The "Friend Finding" Feature No One Asked For: OpenAI’s Pivot to Surveillance Capitalism

It arrived in my inbox at 8:00 PM on Valentine's Day—a cynical timeslot often reserved for news companies hoping you won't notice. The subject line was innocuous enough: "Updates to OpenAI's Privacy Policy".

It framed the changes as a benevolent exercise in transparency, claiming the update was designed to "give you more information about what data we collect" and "how you can control it". It highlighted three seemingly helpful pillars: a new feature for "Finding friends on OpenAI services" , "Age prediction" mechanisms to provide "safeguards for teens" , and details on "New tools" like the Atlas browser and Sora 2.

On the surface, it reads like a standard housekeeping update for a scaling tech company. But if you ignore the friendly summary and conduct a forensic line-by-line comparison of the new 28-page policy against the archived 2024 version, a different story emerges.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content

Subscribe now