#big tech

[homucifer-ryotan]

People in the UK especially, please don't give your ID to Spotify

[ellipsus-writes]

(Source) The Department of Homeland Security is tapping Google and other tech companies / platforms (Meta, Reddit, Discord) to hand over the personal information of people criticizing ICE. The DHS subpoenas include "legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency." In one case, Google has been ordered to convey timestamps of a man's online history, including: "every known IP and physical address, his credit card, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers", etc.

They’re not required by law to comply: they are choosing to.

Big Tech companies have long pledged compliance to MAGA’s agenda—but the breadth and invasiveness of this DHS operation is significant.

As the scope of state suppression grows, so do the surveillance methods. (Basically, we're watching technofascism accelerate in real time.)

(Source) So, if you haven't already, protect your content and identity by moving to more secure spaces—ideally with servers outside the US and backed by robust privacy legislation (e.g., GDPR). The ACLU is offering legal rep to anyone affected by this. Please stay safe and protect others. - the Ellipsus Team

[allthecanadianpolitics]

NDP leader Avi Lewis is calling for a national ban on the predatory practice known as surveillance pricing, where two different people can be charged different prices for the same item just based on demographics or online data collected by websites.

[reasonsforhope]

hey, got any good news related to AI recently? all I can see is just doomposting about AI taking over and it’s really just depressing me

So this isn't an article per se, but fun fact:

A large proportion of AI demos are literally just fake.

AI is not capable of taking over even a tenth as much (and, more likely even a hundredth or a thousandth as much) as Big Tech, Big Business, and fucking Elon Musk would like you to believe

Many Impressive AI Demos Were Fakes

I recently ran across an article on the Seeking Alpha investing site with the provocative title “ AI: Fakes, False Promises And Frauds “, pu

Seeing is not Believing with AI

AI video demos lie to your eyes, but not the way you think.

Elon Musk didn't invent fake tech demos - Blog - Creative Collaboration

Elon Musk has been called out for a spate of strange fibs lately (and if anything, he should have been called out for many more). Here’s the

The fake demos aren't bad news - they're GOOD news. Because AI can't take over everything, AI is decades away from the kind of power and abilities the vast vast majority of people think it has.

While it's true that AI isn't going away, especially when it comes to generative AI, its legitimate and effective use cases are going to be far, far more limited than anyone will currently admit

[thedaddycomplex]

Big tech put the AI in “It ain’t art.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

EU ready to cave to Trump on tech

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.

For more than a decade, it's been clear that the American internet was not fit for purpose. The whistleblowers Mark Klein and Edward Snowden revealed that the US had weaponized its status as the world's transoceanic fiber-optic hub to spy on the entire planet:

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26-difficult-multipolarism-eurostack-5a527c32f149

US tech giants flouted privacy laws, gleefully plundering the world's cash and data with products that they remorselessly enshittified:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

American companies repurposed their over-the-air software update capabilities to remotely brick expensive machinery in service to geopolitical priorities:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Then Trump and his tech companies started attacking key public institutions around the world, shutting down access for senior judges who attempted to hold Trump's international authoritarian allies to account for their crimes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won't give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world's majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

Now, these latent offensive capabilities were obvious long before Trump, but the presidents who weaponized them in the pre-Trump era did so in subtle and deniable ways, or under a state of exception (e.g. in response to spectacular terrorist attacks or in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) that let bystanders assure themselves that this wouldn't become a routine policy.

After all, America profited so much from the status quo in which America and its trading partners all pretended that US tech wouldn't be weaponized for geopolitical aims, so a US president would be a fool to shatter the illusion. And even if the president was so emotionally incontinent that he demanded the naked weaponization of America's defective, boobytrapped tech exports, the power blocs that the president relies on would stop him, because they are so marinated in the rich broth that America drained from the world using Big Tech.

This is "status quo bias" in action. No one wants to let go of the vine they're swinging from until they have a new vine firmly in their grasp – but you can't reach the next vine unless you release your death-grip on your current one. So it was that, year after year, the world allowed itself to become more dependent on America's easily weaponizable tech, making the tech both more dangerous and harder to escape.

Enter Trump (a crisis) (and crises precipitate change). Under Trump, the illusion of a safe interdependence crumbled. Every day, in new and increasingly alarming ways, Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only adversaries and rivals. Every day, Trump proves to the world that American tech isn't merely untrustworthy – it's a live, dire, urgent danger to your state, your companies, and your people. The best time to get shut of the American internet was 15 years ago. The second best time is right fucking now.

NOW!

The result is the burgeoning movement to build a "post-American internet." In Canada, PM Mark Carney's announcement of a "rupture" has the country rethinking its deep connections to the American internet and asking what it could do to escape it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Europe, meanwhile, has multiple, advanced, well-funded initiatives to leave the American internet behind and migrate to a post-American internet, like "Eurostack" and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

But status quo bias exerts a powerful gravity. A reactionary counterrevolution is being waged in the European Commission – the permanent bureaucracy that executes Europe's laws and regulations. Within the EC, an ascendant faction has announced plans for a "dialogue" with representatives from the Trump regime to let them direct the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's landmark 2024 anti-Big Tech regulations:

https://www.politico.eu/article/fatal-decision-eu-slammed-for-caving-to-us-pressure-on-digital-rules/

The DMA and DSA require America's tech giants to open up their platforms in ways that would halt the plunder of Europeans' private data and cash. US tech giants have flatly refused to comply with these rules, relying on Trump to get them out of any obligations under EU law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

That's a sound bet. After all, the last thing Trump did before his inauguration was publicly announce his intention to destroy any country that attempted to enforce these laws:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/trump-davos-europe-tariffs.html

He's making good on his threats. He's already sanctioned a group of officials who helped draft the DSA:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5655855/trump-administration-bars-5-europeans-from-entry-to-the-u-s-over-alleged-censorship

And he's ordered his tech companies to turn over the private emails and messages of other European officials, so he can identify the ones most dangerous to US tech plunder and sanction them, too:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much. For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: reneging.

Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As Politico's Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy."

Moving to the post-American internet is hard – but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

[teal-deer]

I am once again pointing out that the data centers which churn out AI slop are physical places that exist & suffer from all the vulnerabilities that a physical place that exists and requires massive amounts of electricity and water have.

In the interest of civility, I will first point out that many of those things are "zoning laws" and "environmental regulations." Those do require you to bother political officials, which is unsexy, but it can be done.

No matter what big tech tells you, the "cloud" is built on very real, physical infrastructure. And infrastructure can be dismantled.

[politijohn]

Source

Hell yeah