Edward Snowden disclosed in 2013 that the US government's Upstream program was collecting data people reading Wikipedia articles. This revelation had significant impact the self-censorship of the readers, as shown by the fact that there were substantially fewer views for articles related to terrorism and security.[12] The court case Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA has since followed.

Google's move to release location data highlights concerns around privacy. According to Mark Skilton, director of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Network at Warwick Business School in the UK, Google's decision to use public data "raises a key conflict between the need for mass surveillance to effectively combat the spread of coronavirus and the issues of confidentiality, privacy, and consent concerning any data obtained."

the absence of a social contract

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.