Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc — because this one started as a game and ended as a surveillance pipeline, so it earned both. Remember Pokémon GO? Summer of 2016. People were walking into traffic, trespassing in cemeteries, and wandering into strangers' backyards — all to catch...

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...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. We all know the basic deal by now. Meta wants your data to sell ads. Google wants your data to sell ads. A dozen other companies you've never heard of want your data to sell to the people selling ads. And we know Apple tried to draw a line with App Tracking...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. WWDC gave us two things at once. Craig Federighi on stage talking about privacy, trust, and safety. The three-tier Siri routing confirmed. The whole carefully assembled message about how seriously Apple takes your data. And buried in the same keynote week: Apple...

WWDC 2026 was today. Tim Cook's last as CEO, Craig Federighi on stage talking about platform improvements, trust, and safety — and somewhere between the homeOS preview and the AI announcements, iOS 27 confirmed what became obvious pretty early in the 26.x saga: the Liquid Glass slider is real, it's coming, and it...

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...

A meme showed up on my Mastodon feed the other day — sjvn posted it publicly — and it stopped me mid-scroll. It's a size comparison: proton, neutron, electron... and then, smaller than all of them, the close-ad-button. It's a joke. It's also a field guide to modern advertising UX. A quick disclosure before I get into...

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. The FBI issued a warning last week about a phishing-as-a-service platform called Kali365 that can completely bypass multi-factor authentication on Microsoft 365 accounts. Not by breaking MFA. By going around it entirely — using a legitimate Microsoft feature against...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I've spent two posts documenting how GitHub went from beloved developer platform to a Phase 3 extraction engine under Microsoft's roof. Phase 3: Profit covered the trust erosion — the data training opt-out nobody told you about, the absorption into CoreAI, the quiet...

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...

Back in March, I wrote about Bitwarden doubling their Premium price — and specifically how they did it. Buried in a feature announcement. Priced in fake monthly increments for a product that has never once offered monthly billing. Communicated to existing customers fifteen days before their renewal, not before....

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series Tracking people without meaningful consent is wrong. It was wrong when Meta did it to users. It's wrong now. The only difference is who's upset about it. Meta recently rolled out a tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), part of a broader internal program branded the...