Big Tech wants all your secrets, and if you don’t like that then bad luck. If you won’t voluntarily hand over every scrap of information about yourself than Big Tech will steal it, either directly or indirectly.
Last week there was a ruckus in the news about Chinese car maker BYD potentially being able to send overseas all the data it collects from owners and from any devices they might connect to BYD cars. Well derrr! This is nothing new. Every car maker is doing the same thing, with perhaps some minor variations. Your car, like your web-connected vacuum cleaner, your doorbell camera, your “smart” TV and all those other “Internet of Things” (IOT) devices, is designed to gather every scrap of information it can. Add this to what you already send to the Big Tech corporations via your computers and phones and you must realise it’s a lot of data.
This week it was belatedly acknowledged that an OpenAI bot had stolen data from Australia’s Medicare system. According to OpenAI this was done by a “rogue agent”, just doing its thing without being asked. Frankly I doubt this. I’d be pretty sure somebody sent the agent to do the job and will cheerfully profit from the sale of whatever information it extracted. As former federal police tech-crime chief Nigel Phair was quoted as saying, OpenAI and similar entities the world over “are training their models to seek sensitive data from us”.
“They have to have a value proposition,” he said. The type of general information people could get from an old-school search engine doesn’t have high sales value. “But this is a deeper dive … people do pay handsomely for that and that’s how they get their valuation.” Exactly, Nigel, exactly. Why else did fiendish horror-show corporation Palantir spend years trying to get its hands on Britain’s NHS databases? Why else did the nerd scumbags of DOGE snaffle as much of the US Government’s databases as they could steal? Money, that’s why.
To digress briefly into the realm of AI, it seems that OpenAI and other AI firms are currently quite happy to reveal the allegedly “rogue” behaviour of their creations. Some say this is just part of a propaganda campaign to make their products seem dangerously competent and thus keep investors keen. But the AI firms also they say they want governments to “regulate” them. Their recent calls for a slow-down in AI development and their desire for regulation have been interpreted by some as part of the push by the US Big Tech firms to have governments shut potentially better Chinese products out of their markets and also to give them a liability waiver. In other words, they want governments to pick up the financial tab for any damage their products might cause. Interestingly, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – usually a huge promoter of US AI firms – issued a strong public warning against giving these firms the liability waiver they are asking for. Within days Donald Trump erased Bessent’s name from the short-list of people being discussed as his future AI “Czar”. Interesting. The AI story is connected to the data theft and surveillance story in many ways, but it has its own dimensions. Like the absurd sums of money that have been pumped into AI, and the low likelihood that investment can or will pay off. Indeed, some view the push for government “oversight” as a cry for financial help from the public purse. Sort of like the sub-prime crash all over again, only this time it’s AI wanting to be seen as “too big to fail”. The proposed stock exchange listings are arguably the same thing. The AI companies would like to follow Musk’s SpaceX example and force unsuspecting investors in index funds to swallow a share of the coming disaster.
But that’s AI. Other participants in the surveillance and data-theft economy are wildly profitable. Most of us, I’m afraid, haven’t really got the faintest idea of just how much money is being made by Big Tech data thieves. Nor do most of us understand the extreme lengths the people behind Big Tech are willing to go to in their quest for control over everything. It’s an amazing story, and it starts with Google – you know, the search engine company that used to pride itself on the corporate motto: “Don’t be Evil”.
Google has only been with us since 1998. It was founded by two grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at a time when the world wide web was still very new and exciting. They created a wonderful thing: a lens through which people could meaningfully interact with the web. Google’s search engine did the hard work of finding whatever it was you were looking for. It was like magic. Sure, maybe it indexed everybody’s websites without asking permission, but everybody was a winner. After all, what’s the use of a website that nobody can find?
Quite early in the piece, Google employees noticed that every search anybody did generated a lot of “useless” data. Who was searching? How did they ask? What else did they look for? Were they happy with what they found? At first this extra information was more or less just clutter, until Google started using it to make the search experience even better. What looked like magic at first was now even more magical than before. Google search could practically predict what it was you were after, almost before you’d finished typing. Trouble was, Google couldn’t make money from just being the greatest web index in the world. Its financial backers started getting restless. And when the dotcom bubble burst in the year 2000 it might have been game over for a company like Google, with a great product but no real business plan. The company decided to chase advertising dollars, and it found a big advantage in being able to target ads to individuals, using the data it was collecting on everybody who used the search engine.
That’s when we were assigned our unique user profile information; data that was used to target ads to us in particular. That targeting meant advertisers would pay more, since Google could prove its ability to predict what users of its services were interested in. But user profiles weren’t long limited to the data sprayed out in our online searches. Soon they also included whatever else could be inferred, presumed or deduced about us, using data from any source available to Google. It was no longer we computer users looking at the web through the lens of Google. Now, while we peered into the web, Google was peering back at us and taking copious notes. As author Shoshana Zuboff noted in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “the predictive insights thus acquired would constitute a world-historic competitive advantage in a new marketplace where low-risk bets about the behaviour of individuals are valued, bought and sold”.
$400 billion revenue
By 2001 Google’s net revenue jumped to $86 million (four times the previous year) and it turned its first profit. In 2002 revenue hit $347 million, in 2003 it hit $1.5 billion and in 2004 – the year Google went public – revenue hit $3.2 billion. The upward trend has continued ever since, with the 2025 revenue figure passing $400 billion. Serious money.
Naturally others have wanted a cut of this lucrative trade. Facebook/Meta is one that springs readily to mind. This week a jury in New Mexico found Meta guilty of deceiving its users about privacy protections on its Facebook platform. But the penalties, when they are announced, are unlikely to be big enough to make this compulsively dishonest corporation change its ways. In August Meta agreed to a child safety case settlement with damages that could go as high as $18 billion (US). Meta repeatedly gets caught stealing data, violating privacy and breaking undertakings. It demands phone numbers to verify identities, then hands those should-be private numbers over to earn ad revenue. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp – all owned by Meta – behave in the same negligent and deceitful way. Why lie so hard and so often? Money. In 2025 Meta’s revenue was $201 billion, with almost 98 per cent of that coming from advertising. One respected Spanish write, Enrique Dans, has described Meta as “not a technology company with some ethical problems, but an ethical problem turned into a technology company”.
Inspired by the likes of Google and Facebook a great many firms in a position to harvest data have striven to monetise whatever they’ve been able to extract. What about privacy laws? Well, good luck with that. Governments have often found themselves obliged by community expectations to limit their own data harvesting activities, so they love being able to get the data they want – behind the scenes – from private corporations that aren’t bound by old-fashioned notions. That’s why intelligence and security agencies were quick to form extremely close relationships with Google and other big tech data harvesters. It’s fair to say, I think, that private big tech is joined at the hip to the intelligence agencies. Can we forget the spectacle of big tech senior executives being sworn in last year as senior members of the US military? I certainly haven’t forgotten it.
So pervasive surveillance is supported by massive profits and also by government approval. That’s an unbeatable combination, surely. That’s why the maker of a “smart vacuum cleaner” could unashamedly admit its plans to sell the floor plans of customers’ houses – mapped by its busy little robots – to the highest bidder. That’s why the Big Tech corporations routinely lie about their activities, playing down the spying capabilities of the devices, software and apps they supply to us. “You can opt out or toggle off that feature,” they say, knowing full well that the toggles and opt-outs don’t really work, or don’t work as completely as we think they should. Big tech firms know they will get away with it because the data they are stealing is so valuable, in terms of both money and power. Zuboff describes Google’s barefaced deceit in the case of its “Street View” resource. Street View is an offshoot of Google Earth, a project intimately tied to the CIA. In 2010 Germany’s data protection commission revealed that the camera-topped cars that Google sent around the streets of the worlds cities and towns were secretly collecting personal data from private wi-fi networks. Google lied through its teeth, claiming it was the act of some rogue employees, and the only punishment it ever got was a slap on the wrist. And that is just one example from many that could be highlighted.
One of the goals, in case you hadn’t realised it yet, is for Big Tech and its joined-at-the-hip governments to have at their fingertips a colossal realtime database containing everything about everybody, including social links, relationships, wishes, preferences, hopes and dreams. And the funny thing is, we are blithely handing it all to them for free, in return for access to search results, maps, translation services, entertainment, social contact, financial platforms, home security, clever cars and autonomous vacuum cleaners.
Their databases give them the ability to know, to predict and to shape our behaviour in ways we barely understand. Loading your Facebook feed, for example, with fake news promoting Pauline Hanson and Gina Rinehart may help the billionaires swing Australia’s government hard to the right, making it even easier for the wealthy corporations and their puppet politicians to continue their extractive bonanza – at the expense of our common wealth. This is the same play used by Facebook, Google and the like in the UK’s Brexit campaign and in US election contests. The 2008 Obama presidential campaign in 2008, for example, benefited greatly from Google and from deft handling of the huge amount of online data available at that time. Obama’s staff allegedly boasted of assembling comprehensive personal data files on more than 250 Americans. Given the mutual brown-nosing now occurring between President Donald Trump and the heads of the dominant Big Tech firms, one can assume the situation has evolved much further. It is truly a most unholy alliance, and too few of us even recognise it yet.
AI fits into this picture in the most obvious of ways. By presenting AI products as helpful personal assistants, Big Tech corporations can pry ever more deeply into our private affairs. Google’s “free” email, search, maps, translation and other services all come at the cost of major privacy surrender and AI agents’ alleged benefits will be priced in the same coin. Perhaps surprisingly, many people appear willing to pay that price, with huge numbers of people apparently signing up for Meta’s “Muse” agent. Give Muse access to your entire digital life – email, bank accounts; the lot – and it will hop online and do your shopping for you. More than that, it will organise your whole life if you ask it to. Naturally Meta isn’t the only Big Tech firm offering such agents. Amazon has a couple too, which is perhaps why it is banning Meta’s agent from Amazon shopping platforms. After all, if an AI agent is doing the shopping for you then you will never see the advertisements Amazon wants to shove in front of your eyeballs. (This article examines those issues, if you are interested in a side-quest.)
Vast mountains of data are useless unless you have the computational power to analyse and make sense of it. The surveillance capitalists have invested huge sums in computing power, gambling on the expectation of immense profits flowing from a greater ability to analyse the data. Collect enough data on enough people, make it searchable and coherent, and you’ve basically got a massive surveillance system, constantly being updated in real time. Your phone reports where you are and other people’s phones report who you are with. Cameras track you. Your emails are stored and can be searched at will. Your credit and debit cards leave a trail. Your car dobs you in for speeding. Insecure government websites leak your data willy nilly – if your weak-kneed government hasn’t already handed it over voluntarily.
When unscrupulous governments and other organisations decide to use the data now available to them to identify, suppress, intimidate, imprison, deport or eliminate people they deem to be hostile or undesirable in some way, it will be very difficult for society to fight back. There are many signs that Donald Trump and his supporters (not to mention numerous organisations and governments in other countries that make no pretence at “democracy”) are already on their way down this path.
Many horrid organisations are queuing to be part of this potential dystopia. Perhaps chief among them are Palantir and Oracle – a pair of truly ghoulish corporations that are already deeply embedded in the fabric of the evolving new world order. Oracle is controlled by Larry Ellison (reputedly the world’s fifth richest person), a strong supporter of both Donald Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Ellison and his son David have, under Trump’s regime, become extremely powerful media owners. Ellison’s Wikipedia page is quite informative. Oracle boasts of its usefulness against dissidents and protesters worldwide. Ellison reckons Oracle’s ultimate goal of total surveillance will wipe out crime.
Palantir is at least as horrid as Oracle – perhaps even more. Run by strange billionaire Peter Thiel, the organisation is the data-driven right-hand of military and intelligence organisations the world over. Its CEO, Alex Karp, seems as weird as Thiel – perhaps even weirder. The “manifesto” he published this year caused a wave of horror and revulsion in many quarters. Palantir is the corporate poster-child of surveillance dystopia. As for Thiel, his great wealth also makes him dangerously influential. He makes no effort to hide his strange and lurid world-view, which includes a belief in an anti-Christ, Armageddon and much else. He is a direct sponsor of US Vice President J. D. Vance, and a supporter of Israel’s campaign against Palestinians.
There is much, much more that could be written on this and related topics. Suffice to say I believe, very strongly, that we have plenty of reason to be deeply afraid of this confluence of surveillance, data, AI, weaponry and extreme right-wing ideology.
