Author:  L. Marquez Affiliation:  Independent Researcher Abstract WhatsApp has long been positioned as the “private” messaging alternative in a platform economy dominated by advertising and data extraction. That positioning rests on a core technical and symbolic promise: end-to-end encryption (E2EE). In late January 2026, a class-action lawsuit and related reporting reignited a global controversy by alleging that WhatsApp’s privacy assurances are misleading and that internal

Author:  L.Hartwell Affiliation:  Independent Researcher People often talked about AI in 2025 as a series of "fights." These included fights over rules, lawsuits over data and copyright, geopolitical disputes over chips and cloud capacity, and fierce competition among companies to release models that could do more and more. This article contends that numerous conflicts did not "conclude" in 2025 but rather transformed—from vociferous, headline-oriented confrontations to more