Privacy

I rarely expect politicians to be competent about tech stuff, but Warren absolutely nails it here! She correctly identifies an actual problem with AI: it gets people to feed private information to a data hungry company.

"Google already possesses unprecedented troves of user search and AI chat data, and such intimate data could be merged with both user data from other Google services and third-party retailer data to drive consumer behavior in an exploitative manner,” Warren writes, while also questioning whether Google will prioritize shopping results from retail partners over competitors.

No AI apocalypse nonsense, despite the number of well-funded nonprofits that are pushing that narrative. Just the same cold hard facts that were true before the LLM craze kicked off.

Good. Warren calling this out is overdue. Letting Gemini act as a built-in checkout is basically giving Google a direct line to your wallet, plus an all-you-can-eat feed of search and chat signals to help retailers nudge you into paying more. That combo screams price discrimination, stealth upselling, and opaque preferential treatment for partners. I do not trust Google to police itself here.

Warren's questions are the bare minimum. Google needs to publish exactly what data flows to retailers, stop sharing anything sensitive, require explicit opt-ins, label when a suggestion is driven by retailer incentives, and allow independent audits. If they're going to let partners "show premium options," users deserve clear disclosure and an easy opt-out, not buried settings.

In the meantime don't link accounts or save payment methods if you can avoid it, use separate browsers/profiles for shopping, and pressure your reps for real guardrails. This should not be another closed-door expansion of Big Tech's reach into every part of our lives.