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Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media, which resulted in a $140 million verdict and Gawker's bankruptcy in 2016. Thiel funded the case in retaliation for Gawker's 2007 article outing him as gay. He spent approximately $10 million funding various lawsuits against Gawker before the Hogan verdict.

Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old college student, died after receiving unproven cancer treatment found through Baidu's promoted search results. Investigation revealed Baidu accepted payments from unlicensed medical providers for top search placement.

In April 2016, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman announced the company was canceling its planned expansion in Charlotte, North Carolina, which would have created 400 jobs. The decision was made in protest of HB2, the 'bathroom bill' requiring people to use public facilities matching their birth gender. Schulman said the law 'perpetuates discrimination and violates the values and principles at the core of PayPal's mission.'

Tencent founder Pony Ma personally pledged 100 million Tencent shares (worth over $2 billion at the time) to charitable causes in China, one of the largest personal philanthropic pledges by a Chinese entrepreneur, funding medical research, education innovation, and environmental initiatives. Distinct from Tencent's corporate CSR spending, this was a personal transfer of Ma's own equity holdings.

On March 23, 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot designed to engage with users and learn from conversational interactions. Within 16 hours, Tay began posting racist, misogynistic, and inflammatory content including Holocaust denial, racist slurs, and misogynistic statements after being exposed to coordinated trolling and toxic inputs. Microsoft shut down Tay within 24 hours and issued an apology. The incident became a landmark case study in AI safety, adversarial manipulation, and the importance of robust content filters for public-facing AI systems.

In 2016, the EFF filed an amicus brief supporting Apple in its legal battle with the FBI over the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. The FBI sought a court order to compel Apple to create a tool to bypass iPhone encryption. EFF argued this would set a dangerous precedent for government-mandated backdoors in consumer technology.

In 2016, Chuck Robbins personally donated $8,100 to Democratic candidates, including California Attorney General Kamala Harris and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. He described himself as a 'centrist Republican' but said Hillary Clinton was a 'great candidate' and declined to support Trump.

Pierre Omidyar donated $100,000 to NeverTrump PAC in March 2016, stating on Twitter: 'I think Trumpism is dangerous. So I'm personally supporting @NeverTrumpPAC, a rare political contribution during extreme times.' He also signed an open letter from tech entrepreneurs accusing Trump of campaigning 'on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people.'

Launched in 2016, Stripe Atlas allows entrepreneurs worldwide to incorporate a U.S. business entity with a bank account and payment processing. By 2021, Atlas had helped launch over 20,000 businesses across 162 countries, generating $3 billion in revenue and projected to create 219,000 jobs. The program specifically targets founders in markets without strong banking infrastructure, reducing incorporation from months to days at a fraction of previous costs.

The FTC charged ASUS with failing to secure its routers, leaving hundreds of thousands of consumers' home networks vulnerable. ASUS routers had critical security flaws including default login credentials and a cloud service (AiCloud) that stored login credentials in plain text. ASUS agreed to a 20-year consent decree requiring independent security audits.

In February 2016, Tim Cook publicly refused a court order to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, publishing an open letter arguing that creating a backdoor would set a dangerous precedent and undermine security for all iPhone users. Cook framed encryption as essential to civil liberties. The FBI ultimately unlocked the phone with a third party's help and withdrew the case.

In February 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly refused an FBI court order to create software that would bypass iPhone encryption security to unlock a device recovered from the San Bernardino shooting. Cook argued that 'building a backdoor to the iPhone' would be 'too dangerous to create' and warned there was 'no way to guarantee' limited use. Apple filed a motion to vacate the court order, arguing it was unconstitutional. The case became moot when the FBI obtained a $1+ million tool from Israeli company Azimuth Security to crack the iPhone independently. Cook's public stance established Apple as a defender of encryption rights.

Theranos devices produced unreliable results for patients at Walgreens locations, including false positives and negatives for serious conditions. The company voided or corrected tens of thousands of test results in 2014-2015. CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) found the company's lab practices posed 'immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety' and banned Holmes from operating a lab for two years.

Theranos equipment provided inaccurate results for an estimated one out of ten tests, causing thousands of negative patient experiences. Patients were misdiagnosed with conditions including diabetes, cancer, and heart attacks. A pregnant woman was falsely told she was miscarrying; another received incorrect results about a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. In January 2016, CMS declared the Theranos Newark lab posed 'immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety' due to dangerously unreliable warfarin dosage testing. CMS revoked Theranos's CLIA certificate in July 2016 and the company was forced to invalidate two years of blood test results for tens of thousands of patients.

In January 2016, the Linux Foundation changed its bylaws to eliminate voting rights for individual members and made at-large members of its board of directors optional. Developer Matthew Garrett criticized the changes, speculating they were designed to prevent Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Conservancy from running for the board due to her support of the GPL license. Critics argued the changes concentrated governance power among corporate platinum members paying $500K/year while excluding community voices from decision-making.

In 2016, Fairphone became the first electronics manufacturer to source Fairtrade gold for use in its smartphones. The company worked directly with artisanal mining cooperatives to ensure fair wages and safe working conditions, establishing a new standard for ethical mineral sourcing in consumer electronics.

A 2016 Harvard Business School field study found that guests with 'distinctly African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names.' The #AirbnbWhileBlack movement documented widespread discrimination. Multiple lawsuits followed, including from Gregory Selden and three African American women in Oregon. Airbnb 2022 data showed the gap persisted: White users had 94.1% booking success while Black users had 91.4%. CEO Brian Chesky apologized and implemented Project Lighthouse and anti-discrimination measures, removing 1.3 million users who refused to sign a non-discrimination pledge.

On December 1, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced in an open letter to their newborn daughter Max that they would give away 99% of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The pledge was valued at approximately $45 billion at the time. CZI focuses on personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities. As of 2025, CZI has committed over $7.22 billion in grants. However, CZI is structured as an LLC rather than a charitable foundation, giving it more flexibility but also less regulatory oversight.

In 2015, Bill Gates founded Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization investing in clean energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By 2025, Gates had invested approximately $4 billion of his own money into climate efforts through the initiative, with over $3.5 billion in committed capital across roughly 100 companies developing energy storage, sustainable aviation, and carbon capture technologies.

In 2015, it was revealed that Carnegie Mellon University researchers had been paid at least $1 million by the FBI to develop and execute an attack on the Tor network to deanonymize users. The Tor Project disclosed that CMU researchers had exploited a vulnerability in 2014 to identify users. This raised major ethical questions about academic institutions attacking privacy infrastructure.

In 2015, DeepMind signed a deal with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust gaining access to 1.6 million identifiable patient records including HIV status, drug overdoses, and abortions, ostensibly for a kidney injury detection app called Streams. The ICO ruled in 2017 that the Royal Free failed to comply with the Data Protection Act. No privacy impact assessment was conducted, and the scope of data access far exceeded what was needed for clinical safety testing.

Theranos, led by Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, conducted an elaborate years-long fraud claiming its proprietary Edison blood analyzer could perform comprehensive blood tests from tiny finger-prick samples. In reality, the device could only perform a small number of tests, and the company secretly ran the vast majority of patient tests on modified third-party commercial analyzers. Theranos falsely claimed $100 million in 2014 revenue when actual revenue was approximately $100,000, and falsely stated its technology was deployed by the US military in Afghanistan. The fraud raised over $700 million from investors.

Theranos exhibited comprehensive corporate governance failures. Holmes maintained complete control of the board through super-majority voting shares and did not tolerate dissent. The board had no system to monitor regulatory compliance. The laboratory operated for months without a qualified director, violating licensure requirements; when one was appointed, it was a dermatologist unqualified to run a clinical lab who served as an absent figurehead. Unlicensed personnel were allowed to conduct quality control procedures and process patient samples. The company concealed shortcomings through elaborate deception including locking laboratory doors during regulatory inspections and selectively reporting results to evade oversight from CMS.

LinkedIn settled a class action lawsuit (Perkins v. LinkedIn Corp.) for $13 million in 2015. The platform had harvested new users' email contacts through deceptive interface design and sent repeated invitation emails to their contacts without clear consent. LinkedIn sent up to two follow-up reminder emails per contact, making it appear the user was personally endorsing LinkedIn. The 'Skip this step' option was deliberately obscured with a tiny link placed outside the main UI box. The settlement covered LinkedIn members who used the 'Add Connections' feature between September 2011 and October 2014.

Beginning in 2015, LeanIn.Org partnered with McKinsey & Company to produce the annual Women in the Workplace study, the largest comprehensive study of the state of women in corporate America. The inaugural study examined more than 118 companies and 30,000 employees. The study has become a key reference for corporate gender equity policy, documenting persistent gaps in representation, pay, and promotion for women, particularly women of color, and has been published annually since 2015.

Jimmy Wales served as committee chair for Democrat Lawrence Lessig's 2016 presidential campaign, supporting Lessig's platform focused on campaign finance reform and fighting corruption in politics.

Sheryl Sandberg and her late husband Dave Goldberg signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. Through the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation, she has donated over $286 million to causes including women's empowerment, grief resilience, education, and food security. Major gifts include approximately $200 million in SurveyMonkey stock donated to the foundation in 2018, $98 million in Facebook stock to her donor-advised fund in 2017 for disadvantaged women and girls, and $50 million to her donor-advised fund for charitable purposes.

Multiple consumer reviews and tech benchmarks found Kingston USB 3.0 DataTraveler drives delivering sequential read speeds of approximately 30 MB/s, significantly below the advertised 130 MB/s. While Kingston's fine print noted speeds could vary, the gap between marketing claims and real-world performance drew widespread consumer criticism. No formal regulatory action was taken.

In 2015, Brendan Eich co-founded Brave Software to build a privacy-focused web browser that blocks third-party ads and trackers by default. Brave reached 100 million users by October 2025. Eich also advocated for GDPR-style privacy regulation in the US, writing to the US Senate in 2018 that GDPR was 'a great leveller.'

In May-June 2015, under interim CEO Ellen Pao, Reddit enacted its first official anti-harassment policy and became the first major social media platform to ban revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos. Reddit also shut down 5 subreddits that promoted harassment based on race, weight, and sexual orientation. Pao subsequently faced a massive harassment campaign and a petition with over 200,000 signatures calling for her removal, and resigned on July 10, 2015.