A very foreign foreign policy?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-has-regularly-held-secret-talks-with-vladimir-putin/

Musk Has Regularly Held Secret Talks With Vladimir Putin

… The report is alarming on several fronts, as Musk has taken on an outsized role in former President Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election. He holds top-secret clearance as the head of SpaceX, which launches satellites that are vital to U.S. national security, and he owns X, a social media platform with 600 million active users.

… It’s not clear from the report whether Musk was already talking to the Russians when he was in the process of buying X, formerly Twitter, in the fall of 2022. But since the contact started, he’s begun criticizing U.S. military aid in Ukraine, allowed Russian disinformation to run rampant on X and become Trump’s second-biggest campaign booster.

Too expensive? (LinkedIn’s 2024 revenue was $16.37 billion)

https://thehackernews.com/2024/10/irish-watchdog-imposes-record-310.html

Irish Watchdog Imposes Record €310 Million Fine on LinkedIn for GDPR Violations

The Irish data protection watchdog on Thursday fined LinkedIn €310 million ($335 million) for violating the privacy of its users by conducting behavioral analyses of personal data for targeted advertising.

"The inquiry examined LinkedIn's processing of personal data for the purposes of behavioral analysis and targeted advertising of users who have created LinkedIn profiles (members)," the Data Protection Commission (DPC) said. "The decision [...] concerns the lawfulness, fairness, and transparency of this processing."

Perspective. (On the other hand, would it be as good an investment as Standard Oil?)

https://thenextweb.com/news/how-online-world-change-big-tech-companies-google-forced-break-u

How your online world could change if big tech companies like Google are forced to break up

The downsides of a big tech break up

The US Department of Justice may be on the verge of seeking a break-up of Google in a bid to make it less dominant. If the government goes ahead and is successful in the courts, it could mean the company being split into separate entities – a search engine, an advertising company, a video website, a mapping app – which would not be allowed to share data with each other.

While this is still a distant prospect, it is being considered in the wake of a series of rulings in the US and the EU which suggest that regulators are becoming increasingly frustrated by the power of big tech. That power tends to be highly concentrated, whether it’s Google’s monopoly as a search engine, Meta’s data gathering from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, or by small businesses becoming dependent on Amazon.