Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Let's be honest about something first. Google has always collected everything — your searches, your location, your watch history, what you hovered over, how long you paused. That's not news, and if you're reading this series it's not a surprise. But Google has also, in...

A follow-up to Sony Forgot What Won Them the Console War Quick update on the Sony situation because this one is almost too on the nose. A California judge granted preliminary approval of a $7.85 million settlement in Caccuri et al. v. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC — a class action accusing Sony of violating federal...

Week two. Brockman on the stand. Musk in the gallery watching. Before a single question was asked Monday morning, a court filing from Sunday night had already dropped the day's first bombshell. Two days before the trial began, Musk texted Brockman to gauge interest in a settlement. Brockman responded by suggesting both...

The trial's in recess. Musk has, shockingly, followed the judge's orders so far. The prediction markets are not impressed but the lawyers appear to be winning for now. The trial opened Monday. Tuesday evening the Wall Street Journal published a story about missed revenue targets. Friday the Journal dropped a full CFO...

There's a federal judge in Oakland named Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers who said something last week that nobody in that courtroom had probably heard before. She looked at two of the most powerful men in tech — one who controls more capital than most countries, one who posts at 2am like consequences are a feature for other...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Let's go back to E3 2013 for a moment. Microsoft had just announced the Xbox One with a suite of DRM policies that made the gaming community lose its mind. Always-online requirement. 24-hour license checks. Restrictions on used game sales. The internet was furious, and...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Last month I wrote about how GitHub spent eight years burning through the trust it borrowed when Microsoft bought it. The data training opt-out, the quiet absorption into CoreAI, the class system between enterprise customers and the individual developers who built the...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Sort of. More of an afternoon footnote that got interesting. I found out about it scrolling Mastodon. Someone posted the PC Gamer article. Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a speech this week warning that the AI industry is a bubble headed for a 2008-style financial...

Bonus entry in the Big Tech's War on Users series. Parts 1 and 2 are the actual argument. This is just a good example that arrived on schedule. Apple is currently working on a fix for a bug that locked at least one iPhone user out of his device for months. The cause: somewhere between iOS 18 and iOS 26.4, the...

Microsoft rebuilt Windows Recall from scratch. A researcher broke it again in a few weeks. Microsoft's response: that's not a vulnerability. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. You remember Recall. Microsoft announced it in May 2024 as the flagship feature of their new Copilot+ AI PCs. It would take...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. There's a thing called the Global Privacy Control. GPC. It's a signal your browser can send that tells websites, in plain technical terms: do not sell or share my data. The California Attorney General endorses it. It's legally required to be honored under CCPA. It's...

Anthropic flew in clergy. Brought in therapists. Put the word "wanted" in official documentation. Filed it under responsible AI development. I didn't make any of this up. I didn't have to. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Side note before we start: this is not a religious debate and I'm not looking to...

Part 2 of 2. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Part 1 covered the privacy brand — the Google deal, iCloud, Meta, and what "we keep your data safe" actually means. This post is about the other half of Apple's brand: the idea that their judgment is worth the premium. That they know best. That the walled...

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series Proton. The name comes up every single time someone asks where to go after Google. After Gmail. After that moment you realize free email means you're the product. For years, the privacy community has had one reliable answer: Proton. Swiss company. Swiss servers. Swiss law....

YouTube built something fun. The lawyers already knew what it was. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. YouTube announced something fun yesterday. No really. Genuinely fun on the surface. You can now create an AI avatar of yourself for use in Shorts. Record a quick selfie, read a few prompts so it can...