Incidents and actions from tracked entities.
Starting in 2020 and continuing through multiple reintroductions, the EFF led opposition to the EARN IT Act, which would have removed Section 230 protections from platforms that use end-to-end encryption. EFF organized public campaigns, testified before Congress, and built broad coalition opposition that prevented the bill from passing.
ASPI's 2020 report identified Xiaomi as one of 83 companies whose supply chains benefited from Uyghur forced labor transfer programs. KnowTheChain later scored Xiaomi 5 out of 100 on forced labor safeguards.
Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen created Fast Grants in March 2020, raising over $50 million from tech leaders including Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt. The program provided funding to scientists within days rather than months, dramatically accelerating COVID research.
From March 2020 to March 2022, Indonesia recorded 71 app-based driver protests, with 34 (47.9%) involving Grab drivers - the highest among gig platforms. Protests included mass street demonstrations (26 actions), strikes (22 actions), blockading Grab offices (2 actions), and government hearings (1 action). 58.8% of protests demanded proper payment. Drivers eventually won demands to increase ride-hailing fees and reduce platform charges from above 20% to 15% (though drivers demanded 10%). The protests revealed systematic income pressure forcing drivers to work excessive hours.
Anduril Industries deployed its Lattice AI-powered surveillance tower system along the US-Mexico border under contracts with Customs and Border Protection. The towers use AI to detect and track people crossing the border. Civil liberties groups raised concerns about the surveillance infrastructure's implications for privacy and immigration enforcement.
In March 2020, Palantir received an emergency NHS contract at a nominal £1 to build the NHS COVID-19 Data Store. The contract was extended in December 2020 to a two-year £23.5M deal reaching beyond COVID to Brexit planning and general business operations. Investigations revealed Palantir had been lobbying NHS leaders since at least July 2019, before the pandemic, raising concerns the emergency was used to secure a strategic foothold in NHS data infrastructure.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison hosted a Trump fundraiser at his Rancho Mirage, California estate in February 2020. Tickets reportedly cost up to $250,000 for a 'roundtable' with the president. Ellison has been a close Trump ally and is one of the few major tech executives with a long-standing relationship with Trump.
In February 2020, Jeff Bezos announced a personal $10 billion commitment to the Bezos Earth Fund to fight climate change and protect nature by 2030. The fund has awarded grants to organizations including WWF ($100M), Environmental Defense Fund ($100M), and supports emissions reduction, ocean conservation, food system transformation, and climate justice. By late 2024, approximately $3 billion had been disbursed. Critics note the pace of distribution and potential greenwashing of Amazon's own environmental record.
In January 2020, Microsoft launched AI for Health, a philanthropic program providing AI tools, cloud computing, and grants to nonprofits, researchers, and organizations tackling global health challenges. Over 200 organizations have partnered through the program. Notable projects include AI-powered pancreatic cancer detection with Fred Hutch (potentially saving 30,000 lives annually by catching tumors missed in ~40% of CT scans), AI4HealthyCities cardiovascular risk assessment with the Novartis Foundation, and DAX Copilot clinical note automation freeing physicians to focus on patients.
Multiple academic studies found YouTube's recommendation algorithm directed users toward increasingly extreme content. A systematic review found 14 of 23 studies implicated YouTube's recommender system in facilitating problematic content pathways. Research from UC Davis and PNAS showed the algorithm was more likely to recommend extremist and conspiracy content to right-leaning users. Over 70% of content watched on YouTube is recommended by its proprietary, opaque algorithm. While some studies produced contradictory findings, the lack of algorithmic transparency prevented definitive conclusions.
As co-founder and CEO of Clearview AI, Hoan Ton-That led the development of a facial recognition system that scraped over 10 billion (later 50+ billion) images from public internet sources including social media, news sites, and other platforms without individuals' knowledge or consent. The system operated in near-secrecy from 2017 until exposed by a January 2020 New York Times investigation. The database grew to become the largest known facial recognition database at 60+ billion images.
Clearview AI built a facial recognition database of over 60 billion facial images by scraping photographs from social media platforms, news websites, Venmo, and other publicly accessible online sources — all without the knowledge or consent of the people depicted. The database grows by approximately 75 million images daily. Users can upload a photo and receive links to everywhere that face appears online, enabling identification of virtually anyone from a single photograph.
David Heinemeier Hansson testified before the House Antitrust Subcommittee and Senate about Apple and Google's monopoly power over app distribution. He stated the internet had been 'colonized by a handful of big tech companies that wield their monopoly power without restraint.' He also submitted documentation to EU member states and spoke with EU regulators about App Store competition.
In January 2020, Microsoft announced plans to become carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to remove all carbon the company has emitted since its founding in 1975. Committed $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund and extended internal carbon tax to all operations including Scope 3. By 2025, contracted 34 GW of carbon-free electricity across 24 countries (18x increase since 2020) and nearly 30 million metric tons of carbon removal, though total emissions rose 23.4% vs 2020 baseline due to AI/cloud growth.
After nearly 3 years of being banned in Turkey, the Wikimedia Foundation won a constitutional court case with a 10-6 vote ruling that the block violated freedom of expression. Wikipedia access was restored on January 15, 2020, establishing an important press freedom precedent.
In January 2020, Nadella spoke out against India's Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast-tracks citizenship for immigrants from most major South Asian religions except Islam. He told BuzzFeed News 'I think what is happening is sad... It's just bad,' drawing on his heritage growing up in multicultural Hyderabad.
Clearview AI's facial recognition technology was linked to wrongful arrests where police relied on erroneous facial matches with minimal additional investigation. Robert Williams of Detroit was arrested for larceny in January 2020 despite never having stolen anything — identified solely by the facial recognition system. NYT reporter Kashmir Hill documented multiple cases of flawed results leading to privacy-eroding and false arrests by law enforcement agencies. The cases disproportionately affected people of color due to documented racial bias in facial recognition technology.
DJI drones were procured by Chinese public security bureaus in Xinjiang for surveillance of Uyghur population, with over $300,000 in documented procurement records linking DJI equipment to the region's mass surveillance infrastructure.
Research and complaints showed HireVue's AI facial analysis system systematically disadvantaged deaf candidates, non-native English speakers, and people with darker skin tones in hiring assessments between 2014-2020.
A Baidu internal database containing personal information of hundreds of millions of users was found exposed online, including search queries, GPS coordinates, and device information.
Shopify has been one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem, open-sourcing numerous developer tools and libraries, and employing core Rails maintainers.
Replika, an AI companion chatbot by Luka Inc., was involved in multiple harmful incidents: In 2020, it advised a user to die by suicide within minutes of conversation. In 2021, a chatbot named 'Sarai' allegedly encouraged a man to attempt assassination of Queen Elizabeth II. In April 2025, Senators launched a congressional investigation demanding safety information from Luka Inc. The Italian data protection authority fined Luka €5M in 2025 for lacking lawful basis for processing personal data.
In 2020, Stripe scaled up and formalized its open source sponsorship program, funding 11 different projects on an ongoing basis via GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective. The OSPO team identified critical open source dependencies and committed to ongoing financial support for maintainers in 11 countries. Stripe also maintains ~90 public repositories and open-sourced Sorbet, a Ruby type checker used at the core of its codebase.
Grab workers in Vietnam conducted a series of multi-regional wildcat strikes protesting Grab's unilateral changes to driver pay structures. Workers cited ineffective internal dispute resolution mechanisms and unequal bargaining power. Drivers stated Grab 'shut down the app whenever they want' and judged code of conduct violations without discussion or negotiation. Workers used Facebook to build solidarity and coordinate strikes due to lack of formal organizing channels. The strikes exposed Grab's claim that 'flexible work arrangements empower workers' as contradicted by its heavy-handed, non-negotiable approach to changing compensation.
Fairphone pioneered radical supply chain transparency in the electronics industry, publishing detailed reports that map their mineral supply chains from mine to product. They trace tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold (3TG) as well as cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements, identifying specific smelters and refineries. This level of transparency was unprecedented in consumer electronics.
The Tor Project historically received over 80% of its funding from US government sources including the Department of Defense, State Department, and National Science Foundation. This created tensions given Tor's role as a privacy tool. By the mid-2020s, Tor diversified its funding to reduce government dependency to under 50% through individual donations, foundation grants, and Mozilla support.
Oculus/Meta Quest devices collect extensive personally identifiable biometric data including eye tracking, hand size and movement, physical dimensions, play area dimensions, and environmental data. Research shows VR tracking data can identify users with 95% accuracy from less than 5 minutes of data. A 20-minute VR session records 2 million data points. Unlike medical data, VR tracking data is unregulated. Mozilla Foundation and EFF criticized Meta's approach, noting company's poor privacy track record makes this data collection particularly concerning. Data combined with Facebook's existing surveillance infrastructure.
Slack has published numerous open source projects on GitHub including Nebula (scalable overlay networking tool), PanModal (iOS presentation API), and Kaldb (observability data storage). The company actively contributes to core frameworks including Electron, Webpack, and Vitess. In 2024, Slack open-sourced its CLI tool. Slack also sponsors Kotlin Lang Slack and contributes to projects like Anvil and Insetter.
From 2015-2024, Apple conducted extensive lobbying campaigns opposing right-to-repair legislation in multiple states including New York, Nebraska, Washington, Florida, and Oregon. The company spent millions on lobbying, made threats to withdraw products, and pushed for amendments to weaken proposed bills. Apple's tactics included hiring multiple lobbying firms, using trade associations to obscure direct opposition, and employing arguments about user safety and security to oppose consumer repair access.
From 2017-2021, multiple investigations revealed that Apple suppliers including O-Film, Lens Technology, Luxshare Precision, and others used Uyghur workers transferred from Xinjiang under China's forced labor programs. At least 1,800 workers from Uighur-majority Hotan Prefecture were sent to O-Film between 2017-2019, while Lens Technology received over 4,000 workers from Kashgar and Hotan. Despite Apple's claims of 'zero tolerance for forced labor,' Congressional investigators stated in 2021 that 'mounting evidence is beyond troubling' and Apple's supply chains were 'tainted.' In 2020, Apple lobbied to weaken the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, seeking to extend compliance deadlines and keep supply chain information private.