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One of the side effects of running SK NEXUS is that I spend a lot of time keeping up with what’s happening across the technology world.
Tech companies launch new products, buy other companies, and expand into new industries. Then there are the topics like surveillance, data collection, digital identity systems, and the growing relationship between governments and technology companies.
Over the past couple of months, I found myself reading article after article trying to understand how all of these pieces fit together. Though, eventually, I realized they were all pointing toward the same story.
Many of us think surveillance is something only governments do, but that’s only one side of the coin.
Surveillance technology infrastructure is sometimes developed by private sector companies, implemented by the government, and fueled by data that billions of people generate every single day.
The items such as phones, smartwatches, and others were not designed for surveillance purposes only. The main idea of creating such devices is convenience, however, it provides a tremendous opportunity to track human behavior in real time.
And that’s really what this article is about; aka understanding how technology companies and governments gradually converged, how the infrastructure surrounding us evolved, and why surveillance today looks very different from what it did even twenty years ago.
The Foundations of Modern Surveillance
The modern surveillance ecosystem began with the internet, not with facial recognition systems, or government monitoring programs.
The web, which started becoming mainstream during the 1990s, was a much simpler place. Back then, people viewed the internet as a tool they occasionally used rather than a system woven into every aspect of daily life.
That started changing during the early 2000s when many new technologies, platforms and eventually smartphones became central to how people communicated and consumed information, due to which companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon started building ecosystems that encouraged users to spend more time inside their services.
This gave rise to what author Shoshana Zuboff later described as surveillance capitalism. The idea that companies collect large amounts of behavioral data and use those insights to predict future actions, improve products, personalize experiences, and generate advertising revenue.
This was made possible through the introduction of the smartphone which travels everywhere with its user. It is worth noting that smartphones feature numerous pre-installed services like GPS sensors, cameras, cloud computing and many others.
This allows firms to develop user profiles on a scale that would have never been possible before.
The wider public got a glimpse into the implications of this model in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified documents detailing surveillance programs such as PRISM. The disclosures revealed how intelligence agencies were able to obtain access to large amounts of digital information, which triggered a global debate around government surveillance, and corporate data collection.
The Convergence of Big Tech and Government
Historically, governments would construct most of the capability needed for their intelligence and surveillance work internally. If governments needed any information, they would depend upon intelligence organizations and huge-scale investigations. Information gathering would be costly and often require a lot of manpower.
In today’s world, technology companies gather an incredible amount of information just by delivering their services. Search engines deal with billions of searches. Smartphones are constantly recording location data. Social media sites record interactions and relationships.
All of this information is gathered not because of intelligence needs. Nevertheless, quite a bit of it may carry intelligence significance.
Thus, governments do not have to construct all capabilities from scratch anymore. They become increasingly dependent on various technology vendors, who already have all the necessary skills to handle the information they have.
One of the places where this dependency shows up quite visibly is cloud computing.
Over the last decade, governments have moved large portions of their digital infrastructure onto commercial cloud platforms. According to Amazon, AWS GovCloud was specifically developed to help public-sector organizations handle sensitive workloads while meeting government compliance requirements.
Microsoft, likewise, offers a similar platform called Azure Government, which the company describes as a dedicated cloud environment designed for U.S. government agencies and their partners.
Another example of commercialization in information security is artificial intelligence.
Training sophisticated AI systems involves massive computing resources as well as access to the necessary hardware facilities. Governments are now increasingly choosing to collaborate with companies that already have these resources.
A recent example came in May 2026 when the Pentagon (the U.S. Department of Defense) announced agreements with eight major AI and technology companies. These companies included OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, NVIDIA, SpaceX, and Reflection AI. According to the Pentagon, the goal was to accelerate the military’s transition toward becoming an “AI-first fighting force” and improve decision-making capabilities across multiple domains of warfare.
The announcement illustrates how concentrated much of the world’s advanced AI infrastructure has become. Many of the most capable models, cloud platforms, and computing resources are owned by a relatively small number of private companies.
The Pentagon’s announcement also came shortly after a public dispute with Anthropic. As per the reporting from The Guardian, Anthropic declined to allow unrestricted military use of its technology, while the other participating companies agreed to permit their systems to be used for “any lawful purpose” under the Department of Defense’s framework.
One of the key aspects that should be noted, none of what we’ve discussed above is an indication of a covert surveillance program on its own. What we can say for sure is that the cooperation between the government and tech corporations has become more and more interwoven.
The Companies Building the Surveillance Layer
Google
Undoubtedly, Google is one of the most interesting cases because most people use Google products on a daily basis.
For example, Chrome is still the world’s leading web browser, Android is installed on billions of smartphones, Google Maps assists in navigation of cities, and Google Search processes billions of searches per day. As was reported by Demandsage, Chrome is still dominating its segment on a global level.
Individually, each of these services solves very useful problems for users. However, taken together, these services offer tremendous amount of information about people’s behavior without even mentioning Google’s growing AI system.
I’ve actually explored Google’s data collection practices in much greater detail elsewhere in my Privacy Series, particularly in the article focused on browsers and web tracking. So I won’t go too deep into that rabbit hole here.
Nonetheless, the main reason Google appears in discussions around surveillance is due to the sheer scale it operates at.
That was made clear through the Project Maven incident, which was an effort by the Department of Defense of the United States that utilized AI technology to analyze the footage from drones. According to reporting from multiple outlets, the involvement of Google in this particular project faced strong opposition from its employees. The opposition led Google to distance itself from the project.
Throughout the time, Google has continued expanding its government and defense-related work through cloud infrastructure, AI services, and public-sector partnerships. More recently, the company reached an agreement with the Pentagon involving advanced AI capabilities and defense applications.
As mentioned in the article from cdomagazine, the agreement gives Google’s AI the ability to perform tasks for any “lawful government purpose.” This is indeed a very broad scope of the deal because it does not restrict the technology to performing administrative tasks or working in the field of cybersecurity.
For years, the debate on military technology has not been based on the presence of the technological advancement but on the usage. Intelligence gathering, surveillance operations, battlefield planning, and weapons support systems can all fall under lawful military activities depending on the jurisdiction and rules of engagement involved.
Palantir
Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and several co-founders. Governments and large organizations already collect enormous amounts of information, but turning that information into something useful is often much harder than collecting it in the first place, Palantir took advantage of this.