Sunday, June 28, 2026
Amorality is a given ...
Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and the chief design officer of the National Design Studio,
at the unveiling of the TrumpRx drug discount site on 5 February 2026.
Photograph: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Tech. science and government are amoral, it's the people running said appliance
that determine the morality of the agency in question.
To whit
‘It’s dangerous and it’s going to erode trust’:
redesign of US government websites
stokes surveillance fears
The National Design Studio, staffed by Doge veterans,
installed visitor-tracking
software on vital federal websites
An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s
“department of government efficiency” (Doge)
has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites –
for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings –
in ways critics say appear to violate federal law.
The National Design Studio (NDS)
was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans.
A Guardian investigation has found the office has apparently
been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites, including those connecting Americans with prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, passports and voter registration.
The investigation corroborates and advances earlier reporting by the Drey Dossier, a YouTube investigative outlet.
The NDS built and now operates
four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov.
All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software,
configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002.
Separately,
none of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database,
raising questions about how it is funded and overseen.
PostHog's
not the problem, it's who's using it.
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