“Between Dec 20, 2025 and Jan 1, 2026, while most people were offline or distracted, Big Tech and Big AI quietly dropped a series of structural changes. Not features. Not UI tweaks. Governance moves. This examples below are not exhaustive, just a subset. And the pattern matters more than any single announcement.
Start with Google. In late December, it emerged that Gmail users will be able to change their @gmail.com address. Framed as flexibility. In reality, this abstracts identity. The visible address becomes a mutable label, while the real Google Account identity stays fixed, opaque, and permanent. History, risk scoring, enforcement flags, and legal traceability persist across renames. At the same time, unmanaged access paths like POP are deprecated, and policy-enforced OAuth access becomes mandatory. Email stops being a protocol you use and becomes a permission you are granted. This is identity capture, not convenience.
Meta used the same window differently. Between Dec 20 and Dec 22, privacy language was expanded to allow broader use of AI interactions. AI chats, which feel private and conversational, can feed ad targeting and content ranking. This is not clicks or likes. It is emotional, contextual inner speech being monetised. The changes were buried in documentation, not announced.
OpenAI also used the end-of-year period to normalise durability. Policy and documentation updates clarified logging, retention, and safety review practices across consumer, API, and enterprise tiers. Conversations are treated less like ephemeral speech and more like durable records. Sovereignty over interaction history increasingly depends on which tier you pay for.
Microsoft continued a slower but deeper move. Late December updates reinforced the coupling between Windows functionality and Microsoft Account identity. Local autonomy erodes and exit becomes technically painful, but this shift arrives via update notes, not headlines.
Amazon followed the same pattern through policy clarifications around AI and voice services. Interaction metadata and inference exhaust are treated as system improvement inputs, with little visibility into retention or reuse. Smart environments quietly become behavioural sensors.
None of this was announced with fanfare. That is the point. These changes land during the holiday period because timing is now part of governance. When scrutiny is low, defaults can be reset. By the time attention returns, the answer is simple: this is how it works now.
Taken together, this pattern tells us something uncomfortable. These companies no longer believe they need permission. Identity is being treated as permanent platform capital. Behaviour is being made durable by default. Exit is being made destructive enough to deter it. Digital sovereignty is not being debated. It is being quietly redefined.
And this list is only a subset of what moved while they hoped you were not looking.” Source: Dion Wiggins LinkedIn
