Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
🫠 A look inside Canada’s tech brain drain
💰 Amazon to pay US$2.5-billion to settle claims it duped Prime customers
👧🏻 TikTok failed to keep Canadian kids off the app
👟 The creepiness of sneaker surveillance
TECH JOBS
Tech founders leaving Canada at accelerating rate
San Francisco has long had a magnetic pull for entrepreneurs. Capital is abundant, the climate is business-friendly, there’s less red tape and fewer regulatory roadblocks. Canadians co-founded Uber, OpenAI and Slack, all tech giants synonymous with the Bay Area. Now a new study suggests the brain drain has accelerated.
Toronto venture-capital firm Leaders Fund found that just 32.4 per cent of Canadian-led “high-potential” startups launched in 2024 were headquartered in Canada, down from 67 per cent from 2015 to 2019. Most of the movement has been to the United States, home to nearly half of the new Canadian-led, high-potential startups founded in 2024.
Whether the trend will continue is unclear. For one thing, the Trump administration said last Friday it is imposing a US$100,000 fee on companies, typically tech giants, for each new worker they bring in from abroad on H-1B visas. This could be an opportunity for Canadian companies to aggressively recruit from outside the country. And numerous Canadian tech leaders maintain the sector is rebounding, with efforts under way to re-energize tech hubs via new venture capital funds. Read the full story by tech reporters Sean Silcoff and Joe Castaldo.
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SUBSCRIPTIONS
Amazon to pay US$2.5 billion to settle claims it duped Prime customers
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Amazon will pay US$1.5-billion back to customers.Gene J. Puskar/The Associated Press
For anyone who has felt duped into subscribing for an online service and then had to go through the Herculean task of trying to cancel said subscription (I’m looking at you Duolingo!), this story is for you. On Thursday Amazon agreed to pay US$2.5 billion to settle claims that it tricked tens of millions of people into signing up for Prime membership, and then made it hard for customers to cancel.
The surprise settlement comes just days after the trial began in Seattle this week, which stems from a lawsuit the Federal Trade Commission filed in 2023. Amazon will pay US$1-billion in civil penalties – the largest fine in the FTC’s history – and US$1.5-billion will be paid back to consumers who were unintentionally enrolled in Prime, or were deterred from cancelling their subscriptions. Eligible Prime customers include those who may have signed up for a membership via the company’s “Single Page Checkout” between June 23, 2019, to June 23, 2025. Those customers will be automatically reimbursed US$51 within 90 days of the settlement order.
SOCIAL MEDIA
TikTok’s efforts to keep Canadian children off platform ‘inadequate’
After a nearly two-year federal investigation, Canada’s privacy watchdogs released a report this week that found TikTok’s efforts to keep Canadian children off its app, and to obtain meaningful consent to collect vast amounts of sensitive personal information, were “inadequate.”
According to the report, TikTok contravened the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act – the federal law that oversees how private-sector companies collect and use personal information. In response, TikTok has agreed to improve age-gating methods to keep underage users off the app and to improve how it communicates its privacy and data policy, particularly to younger users.
However, Canadian privacy experts say these assurances from TikTok are toothless in the context of the country’s outdated privacy laws. “The outcome amounts to the wolf guarding the hen house because all we’ve done is allow TikTok to maintain its complete control over the collection, use and disclosure of very sensitive information,” said Matt Malone, the director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. “We need system change. We need to really raise the threshold for data collection. We need serious protections for minors and children.” Read my full story here.
What else we’re reading this week
The AI kids take San Francisco (New York magazine)
Why I left Silicon Valley: Chinese tech workers talk about returning home (Rest of World)
What happens when an AI-generated artist gets a record deal? A copyright mess (The Verge)
Adult Money
SURVEILLANCE
Skechers’ GO RUN Elevate 2.0, $75
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Do we really need to track our kids this way?Skechers
Skechers has released a new line of sneakers with a special compartment in the heel that allows parents to hide an AirTag. The company doesn’t say the outright goal is to track kids, but, rather, you’ll “always know where their favourite shoes are.” As The Globe’s parenting columnist Katherine Martinko points out, these shoes just feel like a creepy new form of surveillance technology.
“I dislike how this product line legitimizes an odd, new parental expectation that we know where our children are every minute of the day. Since when did that become part of our job description? It’s a recipe for obsession and paranoia,” she writes. On top of the creepiness factor, there may be long-term negative effects to tracking kids. Research from France and the Netherlands has shown that teens who know their parents can see their whereabouts are more likely to engage in risky behaviours and put themselves in unsafe situations because they assume they can always be found.
Culture radar
STREAMING
Apple TV+ postpones political thriller in wake of Charlie Kirk killing
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Jessica Chastain in The Savant, a new AppleTV+ series about catching domestic extremists online.Elizabeth Fisher/The Associated Press
AppleTV+ is delaying the release of the political thriller The Savant following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The mini series stars Jessica Chastain as a suburban mother-of-two and a military veteran who works at the Anti-Hate Alliance, where she secretly visits 4Chan-like message boards posing as a white nationalist and tries to draw out possible terrorists. The series includes sniper fire and the bombing of a government building. Chastain, who is also an executive producer of the series, said she’s disappointed Apple TV+ delayed the release, writing on Instagram that “The Savant is about the heroes who work every day to stop violence before it happens, and honouring their courage feels more urgent than ever.”
Although the motivations of the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s shooting remain unknown, the messages he engraved on bullet casings reference memes and other internet jokes found on 4chan. For a recent article, I interviewed experts who study extreme violence and online culture who said that the incongruent messages on the bullets suggest that the suspect may have been more interested in gaining notoriety online, rather than being driven by a coherent ideology.
More tech and telecom news
