The Rebel Blog

2025-12-07 21:15:46

News roundup - Nov25

Big tech constantly gaslights you about how wonderful they are. We're here to inform you otherwise. And to show you all the great ethical alternatives.

Here's our roundup of noteworthy stuff from November 2025.

Big tech cesspit

Meta keep plumbing deeper depths of awful

EVERY WhatsApp number leakable! Big Tech security fail

A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers
By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure of phone numbers” ever—along with profile photos and more.
WIREDAndy Greenberg

Alternative link: heise.de/en/news/3-5-Billion-A…

One of the retorts you hear from big tech apologists is "but at least they're secure, so I trust them". Well. Researchers just proved that wrong. They discovered a back door in Meta's WhatsApp - and could access all 3.5 billion phone numbers in the database. And your profile photo.

The researchers tried to warn Meta about this flaw back in 2017 but were ignored. In September 2024 they tried again but were ignored. Meta just don't care about you. But in late 2025 they submitted their full paper and proved they had accessed ALL the numbers. Finally Meta did something, and say they are fixing it. Don't trust them.

Meta reveals that all chats with its AI chatbots will be read by them

Warning! Meta will start snooping on your AI chats in its apps in December
WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram are affected. The policy rolls out starting December 16th, though the EU and UK are exempt for now.
PCWorldViviane Osswald

(Same link without 'pay or ok paywall': archive.is/QegmO )

From Spring 2026 in the EU, and from next week elsewhere, Meta has stated that it will read everything you do in its AI chatbots (i.e. scrape for training it's AI, but also analyse for free behavioural data on you to add to the creepy 'advertising profile' that it keeps on you in a data centre somewhere). This includes in WhatsApp, because of course they shoved their chatbot in there too. Mostly so they can push their 'sensual' chatbots on children - as reported by Reuters.

Meta reveals that you can get away with sex trafficking content 17 times, then they act

7 Allegations Against Meta in Newly Unsealed Filings
Court filings allege Meta tolerated sex trafficking, hid harms to teens, and prioritized growth over user safety for years.
TimeCharlotte Alter

I'm not sure how much evidence people need to not use Meta's products, but this is a big one: a court case against Meta has revealed that they have a '17 strikes and you're out' policy for sex trafficking content. And that has been the case since 2020! So imagine how much of this they've happily indulged, in order to rake in more advertising money. Disgusting.

Please boycott Meta.

Phase 3 of the Big Tech Walkout gets you some of the way there by starting to wean you off WhatsApp:

Start your Big Tech Walkout

EU caving on GDPR and AI act rules

EU Commission about to wreck core principles of the GDPR
The EU Commission has secretly set in motion a potentially massive reform of the GDPR. noybs first overview of the proposed changes.
noyb.eu

Is the EU about to wreck the GDPR by caving to AI hype? NOYB think they are. And for all of you who think the GDPR is bad news because of all the cookie consent popups you have to deal with - that's not the GDPR's fault, it's the way it was implemented. Baby, bathwater.

This is about the 'Digital Omnibus', which you may have read about. We won't go into detail - read the article for yourself, but there's a good quote from Max Schrems, NOYB's founder and an excellent defender of digital rights in Europe:

"The draft is not just extreme, but also very poorly drafted. It is not helping 'small business', as promised, but again mainly benefiting 'big tech'."

How do you think that happened? A butt-ton of money being thrown at the EU politicians via big tech lobbying, promising 'growth' via AI. I hope they don't fall for it.

Brussels knifes privacy to feed the AI boom
Draft proposals obtained by POLITICO show EU is breaking sacred privacy regime to placate industry.
POLITICOEllen O’Regan

But why stop there? Why not scupper the AI act too? Sorry for such depressing news, but at least these are just proposals for now. Many privacy commentators have shown that we can have plenty of growth and innovation WITH strong rules for AI and privacy, but politicians seem to struggle with the concept.

The big techbro plan is slowly being revealed

The Man Who Tracks Silicon Valley’s ‘Nerd Reich’ | The Tyee
US tech titans are building toxic politics at home and looking to export. Gil Duran has a warning for Canada. A Tyee Q&A.
The TyeeHarrison Mooney

...and it's creepy, authoritarian and only helps billionaires.

Gil Duran has an excelled blog The Nerd Reich, which, apart from having an amazing name, does a good job of analysing and explaining what the top tech bros are really like, what motivates them, and what they're planning to do with their billions next.

This news item is an interview with Gil and is a good introduction to the subject. You'll learn about terms such as 'dark enlightenment', 'TESCREAL' and 'techno-fascism'.

We encourage everyone to look into this and be aware that these people, who we enriched by giving away our data, pursue an anti-human manifesto. Anti-human and anti-democracy. And since they are so rich and influential now, this is a topic that will affect us all. Inform yourself; read Gil's blog (and he also has a podcast of the same name).

Google make moves to restrict open source

Application Gatekeeping: An Ever-Expanding Pathway to Internet Censorship
Apple and Google use their app stores to shape what apps you can and cannot have on devices, but now more governments—including the U.S. government—are using legal and extralegal tools to lean on these gatekeepers in order to assert that same control. Google’s central registration system will be devastating for the Android developer community. EFF has signed on to F-Droid’s open letter. If you care about taking back control of tech, you should too.
Electronic Frontier FoundationCorynne McSherry

Google has a new plan to make devs register with ID and pay a fee. As usual this is phrased in terms of 'improving security', and as usual that's just more big tech misdirection. What they're actually doing is expanding their control beyond their own app store (the Play Store).

It is a direct threat to the likes of F-Droid, an alternative app store that lists open source apps. Unlike the free-for-all in the Play Store, F-Droid apps have been vetted, and their open source nature means you can really trust them. Play store apps are very often a privacy nightmare even if it says otherwise in the data section there.

Open source apps are usually developed by several volunteer developers, effectively crowd-sourcing the work. Making them register with ID and pay a fee is massive overreach by Google, and will make this kind of development work untenable.

Lets hope F-Droid's open letter to Google has some effect. To help, you can sign this Change.org petition, and take other actions listed on this page.

More problems with Age Verification services, obviously

Data protection and IT security issues with age verification app “Yoti” - Mint Secure
Datenschutzrisiken und IT-Sicherheitsrisiken bei Yoti-App und AI, welche u.a. Tracking ohne Einwilligung von Benutzenden vornimmt.
Mint SecureRedakteur

Yoti, a leading age verification service, have been shown to not be GDPR compliant. Of course. Every privacy advocate on the planet told governments not to implement age verification requirements because the implementation would be a massive data leak. And so it is: Yoti have been proved to be "extensively tracking users without consent". Please try to minimise the data you make available online, especially to these services that websites use to verify age. Use a VPN to circumvent it, or just don't use the website at all.

And this is on top of the data breach we mentioned in last month's news round up (related to Digital ID).

Data brokers can now track anyone

Databroker Files: All you need to know about how adtech data exposes the EU to espionage
Our latest investigation has shaken up Brussels by revealing that commercial datasets containing 278 million locations can be used to spy on the EU and NATO. The European Commission has expressed its concern, Members of Parliament are calling for action. One thing is clear: ad tracking and data brokers threaten Europe’s security.
netzpolitik.orgIngo Dachwitz

And while we're on the subject of data leaking - here's an article that should make you want to minimise the amount of personal data you provide online. Information from data brokers can be used to locate anyone.

To make the point, the investigation team obtained sample data from data brokers and showed that they could track high ranking EU (e.g. NATO) personnel.

Some people read that and think "so what, I'm not a high ranking EU person", and if that's what you're thinking then you are missing the point entirely. The point is to show the range and power that such data gives to anyone willing to pay for it. Think Russian trolls affecting politics in the EU and US, scammers targeting you personally, stalkers using it to locate girls that spurned them, or conservative states tracking women who have had an abortion. It's creepy and dangerous, and not just about you.

Zoom out. Stop feeding the beast. Take part in the Big Tech Walkout today.

Big tech vs Democracy

Targeted ads become targeted deportations

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.
Brennan Center for Justice9211

This article shows how personal data surveillance is now being turned on American citizens. The data is readily available due to the surveillance economy. Do you trust your government? What about your next government? Some think the UK is just four years behind the US.

Broligarchs profit from insider trading

nytimes.com/svc/oembed/html/?u…
Trump administration insider David Sacks is lining his venture capital billionaire pockets by influencing policies. It's classic insider trading and should be called out - contact your senator.

The EU approves 'Chat Control' lite in certain countries

Chat Control: EU will see your private messages
EU governments have finally agreed on a controversial new law that gives a backdoor to reading text messages and viewing photo messages
Euro Weekly NewsAdam Woodward

It could have been worse (mandatory backdoors to message encryption) but a lite version of the controversial Chat Control law has been approved. This law was never about the kids, and was always about surveillance.

The part of the law that requires scanning of citizens' messages before they are encrypted has been made 'voluntary' by EU member states. It was always proposed as mandatory before, and the change to voluntary got the law passed. It is still a privacy fail, however, so read this article to inform yourself.

X proved to deliberately increase political polarisation

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation
Study finds that a week of political content can bring about a shift in views that previously would have taken three years
The GuardianRobert Booth

This study found that new accounts are bombarded with content to influence their political views. Not surprising when you consider the white supremacist who owns X, but important to prove it nonetheless.

Conclusion: stop using X and move to a non-biased alternative with fire exits, e.g. Mastodon. Otherwise you are just letting yourself get worked by a billionaire's algorithm.

Graphene forced out of France

GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France amid police intimidation claims
The GrapheneOS project has announced on X that they are ceasing all operations in France, asserting that the country is no longer safe for “open source projects”
Privacy GuidesKevin Pham

Never ones to compromise, Graphene OS have moved their servers out of France after the media and police did a campaign to discredit them for 'helping criminals'. A total non-argument, but that's the kind of nonsense that privacy tech has to put up with unfortunately.

The AI bubble

Pass the parcel

The Great AI Bubble
Yes, it’s a bubble. And yes, it’s going to burst.
How to Survive the BroligarchyCarole Cadwalladr

Carole Cadwalladr highlighted this great graphic that shows the circular nature of the mega trillions of dollars being passed around in the AI bubble. When will the music stop?

Sundar Pichai (Google CEO) talks about the AI bubble

Newscast - The Google Boss And The Massive AI Gamble - BBC Sounds
Google boss gives BBC a warning about the economic risks of the AI bubble.
BBC

Even big tech bros like Pichai are calling it a bubble. He's probably got his own self-interested reason for doing so, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.

More evidence that AI's numbers don't stack up

Premium: The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble Vol. 2
We’re approaching the most ridiculous part of the AI bubble, with each day bringing us a new, disgraceful and weird headline. As I reported earlier in the week, OpenAI spent $12.4 billion on inference between 2024 and September 2025, and its revenue share with Microsoft heavily suggests it
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed AtEdward Zitron

Ed Zitron shows, yet again, that if you look at the numbers (amounts invested, revenue predictions) for AI, they don't stack up. Something's got to give. We recommend you read Ed's blog, Where's Your Ed At, and listen to his podcast, Better Offline. So it's a question of when the bubble will pop, not if.

Open AI revealing how shit they are, again

socialmediavictims.org/press-r…

Open AI are being sued, again, for AI-assisted suicide and emotional manipulation. As usual with big tech they treat this kind of thing as just a cost of doing business, and don't care that people die while Open AI build their empire. Other industries get shut down until their products stop ruining lives, but not AI because.... wait, why do they get away with this?

OpenAI confirms major data breach, exposing names, emails and more
Users are waking up to discover OpenAI leaked their data this morning via a faulty third-party plugin. Here’s what you need to know.
Windows CentralJez Corden

Not content with being callous bastards, their data security is found to be terrible too. You can assume the same with other AI companies, they just haven't been caught yet. Freaked out? Try running AI models on your own computer using LM Studio. The data never leaves your machine.

AI is not even building intelligence

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be
The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake.
The VergeBenjamin Riley

If you are wowed by AI you might give them a pass, and subscribe to the "and it's going to get better" mentality. It is, indeed, improving all the time, but just be aware that the endpoint is not what the tech bros (or even the name AI) sells you.

Pretty much all the AI you're being sold is based on LLMs (Large Language Models) and this article explains how that will not lead to intelligence, let alone superintelligence. Is AI being mis-sold?

More AI environmental problems

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09598

An academic study showing how much energy and water AI needs.

"Results show the most energy-intensive models exceed 29 Wh per long prompt, over 65× the most efficient systems. Even a 0.42 Wh short query, when scaled to 700M queries/day, aggregates to annual electricity comparable to 35,000 U.S. homes, evaporative freshwater equal to the annual drinking needs of 1.2M people, and carbon emissions requiring a Chicago-sized forest to offset."

Every Sora AI video burns 1 Kilowatt hour and emits 466 grams of carbon. And for what, exactly?
The Sora 2 platform alone emits nearly a quarter of the carbon of all Meta/Facebook
reclaimed | systemsAlistair Alexander

A study showing how much energy and water Sora (Open AI's video generation app) uses.

"Every 10 second video takes nearly 1 kilowatt hour - .936 Kwh, to be precise - more than boiling 4 full kettles of water. Speaking of water, each of those videos will also need just over 4 litres of the fresh stuff."

Alistair Alexander (@reclaimedsystems)
A few days ago I posted that creating one 10-second AI video on OpenAI’s Sora app takes about 1 kilowatt hour of energy – about 10 per cent of the daily energy used by an average German household. After I posted I got one question which I’ve heard a lot whenever AI’s energy use is discussed: What about Netflix and online gaming - surely they use a lot of energy too? It’s a good question, and answering it helps to put AI’s energy demand in perspective. So…. Lets start with Netflix - a credible estimate from The Carbon Trust in 2021 said that 1 hour’s streaming took around 18 watt hours. So in that case, making one 10 sec Sora Video takes the same as watching 5 and a half of hours of Netflix. And in case you’re wondering, watching HD or 4K is pretty much the same. Most of that energy by far is from your own device, so a large TV takes a lot more than a smartphone. In the Sora estimate, a device is not included. —————————- Now, online gaming is far harder to estimate, there are no clear numbers, but I found some clues. One analysis looks at hosting Destiny 2, a popular online game, on an AWS “ng4b.16xlarge” instance. That’s a low spec GPU set up, of which Amazon’s AWS cloud has millions (no one would use this for serious AI applications). This instance can host 9 games, each up to 9 players. If it’s half full,that’s 36 players. Overall power for that could be around 372 watts (workings in link below). That’s c. 15 watts per player per hour. If you add a Playstion or PC, that could be 250 watts, so that’s .265 Kwh for every of gaming. So making 1 Sora Video takes 4 hours of gaming. And dozens of hours more with a smartphone. ——————————- But with AI’s energy use, we should take a systemic view; after all, an AI model is a massive industrial system with a truly global impact. We don’t have precise energy stats, but we can use overall cloud hosting costs as a proxy - in fact they are better, because to some extent they will also include the material impact of the hardware. Netflix is widely assumed to be paying $1.3bn a year to Amazon’s AWS cloud service – it was the its biggest customer, up until AI, that is. And gaming is likely to require far less than streaming. An investor made some estimates on OpenAI’s compute costs based on the huge deals it has recently made. This year OpenAI will pay around $6bn on compute (which is likely well below the true cost). But here’s the thing: Netflix and online gaming are currently static - AI costs are spiralling upwards. Next year Open AI will pay $14bn for compute, and in 2030 they’ll pay – wait for it - $295bn. So in 5 years, OpenAI will be spending over 200 times more on compute than Netflix. And that’s just based on the deals OpenAI’s already signed. They have every intention of signing even more. So there you have it; there really is nothing you can do online that comes remotely close to the costs of using AI. Below are my workings (which are very boring - but you’re welcome to look) please read the original here : https://reclaimedsystems.substack.com/p/every-sora-ai-video-burns-1-kilowatt or even better subscribe …. and I’d love to read any comments you have ———————————————— Workings My original post is on the calculations is here – so i won’t repeat that here. Suffice it to say that an average German household used 3383 Kilowatt hours of energy a year. - you can find that here: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Environment/Environmental-Economic-Accounting/private-households/Tables/electricity-consumption-private-households.html#:~:text=Table_title:%20Share%20page%20Table_content:%20header:%20%7C%20Specification,%7C%202015:%204%2C959%20%7C%202021:%205%2C411%20%7C It’s important here to note the difference between watts and watt hours (and their 1000x multiples in kilowatts/hours, megawatt/hours etc). A watt is like the strength of the electricity current at any given time – if it relates to a device, its the peak amount of power it needs. The watt hour gives you an amount for overall energy used. So these units are related, but very different, and differently useful. There was a lot of exaggerated estimates on video streaming a few years ago . Especially one from the French “The Shift” website – it was way off. This Carbon Trust 2021 estimate is considered pretty sound: https://www.carbontrust.com/our-work-and-impact/guides-reports-and-tools/carbon-impact-of-video-streaming Essentially, compute for streaming is very low; it comprises of storage, which takes very little energy, and then file transfer – which, even for large files is also quite efficient. Most of the compute is in showing the image on your screen. With online gaming, there is far less information .- interestingly, most online gaming platforms – epic games and Valve/steam for example, are privately owned – so don’t release sustainability reports – where you might find some info on energy use. I found this article – https://parsec.app/blog/publishers-calculate-your-all-in-costs-to-run-cloud-gaming-infrastructure-on-aws-564559db3828 - which considers hosting Destiny 2 from a business perspective. But it gives me the numbers i need to make some estimates. BTW Destiny 2 is a Battle Royale style shooter (if that means anything to you) – so likely to be a lot more energy intensive than say Minecraft or Roblox – which take up a big chunk of online gaming time. The “ng4b.16xlarge” is a very cheap instance – its a cluster of chips provided as a unit. It comprises of 4 Nvidia T4 GPUs. These chips are the specialist Graphics Processing Units” that were originally designed for games, but are now used for AI, because they are designed to handle many computations concurrently – which is ideal for AI- But these GPUs are old – and are not competitive for an AI use these days. Each T4 requires about 70 watts – and to give some context, a current state of the art AI GPU, say the Nvidia GB300, needs around 1200 watts, and then huge amounts more power on top for cooling. Anyway, our ng4b.16xlarge needs 280 watts for its GPUs – it can also use up to 48 virtual CPUs (like normal PC processors) – but in practice the CPus will need a fraction of the power of the GPUs. There is also air cooling to consider. So I’ve added on a third extra power – its a guess, but probably an OK one. So that gets us to 372 watts. One Destiny 2 instance hosts 9 games – they vary in formats between 3 and 9 players max. As AWS instances are easy to scale up and down – my guess is servers are kept quite full most of the time – so i feel assuming 50% capacity is generous. And of course, with games your console or PC is doing most of the work – as it turns out, nearly 20 times the work. A PlayStation has its own GPU, as does a gaming PC – they vary, but 250 watts for the system seems a good estimate – a really powerful PC GPU will be double that, but they are less common. So that’s how we get to .265 kilowatt hours per hour. So then we get to system level calculations and here there’s a pretty obvious point to make: We are not seeing Google, Microsoft or Amazon building out vast gigawatt data centres for Netflix or Steam. Amazon have just built a 2 GW data centre fro Anthropic, Microsoft have just built a similar one for OpenAI. We do not hear the CEO of Netflix or Steam screaming to anyone who will listen – like Sam Altman - that they are running out of GPUs. So we’re clearly not in the same ball park – when we’re looking at AI compared to any other internet service. The netflix spend is an estimate – which is widely used for example here: https://vocal.media/writers/unveiling-netflix-s-aws-utilization (admitttedly not a great source – but I’ve seen it elsewhere too) OPenAI is anything but open when it comes to its costs – but these are some estimates that cam from an investor based on the whopping $1.4 trillion of compute deals, OpenAI has agreed this year. https://tomtunguz.com/openai-hardware-spending-2025-2035/ And as Altman has said he’s aiming for 250GW of compute by 2033 – he will obviously be planning to be adding multiples of that. This amount of compute capacity is truly hard to......well, compute. please read the original here : https://reclaimedsystems.substack.com/p/every-sora-ai-video-burns-1-kilowatt or even better subscribe …. and I’d love to read any comments you have
SubstackAlistair Alexander

A follow up article from Alistair Alexander comparing AI's energy use to that of watching Netflix. It's an interesting comparison, as you may never have considered that streaming a Netflix show uses energy.

"making one 10 sec Sora Video takes the same as watching 5 and a half of hours of Netflix."

embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/po…
Read all of that and then listen to this podcast for a summary of the facts about AI and the environment. Summary - yes it uses a lot of energy and water, but most of the problem is in the increased demand for fossil fuelled power plants, which in turn use a lot of water. AI and the environment is an interesting topic that is not going to go away.

It's not all bad!

Big tech provide an endless supply of bad news, but there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful - including all the great ethical alternatives there are.

There's some open source competition for M365 and Google Drive/Workspace

Office alternative from Germany by Ionos and Nextcloud is now available
With “Ionos Nextcloud Workspace,” there is now German competition for Microsoft 365. The avoidance of US clouds is intended to strengthen digital sovereignty.
heise onlineFrank Schräer

Whilst you can set this kind of thing up for yourself (self-hosted), that's a faff for most people. So it's great to see services springing up where they've hosted ethical open source alternatives for you.

Ionos Nextcloud Workspace provides an open source and European alternative to Microsoft and Google's document and file ecosystems. It uses Nextcloud and Collabra (which in turn uses LibreOffice for the docs) under the hood. These are all open source software so you can trust them. Ionos' offering also provides an AI chat assistant (think document summaries etc) and a video chat client. And it's all hosted in the EU and GDPR compliant.

For comparison you can also get this kind of open source workspace package from Murena, and Proton have their own proprietary E2EE ecosystem of docs collaboration (that now also includes spreadsheets). Not a complete workspace package, but CryptPad also provide and E2EE docs open source product. The market gets even better in 2026 as Filen and Tuta are working on their versions of encrypted file storage and collaboration too.

Others are calllng for a break from the broligarchy too

Don't worry it's not just you (and us) - others see the problem with big tech too. We list them on our website, but want to call out Peaceful Return here:

A Path to Liberation from the Broligarchy
We don’t have to wait for a perfect plan to start moving NOW.
Peaceful ReturnAmanda Ianthe

Kind of like Gil Duran (The Nerd Reich), Amanda at Peaceful Return calls out big tech's move toward control and authoritarianism. That can be referencing the tech bros themselves or it is directed at those they enable with their surveillance products. Rebel Tech Alliance is all about reducing the Surveillance Economy, so it's great when others articulate the problem so eloquently.

The ethical alternatives are great!

Rebel Tech Alliance exists to educate on the problems caused by big tech's business model, the surveillance economy, but we also signpost you to all the great ethical alternatives. E.g. email, messaging, search, browsers, social media, file storage, maps and so much more!

Start your privacy journey but following the easy steps of the Big Tech Walkout:

Big Tech Walkout - start here

Ethical tech tip of the month

This month try out note-taking app Obsidian, from our list of ethical notes apps. The app itself is not open source, but what we like about it is that it uses a common file format and the files are just stored locally on your device. This means you are not tied in to a proprietary file format (app lock-in) like you are with Microsoft OneNote or Apple Notes. Collaboration is therefore easy as you can simply sync the note files between your device and someone else's (e.g. using SyncThing).

Get involved

NOYB enforces your right to privacy everyday
Noyb - European Center for Digital Rights is a non-profit organization based in Vienna, Austria.
noyb.eu

Our privacy org campaign recommendation this month is NOYB (None Of Your Business). They are lawyers who fight for digital privacy rights, and win. With the GDPR and AI Act under attack, as we mentioned above, now is a great time to support NOYB!

Book recommendation

This month we recommend Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Well written, this shocking expose into the inner workings of Meta is a must read. You will understand how truly callous and greedy they are. It will also make a great stocking-filler!

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Rebel Tech Alliance is a non-profit dedicated to getting as many people off big tech products as possible. Why? Because that reduces the surveillance economy, and reducing that is good for individuals and society.

A Path to Liberation from the Broligarchy

We don't have to wait for a perfect plan to start moving NOW.

^{Amanda Ianthe (Peaceful Return)}