Wolfie Christl

"Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees [and will] evaluate their interactions with customers for 'friendliness,' ... recogniz[ing] certain words and phrases, such as 'welcome to Burger King,' 'please,' and 'thank you.' ... the company is 'iterating' on capturing the tone of conversations as well"

Horrible. At least the latter is probably illegal under the EU's AI act.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/884911/burger-king-ai-assistant-patty

The Austrian Ministry of the Interior bought social media surveillance software Tangles from Cobwebs/Penlink and refuses to tell the public whether they also bought the intrusive geolocation tracking add-on Webloc, which relies on the mass collection of personal data from digital advertising and mobile apps.

Public record on the €900k Tangles contract:
https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/17316-2025

German-lang article by @suka_hiroaki@chaos.social:
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000309258/innenministerium-nutzt-ueberwachungssoftware-von-zwielichtiger-firma-will-nicht-darueber-reden

Summary on the Citizen Lab site:
https://citizenlab.ca/austrian-interior-ministry-using-cobwebs-surveillance-software/

Das österreichische Innenministerium hat die Socialmedia-Überwachungssoftware 'Tangles' des umstrittenen Anbieters Cobwebs/Penlink gekauft und macht daraus ein Staatsgeheimnis. Das Ministerium weigert sich, zu beantworten, ob auch das Tangles-Zusatzmodul 'Webloc' gekauft wurde, das eine Art von Massenüberwachung auf Basis von Werbe- und Smartphone-Daten über die halbe Bevölkerung ermöglicht. Ausführlicher Artikel von @suka_hiroaki@chaos.social im Standard: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000309258/innenministerium-nutzt-ueberwachungssoftware-von-zwielichtiger-firma-will-nicht-darueber-reden

"A security researcher has identified 287 Chrome extensions that allegedly exfiltrate browsing history data for an estimated 37.4 million installations"

Recipients include data brokers like Similarweb, roughly 1% of Chrome users affected. Just don't use browser extensions 😢

Article:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/security_researcher_287_chrome_extensions_data_leak/

Original report:
https://github.com/qcontinuum1/spying-extensions/blob/main/report.pdf

Former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig is of course right to worry about the fate of the stated 'principles' of ads not interfering with responses etc in the next iteration.

Even more remarkable, she quotes German worker co-determination as inspiration for a possible solution: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/opinion/openai-ads-chatgpt.html

ICE "agents are tapping into a database, built by the data analytics company Palantir, that combines government and commercial data to identify real-time locations for individuals they are pursuing, the current and former officials said"
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/technology/tech-ice-facial-recognition-palantir.html

"Companies are offering law enforcement agencies the ability to track smartphone users through advertising data gathered on their devices. Le Monde attended confidential presentations of these new surveillance tools ... According to Le Monde's analysis, around 15 companies, at least, now propose such services"

...feat Penlink, RCS, Wave Guard, Rayzone, Cognyte:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/01/22/how-surveillance-companies-track-smartphone-users-through-advertising-data_6749674_13.html