In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology. It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone’s data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever.
Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He’s the founder and CEO of Proton, one of the world’s most popular encryption-focused tech companies. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product—whether people want it or not—is driving new users in droves to Proton’s products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet.
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