Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg’s AI-powered vision for your future wraps his surveillance machine in the soft glow of digital “friendship.” As Meta goes all-in on artificial intelligence, Zuck is selling AI as your friend, therapist, business agent, and more—while quietly building memory files on users that track sensitive topics like divorce, fertility, and tax evasion. As if to underscore how Meta makes its money (97% from advertising), there is no “private chat” mode in Meta’s AI app. And the social media giant feeds users’ AI chat content into personalized, AI-powered ads elsewhere on its platforms. Meta AI is now part of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, a stand-alone app, and on Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, plus is being used in the algorithm for Threads. So you can expect to see payday loan ads if you confide to your new Meta AI ‘friend’ about a financial crunch.

Perhaps the quintessential new Meta product is its Ray-Ban AI smart glasses, worn by federal immigration agents and harassers alike, enabling surreptitious video and audio recording—with facial recognition in the works. At the University of San Francisco, a man wearing Meta’s glasses approached women and made inappropriate comments, potentially recording them without their consent. Meta’s glasses are supposed to have an LED light that indicates they are recording, but the safety feature is hilariously flimsy—it was rapidly proven it could be disabled with a simple modification. As for the video clips themselves, you guessed it—they’re feeding into Meta AI by default. As of reporting last year by tech site The Verge, the glasses’ image, audio, and interaction data were increasingly used by Meta’s cloud AI systems… the ones capable of designing and delivering you hyper-personal ads.

Meta knew very well it was treading into dangerous territory by adding facial recognition to its smart glasses: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” read the document from Meta’s Reality Labs last year.

Zuckerberg’s track record suggests that any boundaries around Meta’s use of personal data are likely to be discarded if AI-powered profits are possible. Take the “Project Atlas” scandal, begun by Meta in 2016 and uncovered three years later. Facebook was paying teens $20 a month to install a “research app” that vacuumed up their private messages, web searches, and location data—disguised as a third-party beta test. Or “Project Ghostbusters,” launched around the same time, when Zuck personally greenlit a “man-in-the-middle” attack on apps like Snapchat and YouTube to get a peek at their analytics as competition. Even Facebook’s then-head of security thought the snooping plan was unethical.

Meta is no stranger to invasive data practices. The company was found guilty of intentionally recording the sensitive health information of millions of women through the “Flo” menstrual tracking app. Meta exploited a technical loophole to spy on users’ web browsing outside of Facebook. Meta’s chatbot remembers everything, even if you don’t want it to. Meta has even patented an AI product to allow its platforms to keep posting for you after you die.

The bombshell Cambridge Analytica scandal, reported in 2018, revealed that Facebook had no strong audits for its app developers or accountability for data misuse of the kind that allowed 50 million users’ data to be hoovered up. Even rivals could be partners in collusion: in 2018, Facebook and Google signed a secret “Jedi Blue” agreement to rig the online ad market and keep out competitors. In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugan, a former Facebook product manager, leaked the “Facebook papers” showing that the platform refused to take actions to address known harms. One horrific example happened in 2017, when Facebook’s platform was used to incite violence in the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. According to a Reuters special report, Facebook failed to promptly heed numerous warnings from organizations in Myanmar about social media posts fueling attacks on the Rohingya. Soon after, Facebook had to admit: “we have been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate speech on Facebook.”

Meta’s torrid stretch of wasteful spending recently saw it lose $80 billion since 2020 on its venture into the “metaverse.” Hence Zuckerberg’s hard pivot to AI—buoyed by Meta’s unstoppable advertising revenue, it plans to boost its infrastructure spending to $135 billion this year alone, largely in AI, as it pursues “superintelligence.”

Zuckerberg has a well-known fascination with the Roman ruler Augustus, and he gets to play emperor on his massive $300 million Hawaiian compound on the island of Kauaʻi, known as the “Garden Island.” With his wife Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg is now among the largest landowners in the state of Hawaii, snapping up tracts that now encompass more than 2,300 acres, including prime ranchland. The compound, according to Architectural Digest, features “two mansions, a gym, a tennis court, several guesthouses and treehouses, and its own water and energy systems. A tunnel runs beneath the property that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter equipped with blast-resistant doors and an escape hatch.” Not to forget the movie theater, shown off in his Instagram reels. The construction of his compound, and the pace of his land acquisition, has even cut off locals’ access to ancestral burial sites. So much for Facebook’s former mission of “making the world more open and connected”: the reported “very strict” enforcement of NDAs made workers on the compound afraid to share photos.

Disturbing trends underlie the fortune that helped buy Zuckerberg’s toys, like his $300 million superyacht. Recent court filings revealed that sex trafficking was widely tolerated on Meta platform, with a “17x” strike policy in past years for accounts found to be engaged in sexual solicitation. The major lawsuit alleged that Meta was aware of the immense scale of adult strangers contacting minors via its platforms, as well as that its products worsened mental health issues in teens and that abusive content was rarely taken down. Plaintiffs argue that Meta sat on its hands instead of implementing fixes—for example, the company’s growth team found that making all teen accounts private would reduce engagement. Meta was recently caught advertising its Threads app on Instagram with photos of 13-year-old schoolgirls.

Zuck has steered his company into technology for weapons-making, after he famously reversed course on Meta’s moderation policies after Trump’s 2024 election win, such as by ending the fact-checking program. Not long ago, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan, “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered” and would benefit from having more “masculine energy.” In his envisioned world of AI friends and VR goggles, maybe we can expect a personalized Emperor Zuck as combination therapist-and-pitchman.