Real cases. Real companies. Real people. This is why we build local.
Meta shipped intimate videos recorded by $299 Ray-Ban smart glasses to contractors in Nairobi, Kenya — without consent. Content included private activities, financial data, and bathroom footage. All marked "private" by users, reviewed by 100+ workers.
Class action — U.S. District Court, N.D. California
— Smart glasses. Very smart. Someone in Nairobi watched your bathroom. Twice. You weren't invited. —
WhatsApp promised "unbreakable encryption." Leaked documents revealed Meta and contractor Accenture accessed 3+ billion private messages via a backdoor. False advertising to billions.
Multi-national class action: Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa
— End-to-end encryption. From you… to Meta… to Accenture… to their contractors in three countries. The "ends" are just further than advertised. —
Meta's "Tag Suggestions" captured facial geometry of millions of Texans through photo tagging — without consent. Largest privacy settlement in U.S. history.
— $1.4 billion sounds like a lot. Meta's Q3 2024 profit: $15.7 billion. The math is doing something. —
Multiple GDPR violations around data processing, cross-border transfers, and user consent. Part of Europe's enforcement wave against major platforms.
— €530M fine. TikTok revenue: ~€20B. Somewhere, a compliance lawyer is still laughing. —
Massive unauthorized collection of personal data from millions of users, violating GDPR consent and processing rules.
— "Professional Network." Very professional. Professionally harvesting your data since 2003. —
Continued fines and enforcement actions related to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica breach and subsequent GDPR violations.
— They paid. They apologized. They learned their lesson. (They did not learn their lesson.) —
OpenAI scraped millions of books, articles, and creative works from living authors without permission or compensation. Multiple class actions ongoing in U.S. and EU courts. The company argues it's "fair use." The authors disagree.
Class action — Authors Guild et al. v. OpenAI, S.D.N.Y.
— "Fair use," they said. 99,000 authors filed a lawsuit. The books are still in the model. The trial date is still pending. —
This is not coincidence. This is the business model. Your data is the product. Your privacy is the cost.
Governments fight back — but by then the damage is done. Companies pay fines and continue.
Local control is the only real protection. When your data lives on your machine, no one can sell it, lose it, or weaponize it.
The good news? You don't need a lawyer, a lobbyist, or a miracle. You need a hard drive and 10 minutes to install Ollama. The exit already exists. We just built a sign pointing to it.
"The more laws, the less justice."
— The Count of Monte Cristo
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