Tag: big tech

Facebook Verified: Meta Now Wants a Video Selfie of Your Face

Meta is rolling out a badge on Facebook that requires users to record a video of their own face.

The feature, massively accelerating the normalization of face scanning and biometric data collection, is called Facebook Verified, and asks a user to record a short video selfie, which the company checks against the photos already on their profile to confirm a match.

The process is free and takes a few minutes.

The company, which has been aggressively lobbying for “age verification” digital ID laws, presents the badge as a way to confirm a real person is behind an account. “As AI makes it easier to generate content, profiles, and messages,” it said, it wants users “to know there is a real person on the other side of a profile.”

The badge is open to Facebook users who are 18 or older and in good standing with Meta’s Community Standards on fraud, scams, and deceptive practices, and who show “no evidence of inauthentic behavior.” It is not available for Pages or ProMode accounts, which limits it to personal profiles.

Once a user completes the one-time check, the badge appears on Marketplace, Dating, Groups, and Profile. Meta said it plans to extend it to Feed posts over time.

Facebook Verified is separate from Meta Verified, the company’s paid subscription, which bundles a badge with impersonation protection and account support. Facebook Verified charges no fee.

Meta has not said how long it keeps the selfie video, where it stores it, or when it deletes it.

The launch materials describe the match and say nothing about the video afterward.

The scan arrives the same month Google added a selfie-video sign-in that records a user’s face to recover a locked account. Age-check laws in several US states and in Britain already require a face or an ID scan to open some accounts.

Meta is now asking hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a face scan too.

Facebook Verified is rolling out in phases, starting in select markets, and Meta plans to expand it worldwide.

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Google’s €890m EU Fine and the Wrong Fight in Washington

Today the European Commission fined Google €890 million for breaking the Digital Markets Act, the law the bloc wrote to pry open its largest online platforms.

€460 million was for self-preferencing in search: the Commission concluded that Google had given its own shopping, hotel, and travel results the prominent placement and the richer display that rival services could not get.

The other €430 million was for the rules Google Play imposes on the developers who sell through it, rules that kept them from telling their own customers about cheaper offers available elsewhere while charging a steering fee above what the law allows.

The Commission ordered Google to stop and to rank outside services on the same terms as its own.

The reaction from Washington arrived before the fine did. Days earlier, twenty-five Republican members of Congress, seven of them on the House trade subcommittee and one its chairman, wrote to President Trump urging him to treat European enforcement as an act of aggression against American business, a tool, they said, of “economic extraction and regulatory coercion.”

They asked him to reach for Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the statute that lets Washington answer unfair practices with tariffs, and reminded the bloc that “the EU’s access to the U.S. market is not guaranteed.”

The lawmakers also caught the Commission in an awkward inconsistency: Apple, Meta, and Amazon wear the gatekeeper label that pulls them under the law, while the Chinese marketplaces Temu and AliExpress, which reach just as far into European pockets, so far don’t.

The timing sharpened the suspicion, the fine landing hours before a batch of the President’s global tariffs was due to expire. Between the inconsistency and the timing, the charge of persecution has something under it. And yet the conduct Europe fined is the conduct American courts have already condemned, in cases brought by an American company, tried before American judges and an American jury, with no connection to Brussels.

Apple spent the past two years losing to Epic Games in a federal courtroom in California. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that the company had willfully violated her 2021 order forbidding it to stop developers from steering customers to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. She threw out the commission Apple had tried to charge on those outside sales and referred the matter to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” she wrote; “the cover-up made it worse.” Fortnite was back in the American App Store within days.

Google lost the same fight on the same ground when a California jury decided in December 2023 that the Play Store and its billing system formed an illegal monopoly, and in July 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld both the verdict and the order that came with it; Google must let rival app stores operate, permit alternative billing, and stop paying companies to keep out of app distribution. Epic’s chief executive called it a total victory. Anti-steering in the App Store, self-preferencing and a closed till in the Play Store; take the European postmark off the charges and they are the same ones a jury in San Francisco already returned.

In May the Supreme Court refused to pause Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s order but in June it agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding, so the question of how far Apple defied the order is still open.

What isn’t open, and what the appeal does not reach, is the 2021 injunction against blocking steering, or the jury’s monopoly verdict against Google that the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The core findings stand. American law looked at what these companies do and called it unlawful; the only live dispute is over how thoroughly Apple flouted the remedy.

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House panel subpoenas 3 left-wing groups in probe of $39M tied to Marxist tycoon Neville Singham

The powerful House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed three left-wing nonprofits in an investigation into more than $39 million that flowed from Marxist tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham to the groups, Fox News Digital has learned.

In three letters dated July 21 and obtained by Fox News Digital, the committee accused the three nonprofits of failing to turn over a “single responsive document” to earlier requests for information.

The committee, led by Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., issued the subpoenas to the People’s Forum Inc., a New York-based activist hub; BreakThrough News, a left-wing nonprofit media outlet; and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which says its work is anchored in “national liberation Marxism.”

The legislative action emerges as far-left nonprofits face growing scrutiny from law enforcement agencies, policymakers and federal agencies for their alleged roles in promoting communist propaganda, engaging in money laundering schemes and fomenting discord and even political violence. Last week, Secretary of State Rubio convened a summit of 65 nations to counter “far-left terrorism.

On Monday, the State Department released a 100-page report on a network of U.S. organizations that allegedly promote propaganda for the communist regime in Cuba.

The panel said it is investigating whether existing laws governing tax-exempt organizations adequately protect against foreign influence — and whether Congress needs to change those laws. The letters cite a five-part Fox News Digital investigation published in March that exposed the flow of $285 million from Singham into a sprawling international network of nonprofits, activist groups and media operations.

“Your responses have failed to include a single responsive document and misrepresented both the scope and purpose of the Committee’s oversight,” the nearly identical letters state. “Accordingly, the Committee is invoking compulsory process to obtain the requested materials.”

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Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

Meta has moved from building traditional structures for its data centers to putting up tents across the U.S. and sticking AI servers inside them. Michael Thomas, founder of market intelligence and data center tracking firm Cleanview Energy, said on X that the AI tech firm has already built or is in the process of constructing three data centers that use the strategy.

One site, located in New Albany, Ohio, already has five buildings that took approximately two to three years to complete. The company then started putting up five tents, with an area of around 125,000 square feet each, in the area. City permits seen by Cleanview Energy say that the construction started in April 2026, while recent satellite images show that the structures have already been completed.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially. It’s said that Meta is inspired by Elon Musk’s feat with xAI, which built a 100,000-strong AI data center in just 19 days in 2024 — something which usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The technique is apparently quite effective, and it’s now being applied to two other sites, including one in Tennessee.

Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called “rapid deployment structures,” is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They’re certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the “classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock” situation. Nevertheless, the company has probably weighed the pros and cons of such a setup and has decided that it was worth taking the risk to gain an advantage in the AI infrastructure race.

Another factor that allowed Meta to bring its data centers online at a much faster pace is its use of “behind-the-meter” power, in which the company installed its own turbines to produce power on-site rather than relying on grid power. This is similar to what Musk did with his Memphis Supercluster, which he initially powered with portable power generators. However, Meta’s turbines would be a permanent feature on the Ohio site, as it’s designed to run independently of the power grid.

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Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

Look at what Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle officially owe, and the numbers seem large but manageable. Look off the books, and a second, bigger pile of debt appears.

A Nikkei study put that hidden figure at $1.65 trillion, up roughly eightfold in four years. It is more than the $1.35 trillion the five report outright.

The Enron echo

The money is tied up in off-balance-sheet vehicles, the same kind of structure Enron used to hide debt before it collapsed 25 years ago. Back then it was fraud. Now, tightened rules and fuller disclosures make it legal.

The tools are still there, though. “Enron’s crime wasn’t having special purpose vehicles,” analyst Gil Luria told Bloomberg Law. “Enron’s crime was hiding them.”

The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts.

Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants.

Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.

The numbers behind the boom

The scale is the story. Meta’s off-balance-sheet debt alone is about $420 billion, nearly triple its reported debt. Oracle’s has grown roughly thirtyfold in four years.

It is all in service of the same race. The industry is expected to spend more than $3 trillion through 2028 building and equipping AI data centres, much of it financed against the chips inside them.

Why it matters now

The timing is awkward. Four of the five report earnings in the next two weeks, and the reported debt will look tidy. The $1.65 trillion sitting in the footnotes will not make the headlines.

The catch is what happens later. When a data centre goes live, its lease rolls onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the facility is marked down, and the loss lands on the lenders and insurers who funded it.

Some already see the risk. S&P has cut Oracle’s credit rating over stretched leverage, and both Morgan Stanley and Moody’s have flagged the wider issue. “What if one of these companies was a house of cards,” asked accounting consultant Tom Selling, “and was propping itself up with this accounting treatment?”

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Google DeepMind CEO Calls for U.S.-Led Global AI Safety Watchdog

Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, is advocating for the United States to create a new artificial intelligence oversight body with authority to evaluate the world’s most sophisticated AI models and potentially coordinate industry-wide slowdowns when risks escalate.

Axios reports that the Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind Google’s ultra-woke Gemini AI system outlined his proposal in a personal manifesto published this week titled “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age.” In an exclusive interview with Axios, Hassabis emphasized the urgency of implementing a more systematic regulatory approach to artificial intelligence, one that would be industry-funded, staffed by leading technical experts, and accountable to the U.S. government.

Speaking from his London headquarters, Hassabis characterized current AI-driven cybersecurity risks as warning signals of greater dangers ahead. He predicted that within 18 months, these capabilities, along with potentially catastrophic biological and nuclear threats, could exist within open-source AI models that would be impossible for any government to control. The DeepMind CEO stressed that risks would emerge not only from open-source models but also from the more powerful proprietary systems being developed by major AI laboratories.

“What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilization unfolds,” Hassabis wrote in his manifesto.

Hassabis has spent recent months conducting private consultations to build support for his proposal, meeting with Trump administration officials, leaders of other AI laboratories, and European government representatives before making his plan public. He reported receiving positive responses from the administration, which had previously adopted a hands-off stance toward AI regulation before the recent Mythos incident raised alarm bells.

The DeepMind chief, who commands significant respect across different factions within the AI community, indicated that leaders of other major AI labs have expressed agreement with the general direction of his proposal. “This is where the industry needs to go,” Hassabis said of the feedback he has received. His timeline for implementation is ambitious, aiming for the new regulatory body to become operational before the end of the current year.

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Zuckerberg to spend over $10B on “historic” Alberta AI data centre investment, sources say

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is behind a massive artificial intelligence data centre planned for Sturgeon County, Alberta, Juno News has confirmed.

This is according to several well-placed sources with direct knowledge of the investment, one that all sources agree will be “historic” in magnitude.

The project is expected to involve roughly $13 billion in total investment, though the final figure could still change as it is unclear if the final proposal has been approved and signed off by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s board.

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Anthropic Removes “Scary” Secret Claude Tracker After Developer Stumbles Across It

Anthropic has removed hidden detection code from its Claude Code tool after a developer reverse-engineered the binary and exposed how the company was subtly monitoring users in China.

The code, which Anthropic described as an experiment launched in March, used a form of prompt steganography to signal information about a user’s environment back to Anthropic’s servers. It was designed to help detect unauthorized resellers and attempts by other organizations to distill Claude’s capabilities into their own models.

How The Detection Worked

The mechanism was first spotted by a Reddit user known as LegitMichel777, who stumbled on it while trying to restore a disabled feature in Claude Code. A separate developer known as Thereallo independently confirmed the finding the same day, June 30, publishing a technical breakdown of exactly how it worked.

The checks only ran in one specific situation: when a user pointed Claude Code at a different server instead of Anthropic’s own – something companies commonly do when they route their traffic through internal systems or third-party gateways. From there, it checked two things:

  • Whether the user’s computer was set to a Chinese time zone (Shanghai or Urumqi).
  • Whether the new server address matched a hidden list of Chinese AI companies (including well-known names like DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot) or known resale and proxy services.

If either check came back positive, Claude Code would quietly tweak a line of text called the “system prompt” – background instructions the app automatically sends to the AI model with every request, invisible to the person typing. Specifically, it changed how the date was written in that line:

  • If the user was in a Chinese time zone, the date switched from using dashes to slashes (e.g., 2026/06/30 instead of 2026-06-30).
  • The apostrophe in the phrase “Today’s date is…” was swapped for one of three lookalike characters, each one a different signal, depending on which combination of checks the session had triggered.

None of this was visible to users, or likely even to the AI model itself in normal use – the characters look identical on screen. But Anthropic’s servers could read the difference instantly. The lists of flagged domains and keywords were also scrambled inside the app’s code using a basic encryption trick, so they wouldn’t show up if someone just opened the file and searched for them.

Thereallo called the approach “prompt steganography” – hiding a signal inside ordinary-looking text – and noted it let Anthropic sort and flag sessions without needing any separate, visible tracking system.

Anthropic’s Explanation

Last Tuesday, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar, who works on the Claude Code team, confirmed the feature on X:

“This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation. The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while. We merged the PR and this should be fully rolled back in tomorrow’s release.”

Anthropic has stated that unauthorized resellers have been selling access to Claude accounts and subscriptions at steep discounts in certain markets. The company has also publicly documented large-scale efforts by Chinese AI labs to distill its models by querying them at high volume through proxies and fraudulent accounts.

Anthropic removed the detection logic shortly after it became public.

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The AI Jobs Apocalypse Has Begun: We Are Witnessing An Unprecedented Wave Of AI-Related Layoffs In 2026

We all knew that this would be coming. In 2026, the rate of AI-related layoffs has greatly accelerated, and that means that large numbers of good paying jobs are suddenly disappearing from the economy. This is occurring when we are already facing one major crisis after another, and so the timing could not be worse. Many young people specifically chose a major in college that would prepare them for positions in the tech industry because those were supposed to be the jobs of the future. Unfortunately, the AI jobs apocalypse is wiping out those jobs the fastest.

Let me give you some cold, hard numbers that will clearly demonstrate what I am talking about.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of announced job cuts in the United States last month was the highest that we have seen during the month of May since the peak of the last pandemic…

U.S.-based employers announced 97,006 job cuts in May, up 16% from the 83,387 job cuts recorded in April, and up 3% from the 93,816 announced in the same month last year, according to a report released Thursday from global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

May’s total is the highest for the month since 2020, when 397,016 job cuts were recorded in May at the height of the pandemic. It also marks the third straight month that cuts have risen, climbing from 48,307 in February to 97,006 in May.

There is no way to spin those numbers to make them look good.

And for the third month in a row, artificial intelligence accounted for more layoffs than any other reason…

In May, Artificial Intelligence (AI) led all reasons for job cuts for the third month in a row, with 38,579 announced cuts. It is the highest monthly total ever recorded for the reason since Challenger began tracking it in 2023, and it accounted for 40% of all cuts announced in May — up from just 7% in January, 25% in March, and 26% in April. For the year, AI has been cited in 87,714 cuts, or 22% of all 2026 layoffs, already far surpassing the 54,836 attributed to the reason in all of 2025.

Read that last sentence again.

The number of AI-related layoffs in 2026 has already surpassed the grand total of AI-related layoffs for the entire year of 2025.

That is how fast things are now moving.

Needless to say, the tech industry is being hit the hardest.

At this point, tech layoffs are running 44 percent faster than last year…

So far this year, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech companies this year, affecting nearly 150,000 people — a pace of about 974 people per day, 44% faster than last year — according to TrueUp, a tech job board and recruiting platform that also runs one of the most widely cited tech layoff trackers.

The trend appears to be accelerating. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years last month, with nearly 40,000 cuts, and AI was the most-cited reason for layoffs across every industry for the third month running, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

There is no long-term loyalty in the tech industry anymore.

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Supreme Court Rules Police Conduct a Fourth Amendment “Search” When Grabbing Your Google Location History Data Through Geofence Warrants

The U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that law enforcement officers conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain cell phone users’ precise Location History data from Google using a geofence warrant.

In a 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court ruled that Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information, even when that data is stored by a third-party technology company such as Google. The ruling represents one of the Court’s most significant digital privacy decisions since its 2018 Carpenter decision involving historical cell-site location data.

Justice Elena Kagan authored the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Jackson separately concurring.

Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred only in the judgment, while Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Barrett also filed a separate dissent.

This builds directly on the landmark Carpenter v. United States (2018) decision, which already required warrants for cell-site location information (CSLI).

The Court made clear that Google’s even more precise and sweeping Location History data — which logs a user’s location every two minutes or so, within about 20 meters, and can even reveal elevation and which floor of a building someone is on — deserves at least the same protection.

The case, Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112), arose from a May 20, 2019, armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Police had surveillance footage and witness statements but no suspect. On June 14, they obtained a Virginia magistrate’s geofence warrant directed at Google.

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