Among 38 undisclosed companies receiving funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, several are developing tools to mine data from social media.
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows
In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture-capital firm that invests taxpayer money in startups developing technology useful to the CIA, provides only limited information about its investments, and some of its trustees have ties to funded companies.
CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA
A company with an innovative line of cosmetic products caught the attention of Oprah’s lifestyle magazine and beauty bloggers. Now the CIA is involved, too.
Dark Web Informer on Twitter / X
‼️🇺🇸 LAPSUS$ Group is allegedly selling a massive dataset of https://t.co/Q6UlD72i8v, an AI recruiting platform with $500M+ revenue, is being auctioned on a popular cybercrime forum, TG, and their website.▪️Total Size: ~4TB▪️Data Includes: 211GB of database▪️939GB of source… pic.twitter.com/hEvp244uNO— Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) March 30, 2026
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color | ACLU
The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.
UK spies using social media data for mass surveillance | TechCrunch
Privacy rights group Privacy International says it has obtained evidence for the first time that UK spy agencies are collecting social media information on potentially millions of people.
Can “Conscious Data Contribution” Help Users to Exert “Data Leverage” Against Technology Companies?
Tech users currently have limited ability to act on concerns regarding the negative societal impacts of large tech companies. However, recent work suggests that users can exert leverage using their role in the generation of valuable data, for instance by withholding their data contributions to intelligent technologies. We propose and evaluate a new means to exert this type of leverage against tech companies: "conscious data contribution" (CDC).
Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft come together to create the Partnership on AI | TechCrunch
The world's largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is
ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for feeding surveillance company user data
Geofeedia touts access to Twitter's firehose, "partnership with Instagram."
American tech giants are making life tough for startups
Big, rich and paranoid, they have reams of data to help them spot and buy young firms that might challenge them
The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of these impacts to inform evidence-based technology policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits. Unlike most other global-scale scientific challenges, however, the data necessary for scientific progress are generated and controlled by the same industry that might be subject to evidence-based regulation. Moreover, technology companies historically have been, and continue to be, a major source of funding for this field. These asymmetries in information and funding raise significant concerns about the potential for undue industry influence on the scientific record. In this Perspective, we explore how technology companies can influence our scientific understanding of their products. We argue that science faces unique challenges in the context of technology research that will require strengthening existing safeguards and constructing wholly new ones.
An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing | CNN Business
Add Meta to the list of companies with AI agents going rogue. An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.
An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing | CNN Business
Add Meta to the list of companies with AI agents going rogue. An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of... - Adam Wood
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their...
So the people launching a new Twitter under the name Twitter launched their thing so I signed up. Turns out they have an AI scanning tweets for "truth" and it currently has no idea what it's doing. Posted something innocuous about Star Wars Zero Company and it essentially blocked it from all feeds.
So the people launching a new Twitter under the name Twitter launched their thing so I signed up. Turns out they have an AI scanning tweets for "truth" and it currently has no idea what it's doing. Posted something innocuous about Star Wars Zero Company and it essentially blocked it from all feeds.
