Pegasus Spyware, Facial Recognition & ICE Surveillance (07/06/2026)
- › Pegasus spyware infected the phone of an EU lawmaker whose committee was investigating Pegasus.
- › A major UK supermarket is expanding facial recognition to as many as 150 more stores to identify shoplifters.
- › ICE's internal watchdog is reportedly investigating people who criticized the agency online.
- › A court will let a class action proceed against Healthline over sharing readers' health data with TikTok and Microsoft.
- › Every story today is surveillance aimed at the people it was supposed to protect.
Every story in today’s privacy roundup is the same story: surveillance turned on the people it was meant to serve. Pegasus spyware landed on the phone of the European lawmaker whose job was to investigate Pegasus. A British supermarket is scaling facial recognition to catch shoplifters. An immigration agency’s own watchdog is now looking into its online critics.
Top Privacy Alerts
1. Pegasus Infects the Phone of a Spyware Investigator
Pegasus spyware infected the phone of a member of the European Parliament who sits on the committee investigating Pegasus, and campaigners are demanding the EU finally act on long-delayed recommendations (The Register). When the tooling reaches the people overseeing the tooling, the risk stops being hypothetical for anyone. The phone in your pocket is a full-time sensor pointed at you, and the belief that yours is clean is a decision, not a fact.
Operator Note: Assume the device you carry can be turned against you, and design your most sensitive conversations around that assumption rather than around trust in the hardware.
2. A UK Grocer Triples Down on Facial Recognition
A major UK supermarket is putting facial recognition into as many as 150 more stores by year’s end to identify shoplifters, a system critics call Orwellian (The Register). Biometric surveillance does not ask for consent and does not forget. Once a face is enrolled, the shopper has no practical way to opt out, and the retailer is trading a small drop in shrinkage for a large expansion of who gets watched.
3. ICE’s Watchdog Turns Toward Its Critics
ICE’s internal watchdog is reportedly investigating people who criticized the agency online, which turns an accountability function into a surveillance one (PogoWasRight). When the mechanism built to check power gets aimed at the power’s critics, the chilling effect is the point. People self-censor long before anyone is ever charged.
4. Health Data Sharing Suit Against Healthline Advances
A court will let a proposed class action proceed against Healthline over claims it shared readers’ health information with TikTok and Microsoft (PogoWasRight). Health data is among the most sensitive information a person carries, and piping it to ad-tech platforms treats a private medical concern as a targeting signal.
Operator Note: If your site touches anything health-adjacent, audit your trackers now. The tracking pixel you forgot about is the liability you will end up litigating.
The Axe Report is a daily briefing from Grab The Axe. Need help assessing your organization’s security posture? Take our free Human Attack Surface Score assessment.
A PhD candidate in Health Psychology and former Corrections Officer, Jeff founded GTA to dismantle passive security models. He focuses on the 'Human Zero-Day', mitigating executive burnout and decision fatigue before they become security breaches.
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