On Wednesday, Prince William did his first event of the week (I’m not joking) with a panel-discussion appearance at London Tech Week. The panel discussion was about one of William’s “key issues,” homelessness and how he’s the savior of unhoused people. What’s killing me is that not enough people are talking about what William actually SAID during the panel discussion and what he announced. This is typical of both William and the royal reporters who cover him – William is a lump on a log 99% of the time, and his few-and-far-between public statements are rarely significant. But what he announced this week was genuinely bonkers and I need genuine data-privacy experts to tap into this conversation.
So what was the big announcement? William’s homelessness project Homewards is launching something called the Homelessness Data Lab. They’re partnering with Salesforce and the UK property charity LandAid, and they’re going to access private citizens’ bank records, cell phone data and rental records to try to “predict” homelessness. The goals here are nebulous at best, and what William described at the tech conference sounds more like an illegal data gathering to monitor potential homelessness rather than offer support and solutions to homelessness. Well, if you can believe it, it gets a lot worse. Guess who’s also a huge cheerleader for AI?
Britain’s Prince William said artificial intelligence was being harnessed to identify people at risk of homelessness, enabling early intervention to keep them in housing or reduce the time they spend on the streets or in temporary accommodation.
The prince told an audience at London Tech Week that it was an “unusual conversation” for a technology forum, but the types of data companies handled daily could give insights that made a real difference.
“I’m not sure you realise how much that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness before they arise,” he said.
The programme launched its Homelessness Data Lab at Tech Week in partnership with LandAid and Salesforce, supported by Bloomberg, VodafoneThree, Accenture, NatWest Group and others. The lab will analyse data to flag warning signs – such as a missed bill payment, a phone being cut off or a child absent from school – to intervene to reduce homelessness, a problem Homewards said affected more than 430,000 people in Britain.
The prince said the data could help identify much earlier when somebody was getting into difficulties, allowing intervention that could help them stay in their homes, jobs and communities.
“Prevention is better than cure,” he said, appealing to other companies and organisations to join the 25 already working with the lab.
William was shown an “Economic Wellbeing Explorer” map that uses anonymised data from NatWest to pinpoint homelessness risks in Lambeth, London, one of the six locations Homewards works in.
“It’s game-changing stuff,” he told Tim Siret, an analyst at Smart Data Foundry, a subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh, which created the explorer.
Proponents of AI – mostly the people working for or investing in AI companies – swear up and down that AI can be used for everything, that it will save humanity, that it can do all of these wonderful things. When really, this is a prime example of what AI is actually being used for: data-mining people’s banking records, rental records and phone records. Unethical and illegal breaches of privacy, and spending millions of dollars on AI make-work to replace actual person-to-person contact within communities. Let me ask Prince William this: would he be okay with data-mining people’s medical records to “prevent homelessness”? Of course not, because that would be such an obvious breach of medical privacy, right? So why is everyone shrugging at Blundering Bill giving AI free access to private citizens’ banking and cell phone data?? Also: isn’t BlunderBill an environmentalist?? He should check out what AI is doing to the environment.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- The Prince of Wales taking part a panel discussion during London Tech Week to highlight role of data and technology in preventing homelessness at Olympia London. Featuring: Prince William Where: London, United Kingdom When: 10 Jun 2026 Credit: Aaron Chown/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- The Prince of Wales taking part a panel discussion during London Tech Week to highlight role of data and technology in preventing homelessness at Olympia London. Featuring: Prince William Where: London, United Kingdom When: 10 Jun 2026 Credit: Aaron Chown/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- The Prince of Wales taking part a panel discussion during London Tech Week to highlight role of data and technology in preventing homelessness at Olympia London. Featuring: Prince William Where: London, United Kingdom When: 10 Jun 2026 Credit: Aaron Chown/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- The Prince of Wales taking part a panel discussion during London Tech Week to highlight role of data and technology in preventing homelessness at Olympia London. Featuring: Prince William Where: London, United Kingdom When: 10 Jun 2026 Credit: Aaron Chown/PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
People really need to wake up and see what billionaires are trying to do. They want your data, they want control, they want to reduce you to livestock status that will serve their needs.
ffs, this is insane and there is ZERO chance that data mining will help because to help, you would need programs in place that could actually help people. But the programs do not exist and they are not proposing them, and they are the very people who are charging people insane rent for crap places to live, who are using up resources at an extreme rate, causing people to pay more for electricity and water and food.
They already have my data. Between my Amazon purchases, my credit card data, wherever the credit bureaus get their information, and the presumably confidential government records that the DOGE kids slurped up, my supposed privacy has long been for sale. And I say this as someone who still uses cash for many transactions. This sucks — royally, and there’s little that I can do to stop it, despite my very focused efforts.
I am still p*ssed off that BigBallz walked out of that SSA building with my data–and everyone else’s–on a thumb drive & gave it to Palantir. Absolutely disgusted. And now they probably know I wrote this comment. 😡
100% this.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/06/07/the-nerdy-escorts-cashing-in-on-silicon-valleys-ai-boom/
So as AI absorbs more cognitive and administrative work, one of the safest ways for talented, educated, and attractive people to monetize themselves is through increasingly personal forms of service to the ultra-wealthy ( as this article highlights, as sex workers). This economy concentrates wealth among a small elite while pushing everyone else toward selling access to their bodies, personalities, relationships, and identities. The promise was that this fancy new technology would liberate us from drudgery. The reality may be that it is creating new forms of dependency and servitude.
Start with William’s records. Let’s see what they predict. William can be exhibit A.
Came here to say the same. This whole scheme is such a privacy disaster. And zero information about how all of this spy9ng and snooping can address homelessness.
Does he really think people have no idea when they’re at the edge of financial disaster, that one day they open a banking app and say oh! I’m broke? It’s about jobs and affordable food and housing and childcare, not some paternalistic Big Brother breathing down your neck.
Gotta say, I encounter unhoused people on the regular. I don’t think any of these poor folks even have bank accounts or phones. And I don’t see how data mining would help. In any case, somebody yesterday said everybody deserves privacy no matter their station in life.
Yes! If he’s so certain that it’ll do nothing but good, let him be the canary.
Last night when I was reading before bed, I read this article about the British economy: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/uk-productivity-economy-reform-party/687303/
My question is how the Royals can justify their existence when all around them there is true and unimaginable suffering.
I read that yesterday too. Wow, was that eye-opening! And sad. The thing is, I don’t think the Royals think about the commoners/”peasants” at all. I think they shrug and think, “It’s just their lot in life.”
I think they justify their existence because they are (in)bred to believe that they are special. The real question to me is how the rest of the UK can buy into the myth that these lazy, useless, selfish users deserve to be taking so much from the public.
Omg. This is really freaking awful.
Is it surprising William supports AI? AI let him sit on a bench and put words in his wife’s mouth and lets him hide from his duties while still giving his subjects his Royal Visage for consumption. He must think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread!
Jesus, sometimes I wonder whether these brothers even share a tiny bit of the same DNA at all! Hell has to freeze over before Harry would consider data-abuse as a remedy for anything! But yeah, Wills is a lost case. Sometimes I tend to be sorry for him. Occasionally. Rarely. Okay. I don’t!
I think I’ve reached my quota of stupid today.
Holy blundering, batman. My god. Okay, break down the logic: what kind of privacy protections do people have when using their own retail banking accounts online? When communicating with their children’s schools???? When paying their phone bills? Just to cite blundering bill’s examples. I would imagine banking regulations (FSA in the UK) would pretty effectively bar AI data-hoovering of customer information. Schools???? You must be joking. Some AI leviathan is monitoring when your kid gets the flu so nanny state / police state can breathe down your neck???? No, thank you. Phone bills???? People switch mobile carriers all the time. People go month to month with rolling contracts. That’s not a red flag, that’s too much data to cut a pattern on. FWIW, even if you could get data points like these *without* violating basic GDPR (since 2018) privacy laws, WHAT WOULD YOU DO to help those at risk of homelessness? Just putting them in the sin bin to score PR points isn’t helpful. What *practical* solutions would the great tech broligarchy bring to the table??? Like affordable housing? Rent control? Social housing, council housing, living wages, etc…… SMDH. JFC. This dude really needs to get off his own bottom and get to grips with reality.
I don’t see any legal basis for this. How are they proposing to access people’s data LEGALLY? And then what do they do next? Sounds like they’re planning to ring them up and say, “Your private data indicates you could be homeless soon. How can we help?” Someone in the UK should be talking to lawyers because this can’t be legal or a legit use of personal information.
I would imagine the person would have to give consent, esp given the UK has adopted the EUs GDPR digital data laws (which are v strict about this). Also NONE of the banks would allow randoms access to their data – they’d get sued into oblivion and back.
This coming from a man who is obsessed with privacy? Mmmmmkay.
Hmm, lets see what this has to say about the Duchy estate and what health issues the mold in those homes cause.
Pegs is a tool and not a very useful one. Many things cause homelessness, how about PTSD from veterans and others who are not getting the MH support they so desperately need.
Maybe AI can give us an heir that can ACTUALLY do the job!!! His stepford wife needs an AI upgrade as well.
“Maybe AI can give us an heir that can ACTUALLY do the job!!! His stepford wife needs an AI upgrade as well.”
What I find so depressing is KP has been has been using AI, misdating images, deceptive photography and the same technology outfit the BBC uses to create visual effects for TV programmes like Dr. Who for a while now. He will probably have to shave his face clean again to facilitate better imaging because I don’t think it’s too ‘tin foil hat’ to believe he might retreat to a private life altogether and just leave an AI avatar in his place.
“Maybe AI can give us an heir that can ACTUALLY do the job!!! His stepford wife needs an AI upgrade as well.”
Absolutely perfect comment! 👏
beyond the horrific privacy implications, this isn’t the solution. he refuses to talk about that because what it would take is government money or support.
let’s say you do see from someone’s bank account that – oh clearly they don’t have enough savings to help them if they lose their job etc. is the government going to offer them a universal basic income? a stipend? will the government accelerate their placement on a list for housing? will the government increase the amount of affordable/free dignified housing it is building and making available more quickly?
just having the information doesn’t help if you take away people’s agency and don’t provide support. does this mean after you find out how many people are one mistake, or one firing away from homelessness, the government will implement a UBI or increase available housing stipends?
Exactly. No plan for what to do after people have been “identified”. I think now that tech billionaires know they can breeze into a government agency and walk out with all of their data, they have moved on to part B of their plan which is to turn us all into serfs. This data will be used against people to target them for predatory lending to drain people of their money to where they will be willing to do anything to survive.
Obviously he is trying to present himself as “modern.” But this idea is not 2026–it is 1984, as in Orwell.
This man is such a waste of cells!
So, he is going to use Big Brother to solve homelessness, totally ignoring the fact that Big Brother displacing human workers is going to cause homelessness?
Pope Leo would like a word with this idiot. His encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) was really a great read and warning on misuse of AI. William has no idea what he is talking about. Just blunder after blunder.
They’d have to monitor EVERYONE, including you and me, because the whole point is to predict future homelessness. And while banks already know if a check bounced, this seems to go way beyond that and into sharing our bank data with public agencies and even potentially with not-for-profit homelessness charities like the ones William supports.
This looks exactly like a tech industry-promoted wedge into our personal data without asking for consent. The argument seems to be, “it’s for the public good, really, because it’s about helping the homeless, so don’t make banks require consent for sharing information on the entire population’s bank accounts.”
William is such a tool.
And then what happens? You get an email or a call, or social services show up at your door, to tell you you missed a bill payment? As if you didn’t already know? I mean, I’ve sometimes missed payments simply because I’ve forgotten, which is why I try to automate my bill payments, but would that trigger some homelessness red flag for me? And after you’re told you’re on the brink of homelessness, what then, because the housing and mental health services are lacking. The whole world, including the tech industry, knows you’re missing bill payments, but we’re not going to do anything about it. Great.
So Bulliam the Functionally Illiterate doesn’t think that maybe missed payments, bankruptcies, eviction notices — or things like a late stage alcoholism, serious mental help problems, or a drug dependency — can indicate that the chance of a person becoming homeless is higher than average?
He needs AI for that, with all it entails — stolen data, privacy breaches, negative impact on the environment?
Too bad he’s showing the world again that he doesn’t care about people knowing that he’s living in a sheltered parallel universe where everything related to Real Life goes over his head and beyond everything he’s able to grasp.
For Prince Bill, this is a tiger biting off your face issue. Doesn’t he realize that technology can be turned against him and his financials as leverage to eliminate the monarchy
The problem here is that people running these companies and using the data are not good people with good intentions. Information like this will be used to deny people housing, kick people out of their homes if a landlord deems them to be “at risk for homelessness,” or on the other end, increase their rent if they see from this data that they are “safe” from homelessness and, in their minds, can afford higher rent. I’m not sure if the UK uses credit scores, but credit scores already screw people over in the US when trying to find housing, I can’t imagine giving landlords access to banking info and children missing school (that part in particular is just insane)
They’re not giving any examples of HOW this could help and what happens after someone is flagged for being close to homelessness. Exactly what will they do? What specific services will they provide? What happens next? But William doesn’t care because I’m sure someone’s giving him a lot of money to access this private info.
Predicting homeless and providing the help needed could be a good thing – but it would take decent people involved to not abuse the information they’re provided with and strict privacy and confidentiality rules. None of those companies and corporations have that.
Some insider baseball. Salesforce acquired a small company called Radian6 a while ago, who had build this dashboard to track social media usage of target audiences. It was all on the up and up, and was designed to track “real-time conversations, sentiment, and analytics across social networks, blogs, and forums.” Prior to the Salesforce acquisition, the dashboard was used by the RCMP and also political parties. I suspect AI has been since integrated and the platform can do much much more, but Salesforce is notorious for acquiring products and ruining them, so who knows. What William is suggesting is already being done with all of us at some level. Adding financial information would be egregious, to put it lightly.
Yes, we’re all already being followed all over social media. It’s one of the reasons I no longer go to the Fail or comment there (well, that and I don’t want to give them clicks). And marketing companies already have us pegged into hundreds of categories (white suburban mom who likes hiking, wealthy retired Latino), based on our browsing histories, so they can target the ads on our browsers. And our banks already monitor if we’ve bounced checks and hand over the information to credit rating companies like Experian.
But it would be next-level to associate our financial information (bounced checks, missed bills or regular trips to the liquor store) with our social media histories. And horrifying.
This is @EasternViolet, your point is spot-on: a lot of this data is already effectively in the public domain, if not in the public domain, in the domain accessible to law & order, or state agencies, or credit ratings agencies or local governments. Or national governments. I mean. If they wanted to *do* something with it, that was productive, and humanitarian, nothing is stopping them. The problem isn’t aggregating data. We’re drowning in data. You know the saying, they spit, you drown? Data isn’t putting a roof over your head. For that you need to build houses, actually use your hands and legs and limbs.
Is he insane??!
What a fascist freak!🤬
Hey Bill, fewer people would be at risk of homelessness if the cost of living wasn’t so high, eating up most (or all) of their paychecks. If the rich (that includes you, too) paid their share of taxes, and the cost of goods and services went down to be on par with average wages, more people could afford to save and stay in their homes. You don’t need to invade someone’s privacy to figure that out.
Wtaf. Holy dystopian nightmare, Batman.
He really is such a tool. He’s dumb and incurious and arrogant and apparently can be suckered into anything. Does he get a kickback for this or is he just subjecting people to this for free?
It doesn’t do anything. They don’t even know if they can “predict” homelessness because they don’t know what causes it in the first place! They’re just guessing! And what on earth are they going to do with this information?! They’re just making people’s lives worse. This doesn’t build houses, this doesn’t ensure people won’t lose their jobs.
Holy hell this sucks. And way to destroy the environment for this bullshit.
I’m not even sure how this is allowed? Are they not following data protection laws anymore? What’s the guarantee of security? Bad actors are going to have a field day; how helpful to consolidate all this info in one spot.
How unbelievably hideous and sickening. Will anyone push back?
This is @Calliope, there are data protection laws, GDPR laws came into effect in 2018 in the EU — after we voted to leave the EU (I say “we” but as an expat American I didn’t vote in that referendum) but before we had actually departed the bloc. Those privacy laws — specifically covering personal data collected by tech companies and online vendors — remained in force in the UK after Brexit was ratified and came into effect. FWIW I suspect this is how the Middletons’ kiddie empire came crashing down, when they could no longer sell their clients’ data.
WTAF. 😳
You’d never know that Harry is the one who lives in California with the amount of techbro stupidity that William seems to spout on the daily. Of COURSE he thinks that AI should be used to analyze people’s personal and financial data to “help” them. No word yet on how exactly these people who are flagged will be “helped” or who exactly would be compiling all of this data, not to mention protecting it. But those are just unimportant details for a big brain like William’s- you’ve gotta move fast and break stuff, right?
But don’t worry, William who it is worth mentioning isin fact one of the biggest landlords in Britain, says he’ll only make use of this personal data to help people. You’ll have to take his word for it that data won’t be used to identify people who, for example, are paying less than what William the landlord thinks they should be able to pay. Dynamic rental pricing, baby! Oh, and on the other side, early predictive signs for his fellow landlords to easily identify who might not be able to afford their rent so they can get rid of them early before missing a month.
If William is truly to dumb to see that this kind of thing is exactly what these tools will be used for, then he should resign.
Or to deny them a rental in the first place 🙁
William needs to go and brush his damn teeth!
Mr. Save the Planet (but only for 10 years!) doesn’t pay attention to what’s going on in this world because he’s going to be fine, no matter what. Nobody is going to build a data center near his 150 acres of Windsor woods. And how the heck is that company choosing who to monitor???? EVERYBODY???? Mass surveillance????? And no legal checks whatsoever????
How about giving 6 of his 7 forever homes to the homeless. That would help.
What in the Minority Report dystopian hell is this?
First, if they are accessing people’s data without their consent that’s a huge privacy issue.
Second, there’s already studies out there that discuss the indicators of what makes a person more likely to be houseless and what works to keep people in their homes. This is just a data grab.
“This is just a data grab.” 🎯
Um, I’m pretty sure about half the. Population already knows we’re at risk. We don’t need ai to tell us we’re just getting by… we KNOW.. but how are you going to help us with your info??? And duh, the biggest predictors, probably a chronically low bank balance, ✔️ Genius.
Or he could…you know…deal with actual existing homelessness before trying to predict when people will become homeless. Take care of those without home. Figure out why they are homeless. Solve the cause, and then worry about why others may end up in a situation that you now have solved.
I hate these idiots with so much money and not a lick of sense between them.
Can you imagine the fallout if Harry had said something like this?