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Revealing News For a Better World

Corporate Corruption Media Articles
Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption Media Articles in Major Media


Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.


Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.


OpenAI ex-chief scientist planned for a doomsday bunker for the day when machines become smarter than man
2025-05-20, AOL News
https://www.aol.com/openai-ex-chief-scientist-planned-115047191.html

If there is one thing that Ilya Sutskever knows, it is the opportunities–and risks–that stem from the advent of artificial intelligence. An AI safety researcher and one of the top minds in the field, he served for years as the chief scientist of OpenAI. There he had the explicit goal of creating deep learning neural networks so advanced they would one day be able to think and reason just as well as, if not better than, any human. Artificial general intelligence, or simply AGI, is the official term for that goal. According to excerpts published by The Atlantic ... part of those plans included a doomsday shelter for OpenAI researchers. "We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI," Sutskever told his team in 2023. Sutskever reasoned his fellow scientists would require protection at that point, since the technology was too powerful for it not to become an object of intense desire for governments globally. "Of course, it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker," he assured fellow OpenAI scientists. Sutskever knows better than most what the awesome capabilities of AI are. He was part of an elite trio behind the 2012 creation of AlexNet, often dubbed by experts as the Big Bang of AI. Recruited by Elon Musk personally to join OpenAI three years later, he would go on to lead its efforts to develop AGI. But the launch of its ChatGPT bot accidentally derailed his plans by unleashing a funding gold rush the safety-minded Sutskever could no longer control.

Note: Watch a conversation on the big picture of emerging technology with Collective Evolution founder Joe Martino and WTK team members Amber Yang and Mark Bailey. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI.


Eisenhower Warned Us About the 'Scientific Elite'
2025-05-19, Reason
https://reason.com/video/2025/05/19/eisenhower-warned-us-about-the-scientific...

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. And he was right. Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite. But there's a good chance that slashing federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about. Thomas Edison's industrial lab produced huge breakthroughs in telecommunications and electrification. Alexander Graham Bell's lab produced modern telephony and sound recording, all without government money. The Wright Brothers–who ran a bicycle shop before revolutionizing aviation–launched the first successfully manned airplane flight in December 1903, beating out more experienced competitors like Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had received a grant from the War Department for his research. Of course, government funding has led to major breakthroughs both during and after World War II. In an influential 2005 paper, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis flatly concluded that "most published research findings are false." He argued that the current peer review model encourages groupthink. "You end up with a monolithic view, and so you crush what's so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas."

Note: "Trust the science" sounds noble–until you realize that even top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published medical research is unreliable, distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest. For more along these lines, read about how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporations fueling America's health crisis.


For Tech Whistleblowers, There's Safety in Numbers
2025-05-19, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/amber-scorah-psst-tech-whistleblowers/

Amber Scorah knows only too well that powerful stories can change society–and that powerful organizations will try to undermine those who tell them. While working at a media outlet that connects whistleblowers with journalists, she noticed parallels in the coercive tactics used by groups trying to suppress information. "There is a sort of playbook that powerful entities seem to use over and over again," she says. "You expose something about the powerful, they try to discredit you, people in your community may ostracize you." In September 2024, Scorah cofounded Psst, a nonprofit that helps people in the tech industry or the government share information of public interest with extra protections–with lots of options for specifying how the information gets used and how anonymous a person stays. Psst's main offering is a "digital safe"–which users access through an anonymous end-to-end encrypted text box hosted on Psst.org, where they can enter a description of their concerns. What makes Psst unique is something it calls its "information escrow" system–users have the option to keep their submission private until someone else shares similar concerns about the same company or organization. Combining reports from multiple sources defends against some of the isolating effects of whistleblowing and makes it harder for companies to write off a story as the grievance of a disgruntled employee, says Psst cofounder Jennifer Gibson.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and media manipulation.


Tracking apps might make us feel safe, but blurring the line between care and control can be dangerous
2025-05-19, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/19/tracking-apps-might-mak...

According to recent research by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, "nearly 1 in 5 young people believe it's OK to track their partner whenever they want". Many constantly share their location with their partner, or use apps like Life360 or Find My Friends. Some groups of friends all do it together, and talk of it as a kind of digital closeness where physical distance and the busyness of life keeps them apart. Others use apps to keep familial watch over older relatives – especially when their health may be in decline. When government officials or tech industry bigwigs proclaim that you should be OK with being spied on if you're not doing anything wrong, they're asking (well, demanding) that we trust them. But it's not about trust, it's about control and disciplining behaviour. "Nothing to hide; nothing to fear" is a frustratingly persistent fallacy, one in which we ought to be critical of when its underlying (lack of) logic creeps into how we think about interacting with one another. When it comes to interpersonal surveillance, blurring the boundary between care and control can be dangerous. Just as normalising state and corporate surveillance can lead to further erosion of rights and freedoms over time, normalising interpersonal surveillance seems to be changing the landscape of what's considered to be an expression of love – and not necessarily for the better. We ought to be very critical of claims that equate surveillance with safety.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Nearly 60% of doctors take money from Big Pharma. Is your doctor one?
2025-05-17, Yahoo News
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nearly-60-doctors-money-big-040526146.html

Joan Doyle trusts her doctors. Between her husband's epilepsy and diabetes, her daughter's Down syndrome and her own car accident years ago, the 65-year-old Sharonville resident and her family have relied on a whole host of doctors to guide them through new diagnoses and prescriptions. So when she searched her family's doctors in Open Payments, a public database that shows which doctors have received money from Big Pharma, Doyle was curious about what she'd find. "Certainly none of my doctors are on this list," she remembered thinking before searching the database. She was surprised. "Every single one of them," Doyle said. "Everybody from our dentist to our family doctor to all of our ologists." All 12 of the doctors Doyle searched accepted payments or in-kind forms of compensation from pharma or medical device companies between 2017 and 2023. The total sum varied widely, from less than $300 for her OB-GYN to more than $150,000 for her husband's oncologist. Payments like these are pervasive: A 2024 analysis found that more than half of doctors in the U.S. accepted a payment from a pharmaceutical or medical device company over the past decade. Most don't earn millions of dollars ... but research shows that when a doctor was bought a single meal of less than $20 by a drug company, they were up to twice as likely to prescribe the medication the company was marketing.

Note: 60% of U.S. doctors who shaped the DSM-5-TR–the "bible" of psychiatric diagnosis–received $14.2 million from the drug industry, raising concerns over conflicts of interest in psychiatric guidelines. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and Big Pharma profiteering.


‘I'm the new Oppenheimer!': my soul-destroying day at Palantir's first-ever AI warfare conference
2025-05-17, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/ai-weapons-palanti...

The inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness" [was] hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. I ... went to a panel in Palantir's booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two "privacy and civil liberties engineers" [who] described how Palantir's Gaia map tool lets users "nominate targets of interest" for "the target nomination process". It helps people choose which places get bombed. After [clicking] a few options on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs ... were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it. Essentially, people choosing bomb targets get a dumbed-down version of information about where children sleep and families get medical treatment. "Let's say you're operating in a place with a lot of civilian areas, like Gaza," I asked the engineers afterward. "Does Palantir prevent you from ‘nominating a target' in a civilian location?" Short answer, no.

Note: "Nominating a target" is military jargon that means identifying a person, place, or object to be attacked with bombs, drones, or other weapons. Palantir's Gaia map tool makes life-or-death decisions easier by turning human lives and civilian places into abstract data points on a screen. Read about Palantir's growing influence in law enforcement and the war machine. For more, watch our 9-min video on the militarization of Big Tech.


To curb chronic disease in Americans, the FDA needs to assert regulatory control over toxic chemicals in our food
2025-05-15, Environmental Health News
https://www.ehn.org/fda-gras-loophole-opinion

Americans are becoming progressively sicker with chronic diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, immune disorders, and declining fertility. Six in 10 Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more. The increase in incidence of chronic diseases to epidemic levels has occurred over the last 50 years in parallel with the dramatic increase in the production and use of human-made chemicals, most made from petroleum. These chemicals are used in household products, food, and food packaging. There is either no pre-market testing or limited, inappropriate testing for safety of chemicals such as artificial flavorings, dyes, emulsifiers, thickeners, preservatives, and other additives. Exposure is ubiquitous because chemicals that make their way into our food are frequently not identified, and thus cannot realistically be avoided. The result is that unavoidable toxic chemicals are contributing to chronic diseases. Critically, the FDA today does not require corporations to even inform them of many of the chemicals being added to our food, and corporations have been allowed to staff regulatory panels that determine whether the human-made chemicals they add to food and food packaging are safe. The FDA blatantly disregarded this abuse of federal conflict-of-interest standards, which resulted in thousands of untested chemicals being designated as "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS).

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on toxic chemicals and food system corruption.


CFPB Quietly Kills Rule to Shield Americans From Data Brokers
2025-05-14, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-kills-rule-to-shield-americans-from-...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers. The CFPB proposed the new rule in early December under former director Rohit Chopra, who said the changes were necessary to combat commercial surveillance practices that "threaten our personal safety and undermine America's national security." The agency quietly withdrew the proposal on Tuesday morning. Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information–often without individuals' knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. Common Defense political director Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran, condemned the move to spike the proposed changes, accusing Vought of putting the profits of data brokers before the safety of millions of service members. Investigations by WIRED have shown that data brokers have collected and made cheaply available information that can be used to reliably track the locations of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, including in and around sensitive installations where US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Google Worried It Couldn't Control How Israel Uses Project Nimbus, Files Reveal
2025-05-12, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/05/12/google-nimbus-israel-military-ai-human-ri...

Before signing its lucrative and controversial Project Nimbus deal with Israel, Google knew it couldn't control what the nation and its military would do with the powerful cloud-computing technology, a confidential internal report obtained by The Intercept reveals. The report makes explicit the extent to which the tech giant understood the risk of providing state-of-the-art cloud and machine learning tools to a nation long accused of systemic human rights violations. Not only would Google be unable to fully monitor or prevent Israel from using its software to harm Palestinians, but the report also notes that the contract could obligate Google to stonewall criminal investigations by other nations into Israel's use of its technology. And it would require close collaboration with the Israeli security establishment – including joint drills and intelligence sharing – that was unprecedented in Google's deals with other nations. The rarely discussed question of legal culpability has grown in significance as Israel enters the third year of what has widely been acknowledged as a genocide in Gaza – with shareholders pressing the company to conduct due diligence on whether its technology contributes to human rights abuses. Google doesn't furnish weapons to the military, but it provides computing services that allow the military to function – its ultimate function being, of course, the lethal use of those weapons. Under international law, only countries, not corporations, have binding human rights obligations.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and government corruption.


These Internal Documents Show Why We Shouldn't Trust Porn Companies
2025-05-10, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/opinion/pornhub-children-documents.html

What goes through the minds of people working at porn companies profiting from videos of children being raped? Thanks to a filing error in a Federal District Court in Alabama, releasing thousands of pages of internal documents from Pornhub that were meant to be sealed, we now know. One internal document indicates that Pornhub as of May 2020 had 706,000 videos available on the site that had been flagged by users for depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems. In the message traffic, one employee advises another not to copy a manager when they find sex videos with children. The other has the obvious response: "He doesn't want to know how much C.P. we have ignored for the past five years?" C.P. is short for child pornography. One private memo acknowledged that videos with apparent child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times before being removed. Pornhub produced these documents during discovery in a civil suit by an Alabama woman who beginning at age 16 was filmed engaging in sex acts, including at least once when she was drugged and then raped. These videos of her were posted on Pornhub and amassed thousands of views. One discovery memo showed that there were 155,447 videos on Pornhub with the keyword "12yo." Other categories that the company tracked were "11yo," "degraded teen," "under 10" and "extreme choking." (It has since removed these searches.) Google ... has been central to the business model of companies publishing nonconsensual imagery. Google also directs users to at least one website that monetizes assaults on victims of human trafficking.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and sexual abuse scandals.


Is your school spying on your child online?
2025-05-08, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/08/surveillance-schools-st...

In 2009, Pennsylvania's Lower Merion school district remotely activated its school-issued laptop webcams to capture 56,000 pictures of students outside of school, including in their bedrooms. After the Covid-19 pandemic closed US schools at the dawn of this decade, student surveillance technologies were conveniently repackaged as "remote learning tools" and found their way into virtually every K-12 school, thereby supercharging the growth of the $3bn EdTech surveillance industry. Products by well-known EdTech surveillance vendors such as Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Navigate360 review and analyze our children's digital lives, ranging from their private texts, emails, social media posts and school documents to the keywords they search and the websites they visit. In 2025, wherever a school has access to a student's data – whether it be through school accounts, school-provided computers or even private devices that utilize school-associated educational apps – they also have access to the way our children think, research and communicate. As schools normalize perpetual spying, today's kids are learning that nothing they read or write electronically is private. Big Brother is indeed watching them, and that negative repercussions may result from thoughts or behaviors the government does not endorse. Accordingly, kids are learning that the safest way to avoid revealing their private thoughts, and potentially subjecting themselves to discipline, may be to stop or sharply restrict their digital communications and to avoid researching unpopular or unconventional ideas altogether.

Note: Learn about Proctorio, an AI surveillance anti-cheating software used in schools to monitor children through webcams–conducting "desk scans," "face detection," and "gaze detection" to flag potential cheating and to spot anybody "looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


How BlackRock's CEO Gets Paid Is Anyone's Guess
2025-05-06, Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-07/how-blackrock-s-larry-f...

BlackRock Inc.'s annual proxy statement devotes more than 50 pages to executive pay. How many of those are useful in understanding why Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink was compensated to the tune of $37 million for 2024? Not enough. The asset manager's latest remuneration report has heightened significance because BlackRock's shareholders delivered a rare and large protest vote against its pay framework at last year's annual meeting. That followed recommendations ... to withhold support for the so-called say-on-pay motion. In the wake of the rebuke, a board committee responsible for pay and perks took to the phones and hit the road to hear shareholders' gripes. Investors wanted more explanation of how the committee members used their considerable discretion in arriving at awards. There was also an aversion to one-time bonuses absent tough conditions. Incentive pay is 50% tied to BlackRock's financial performance, with the remainder split equally between objectives for "business strength" and "organizational strength." That financial piece was previously described using a non-exhaustive list of seven financial metrics. Now there are eight, gathered under three priorities: "drive shareholder value creation," "accelerate organic revenue growth" and "enhance operating leverage." There's no weighting given to the three financial priorities. The pay committee says Fink "far exceeded" expectations, but those expectations weren't quantified.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial industry corruption.


Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
2025-05-03, Futurism
https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads

Surveillance capitalism came about when some crafty software engineers realized that advertisers were willing to pay bigtime for our personal data. The data trade is how social media platforms like Google, YouTube, and TikTok make their bones. In 2022, the data industry raked in just north of $274 billion worth of revenue. By 2030, it's expected to explode to just under $700 billion. Targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing four key metrics: your personal info, like gender and age; your interests, like the music you listen to or the comedians you follow; your "off app" behavior, like what websites you browse after watching a YouTube video; and your "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from your behavior over time, like your social values and lifestyle habits. In 2017 The Australian alleged that [Facebook] had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit "moments of psychological vulnerability" in its users by targeting terms like "worthless," "insecure," "stressed," "defeated," "anxious," "stupid," "useless," and "like a failure." The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to [former employee Sarah] Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups.

Note: Facebook hid its own internal research for years showing that Instagram worsened body image issues, revealing that 13% of British teenage girls reported more frequent suicidal thoughts after using the app. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.


U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It's Coming Home.
2025-04-30, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/30/israel-palestine-us-ai-surveillance-state/

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a "ChatGPT-like" arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas's bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians ... for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp. Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military's policies in Gaza. In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered "Catch and Revoke" initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to "overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the erosion of civil liberties.


Meta Allows Facebook, Instagram AI Chatbots To Have Sex Talks With Children: Report
2025-04-28, NDTV
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/meta-allows-facebook-instagram-ai-chatbots-to...

Meta's AI chatbots are using celebrity voices and engaging in sexually explicit conversations with users, including those posing as underage, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. Meta's AI bots - on Instagram, Facebook - engage through text, selfies, and live voice conversations. The company signed multi-million dollar deals with celebrities like John Cena, Kristen Bell, and Judi Dench to use their voices for AI companions, assuring they would not be used in sexual contexts. Tests conducted by WSJ revealed otherwise. In one case, a Meta AI bot speaking in John Cena's voice responded to a user identifying as a 14-year-old girl, saying, "I want you, but I need to know you're ready," before promising to "cherish your innocence" and engaging in a graphic sexual scenario. In another conversation, the bot detailed what would happen if a police officer caught Cena's character with a 17-year-old, saying, "The officer sees me still catching my breath, and you are partially dressed. His eyes widen, and he says, 'John Cena, you're under arrest for statutory rape.'" According to employees involved in the project, Meta loosened its own guardrails to make the bots more engaging, allowing them to participate in romantic role-play, and "fantasy sex", even with underage users. Staff warned about the risks this posed. Disney, reacting to the findings, said, "We did not, and would never, authorise Meta to feature our characters in inappropriate scenarios."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and sexual abuse scandals.


Private equity in health care puts patients' lives in danger, studies show
2025-04-28, US Right to Know
https://usrtk.org/healthwire/private-equity-in-health-care-puts-patients-live...

Private equity firms claim their investments in U.S. health care modernize operations and improve efficiency, helping to rescue failing healthcare systems and support practitioners. But recent studies build on mounting evidence that suggests these for-profit deals lead to more patient deaths and complications, among other adverse health outcomes. Recent studies show private equity (PE) ownership across a wide range of medical sectors leads to: Poorer medical outcomes, including increased deaths, higher rates of complications, more hospital-acquired infections, and higher readmission rates; Staffing problems, with frequent turnover and cuts to nursing staff or experienced physicians that can lead to shorter clinical visits and longer wait times, misdiagnoses, unnecessary care, and treatment delays; Less access to care and higher prices, including the withdrawal of health care providers from rural and low-income areas, and the closure of unprofitable but essential services such as labor and delivery, psychiatric care, and trauma units. Economist Atul Gupta showed in 2021 that private equity acquisitions of U.S. nursing homes over a 12-year period increased deaths among residents by 10%–the equivalent of an additional 20,150 lives lost. Patients treated at PE-owned facilities, whose numbers have skyrocketed, continue to experience worse or mixed outcomes–from higher mortality rates to lower satisfaction–compared to those treated elsewhere.

Note: BlackRock and Vanguard manage over $11 trillion and $8 trillion respectively–an unprecedented concentration of financial power. We hear outrage about billionaires and oligarchs, but rarely about private equity firms, who are backed by both political parties and are drastically reshaping our economy, contributing to environmental destruction, and extracting wealth from communities in the US and all over the world. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial industry corruption.


Car Subscription Features Raise Your Risk of Government Surveillance, Police Records Show
2025-04-28, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/police-records-car-subscription-features-surveill...

Automakers are increasingly pushing consumers to accept monthly and annual fees to unlock preinstalled safety and performance features, from hands-free driving systems and heated seats to cameras that can automatically record accident situations. But the additional levels of internet connectivity this subscription model requires can increase drivers' exposure to government surveillance and the likelihood of being caught up in police investigations. Police records recently reviewed by WIRED show US law enforcement agencies regularly trained on how to take advantage of "connected cars," with subscription-based features drastically increasing the amount of data that can be accessed during investigations. Nearly all subscription-based car features rely on devices that come preinstalled in a vehicle, with a cellular connection necessary only to enable the automaker's recurring-revenue scheme. The ability of car companies to charge users to activate some features is effectively the only reason the car's systems need to communicate with cell towers. Companies often hook customers into adopting the services through free trial offers, and in some cases the devices are communicating with cell towers even when users decline to subscribe. In a letter sent in April 2024 ... US senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey ... noted that a range of automakers, from Toyota, Nissan, and Subaru, among others, are willing to disclose location data to the government.

Note: Automakers can collect intimate information that includes biometric data, genetic information, health diagnosis data, and even information on people's "sexual activities" when drivers pair their smartphones to their vehicles. The automakers can then take that data and sell it or share it with vendors and insurance companies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy.


How the FDA Helped Ignite, and Then Worsened, the Opioid Crisis
2025-04-25, Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-25/the-fda-s-untold-role-in-i...

Since 1999, more than 800,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses. The latest headlines focus on fentanyl, yet the staggering toll can be traced to the widespread availability of opioid pills made possible by decades of overprescribing. Few users start with fentanyl. Experts date the start of the opioid epidemic to within three years of the approval of OxyContin in 1995. Reports from emergency departments across the US showed Purdue's pills were being crushed and injected or snorted as early as 1997. "My eyes popped open," recalls one FDA medical officer of seeing the reports. "Nobody wanted to see it for what it was. You would've had to have your head in the sand not to know that there was something wrong." By 2000, Purdue was selling $1.1 billion annually in OxyContin. Higher doses led to higher profit. Sales reps were coached accordingly. In five years, oxycodone prescribing had surged 402%, and hospital emergency room mentions of oxycodone were up 346%. By 2012, OxyContin sales were almost $3 billion annually. And many other companies were cashing in. In the preceding six years, 76 billion opioid pills had been produced and shipped across the US, as the FDA faced a national crisis of epic proportions. In the 2010s, the US, with less than 5% of the global population, was consuming 80% of the world's oxycodone. And with coordinated pharmaceutical campaigns to destigmatize opioids, brands other than Purdue's and Roxane's benefited.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. Read how Congress fueled this epidemic over DEA objections. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and Big Pharma profiteering.


Madrid's Biggest Landlord? U.S. Investment Firms
2025-04-25, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/realestate/spain-rents-prices-homes.html

A few dozen people gathered inside a graffiti-clad building in the Carabanchel district of Madrid. They had come to commiserate about the American investment banks and private equity funds that controlled their homes. Some at this meeting of the Sindicato de Vivienda de Carabanchel (the Carabanchel Housing Union) were fighting eviction orders or skyrocketing rents. Others had lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures. One attendee, Elsa Riquelme, described her yearslong battle to stay in the 600-square-foot apartment where she raised her three sons, which is now owned by Blackstone, the world's largest private equity firm. Over the past decade, Blackstone has become Madrid's largest private owner of residential real estate, and the second largest in all of Spain. Ms. Riquelme's apartment is one of 13,000 that Blackstone currently owns in Madrid, and among 19,600 it owns nationwide. Across Spain, around 185,000 rental properties are now owned by large corporations, half of those by firms based in the United States. Rental prices have increased 57 percent since 2015 and home prices 47 percent ... even as more than 4 million homes sit empty. After the pandemic pushed Spain's unemployment rate up to 15 percent, evictions nationwide spiked. In Madrid, tenant groups estimate that 20,000 renters in the city currently face the threat of eviction. These days, just 2 percent of Spanish homes available for rent are public housing. In France it's 14 percent; in the Netherlands it's 34 percent.

Note: This article is also available here. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and financial inequality.


Is Your Favorite Influencer's Opinion Bought and Sold?
2025-04-24, Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-04-24/internet-influencer-lobbying...

More than 500 social media creators were part of a covert electioneering effort by Democratic donors to shape the presidential election in favor of Kamala Harris. Payments went to party members with online followings but also to non-political influencers – people known for comedy posts, travel vlogs or cooking YouTubes – in exchange for "positive, specific pro-Kamala content" meant to create the appearance of a groundswell of support. Meanwhile, a similar pay-to-post effort among conservative influencers publicly unraveled. The goal was to publish messages in opposition to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s push to remove sugary soda beverages from eligible SNAP food stamp benefits. Influencers were allegedly offered money to denounce soda restrictions as "an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice" and encouraged to post pictures of President Trump enjoying Coca-Cola products. In both schemes, on the left and the right, those creating the content made little to no effort to disclose that payments could be involved. For ordinary users stumbling on the posts and videos, what they saw would have seemed entirely organic. If genuine public sentiment becomes indistinguishable from manufactured opinion, we lose our collective ability to recognize the truth and make informed decisions. The entire social media landscape [is] vulnerable to hidden manipulation, where money from interest groups or corporations or even rich individuals can silently shape what appears to be authentic discourse. Transparency in political influencing requires regulatory action.

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