Adtech is almost everything you do online. They’re using Adtech to track and investigate. Every little thing you do — shopping, browsing, checking health information, connecting on social, ChatGPT — is on Adtech.

ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest, 404 Media reports. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.

Starting a series on Open Social! Hoping to spotlight some of my favorite atproto projects :) And your favorites too, so tag them in the comments! There were a ton of logos in this video, so I've tagged everyone in the comments #tiktoksale #opensocial #atproto

this is something i think about a lot, aside from all the other issues imagine if YOU do depend on, eg, claude, to run your biz. something happens tomorrow and your whole “team” is gone. obviously this is the game, too. the math is platform threat ^ bus factor

Apple and Google have previously removed apps providing nudify services from their app stores. So why havent they taken action against X and Grok? @carolinehaskins.bsky.social reports

Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump was a mask off moment and showed the world we can’t depend on US tech companies. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!

I think about this one a lot

This was just sent to me by an LAUSD parent. A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education. Here is what the AI tool generated:

be the bitch doing something yourself that you want to see in the world

Ha, this is so great. It’s simple. If you don’t want otherwise satisfied busy people to stop everything to take a stand, don’t fuck with our friends ❤️

Oh really

We belong dead

big late breaking news: the market monitor for the largest energy grid in the u.s., covering much of the midwest and mid-atlantic, has called to block new data centers connections to the grid, saying current course of growth assures regular blackouts

NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Honored to serve on Mayor-elect @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social Transition Committee on Technology. For too long, too many New Yorkers have been left behind. NYC deserves governance that centers affordability, equity, and the public good-looking forward to the work ahead. www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news...

Mark MacCarthy says there is little doubt that the AI investment boom is a bubble. The real questions, he says, are when will the bubble burst, how severe will the consequences be, and what should policymakers do now to prepare for the inevitable downturn.

The reason why platform companies do make it hard to find account location information is not because they believe in privacy, it's so that advertisers do not know how much is lost to low-tier engagement. Growth, at all costs, means avoiding publishing basic metadata so that advertisers don't sue.

Even the ad targeting was basically a zero sum arms race with minimal or negative utility for both brands and consumers. We basically constructed a system that was bad for users and bad for buyers but created a simulacrum of consumer rationality that was attractive to executives.

This is all true but the profit motive for fake news was realized domestically far more than by foreign psyops or grifters. The outcome of this opaque ad revenue system is the political landscape we have today, which is thanks to American tech companies monetizing American fake news.

Insurers AIG, Great American, and WR Berkley seek permission to limit liability from AI agents and chatbots and to retreat from coverage of AI risk as multibillion-dollar claims mount www.ft.com/content/abfe...

Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that engaged in the trafficking of humans for sex. “You could incur 16 violations and upon the 17th violation, your account would be suspended" time.com/7336204/meta...

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...

evergreen

I think the shortest version of why LLMs are an anti education technology is that education is fundamentally about making shared context to understand ourselves, each other, and the world And by design LLMs destroy shared context

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

Another similarity of LLMs to humans: if you expose them to a lot of disinformation, they will believe it. Which you can exploit, apparently called "LLM grooming". So LLMs fail at three levels: /1 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives

Prove to me this isn’t the single most critical comment on media this year

talkin' about the AI bubble

So this ad revenue metric is indicative of such a fascinating and weird set of business decisions by Google to inexplicably kill of SEO-- and I honestly don't get how they think this is going to pay off for them in the long run. 🧵 1/

BREAKING: Following Tucker Carlson's friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Rocket Money has ended its sponsorship of Carlson's podcast. 🧵

In an email to customers, Rocket Money has confirmed that they stopped advertising on the Tucker Carlson show following his interview with Nick Fuentes and are working “to ensure our partnerships reflect our values.” popular.info/p/update-roc...

⚖️ A judge just forced OpenAI to hand over deleted records about its stolen training data. They called it privileged — but it looks a lot more like obstruction. We wrote about it this week in The Dispatch: dispatch.techoversight.org/big-tech-ac...

Incredible- Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day."

This is so needed. Very happy someone is tackling this in a systematic manner.

For @techpolicypress.bsky.social I laid out a tech agenda for Mayor-elect zohrankmamdani.bsky.social that resists surveillance and extraction while advancing his goals for affordability, dignity, and justice.

YouTube publicly decries Biden pressuring it to censor, then quietly does this at Trump's behest: theintercept.com/2025/11/04/y...

"Artificial intelligentsia." — @ruha9.bsky.social 🔥🔥🔥

Andreessen Horowitz is reportedly pausing its fund to support founders who lack access to traditional venture networks Many of its participants were women and minorities who, overall, receive very little venture capital funding

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Almost every major news story this week is about how the entire economy is now gambling, scams, bribes and theft.

I very rarely have direct contact on newsroom projects anymore, but this is cool because I did work with folks to help with the original collection protocol to make sure this information was handled and stored privately and wouldn't leave us with a re-identifiable dataset.

Everyone keeps saying that an individual's user data just isn't worth that much. Well now we know it's worth at least as much as a 3GB/mo cell phone plan.

I’ve long been a fan of the Check My Ads people. Now they’re launching a really ambitious-looking “Policy Platform” aimed at cleaning up the online-advertising business. My belief is that anyone who’s had much exposure to that business or to “AdTech” probably agrees that cleanup is called for […]

We cooperated with RTE PrimeTime over the last year on this very significant story about RTB data exposing the movements of Irish people, including military and political personnel. Link to this morning's preview piece is here --> www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

There's so much talent, audience, attention, interest, and money up in the air right now. The co-ops coalescing right now are just one example of this. Hopefully a sign that it'll be a million sustainable blooms and not one enormous overbalanced one.

The amount of shit I got for this segment at the time was astronomical, and it was all from people who now stalk CVS employees to get them fired for insufficient online sadness. Cheering on political violence is both evil and not new, an outgrowth of an internet intentionally dismantled years ago.

Every major publication in this country needs to have dedicated staffers or correspondents reporting on gaming, streamers, podcasts, and TikTok. Not as a once in a while thing. As standard beats. These are massive segments of American culture. No excuses for it anymore.

If you do want to hurt Google’s power, start moving off its services and push your politicians so they realize this is an issue they should be working on. Move to Proton, Qwant/Ecosia, and Vivaldi to start. More options here: disconnect.blog/getting-off-...

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