The United Nations runs Google's ad-tech on its own website, without consent, while telling the rest of us to account for AI's footprint — That Privacy Guy!
Image generation details
ModelFlux.1 Dev (q8p)
ArchitectureFlux DiT (Diffusion Transformer) + T5-XXL + CLIP-L text encoders · 12B (DiT) + 4.7B (T5-XXL) + 0.4B (CLIP-L)
Text encodersT5-XXL + OpenAI CLIP ViT-L/14
VAEFlux VAE (f16)
SamplerEulerA · 20 steps · guidance 4
Resolution1344×768
Seed914325566
Clip skip1
GeneratorDrawThings (Flux.1 Dev q8p) via TPG Blog Pipeline
HardwareApple M1 Ultra · 20 cores (16 performance + 4 efficiency) · 48 cores GPU · 128 GB unified
OSmacOS 26.3 (build 25D125)
AuthorAlexander Hanff
Prompt<br>A vast empty marble general assembly hall of an international organisation, rows of curved desks descending toward a tall speaker's podium, dozens of small black surveillance cameras mounted along the walls and ceiling all turned toward the empty seats, cold blue light, faint green data streams reflecting on the polished marble floor, cinematic low-key lighting, shallow depth of field, wide angle film still, 35mm
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The United Nations runs Google's ad-tech on its own website, without consent, while telling the rest of us to account for AI's footprint
I have spent the better part of my life fighting for privacy - for the right of a person to control what is known about them, by whom, and to what end. It is a right the United Nations itself gave the world, in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and restated in binding terms in Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. I am a supporter of the UN, and of the architecture of rights it built across the last seventy-five years. I want to be very clear about that before I say anything else, because what follows is written out of respect for what the organisation is supposed to stand for, not out of any wish to see it diminished.
On AI accountability, the UN is right
The Secretary-General has been right to raise the environmental cost of artificial intelligence - the electricity these systems burn, the water their data centres consume, the carbon they put into an atmosphere we all share. I agree with the position completely. If anything I would like the UN to go further, to treat the whole of corporate environmental, social and governance accountability with the seriousness it deserves, and to hold the companies building these systems to a standard that matches their scale and their power. On the substance of what the UN is asking of industry, I do not disagree with a single word.
The problem is the hypocrisy
My problem is not the message. My problem is that the organisation delivering it does the very thing it condemns - on its own website, at enormous scale, using the very vendors it is demanding the rest of the world hold to account - and it does not so much as acknowledge that the harm exists.
I ran a forensic capture of the United Nations English-language homepage, https://www.un.org/en/, from an EU vantage point. The capture is cryptographically signed and RFC 3161 timestamped, so every figure below can be independently verified rather than taken on my word. What it shows is that the page loads Google Tag Manager, Google DoubleClick advertising infrastructure, YouTube tracking, and Google-hosted fonts and APIs - third-party services that profile the people who visit - and it does so with no consent banner of any kind. There is no consent mechanism on the page at all. Nothing is asked. Nothing is offered. The tracking simply runs, on every visitor, the moment the page loads.
Not bound by the law is not the same as free to ignore it
The UN is an international organisation. That is a specific thing in law - a body created by treaty between states, with its own legal personality, and with immunities from national jurisdiction set out in the Charter itself (Article 105) and in the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. In practice that means a national data protection authority cannot serve the UN with an enforcement notice or a fine. The General Data Protection Regulation and the ePrivacy Directive, as instruments of national and EU enforcement, do not reach the UN in the way they reach other data controllers.
That immunity is a reason to hold a higher standard, not a licence to hold a lower one. An organisation that exists to create, maintain and champion human rights, and that lectures industry on responsibility, should be setting the bar for everyone else - not quietly availing itself of the very surveillance technologies that erode the rights it was built to defend. These...