids.” And Meta — I mean, my God, the data they have on harm is astonishing."

Note: Read more about the dark side of social media and the sextortion rings where kids target kids. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.


Matt Taibbi: To Protect Free Speech, I’m Suing the Man Who Defamed Me
2026-01-05, The Free Press
https://www.thefp.com/p/matt-taibbi-to-protect-free-speech-im-suing-the-man-w...

Tech writer Eoin Higgins [recently] published Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The main subjects of the book—fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald and myself—are [portrayed as] puppets controlled by Big Tech overlords such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. Higgins’s case against me concerns my involvement with the Twitter Files—a trove of the social media website’s internal communications that Musk sent to reporters, including me, after he acquired the company in 2022. I took significant heat for my coverage, which included Twitter employees’ deliberations about whether to suppress the report about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. IRS agents made an unannounced visit to my home the day I testified in Congress about my findings, and delegate Stacey Plaskett falsely accused me of perjury and threatened to jail me. Despite this, Higgins says I sold out—literally—by working on the Twitter Files. He claims that I “fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power” after having “cash[ed] in” with my “benefactor,” Musk. I’ve never taken money from Musk or any other “tech billionaire on the right,” as Higgins implies. The trend of casual defamation that prevails on social media—where pseudonymous accounts blithely accuse people of rape or pedophilia all day, every day—has seeped into the regular press, where “reckless disregard” has become the norm.

Note: Read the complete article to learn how Matt Taibbi fell out of favor with mainstream media when he started questioning the lies underpinning the Russiagate narrative. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and media manipulation.


These Apps Let You Bet on Deportations and Famine. Mainstream Media Is Eating It Up.
2025-12-29, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/29/polymarket-kalshi-betting-prediction-cnn-...

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced. Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds. Betting apps have at times delivered better accuracy than polling results. For example, while pollsters clocked last year’s presidential race as deadlocked in the days before the election, Polymarket gave Trump an edge at 58 percent. But whether they are consistently better is a whole other story. Consider the 2022 midterm elections: Up until election night, the major prediction markets “failed spectacularly” and “projected outcomes for key races that turned out to be completely wrong,” according to one expert analysis. Prediction markets are also more prone to manipulation than they’d have you believe. And this can give deep-pocketed political actors another vessel for information warfare. Kalshi was even embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators as recently as this summer for this very reason.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and financial industry corruption.


Palantir CEO Says Legalizing War Crimes Would Be Good for Business
2025-12-05, Futurism
https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-war-crimes

The AI surveillance platform provider Palantir is no stranger to controversy. It brings in billions each year from controversial partnerships with groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli Defense Forces, something CEO Alex Karp isn’t keen on changing anytime soon. In an interview ... this week, Karp even took it a step further, arguing that legalizing US war crimes would open up a whole new market for Palantir. Unlike other moguls profiting off the military industrial complex who hide behind concepts like “democracy” and “national security,” the Palantir CEO isn’t afraid to put his mouth where his money is with disarmingly bombastic language. In a letter to shareholders earlier this year, for instance, Karp quoted hawkish political scholar Samuel Huntington in arguing that the “rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'” While this could be seen as a damning indictment of Western civilization and its violent stranglehold over the world economy, Karp instead positions it as a source of inspiration. In another part of his interview ... the Palantir CEO reaffirmed his commitment to ICE, emphasizing the important role he plays in making immigrants lives worse. “I’m going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively,” Karp said.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Intimate Advertising, the Next Frontier in AI Manipulation
2025-11-25, Jacobin
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/intimate-advertising-ai-manipulation-data

OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will soon allow erotic and sexually explicit interactions for adult users. Erotic features aren’t just another product update; they deepen emotional dependency and encourage people to treat AI companions as partners rather than tools. This shift opens the door to what I call “intimate advertising” — a powerful new form of manipulation in which tech companies shape human desire and manipulate users for profit. AI has continual access to our anxieties, frustrations, desires, and secrets. It can understand how our minds work and detect when we are most vulnerable — and, therefore, most persuadable. What is particularly troubling is that this new form of advertising will come from entities that many will consider friends and life advisors. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 220 million times worldwide and are used regularly by over half of US teens. With intimate advertising, personal companionship becomes inseparable from businesses’ persuasion techniques. A system designed to comfort you can easily be repurposed to sell to you. The deeper AI companions embed themselves in our emotional lives, the more vital it becomes to draw a clear line between care and commerce. Before Big Tech turns intimacy into its most profitable advertising channel yet, we must press regulators to enforce the idea there are limits on how far we are willing to let AI into our private lives.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy.


Higher screen time linked to brain abnormalities and ADHD symptoms in children, study shows
2025-11-21, US Right to Know
https://usrtk.org/healthwire/screen-time-linked-to-brain-abnormalities-and-ad...

Children who spend more time on mobile phones, TVs, and video games may face a higher risk of developing attention problems as they grow, according to a first-of-its kind, large-scale study. The findings, recently published in Translational Psychiatry ... indicate a link between longer screen time and more severe symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Researchers ... also found measurable, though subtle, brain abnormalities among heavy screen users. Longer screen time at ages 9–10 predicted higher ADHD symptoms two years later. Higher screen time was linked to a smaller cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking and attention. Children with more screen time at the outset had a smaller right putamen, a region involved in language learning, addiction, and reward processing. Heavier screen use after two years was tied to slightly thinner development in three other cortical regions that support important cognitive functions, such as attention, working memory, and language processing. Screen use has increased worldwide among children and adolescents, with more than one-third of U.S. parents of a child under 12 reporting their children began interacting with a smartphone before the age of 5. While digital devices are promoted as essential tools for school and social connection, their excessive use has been tied to disrupted sleep, reduced physical activity and negative impacts on mental health.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.


How Cops Are Using Flock Safety's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists
2025-11-20, Electronic Freedom Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flock-safetys-alpr-n...

2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate. Via public records requests, EFF obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. The data shows that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to the 50501 protests in February, the Hands Off protests in April, the No Kings protests in June and October, and other protests in between. Some agencies have adopted policies that prohibit using ALPRs for monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like "protest" without articulating an actual crime under investigation.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.


How NDAs keep AI data center details hidden from Americans
2025-10-28, NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/data-center-ai-google-amazon-nda-non-d...

The construction of ... hyperscale data centers — giant facilities that house servers and computing resources — is booming nationwide. President Donald Trump’s AI action plan and related executive orders have recently facilitated their speedy approval, in part by loosening environmental regulations. As the facilities have spread into suburbs and farmland, they’ve drawn pushback from dozens of communities concerned by how they could upend daily life. Data centers often draw enormous amounts of water and electricity, causing residents to complain about rising power bills and water shortages. The confidentiality behind some of the projects has only added to the level of concern. An NBC News review of over 30 data center proposals across 14 states found that in a majority of cases, local officials signed NDAs and worked with what appeared to be shell companies that can conceal visibility into the project developers. Five elected officials in different counties said the agreements barred them from sharing information with their constituents. Some local officials ... said they felt pressured to sign NDAs to keep their communities in the running. Data center NDAs can extend years beyond the initial proposal dates. Many of them also include clauses requiring local jurisdictions to limit disclosure of records as much as legally possible under Freedom of Information Act laws and notify the companies first so they have a “reasonable opportunity to prevent disclosure.”

Note: Read about a small Wisconsin city that successfully defeated a giant data center. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.


Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.