Tag: big tech

Joe Rogan Guest Reveals Facebook’s Secret Experiment That Manipulated 700,000 Users Without Warning

Joe Rogan sat down with Harvard professor and mind control expert Rebecca Lemov, and it didn’t take long for the conversation to dive into one of his favorite topics: government interference in our digital lives.

Rogan opened the conversation by saying, “There are so many different kinds of mind control.”

“One of the things we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast is, that an enormous percentage of what you’re seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real. It’s not organic,” he explained.

“It’s state-run and state-funded, and it’s whether it’s foreign governments or our government or even corporations, you’re getting inorganic discourse that’s designed to form a narrative and which is a form of mind control,” he added.

Lemov picked up on that point and took it further. Even when people know something is fake, she explained, our brains still react as if it were real.

“Yeah. I mean, I think even on a basic level, people, it’s known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real,” she said.

“Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as, like, in-person interaction,” she added.

It’s not just governments pulling the strings, she warned. The platforms themselves are designed to influence how we feel.

“I think at the root, there is a kind of way that, on an emotional level, it’s not just manipulation of ideas,” she said, “but there’s a kind of emotional engineering that’s built into the platforms and doesn’t even demand, you know, at first, government involvement.”

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YouTube and Netflix Deploy AI and Behavioral Tracking to Intensify Targeted Advertising

YouTube and Netflix are moving aggressively to expand the ways they track and monetize viewer behavior, leaning further into AI-driven systems and behavioral profiling to fine-tune ad delivery.

YouTube’s latest experiment with intrusive advertising comes in the form of “Peak Points,” a format that leverages Google’s Gemini AI to dissect video content and identify the exact moment a viewer is most emotionally invested.

Ads are then served immediately after these moments. While the idea is to capture attention when it’s most focused, the reality for viewers could mean jarring interruptions right after an emotional payoff or a pivotal scene.

This development was announced during YouTube’s Upfront event in New York, where the company pitched it as a smarter way to keep audiences engaged with advertisements. But the concept is likely to be unwelcome news for users already frustrated by mid-roll ads. Now, even emotional immersion is being treated as just another metric for ad targeting.

Meanwhile, Netflix is unveiling its own strategy to transform user engagement into a high-resolution marketing blueprint. At its recent advertising presentation, Netflix rolled out a host of new tools that feed off detailed user data, facilitated by what it calls the Netflix Ads Suite. The platform is now operational in North America and will soon be deployed across all countries where the ad-supported model is available.

A key feature of the system is its “Enhanced Data Capabilities,” which allow brands to merge their customer data with Netflix’s audience data. This process, conducted through intermediaries like LiveRamp or directly through Netflix, enables highly targeted ad delivery. To support this, Netflix has granted data access to third-party giants including Experian and Acxiom, firms notorious for building detailed consumer profiles for advertisers.

Netflix is also introducing a “clean room” setup, a controlled data-sharing environment where outside partners can analyze combined datasets without directly accessing raw user information. However, such structures often do little to curb the broader privacy implications of the data they facilitate.

Another part of Netflix’s expanded toolkit includes “brand lift” measurement, essentially tying a user’s viewing habits to how they perceive particular brands. It’s a more aggressive step toward turning personal entertainment choices into commercially valuable behavioral signals.

In tandem with these tools, Netflix has previewed new ad formats powered by generative AI. These include interactive mid-roll and pause-screen ads that can include prompts, overlays, or even buttons to push content to a second screen. These formats are being framed as personalized and responsive, and are slated to be available across all ad-tier markets by 2026.

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Google Reaches $1.375 Billion Settlement with Texas Over Privacy Violations Involving Location Tracking and Biometric Data

Google has reached a $1.375 billion settlement with Texas over allegations the tech giant intruded on user privacy by collecting data without proper consent. The resolution, announced by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, concludes two lawsuits centered on the company’s handling of sensitive information across several of its products.

The lawsuits focused on practices involving Google’s location tracking, biometric data collection, and its private browsing tool, Incognito mode. According to Paxton, the company engaged in prolonged surveillance of individuals’ movements, online activity, and even biometric identifiers like voiceprints and facial features, activities he claimed were conducted without user knowledge or agreement.

“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” said Paxton. “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

Although the total settlement figure has been made public, specific terms remain undisclosed, and the state has not explained how the funds will be distributed.

Google has denied any wrongdoing and emphasized that the agreement resolves claims based on policies that have already been updated. “This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. He added, “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”

The original lawsuits, filed in 2022, accused Google of circumventing user privacy settings, continuing to track locations despite users believing the feature was off. They also charged that the company’s so-called private browsing mode did not actually provide meaningful privacy and that Google had collected biometric data from Texans without obtaining legally required consent.

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X Complies with Over 8,000 Indian Government Censorship Orders, Blocks News and User Accounts

The X Global Government Affairs team has revealed that the social company has received over 8,000 censorship orders from the Indian government, affecting access in that country to entire accounts.

We obtained a copy of the memo for you here.

Among them are executive orders to block accounts of international news organizations and prominent X users, the post said, adding that the company will comply by “withholding” those accounts only in India.

Other platforms have also received the same orders but have yet to comment on the issue.

According to the post, the decision was not an easy one to make but X views it as necessary in order for the platform to continue its presence in India.

Noncompliance with the orders could have resulted in “significant fines” and even imprisonment of local employees, X announced.

It is further explained that the Indian government’s orders do not state which individual posts were found in violation of the country’s law, opting rather to demand that entire accounts must be blocked.

“For a significant number of accounts, we did not receive any evidence or justification to block (them),” Global Affairs writes.

Even though the decision has been made to comply with the orders at this time, X made it clear the company “disagrees” and views the blocking of accounts rather than individual allegedly offending posts as not only “unnecessary” but also a form of censorship that affects both existing and future content, in that way violating users’ right to free speech.

Having complied in order to stay in the market, X is now “exploring all possible legal avenues available to the company.”

The Global Affairs post is urging affected users who are located in India, to turn to the courts in a bid to have the orders overturned – since they, unlike X, have this option. Those users are also reminded they can contact the government directly.

X lists a number of legal aid organizations that those with blocked accounts can consider contacting, and explains the decision to go public with some details about the censorship orders as “essential for transparency” – while “lack of disclosure discourages accountability and can contribute to arbitrary decision making.”

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Google Hit with Historic $1.375 Billion Settlement for Secretly Tracking People’s Movements, Private Searches, Voiceprints, and Facial Data

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has delivered a knockout punch to Google, securing a record-shattering $1.375 billion settlement for the Big Tech’s covert surveillance of everyday Americans.

This staggering sum is nearly a billion dollars more than what 40 states combined were able to wring from Google for similar offenses — a testament to Paxton’s unrelenting crusade against Big Tech tyranny.

In 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a 44-page lawsuit against Google, accusing the multibillion-dollar corporation of “systematically misleading” and “deceiving” Texans for years in order to secretly track their every move — and rake in obscene profits from it.

The lawsuit lays out a damning case against Google, alleging that the tech behemoth “covertly harvested” users’ precise geolocation data, voiceprints, and even facial geometry — all while leading users to believe they had turned off such invasive tracking.

According to the lawsuit, Google duped its users by creating a maze of confusing and misleading settings, falsely telling Texans they could protect their privacy by turning off features like “Location History.” But in reality, Google was still logging user data using obscure and hard-to-find settings like “Web & App Activity,” storing data in shadowy internal databases with Orwellian names like “Footprints.”

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Mozilla’s Google Dependence Threatens Firefox’s Survival

Despite its mission to challenge Big Tech dominance, Mozilla now finds itself tethered to one of its largest rivals in a paradox that could threaten the very survival of its flagship browser, Firefox.

As the Justice Department pushes forward with remedies aimed at curbing Google’s monopoly over online search, Mozilla’s financial dependence on the search giant is surfacing as a glaring vulnerability, one that the organization admits could become existential.

Mozilla’s Chief Financial Officer, Eric Muhlheim, testified in court on Friday, describing the potential fallout of the DOJ’s proposals as dire. “It’s very frightening,” he said if Google were barred from paying to remain the default search provider in Firefox.

That payment, ironically, forms the lifeblood of a browser that was created to stand as a counterweight to corporate control of the internet. Firefox generates roughly 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, and Muhlheim confirmed that about 85 percent of that comes from its agreement with Google; an arrangement that funds both Mozilla’s for-profit arm and, by extension, the nonprofit foundation behind it.

While the court has already determined that Google’s use of default search engine contracts amounts to illegal monopolistic behavior, Mozilla’s testimony underscores the tangled consequences of dismantling those deals. Mozilla, positioned as a David to Google’s Goliath in the browser wars, depends on the very dominance the DOJ seeks to unwind.

Muhlheim didn’t mince words about what severing the deal could mean. The immediate loss of that income would require sweeping cutbacks. He spoke of a “downward spiral” in which reduced funding for product development would degrade Firefox, prompt user attrition, and potentially “put Firefox out of business.” The ripple effects, he warned, would hit Mozilla’s other initiatives—such as its work on ethical AI and open web standards.

The contradiction is hard to miss: Firefox, hailed by digital rights advocates as a rare independent in a browser market increasingly shaped by Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Chromium, is only able to survive because of a search contract with Google. Its own browser engine, Gecko, was developed precisely to prevent a single corporation—then Microsoft—from dictating how the internet worked. Now, two decades later, Mozilla’s survival hinges on the largesse of another tech behemoth.

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Report: FBI Agent Elvis Chan, Key Figure in 2020 Election Censorship Scheme, Placed on Terminal Leave

FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan, one of the central figures in the federal government’s censorship of conservative voices during the 2020 presidential election, has reportedly been placed on terminal leave.

The development was first reported by independent journalist Breanna Morello.

Chan, who served as the FBI’s key liaison between the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, was instrumental in a government-led censorship campaign to silence conservative voices and suppress damaging information about Hunter Biden in the lead-up to the election.

Morello, citing sources familiar with Chan’s situation, reports that the longtime San Francisco-based agent has not accessed any of his government devices for over a month.

Chan still lists himself as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge on his LinkedIn page, which includes preferred pronouns — “he/him.”

The House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit against FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan last year for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena tied to the 2020 election censorship scandal.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, lays out damning allegations: that Chan, acting as the FBI’s liaison with Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter, played a central role in the federal government’s backdoor scheme to censor Americans online before the 2020 presidential election.

Despite being subpoenaed by Congress to testify, Chan—under orders from Biden’s Department of Justice—refused to appear. Why? Because Congress wouldn’t allow DOJ lawyers to sit in and monitor the interview. Yes, the DOJ wants to babysit its agents during congressional investigations, undermining the House’s constitutional oversight authority.

According to the complaint, Chan was a “pivotal figure” passing information from the FBI to social media companies in the months leading up to the election—information that often led to the silencing of viewpoints inconvenient to the ruling regime.

According to Morello, Chan also testified in the landmark case Missouri v. Biden—a case in which I, Jim Hoft, am a plaintiff—where he conveniently claimed to have “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s role in pressuring tech companies to censor the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story.

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Google’s Updated Local Services Ads Terms Spark Privacy Fears, Threaten Confidentiality in Medical and Legal Sectors

Google has once again raised considerable privacy and surveillance concerns – including affecting sensitive sectors like the medical industry – this time with its updated Terms of Service for Local Services Ads (LSA).

The LSA scheme is designed to give local business leads, like calls and emails, directly from local customers who search for their services on Google.

But an email sent to participating advertisers last week informed them that failure to accept the terms by June 5 will mean their ads will no longer appear either in the giant’s Search or Maps.

The new rights over advertiser assets benefit not only Google but also the company’s affiliates, and what they now can do is access all content in an LSA profile (including calls from potential customers) in order to use, modify, and display it across Google products and services.

This by no means exhaustive list of content includes business photos, entity name, location, phone number, category, site, and hours.

Google is also claiming the right to select, modify, display, and use content such as photos, provider bios, service descriptions, pricing information, and discounts.

That content is derived from phone calls and messages with end users routed through Google, and URLS identified and shared in the LSA account.

Ad agencies can be the ones to consent to the terms on behalf of advertisers, and in that case, the new rules apply to both. However, it is at this time not clear whether agency manager accounts can make this decision without letting the clients know how their data will be handled starting June 5.

When applied to advertisers representing legal and medical firms, Google having the right to record phone calls and messages means they would be unable to continue to use LSA without breaking confidentiality.

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Meta’s Oversight Board Condemns Free Speech Reforms, Pushes for Continued Censorship Over “Human Rights” Concerns

Welcomed by opponents of the multi-year Big Tech-government censorship collusion in the US, Meta’s decision to abandon its controversial “fact-checking” program is receiving criticism from others.

Among them is Meta’s Oversight Board, which is also unhappy that the company is allowing more freedom to users of its platforms when it comes to discussing issues like gender identity and immigration.

Announcing the changes earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the “moderation” system in place until that point had produced “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

The content was flagged, downranked, or removed, as were users if either censorship algorithms or third-party “fact-checkers” decided it contained “misinformation” or “hate speech” – and the criteria for this was heavily biased in favor of the former administration’s agendas.

But looking back at the policy shift announced on January 7, the Board expressed its concern that Meta went about this “hastily, in a departure from the regular procedure, with no public information shared as to what, if any, prior human rights due diligence the company performed.”

The Board decided to put the emphasis on “human rights” rather than free speech, in particular the handling of topics related to LGB and transgender issues.

Meta’s policy now allows users to make allegations about mental illness or abnormality “when based on gender or sexual orientation.” This is essentially explained as a way to allow the discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality that is already happening in society, in political and religious contexts.

But the Board thinks this may result in human rights violations and wants Meta to investigate whether that is happening, and to “update it” on the findings twice a year.

Just how restrictive the rules around these issues have been is illustrated in the two cases the Board was considering – attempts to ban videos expressing views about the participation of transgender persons in sports and their “access” to bathrooms.

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Israeli Intelligence Is Now In Charge of Your Google Data

Google recently announced it would acquire Israeli-American cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion. The price tag — 65 times Wiz’s annual revenue — has raised eyebrows and further solidified the close relationship between Google and the Israeli military.

In its press release, the Silicon Valley giant claimed that the purchase will “vastly improve how security is designed, operated and automated—providing an end-to-end security platform for customers, of all types and sizes, in the AI era.”

Yet it has also raised fears about the security of user data, particularly of those who oppose Israeli actions against its neighbors, given Unit 8200’s long history of using tech to spy on opponents, gather intelligence, and use that knowledge for extortion and blackmail.

Israel’s Global Spy Network

Wiz was established only five years ago, and all four co-founders — Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik — were leaders in Israel’s elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200. Like many Israeli tech companies, Wiz is a direct outgrowth of the military intelligence outfit. A recent study found that almost fifty of its current employees are Unit 8200 veterans.

“That experience showed me the impact you can make when you combine great talent with amazing technology,” Rappaport said of his time in the military.

Former Unit 8200 agents, working hand-in-glove with the Israeli national security state, have gone on to produce many of the world’s most infamous malware and hacking tools.

Perhaps the most well-known of these is Pegasus, spyware used by governments around the world to surveil and harass political opponents. These include India, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which used the tool to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.

In total, more than 50,000 journalists, human rights defenders, diplomats, business leaders and politicians are known to have been secretly surveilled. That includes heads of state such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Iraqi President Barham Salih. All Pegasus sales had to be approved by the Israeli government, which reportedly had access to the data Pegasus’ foreign customers were accruing.

Unit 8200 also spies on Americans. Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency regularly shared the data and communications of U.S. citizens with the Israeli intelligence group. “I think that’s amazing…It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen,” he said.

For the Israeli government, the utility of these private spying firms filled with former IDF intelligence figures is that it allows it some measure of plausible deniability when confronted with spying attacks. As Haaretz explained: “Who owns [these spying companies] isn’t clear, but their employees aren’t soldiers. Consequently, they may solve the army’s problem, even if the solution they provide is imperfect.”

Today, former Unit 8200 agents not only create much of the world’s spyware, but also the security features that claim to protect against unwanted surveillance. A MintPress investigation found that three of the six largest VPN companies in the world are owned and controlled by an Israeli company co-founded by a Unit 8200 veteran.

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