Notable links: October 30, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

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ChatGPT Is Building Detailed Psychological Profiles of Its Users

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that chatbots like ChatGPT are profiling their users. Still, there are some surprising numbers here:

“A staggering 96 percent of memories were created unilaterally by the chatbot, according to the study, meaning that the users had little overt control over the data points that ChatGPT logged as their interactions wore on. Stored memories were also deeply revealing about users. About 28 percent of the memories examined contained personal data as defined by Europe’s strict General Data Protection Regulation standards, and 52 percent contained rich “psychological insights” about users.”

I think back to Gina Chua and Adiel Kaplan’s three-layer cake analogy for the AI stack. In their analysis, the consumption layer profiles the user; this new report makes clear how deep that profiling goes.

As I said in my commentary then:

“Profile data is accumulated, private, and usually non-portable. The consumption layer also represents the greatest risk to creators from platform business decisions, both in terms of the business models of those platforms and which creators they choose to feature. Open portability standards and protocols — combined with full user control of their data — can scale, create useful competition, and empower users in the process.”

Nothing here dissuades me from that view. To be as useful as possible, AI tools need to dig into our most personal information, make inferences about who we are and what’s interesting to us, and maintain highly personal profiles. Our AI agents are not some kind of trusted friend: they are products owned by a third party that needs to justify a trillion dollar valuation and may not have our best interests at heart. All the major vendors provide services used by the military and law enforcement. What happens if one of those agencies wants to get hold of that profile information? These companies simply cannot be trusted with our most private information, and should not have access to it.

But, of course, legislators have also been negotiated into a position of alignment with AI accelerationism. We need to gather all of this personal information about individuals in a supposed democracy, they argue, because otherwise China will win! These concerns seem to trump the fact that privacy is considered a fundamental human right, for very solid and defensible reasons: it makes dissent, organizing, a free press, and a well-lived life possible.

I am not arguing that there are not legitimate uses for AI or that the technology is not transformative. But there should not be an argument that we should let go of our core human values or the fundamental protections needed to maintain a robust democracy — of which privacy is one — because this tech is cool and we need it to grow really fast and by the way it’s also now propping up our economy. Trading privacy for growth is not a smart long-term strategy: it will bite us.

As individuals, we can protect ourselves by using different tools. But privacy is a group inoculation. If the chatbot is profiling its users, I suspect it’s also profiling the people its users are talking about. We need to demand better behavior from our vendors while taking steps to also demand it from our friends.

Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning

Proton, based in Switzerland, offers encrypted email, file storage, calendars, and more. It markets itself as a privacy-oriented alternative to Google Workspace, based in a neutral territory that is generally outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. I’ve generally been glad that it exists — but stories like this give me pause.

404 Media reports:

“Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public’s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.”

CEO Andy Yen comes across as a bully who is pushing his staff to adopt AI as quickly as possible in order to maximize Proton’s revenue because its ARR was slipping. That’s not an approach you would hope a security-oriented, encryption-based organization would take.

This follows an unwise decision to praise a Trump nomination at the beginning of his second administration. Yen said it wasn’t intended as a political statement. I don’t think that he’s necessarily a Trump supporter, but it was part of a series of incidents that follow a troubling pattern: an action that undercuts Proton’s brand and stated values, followed by defensive excuses. It suspended journalist accounts at the request of a cybersecurity agency and then called the outcry “blown out of proportion”; it handed over the recovery email address for a Catalan activist, an iCloud address that led to Apple providing their full personal information, and said its hands were tied.

And then there’s this:

“Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.””

Services like Proton need to exist. Privacy is an important prerequisite to democracy: it protects journalists, activists, vulnerable communities, and everyone’s ability to live well and with dignity. But it’s a serious business. A move-fast culture of bullying that apes startup-land and calls caution “loser thinking” does not instill confidence, and implies it’s only a matter of time before something much worse happens.

'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear

This is something we should all be excited about:

“The world's solar power is crossing a threshold. A decade ago, it barely registered on a global scale, providing just 1% of the world's power. In 2026, it will almost certainly increase to 10% of power, and overtake nuclear, a mainstay of electricity since the late 1970s.”

Solar energy is abundant, and the cheaper and more efficient it gets, the more electricity there will be to power anything we want. On that level alone, we should be cheering for its success.

But the other property solar energy has is relative decentralization. While not anyone can build a solar panel, anyone can plug one in — and, obviously, the sun belongs to everyone. It represents real energy independence, not just internationally, but from large energy companies (at every level from fossil fuel multinationals to utilities) that have enjoyed enormous influence for over a century.

Or it should. Energy companies have sponsored laws, rules, and regulations in the US and elsewhere that have made it harder for people to plug solar in. Those should be defeated, and our electrical systems should be upgraded to take decentralized solar into account.

But the power dynamics don’t end at the influence of energy companies: a large share of the polysilicon in solar panels is produced in Xinjiang, where there have been well-documented allegations of forced labor of Uyghurs and other minority groups. Batteries often contain cobalt, which is dug from the Democratic Republic of Congo, often by hand and often by children and slaves. They also contain lithium, drawn from brine operations that drain water from Indigenous communities in the Andes.

The next frontier needs to be freeing these technologies from harm — and there’s a long way to go. There’s some promise from tech like nickel-and-cobalt-free LFP batteries, more ethical lithium extraction, and recycling, but these need further investment, and the underlying issues require sustained attention. There is an energy revolution, but everyone should see the benefits.

And more:

Here are some of the articles I didn't get a chance to go into in depth this week.

It’s now official, tech is the new tobacco

Following in the footsteps of tobacco and the fossil fuels industry, tech companies have been sponsoring academic research that conveniently produces findings in their favor, while working hard to discredit research that might undermine their businesses. Internal documents from Meta, made public through an ongoing lawsuit against them, confirm it.

The Subculture Flywheel

In common with all of Corey Ford's guides, this is an easy-to-follow way to build culture and practices in your team that further the values and outcomes you want to see. It's simple, human, and effective.

Silicon Valley wants you to invest in miracles

Anthropic's S-1 filing is bananas. It's openly cult-like: it wants you to "be part of something bigger" that, by the way, might destroy humanity. As one Wall Street leader put it to me this week: either they're lying about the impact and they shouldn't be allowed to go public, or they're telling the truth about the impact and they shouldn't be allowed to go public. Also, they acknowledge that they might never be a viable business. Fun times.