---
title: "Tech Ethics Timeline"
date: 2025-12-05
type: project
blurb: "Gemini Deep Research project mapping ethical and legal violations at the largest tech companies over time, scored by impact."
canonical: https://dazuck.com/projects#tech-ethics-timeline
---

A Gemini Deep Research run that built a longitudinal view of corporate ethics failures across big tech — antitrust, privacy, labor, safety, content, and AI-specific violations from 2000 through 2024. Each incident was scored by impact (severity × scope × duration × precedent) and plotted on a per-company timeline, with the bubble size scaled to the impact score.

The headline pattern: a small number of companies carry most of the cumulative impact, and the distribution is not what most narratives assume.

**Aggregate impact scores (cumulative through 2024):**

- Meta / Facebook — **90** (Cambridge Analytica, content moderation failures, repeated FTC actions)
- Google / Alphabet — **67** (antitrust on search and ads, multiple EU rulings, privacy)
- Amazon — **45** (labor practices, antitrust, FTC suit)
- Apple — **42** (App Store antitrust, supply-chain labor, privacy posture vs. practice)
- Tesla — **34** (Autopilot safety, labor/discrimination, securities)
- Microsoft — **33** (concentrated in two eras: early-2000s antitrust, then 2020s AI/cloud)
- OpenAI — **26** (compressed into 2022-2024 — copyright suits, governance crisis, safety departures)
- Netflix — **14** (lowest — content controversies but limited regulatory exposure)

The Meta-vs-rest gap is striking. So is OpenAI's score for a company that didn't exist meaningfully until 2022 — it took less than three years to accumulate impact comparable to companies with 20+ year histories.

![[tech-ethics-timeline.png]]

The original rich HTML output from Gemini wasn't saved — only this screenshot survived. If the source thread is still accessible in Gemini, the full report (with per-incident detail and citations) can be re-exported.

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*This is the source markdown for https://dazuck.com/projects#tech-ethics-timeline.*  
*Full writing + projects index: https://dazuck.com/llms-full.txt*