net.wars

Eating the web

“Traffic to my blog has plummeted,” a friend said recently. Over decades, he’s built a thriving community, and his core users persist. But Google was crucial for bringing in new readers – and its introduction of AI and changes to its algorithm have punished small sites.

This week, Sean Hollister reports at The Verge that Google is using its AI to replace the headlines on news stories. For Google, it is, as Charles Arthur comments at The Overspill, a “small” and “narrow” experiment – until it becomes a feature. For The Verge, however, the impact is noticeable: the headlines it crafts to market its journalists’ work are being replaced with boring titles that do not accurately convey the articles’ content.

Then, the week before last, Joe Toscano reported at Forbes that Google has patented a system that uses AI to rewrite website landing pages to produce customized versions for its users. Toscano links this to an earlier announcement in which Google announced a protocol to make websites’ structure more readable to AI agents. Toscano suggests that taken together the two elements allow Google to break websites apart into their component parts for reassembly by AI agents into whatever version they identify as best for the user they represent.

In the early 1990s, someone I met directed me to read the work of Robert McChesney, whose books recount the cooption and commercialization of radio and television, also originally conceived as democratic, educational media. Helping to prevent a similar outcome for the Internet is a lot of what net.wars has always been about. Now, Google, which would not exist without the open web, wants to eat the whole thing.

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On Tuesday, a jury in a New Mexico court found Meta guilty of misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabling harm including child sexual exploitation, as Katie McQue reports at the Guardian. The jury has ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties. Meta will appeal. Snapchat and TikTok, which were also accused, settled before the trial began.

The New Mexico attorney general’s office says it intends to pursue changes to platform design including age verification and “protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors”.

On Wednesday, a jury in Los Angeles found YouTube guilty of deliberately designing an addictive product. As Dara Kerr reports at the Guardian, the case was brought by a 20-year-old woman who claimed her addiction to Instagram and YouTube began at age six, damaging her relationships with her family and in school and causing her to become depressed and engage in self-harm. The jury awarded her $6 million, split between Meta (70%) and YouTube (30%). Both companies say they will appeal.

They will have to, because, as Kerr reported in January, there are more of these trials to come, and even to trillion-dollar companies thousands of fines can add up to real money. In a consolidated case, in California state and federal courts thousands of families accuse social media companies of harming children. Reuters reports that more trials are scheduled: a school district in Breathitt County, Kentucky in federal court against Meta, ByteDance, Snapchat, and Google, and one in state court in California in July against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.

In January, the Tech Oversight Project reported newly unsealed documents contained the “smoking gun” evidence – that is, internal email discussions – that the four companies deliberately designed their products to be addictive and failed to provide effective warnings about social media use. Certainly, the leaked documents make it sou9nd like a plan. Tech Oversight quotes one: “Onboarding kids into Google’s Ecosystem leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime.” It’s hard not to see the commonality with Joe Camel and so many other marketing strategies.

Key to these cases is Section 230 – the clause in the Communications Decency Act that shields online services from liability for the material their users post and allows them to moderate content in good faith. The plaintiffs argued – successfully in New Mexico – that the law does not shield the platforms from liability for their design decisions. The social media companies naturally tried to argue that it does.

At his blog, law professor Eric Goldman discusses the broader impact of these bellwether cases. As he says, whatever changes the social media companies feel forced to make by the potential liability of myriad jury trials and new laws may help some victims but almost certainly hurt other groups who were not represented at the trial. Similarly, at Techdirt Mike Masnick warns that features like autoscrolling and algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful; it’s the content they relentlessly serve that is really the issue; cue the First Amendment. And few who are not technology giants can afford to face jury trials and fines. Are we talking a regime under which every design decision has to go through lawyers?

In a posting summarizing the history of S230, Goldman predicts that age verification laws will reshape the Internet of 2031 or 2036 beyond recognition, killing most of what we love now. So much doom, so little time.

Illustrations: The volcano of Stromboli, on which JRR Tolkien based Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings (by Steven J. Dengler at Wikimedia.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Turn left at the robot

It’s easy to forget, now that so many computer interfaces seem to be getting more inscrutable, that in the early 1990s the shift from the command line to graphical interfaces and the desire to reach the wider mass market introduced a new focus on usability. In classics like Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, a common idea was that a really well-designed system should not require a manual because the design itself would tell the user how to operate it.

What is intuitive, though, is defined by what you’re used to. The rumor that Apple might replace the letters on keys with glyphs is a case in point. People who’ve grown up with smartphones might like the idea of glyphs that match those on their phones. But try doing technical support over the phone and describing a glyph; easier to communicate the letters.

Those years in which computer interfaces were standardized relied on metaphors based on familiar physical items: a floppy disk to save a file, an artist’s palette for color choices. In 1993, leading software companies like Microsoft and Lotus set up usability labs; it took watching user testing to convince developers that struggling to use their software was not a sign the users were stupid.

With that background, it was interesting to attend this year’s edition of the 20-year-old Human-Robot Interaction conference. Robots don’t need metaphors; they *are* the thing itself. Although: why shouldn’t a robot also have menu buttons for common functions?

In the paper I found most interesting and valuable, Lauren Wright examined the use of a speaking Misty robot to deliver social-emotional learning lessons. Wright’s group tested the value of deception – that is, having the robot speak in the first person of its “family”, experiences, and “emotions” – versus a more truthful presentation, in which the robot is neutral and tells its stories in the third person, refers to its programmers, and professes no humanity. The researchers were testing the widely-held assumption that kids engage more with robots programmed to appear more human. They found the opposite: while both versions significantly increased their learning, the kids who used the factual robot showed more engagement and higher scores in the sense of using concepts from the lesson in their answers. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Children don’t in general respond well to deception. Really, who does?

The children’s personal reactions to the robots were at least as interesting. In Michael F. Xu‘s paper, the researchers held co-design sessions and then installed a robot in eight family homes to act as a neutral third-party enforcer issuing timely reminders on behalf of busy parents. Some of the families did indeed report that the robot’s reminder got stuff done more efficiently. On the other hand, the experiment was short – only four days – and you have to wonder if that would still be true after the novelty wore off. There were hints of this from the kids, some of whom pushed back. One simply bypassed a robot reminding him of the limits on his TV viewing by taking the TV upstairs, where the robot couldn’t go. Another reacted like I would at any age and told the robot to “shut up”.

The fact versus fiction presentation included short video clips of some of the kids’ interaction with the robot tutor. In one, a boy placed his hands on either side of the robot’s “face” while it was talking and kept moving its head around, exploring the robot’s physical capabilities (or trying to take its head off?). The speaker ignored this entirely, but the sight hilariously made an important point: the robot’s physical form speaks even when the robot is silent.

We saw this at We Robot 2016, when a Jamaican lawyer asked Olivier Guilhem, from Aldebaran Robotics, which makes Pepper, “Why is the robot white?” His response: “It looks clean.” This week, one paper tried to tease out how “representation bias” – assumptions about gender, skin tone, dis/ability, accessibility, size, age – affect users’ reactions. In the dataset used to train an AI model, bias may be baked in through the historical record. With robots, bias can also present directly through the robot’s design, as Yolande Strengers’ and Jenny Kennedy’s showed in their 2020 book The Smart Wife. Despite its shiny, unmistakable whiteness, Pepper’s shape was ambiguous enough for its gender to be interpreted differently in different cultures. In the HRI paper, the researchers concluded that biases in robot design could perpetuate occupational stereotypes – “technological segregation”. They also found their participants consistently preferred non-skin tones – in their examples, silver and light teal.

“Who builds AI shapes what AI becomes,” said Ben Rosman, who outlined a burgeoning collaborative effort to build a machine learning community across Africa and redress its underrepresentation. The same with robots: many, many cultural norms affect how humans interact with them. That information is signal, not noise, he says, and should be captured to enable robots to operate across wide ranges of human context without relying on “brittle defaults” that interpret human variation as failures. “Turn left at the robot,” makes perfect sense once you know that in South Africa “robots” are known elsewhere as traffic lights.

Illustrations: Rosey, the still-influential “old demo model” robot maid in The Jetsons (1962-1963).

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast, we interview Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel awards.
At Skeptical Inquirer, the latest Letter to America finds David Clarke conducting the English folklore survey.

A short history of We Robot, 2026 edition

On the eve of We Robot 2026, here are links to my summaries of every year since 2012, the inaugural conference, except 2014, which I missed for family reasons. There was no conference in 2024 in order to move the event back to its original April schedule (covid caused its move to September in 2020). These are my personal impressions; nothing I say here should be taken as representing the conference, its founders, its speakers, or their institutions.

We Robot was co-founded by Michael Froomkin, Ryan Calo, and Ian Kerr to bring together lawyers and engineers to think early and long about the coming conflicts in robots, law, and policy.

2025: Predatory inclusion: In Windsor, Ontario, a few months into the new US administration, the sudden change in international relations highlights the power imbalances inherent in many of today’s AI systems. Catopromancy: in workshops, we hear a librarian propose useful AI completely out of step with today’s corporate offerings, and mull how to apply existing laws to new scenarios.

2024 No conference.

2023 The end of cool: after struggling to design a drone delivery service that had benefits over today’s cycling couriers, we find ourselves less impressed by robots that can do somersaults but not anything obviously useful; the future may have seemed more exciting when it was imaginary.

2022 Insert a human: following a long-held conference theme about “humans in the loop, “robots” are now “sociotechnical systems”. Coding ethics: Where Asimov’s laws were just a story device, in workshops we try to work out how to design a real ethical robot.

2021 Plausible diversions: maybe any technology sufficiently advanced to seem like magic can be well enough understood that we can assign responsibility and liability? Is the juice worth the squeeze?: In workshops, we mull how to regulate delivery robots, which will likely have no user-serviceable parts. Title from Woody Hartzog.

2020 (virtual) The zero on the phone: AI exploitation and bias embedded in historical data become what one speaker calls “unregulated experimentation on humans…without oversight or control”.

2019 Math, monsters, and metaphors. We dissect the trolley problem and find the true danger on the immediate horizon is less robots, more the “pile of math that does some stuff” we call “AI”. The Algernon problem: in workshops, new disciplines joining the We Robot family remind us that robots/AI are carrying out the commands of distant owners.

2018 Deception. We return to the question of what makes robots different and revisit Madeleine Clare Elish’s moral crumple zones after the first pedestrian death by self-driving car. Late, noisy, and wrong: in workshops, engineers Bill Smart and Cindy Grimm explain why sensors never capture what you think they’re capturing and how AI systems use their data.

2017 Have robot, will legislate: Discussion of risks this year focused on the intermediate situation, when automation and human norms must co-exist.

2016 Humans all the way down: Madeline Clare Elish introduces “moral crumple zones”, a paper that will resonate through future years. The lab and the world: in workshops, Bill Smart uses conference attendees in formation to show why getting a robot to do anything is difficult.

2015: Multiplicity: W
When in the life of a technology is the right time for regulatory intervention?

2014 Missed conference

2013 Cautiously apocalyptic: Diversity of approaches to regulation will be needed to handle the diversity of robots, and at the beginning of cloud robotics and full-scale data collection, we envision a pet robot dog that can beg its owner for an upgraded service subscription.

2012 A really fancy hammer with a gun. At the first We Robot, we try to answer the fundamental question: what difference do robots bring? Unsentimental engineer Bill Smart provided the title.

Power games

UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s desire to bring in a UK digital ID is awake again with the announcement that the government plans to make the IDs available for “a handful of uses” before the next general election, due by 2029, . The requisite consultation closes May 5.

At Computer Weekly, Lis Evanstad adds a summary and detail about the consultation. Government by app! What could possibly go wrong?

Among other new information in the consultation: the age for being able to get a digital ID could drop below 18, perhaps even to issuance at birth. There might be a single unique identifier to enable linking data throughout government systems. Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, talks smoother access to government services and the ability to share only the piece of data that’s needed for a specific purpose, but not about the risks of tying everything to a single identifier whose compromise can reverberate throughout your life.

In his Guardian piece, Stacey quotes Jones, who positions the digital ID as a way to improve fairness in access to government services, which he says accrue disproportionately to “pushy” people with time, patience, and energy.

This sounds good until you read Government Digital Service co-founder Tom Loosemore‘s blog, where he notes that creating that sort of stonewalling bureaucracy is often a deliberate strategy to manage demand. Loosemore argues that agentic AI will force an end to this strategy because agents will have unlimited patience and “reduce the cost to citizens of appeals, challenges, and calculations etc to near-zero”. Instead of having to manually dig through financial records, Loosemore finds in an experiment that an AI agent can scan the documents, find the information, and present only the data required to establish the citizen’s entitlement to benefits.

He believes AI agents will also bring a new level of transparency (and perhaps “pushiness”): “AI Agents will always dig out that 93 page PDF of guidance hidden.” Governments, he writes, will be forced to “clarify and tighten policies & processes, with all the painful political trade-offs therein”.

Or: will budget-protecting governments adopt their own agentic AIs to move and re-bury the stuff they don’t want applicants to find and recalibrate their requirements to make them resistant to automation? Seems just as likely, really.

While all that was going on, significant votes took place on the future of access to online content. On Tuesday, Jennifer McKiernan reports at the BBC, MPs rejected the proposed social media for under-16s, which would have been added to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill. Instead, the government is continuing to collect information from the consultation it launched on March 2, which closes on May 26.

Some MPs seem to have been persuaded by the argument – mooted by, among others, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – that banning children from social media will simply push them to find darker, less visible unregulated online spaces with less in the way of protection or moderation. The Commons did, however, support a government proposal to give the relevant ministers greater powers to restrict or ban children’s access to social media services and chatbots, limit their use of VPNs, and change the “age of digital consent”. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill now goes back to the Lords for more discussion. .

As an unelected body, in recent years the House of Lords has often been a damper on hastily-passed legislation in response to political trends, but here they’re leading. The social media ban passed there. This week, as Dev Kundaliya reports at Computing. the Lords voted on two amendments, one to the Crime and Policing bill, the other to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill. At the Online Safety Act Network blog, University of Essex professor Lorna Woods explains these in detail. The first would enable the government to amend the Online Safety Act to “minimize or mitigate the risks of harm to individuals” from illegal AI-generated content. The second would give the government latitude to change the age of consent.

Woods’ main point is the extreme power being given the government here to bypass Parliament, calling the clauses Henry VIII powers – that is, giving the government the power to change or repeal an Act of Parliament without consulting Parliament. The government’s official justification is to give the government greater flexibility to adapt on the fly to new technologies and online harms. Or to bar access to stuff it doesn’t like, presumably.

The Open Rights Group agrees, calling the plan powers to restrict the entire Internet. ORG also cites a March 0 open letter from 400 scientists and calls for a moratorium on age assurance to learn more about the technological hazards and social impact and for adopting alternative measures in the meantime, such as regulating algorithmic manipulation and providing parents with support.

At DefendDigitalMe, Jen Persson points out that the books already contain laws enabling considerable digital control of children; surveillance, she writes, is being “dressed as ‘safety'”. None of this, she writes, is compatible with children’s *rights*, which don’t seem to get much of a look-in.

Illustrations: Henry VIII, as painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (via Wikimedia.

Also this week: TechGrumps 3.38, The Bettification of Everything.

Bedroom eyes

We’ve long known that much of today’s “AI” is humans all the way down. This week underlines this: in an investigation, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten learn that Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are capturing intimate details of people’s lives and sending them to Nairobi, Kenya. There, employees at Meta subcontractor Sama label and annotate the data for use in training models. Brings a new meaning to “bedroom eyes”.

This sort of violation is easily imposed on other people without their knowledge or consent. We worry about the police using live facial recognition, but what about being captured by random people on the street? In January’s episode of the TechGrumps podcast, we called the news of Meta’s new product “Return of the Glasshole“.

Two 2018 books, Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s Ghost Work and Sarah T. Roberts’ Behind the Screen made it clear that “machine learning” and “AI” depend on poorly-paid unseen laborers. Dataveillance is a stowaway in every “smart” device. But this is a whole new level: the Kenyans report glimpses of bank cards, bedroom intimacy, even bathroom visits. The journalists were able to establish that the glasses’ AI requires a connection to Meta’s servers to answer questions, and there’s no opt out.

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating, and at Ars Technica Sarah Perez reports that a US lawsuit has been filed.

As the original Swedish report goes on to say, the EU has no adequacy agreement with Kenya. More disturbing is the fact that probably hundreds of people within Meta worked on this without seeing a problem.

In 1974, the Watergate-related revelation that US president Richard Nixon had recorded everything taking place in his office inspired folksinger Bill Steele to write the song The Walls Have Ears (MP3). What struck him particularly was that everyone saw it as unremarkable. “Unfortunately still current,” he commented in his 1977 liner notes. Nearly 50 years later, ditto.

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A lot of (especially younger) people don’t remember that before 9/11 you could walk into most buildings without showing ID. Many authorities – the EU in particular – have long been unhappy with anonymity online, and one conspiratorial theory about age gating and the digital ID infrastructure being built in many places is that the goal is complete and pervasive identification. In the UK, requiring ID for all Internet access has occasionally popped up as a child safety idea, even though security experts recommend lying about birth dates and other personal data in the interests of self-protection against identity theft.

Now we have generative AI, and along comes a new paper that finds that large language models can be used to deanonymize people online at large scale by analyzing profiles and conversations. In one exercise, they matched Hacker News posts to LinkedIn profiles. In another, they linked users across subReddit communities. In a third, they split Reddit profiles to mimic the use of pseudonymous posting. Pseudonymity doesn’t offer meaningful protection (though I’m not sure how much it ever did), and preventing this type of attack is difficult. They also suggest platforms should reconsider their data access policies in line with their findings.

It’s hard to imagine most platforms will care much; users have long been expected to assess their own risk. Even smaller communities with a more concerned administration will not be in a position to know how many other services their users access, what they post there, or how it can be cross-linked. The difficulty of remaining anonymous online has been growing ever since 2000, when Latanya Sweeney showed it was possible to identify 87% of the population recorded in census data given just Zip code, date of birth, and gender. As psychics know, most people don’t really remember what they’ve said and how it can be linked and exploited by someone who’s paying attention. The paper concludes: we need a new threat model for privacy online.

***

The Internet, famously, was designed to support communications in the face of a bomb outage.

Building it required physical links – undersea cables, fiber connections, data centers, routers. For younger folks who have grown up with wifi and mobile phone connections, that physical layer may be invisible. But it matters no less than it did twenty-five years ago, when experts agreed that ten backhoes (among other things) could do more effective damage than bombs.

This week’s horrible, spreading war in the Middle East has seen the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the Red see to commercial traffic. Indranil Ghosh reports at Rest of World that that 17 undersea cables pass through the Red Sea alone, and billions, soon trillions, of dollars in US technology investment depends on fiber optic cables running through war zones. There’s been reporting before now about the links between various Middle Eastern countries and Silicon Valley (see for example the recent book Gilded Rage, by Jacob Silverman), but until now much less about the technological interdependence put in jeopardy by the conflict. Ghosh also reports that drones have struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in UAE and one in Bahrein.

The issue is not so much direct damage to the cables as the impossibility of repairing them as long as access is closed. The Internet, designed with war in mind, is a product of peace.

Illustrations: Monument to Anonymous, by Meredith Bergmann.

Also this week: At the Plutopia podcast, we interview Kate Devlin, who studies human-AI interaction.

Saving no one

In the early 2010s, after “nano” and before “AI”, 3D printing was the technology that was going to change everything. Then it seemed to go quiet except for guns.

“First we will gain control over the shape of physical things. Then we will gain new levels of control over their composition, the materials they’re made of. Finally, we will gain control over the behavior of physical things,” Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman wrote in their 2013 book, Fabricated. As far as I can tell, we’re still pretty much in the era of making physical things that could be made by traditional methods rather than weird new shapes that could *only* be produced by additive manufacturing. More than 15 years after a fellow technology conference attendee excitedly lectured me that 3D printing was going to change everything, its growth remains largely hidden from most of us.

Until this past week, when I attended an event awash in puzzle makers and discovered that it’s been a godsend to them for making not only prototypes but also small runs of copies or published designs, freeing them from having to find space and capital for the kind of quantities required by traditional production. It’s good to see a formerly hyped technology supporting clever and entertaining human invention.

Exploding egg, anyone?

***

In one of the biggest fines in its history, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has announced it is fining Reddit £14.5 million for failing to put in place an effective age verification mechanism to block under-13s from using the site under Reddit’s stated terms of service. The story is somewhat confused by timing: the fine is under data protection law and relates to the period before the arrival of the Online Safety Act, but the OSA’s requirement for age verification brought the changes that sparked the fine. Reddit says it will appeal.

In the UK terms and conditions Reddit announced in June 2025, the company says that “by using the services, you state that…you are at least 13 years old”. But Reddit didn’t require proof, and the ICO says that many under-13s use(d) the platform.

In July, when the Online Safety Act came into effect, Reddit added an age gate of 18 for “mature” content. Unlike many other social media sites that are just giant pools of content sorted by curation or algorithm, Reddit is a large set of distinct subReddits. Each of these communities has its own rules, social norms, and, most important, human moderators. Because of this, it’s comparatively easy to mark a particular subReddit as “for adults only”. After the July change, anyone in the UK wishing to access one of those subReddits was asked to submit a selfie or an image of a government-issued ID in order to prove their age.

The ICO’s findings state that Reddit failed to protect under-13s from accessing content that placed them at risk; that it processed under-13s’ data unlawfully (because they are too young to meaningfully consent); and that a simple statement is not a sufficient age verification mechanism (which is made clear in the OSA).

A Reddit spokesperson told the Guardian: “The ICO’s insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety.”

I take their point; I’d rather skip the “mature” content than bear the privacy risk of uploading personal data to whatever third-party company Reddit is using for age verification. Last July, I decided I would just be a child. (Although: my Reddit account dates to 2015, so they could just do the math.)

Turns out, it may have been a wise decision. Reddit, saying it didn’t want to hold users’ personal data, chose the age verification provider Persona.

Persona deserves a look. Last week, Discord announced it would begin treating all users as teens until they’d been verified, also using Persona. The result as Ashley Belanger reports at Ars Technica was a user backlash. First, because last time Discord tried this, its now-former age verification provider’s pile of 70,000 users’ age check information was hacked.

Second, because The Rage reports that a group of security researchers found a Persona front end exposed to the open Internet on a US government server. On examination, that code shows that Persona performs 269 different verification checks and scours the Internet and government sources using your selfie and facial recognition. Discord has now announced it will delay introducing age verification – and won’t be using Persona after an apparently unsatisfactory trial in the UK last year.In a blog posting, Discord says that, like Reddit, it does not want to know its users’ identification details. It is adding more verification options.

If the world had already had a set of established trustworthy companies that specialized in age verification when the OSA came into effect, then it would make sense to turn to them to provide that service. But we aren’t in that situation. Instead, although providers have been working for more than a decade to build such systems, their deployment at scale is new.

Part of keeping children – and the rest of us – safe is protecting security and privacy – and child safety campaigners’ refusal to accept this has been an issue for decades. Creating new privacy risks doesn’t keep anyone safer – including children.

Illustrations: Six-panel early 1970s cartoon strip, “What the User Wanted”.

Information wants to be surveiled

It has long been the case that the person sitting next to you on an airplane may have paid a very different price for their seat than you did. For two reasons. First, airlines don’t price seats – they price itineraries. A seat from London to New York may be priced very differently depending on whether it’s one-way, one-half of a round trip, or one stage in a larger, multi-stage journey. Second, however, airlines are sophisticated about maximizing the value of your seat, responding to patterns of peak travel (Thanksgiving, August), when you buy it, and other factors. Despite their complexity, those prices are supposed to be based on published tariffs that anyone can, in theory, calculate for themselves and come up with the same answer.

In 2012, travel and data privacy expert Edward Hasbrouck explained all this as part of documenting and opposing the airlines’ desire to move to personalized pricing. Instead of acting as common carriers and publishing tariffs that apply across the board, with personalized pricing the airlines would use the information they have about you to charge what you can and would be willing to pay. In 2012, the International Air Transportation Association called it “New Distribution Capability”.

This is a much scarier proposition now than it was then; companies have a lot more data they can exploit. In 2012, they might simply have known your flying habits and credit score, while balancing their desire to get the most they can for the seat against the time they have left to sell it. Uber uses similar tactics; it raises the price of a ride – “surge pricing”, or “dynamic pricing” – when demand is high.

Today, an airline might know – or be able to find out – that you are racing against time to see a beloved relative before they die. And why should it stop with airlines? Exploitative possibilities abound.

Uber has already been dubiously accused of charging more when riders’ phone batteries are low. Retailers collect shopping histories through loyalty cards and apps; often customers already pay more for opting out.

Some types of price discrimination have long been illegal under consumer protection law. On February 12, US senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced the Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026 to block it in grocery stores. Other efforts are also underway in the US. This week’s news is calling this “surveillance pricing” or “predatory pricing”, which accurately reflects the data collection and surveillance capitalism underpinning.

This is not really a story about specific technologies, although “AI”; the issue is, as Hasbrouck writes, opacity and discrimination.

The technological pieces are in place to make this all much worse. Not just online, where prices are easily generated on the fly, but also in real-world retailers via wireless connections and electronic shelf tags, which already exist in some stores. A May 2025 study finds that these tags are so far not used to implement surge pricing but to update sale prices and offer discounts – but for how long?

In a May 2025 paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing researchers examine the rise of algorithmic pricing – Uber, landlords, retailers – generally and personalized pricing in particular. The authors note that the latter requires market power, and buyers must have limited ability to exploit price differences. And also: it’s profitable (duh). The authors go on to discuss the role of privacy, data protection, consumer laws, and backlash, in curbing unfairness. At Big, which focuses on consolidation and market power, Matt Stoller warns of the potential power of Google’s plan to run pricing strategies for advertisers.

Hasbrouck returned to the subject last year while recapping the latest season of The Amazing Race to explain the airlines’ use of systems that deliver increasingly opaque and unpredictable pricing and the lack of enforcement enabling it.

In a pair of posts, the ACLU’s Jay Stanley follows Hasbrouck’s logic to new levels, laying out a possible future these developments may bring. The desire to wring every last possible bit of profit out of us – we’re talking everyone who sells goods or services now, not just airlines – in Stanley’s view will lead to collecting more and more detailed data. The digital identification infrastructure being built into airports – as planned here in 2013 and shown arriving in 2022 – will ensure there is no countermeasure we can take to escape monitoring and data collection. In Stanley’s projection, stores will be able to demand a digital identification sign-in as a condition of entry.

Again, a bit of this is here already. In the UK, Facewatch, which we first encountered in 2013, is used by some major retailers to identify and bar shoppers who have previously been caught shoplifting or being violent. Recently, the system flagged a shopper and staff ousted the wrong person, who found it difficult to prove the mistake.

In other words, all these technologies, wrapped up together, could enable a world not much different from that imagined by Ira Levin in his 1970 book This Perfect Day, where everything anyone wanted to do required permission from a centralized system. Although: the key to making that work was drugging the entire population.

Illustrations: Burmese python in Florida, 2011 (via Wikimedia).

R.I.P. Dave Farber

For decades, Internet pioneer David J. Farber, who died on February 7, aged 91, maintained the Interesting People email list. When he began, it was an unusual choice, as few academics then reached out in such a public way.

Often called the grandfather of the Internet because he invented technologies and taught students whose work became crucial to its development, Farber’s long and distinguished career, which others recount in better detail, included stints at many respected US institutions – Bell Labs, RAND, the University of Delaware, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania – and a presence on too many technical organizations and projects to count. He was a regular at conferences, and Ione of those, in 1998, is where I met him in person.

Among the obits lauding his professional career: Stevens,Institute of Technology, where he earned his first degree (“he created the future”); the Internet Hall of Fame (“a mentor to many generations”); the Electronic Frontier Foundation , where he was a board member; the Japan Times, Tools on Fire, the New York Times (“gregarious”).

“Gregarious” was crucial to building the Internet, as Times writer Peter Wayner writes. Until 2020 the mailing list, whose membership Wayner estimates at 25,000, was really how I knew him. Farber liked to collect information and knowledge in all forms, including human, though I thought of the list less as interesting *people* than alerts to interesting information. However, the sources of that forwarded information were often surprising. Farber seemed to know *everyone*.

In 2020, covid’s arrival led Farber to create a new platform, a weekly Zoom call, which he of course publicized on his mailing list. Over the last nearly six years, many of these calls featured invited speakers, who might cover any topic from medical privacy to quantum computing to Hong Kong real estate to Brexit. Many regulars were his old friends; many others, like me, were newcomers. He was welcoming to all and eager to ask questions.

He was particularly interested in hearing from Asian speakers since he had moved, at 83, to Japan in 2018 to take up a post at Keio University. The move to a new country and culture seems to have given him a berth in a place where his age was respected and his accomplishments were revered. In the last week of January, he wound up what turns out to be his final semester by sending in the final grades for his class of 37 students. He was a teacher and communicator to the last. R.I.P.

Illustration: Dave Farber on a Zoom call, drawn by his friend of 70-plus years, John De Pillis (used by permission).

Whooped

In 2022, we noted a discussion by Julia Powles and Toby Walsh, summarized here, that warned about the increasing collection of data about elite athletes. The data, they said, does not flow to the sports scientists who really can help athletes perform better and minimize their risk of injury, but to data scientists and data crunchers. The money could be better spent on healthier environments and financial support. Powles, with Jacqueline Alderson, followed up in 2023 with best practice principles.

Cue tennis. At this year’s Australian Open, which concluded on February 1, eventual men’s singles champion Carlos Alcaraz, women’s singles finalist Aryna Sabalenka, and men’s singles semifinalist Jannik Sinner were all told to remove their Whoop tracker devices before playing early-round matches.

An important part of this story is the ridiculously convoluted nature of tennis politics. The International Tennis Federation runs lower-level tournaments and junior events; the Grand Slams are laws unto themselves; the men’s and women’s pro tours are run by the ATP and WTA respectively. That’s seven powers – without the national tennis federations or the national and international anti-doping edifice.

The players were caught between conflicting decisions. In mid-December, the ITF approved Whoop devices in competition as long as haptic feedback is disabled, adding it to its list of permitted “Player Analysis Technology” devices. On a Whoop, “haptic feedback” means the device vibrates to alert you to…something.

The ITF published its detailed examination (see also a wearer’s review by Emilie Lavinia at The Independent). Whoop’s array of sensors can capture: heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep stages and performance, recovery, activity strain metrics, blood oxygenation (SpO2), skin temperature, respiratory rate, and blood pressure (only some models), and perform on-demand ECG and irregular heart rhythm notification (only some regions, where it’s approved). As the ITF notes, data capture takes place automatically whenever the athlete is wearing the device. Players are allowed to charge the device on-court using its battery pack.

So far, so good. Turning off haptic feedback requires the player to disable alarms, turn off the “Strength Trainer” screens; and turn off “Strain Target” if they want to use “Live Activity” mode. The player has to show tournament officials on request that their settings are compliant (or that they’re using the Whoop 3.0, which has no haptic feedback).

The device has no screen; viewing the data requires an Android or iOS device, the app, paired via Bluetooth, and a subscription. This is the Gillette razor, or “free puppy” business model: the device is free, you pay for ongoing access to your own data.

So basically, the ITF is allowing players to collect data using the Whoop device for future inspection and discussion with their teams, as long as it doesn’t vibrate on their wrist. The key here is the potential for the device to be a conduit for an automated form of in-match coaching; the definition of PAT devices given in Appendix III of the ITF’s Rules of Tennis (PDF) specifically directs readers to Rule 30, which covers coaching.

For most of tennis’s Open Era – basically since 1968, when the sport went professional – coaching from the stands was banned. The original argument in favor of the ban was that tennis was and is a highly unequal sport. Top players can afford any assistance they want. The lowest-ranked players scrounge, as Irish player Conor Niland, who topped out at 129 in the world, recounts in a Guardian interview and in his excellent 2024 book, The Racket. Until the 1990s, even mid-range players often toured alone. Therefore, allowing coaching from the stands during matches threatened to make the playing field even more unequal.

As money flowed into tennis, the numbers who could afford traveling coaches rose and the no-coaching rule was increasingly flouted. Following a series of trials, the WTA began allowing coaching in 2022. The ATP, the ITF, and the Grand Slams finally began allowing it in 2025. Rule 30 leaves it open for events’ governing bodies to prohibit it.

The Whoop controversy digitizes all this baggage. Rule 30 differentiates between off-court coaching (coaching from the stands), which is permitted, and on-court coaching, which is only permitted during specific team events. Ordinary watches are allowed, but smart watches and mobile phones are banned because they are capable of communications, Teresa Merklin explains at Fiend at Court.

“We have coaching. why can’t you have your own data?” former champion Todd Woodbridge asked on TV.

We are still at the beginning of these technologies and their controversies. Merklin digs up a forgotten incident: in 2013, Wimbledon shot down Bethanie Mattek-Sands’ query about wearing Google Glass. Devices will keep shrinking and becoming harder to spot.

Unlike in the past, however, PATs are cheap compared to hiring traveling personnel. While Powles and Walsh were undoubtedly right that data analysis is no substitute for physiologists’ and sports scientists’ expertise, PATs might give lower-ranked players previously unaffordable insight. Given the increasing heat stress at many tournaments, feedback that warns when your body is overstressed seems like a good idea. On the other hand, can you imagine how much bettors would love to have access to this kind of data in real time?

In search of the future Internet

“What kind of Internet do you want [him] to inherit?” “Him” was then measuring his age in weeks.

“Not *this* Internet.”

Now, when said son has grown to measure his life in months, my friend and I are no closer to a positive vision. But notably many more people seem to be asking the same kind of question.

In the last week I’ve been to two meetings convened to pull together a cross-section of activists, policy wonks, and techies to talk about building movements to push back against the spread of technological control. The goals of these groups, like my friend’s and mine remain fuzzy, but they reflect a widespread growing alarm about AI, US entanglement, and our other technological ills.

“When did the future stop being something we plan for and become something done to us?” a friend asked about five years ago. That sense of being held hostage by the inevitability narrative is there, too, in a jumble including job loss, the evils of capitalism, the embedding of companies like Palantir in the health service and soon in policing, the speed of change, widespread loneliness, sustainability, and existential threats. So the overall feel has been part-Occupy, part consciousness-raising session.

Those who did have visions to propose often seemed to be describing things that already exist: trusted, authoritative content (the BBC, Wikipedia); ending capitalism in favor of shared ownership and distributed power (“there’s always someone reinventing communism,” the person next to me muttered), and recreating the impossible dream of micropayments.

One meeting polled us with a list of concerns about AI and asked us to pick the most important. The winner, by far, was “consolidation of power”. This speaks to a wider movement than merely opposing AI or resisting the encroachment of the worst technology surveillance practices into daily life.

Similar discussions have been growing for at least a couple of years. At The Register, long-time open source advocate Liam Proven writes after attending the Open Source Policy Summit that Europe is reassessing its technological reliance on US IT services, which offers the potential for a US president to order disconnection. The lack of European billion-dollar technology companies leads people to forget the technology invented here that instead embraced openness: the web, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Open StreetMap, the Fediverse.

It’s a little alarming, however, that all of this discussion hovers at the application layer. Old-timers who’ve watched the Internet build up understand that underneath the social media and smartphones lies the physical layer, the infrastructure that is also condolidated and controlled: chips, cables, wireless spectrum. For younger folks, those elements are near-invisible; their adult lives have been dominated by concerns about data. Yet in the last year we’ve been warned of sabotage to undersea cables and chip shortages. There’s more general recognition of the issues surrounding data centers’ demand for power and water.

Even so, there’s a good amount of recognition that all the strands of our present polycrisis are intertwined – see for example the mission statement at Germany’s Cables of Resistance. A broader group, building on the 2024 conference convened by Cristina Caffarra, who called out policy makers at CPDP 2024 for ignoring physical infrastructure, is working on a EuroStack to provide a European cloud alternative.

At the political layer, we have Dutch News reporting that Dutch MPs are pushing their government to move away from depending on US technology companies to provide essential infrastructure. In the UK, LibDem and Green MPs are calling on the government to reconsider its contracts with Palantir.

A group called Pull the Plug will lead a “march against the machines” in London on February 28 to demand the UK government create citizens’ assemblies and implement their decisions on AI.

It feels like change is gathering here. In the US, the future still looks much like the past. In a blog post this week, here is Anthropic, presumably responding to OpenAI’s plan to add advertising to ChatGPT:

But including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking…We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see “sponsored” links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.

Compare and contrast to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their 1998 Google-founding paper:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

No wonder Anthropic adds this caution: “Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so.” Translation: we may need the money.” Of course they’ll frame it as serving the customer better.

Illustrations: (One of) the first Internet ad, for AT&T, on HotWired (via The Internet History Podcast.

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast we talk to science fiction writer Ken MacLeod.