Perplexity AI Hit with Class-Action Lawsuit Over Secret Data Sharing with Meta and Google

This is the wake-up call that keeps arriving and keeps being ignored. An AI search tool that markets itself on privacy and direct answers was allegedly piping your conversations to the two largest advertising platforms on earth. Before it even processed your query. In Incognito mode. The technical allegation — trackers loading at login that transmit to third parties — is not exotic. It is mundane web surveillance applied to a product where users share their most specific, revealing questions. The kind of questions you would never type into Google because you know Google is watching. The class excludes paid subscribers, which is its own tell: the free tier users were the product. For anyone building AI tools, this is a brutal reminder. Trust is your scarcest resource. Every AI product implicitly promises "your data is safe with us" — and users, conditioned by years of chatbot interactions, share things they would never put in an email. If your analytics stack includes third-party trackers anywhere near user conversations, rip them out today. The regulatory and legal environment has caught up with the "move fast" era of AI deployment.