Data privacy advocates worry that Google collects too much personal information

Google Search incorporated AI Overviews in 2024 to fight back competitors

Analysts believe that generative AI tools—not antitrust rulings—are Google's biggest threat because they draw users away from traditional search and potential ad revenue. AI partnerships, like the one between Apple and OpenAI, may further reduce Google's market share.

In 2020, the US DOJ sued Google for unlawful monopolization of the search engine market

The US Department of Justice and numerous states accused Google of making exclusionary agreements with Android phone manufacturers to make its search engine the default on those devices, preventing competitors from gaining market share.

Google Search trends reveal truths about society that traditional surveys miss

Studies of human behavior show that survey respondents may lie to present themselves more favorably. By studying anonymous search data, researchers have uncovered hidden racism, mental health struggles, and interest in taboo or stigmatized topics.

Balancing free speech while curbing misinformation has destroyed content moderation

Accusations of censorship and bias have led social media companies like Meta and X to scale back or abandon moderation tools—just as foreign propaganda surges. Researchers say their ability to track manipulation online has become severely limited.

What we learned about Google

Google processes over 8.5 billion searches every day—more than the number of people on Earth. This short breakdown covers how the company evolved from a Stanford research project into a global tech leader, with products like YouTube, Gmail, and Android reaching billions worldwide.

The 'Facebook papers' revealed the company prioritized profit over public safety

A whistleblower came forward with internal documents showing employees warned leadership about the company's role in fueling political unrest and misinformation. Systems like XCheck shielded high-profile users like President Donald Trump from normal content rules, often to avoid PR backlash.

Privacy concerns in the credit scoring system

Because credit scores use a lot of personal information (such as whether or not someone makes credit card payments on time), some worry their privacy is being compromised in the data collection process.

Tech giants like SpaceX and Meta are increasingly behaving like sovereign powers

Companies now make unilateral decisions once reserved for nation-states, such as controlling satellite internet access in active war zones and influencing global information flows. Lawmakers and the international order are struggling to keep up with technological developments, let alone regulate them.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, didn't believe in its ad model at first

He admits the company made many mistakes during its growth from 100 Google employees to nearly 200,000 in 2022. His biggest mistake as CEO involved social media, which was not executed well with the Google+ platform.

As of 2025, there are no federal laws involving privacy and smart city technologies

Advancements in cloud technology and artificial intelligence allow cities to capture, store, and analyze more information than ever before. Experts warn that the unhindered ability to collect and use this data may infringe on residents' rights and endanger them if the data gets into the hands of malicious parties.

Critics call WeChat a surveillance tool

This report from the Citizen Lab details evidence WeChat, with 1.4 billion users, is a powerful surveillance tool for the Chinese Communist Party. In particular, it finds the government uses non-China accounts to train censorship algorithms for use on domestic communications.

Google banned ads for loans due within 60 days and interest rates exceeding 36% or higher

In 2016, Google said it would stop allowing payday lenders to advertise on the search engine. According to the company, this decision was made to protect users from deceptive and harmful financial products.

Understanding the causes, effects, and prevalence of algorithmic bias

Found in search engines, hiring and college admissions tools, facial recognition systems, and other software, algorithms act on the rules they are programmed with, which may be authored by individuals unaware of their own biases. Algorithms based on limited, incomplete, or inaccurate data are more likely to inherit and propagate existing biases.

Listen to a former Palantir employee's take on the company

Among other former Palantir employees who have spoken out against the company's role in aiding surveillance and in the American government, former content strategist Juan Sebastían Pinto is concerned that Palantir is creating a monopoly over artificial intelligence.

Ads follow you around the internet through cookies

A technology called “cookies” enables advertisers to essentially team up and follow your behavior around on the internet. This video explains why it seems like ads seem to follow you as you go from website to website—as well as data privacy advocates’ war against cookies.

Google data centers possess six layers of security

Property boundaries, such as anti-climb fencing, overlapping cameras, vehicle crash barriers, and circulating patrols, are coupled with lobby iris scans and ID and badge checks. The security operations center monitors individuals throughout their visit, including the less than 1% of Google users who ever receive permission to visit the data center floor.

How political campaigns use your data

What do campaigns know about US voters, and how do they use that information to shape their strategies during elections? US political campaigns base their strategies and tactics on data collected from more than 200 million voting-age Americans. This visualization by Reuters breaks down how data firms create national databases of voter files, collecting information from a variety of sources to create detailed voter profiles and how political campaigns use that data.

The US protects free speech more broadly than any other democracy

Well-known First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams explains that the US offers stronger free-speech protections than even close democratic allies, where hate speech is criminalized, libel laws favor plaintiffs, and a "right to be forgotten" can erase truthful information from the internet.

Americans think being informed is a priority for voting, but don't prioritize reading the news

Many Americans report feeling "news fatigue," finding much of the news they encounter irrelevant. Still, being informed is recognized as a major civic duty. Many Americans have stopped seeking out the news or are far more selective about where they receive it, and an increasing sense that its up to individuals to confirm the facts they're being told.

Orwell warned readers about how abuse of language can lead to dystopias

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell argues that language is the primary tool of political control and is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The essay warns readers that how they use and consume language will dictate what they permit—or prohibit—in society.

The dark web can expose anonymous users to potentially dangerous environments

Browsing the dark web requires onion routing, which prevents visitors from being identified and the locations from which they connect from being traced. This has been useful to activists in environments affected by political oppression or instability. However, those unfamiliar with navigating the space may encounter malware and network attacks from denizen hackers.

Ethereum’s biggest risks and top criticisms

As it evolves, critics say Ethereum’s constant changes make the platform overly complex and fundamentally less secure. They also say the Ethereum Foundation and a handful of developers wield too much control over the crypto platform, and that gas fees are prohibitively expensive. Some criticisms are addressed in Ethereum’s roadmap, but others strike at the crypto platform’s core. Go deeper on why here.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos emphasizes worrying about customers rather than competition

In a 1999 shareholder letter, Bezos wrote, "I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Our customers have made our business what it is, and we consider them to be loyal to us – right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service." Motivated by fear, the entrepreneur advocates consistent innovation, experimentation, and improvement to create a better customer experience.

Web crawlers and internet archives and back-ups limit perfect erasure of online data

Crawlers are programs that automatically browse the internet for links and index pages for search engines to pull up when page content matches search queries. Networks of global data centers also create copies of content as fail-safes for potential failures to ensure access isn't ever lost.

Wikipedia openly displays edit history and editorial disputes to assess trustworthiness

Unlike a journal article, which may be reviewed by up to three people before publication, popular Wikipedia pages may be reviewed thousands of times by editors, potentially enhancing their reliability. Less reviewed articles still require reliable third-party sources and remain subject to verification by bots and administrators who can undo edits.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Telehealth demand for GLP-1s for weight loss is booming as consumers seek easier access.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

US consumers collectively owe more than $1T to credit card companies—almost as much as they owe in auto loans.

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

The price of gas is a composite made up of several different factors, with the federal gas tax making up less than 20% of what drivers pay at the pump.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.