After more than a year in court, city officials were forced to tell their own citizens how much public water Google was using. “But most troubling in the affair,” Binoy Kampmark wrote for Scoop in 2023, “leaving aside the lamentable conduct of public officials, was the willingness of a private company to bankroll a state entity in preventing access to public records.” This is the type of surveillance capitalism top secret future that Big Tech is implementing for all of us.