Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple announced this week that Brazilian developers can finally distribute apps through alternative marketplaces and offer payment options outside Apple's own system. Cue the fireworks. Cue the press release. Cue Epic Games and the Coalition for App Fairness — whose membership...

Back in February, I wrote about the ad blocker war and Manifest V3 — specifically how Google's MV3 framework wasn't really about security, it was about surgical removal of the capabilities that made ad blocking effective. I said that Chromium-based browsers were the most exposed, and I said Firefox and its hardened...

Apple's Privacy Is Now Underwritten by Google and Nvidia. Let That Sink In. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple Intelligence and a smarter Siri sounds great in a world where it's your choice, your hardware, or at worst a server sitting effectively next to the iCloud you're already trusting. It...

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series. This one got lost in the shuffle of other stories a couple weeks back, and I almost let it slide. That would have been a mistake. Because while the headlines have moved on, the case hasn't — and what's sitting inside it is worth paying attention to. The DOJ wants Apple,...

A few days after I wrote about Google replacing Search with Gemini wearing Search's clothes, the numbers started coming in. DuckDuckGo's U.S. app installs spiked 30% in the week following Google I/O, sustained across six consecutive days, holding through Memorial Day weekend when DDG normally sees traffic drop. On iOS...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Yesterday I published a post about Apple's privacy promise looking increasingly like a marketing slogan. Then Google held I/O the same day and made the whole thing worse. TechCrunch's headline wasn't wrong: Google Search as you know it is over. What replaces it isn't...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple has built its entire brand identity around privacy. "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." Billboards. Keynotes. The thing Apple fans reach for when justifying the premium they pay. And for a long time it wasn't just marketing — I've written before...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I asked a question back in March: can a user-hostile leopard change its spots? I was cautiously, skeptically willing to entertain the possibility. Microsoft had made noises about pulling Copilot back from its most obnoxious outposts. Pavan Davuluri said some words. I...

There's a thing that happens to me regularly that I suspect happens to you too. I'm trying to get to a site — reading an article, buying something, just clicking around — and suddenly I'm not going anywhere until I've proven my humanity to Google. Traffic lights. Buses. Motorcycles. And at least once, a traffic light...

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...

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...

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...

I've now written two posts about YouTube systematically degrading its free experience — background playback killed in browsers, lyrics paywalled after six years of being free. Each time I've said: this is a pattern, not a coincidence. This is deliberate, not incidental. So let's talk about what else has been going on,...

Four days ago, I wrote about YouTube killing background playback in browsers and how it was part of a broader pattern of systematically degrading free features to push people toward Premium subscriptions or their data-slurping app. Guess what happened this week? YouTube Music just put song lyrics behind a paywall. The...

Remember when you could open YouTube in Samsung Internet or Brave, lock your screen, and keep listening to music or podcasts while doing literally anything else on your phone? Yeah, that's done. As of this week, YouTube officially killed background playback through third-party browsers. No more workarounds. No more...