Our impact and success

Since Google changed its traditional search model to one that generates AI Overviews instead, small and independent press outlets have faced an impossible choice. Either let Google carry on stealing their reporting – without paying – to generate AI Overviews or opt out of Search and be effectively removed from the internet.

Foxglove and our partners submitted a complaint to the CMA on this issue in June 2025, highlighting the significant damage AIO was causing to UK news publishers – leading to drops of up to 79% in traffic to their websites – and calling on the regulator to act. 

Following our complaint and campaign, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced in June 2026 it would introduce new ‘conduct requirements’ for Google, aimed at stopping it from stealing journalists’ work to feed its ‘AI Overviews.’ 

This opt out should protect independent British media to stop having their work stolen – and prevent Google using its bloated monopoly power to crush a critical part of our democracy.

We are continuing to pressure the CMA to bring in conduct requirements more quickly and not to allow Google to mark its own homework – and will continue to push for other regulators around the world to commit to the same action.

Foxglove is challenging the mass-build out of new hyperscale data centres unless they can be powered entirely by new on-site renewable energy and do not leave the rest of us paying the financial and environmental costs for Big Tech’s obsession with Generative AI.

We successfully challenged construction of a 90MW data centre to be built on a landfill site site in Buckinghamshire, after developer Greystoke said it hadn’t even needed to have done an environmental impact assessment (EIA), a baseline measure for any major infrastructure project.

Days before we were due to go to court, the government, who were a co-defendant in the case, conceded that the failure to make “mitigation measures” designed to remove the need for an EIA non legally binding was, in their words, “a serious logical error”. The conceded the case and Greystoke followed suit a few months afterward.

This established a precedent that any mitigation measures designed to prevent new data centres from having an impact on the environment must be legally binding.

In 2020, working with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, we launched a legal challenge of the Home Office for using a “visa streaming” algorithm which was being used to process every visa application to the UK.

We were concerned that the system was racist, discriminatory and contained “feedback loop” bias problems where past bias and discrimination, fed into a computer program, reinforced further persecution, based on the previous data. 

Faced with our legal case, the Home Office caved in and agreed to stop using the algorithm. 

This was great news, because it got rid of an algorithm that entrenched racism and bias into the visa system. It was also the first successful judicial review of a UK government algorithmic decision-making system.

During lockdown at the height of the Covid pandemic, the government cancelled in-person A-level exams cancelled. Instead, they proposed awarding A-level grades on the basis of an algorithm which systematically discriminated against pupils who attended schools that had struggled historically.

Foxglove teamed up with an A-level student who stood to be directly affected by the algorithm, Curtis Parfitt-Ford. We launched a legal challenge, and a petition which quickly gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Faced with an avalanche of criticism – and the prospect of losing in court – the government caved and the A-level algorithm was dropped.

Foxglove fights for NHS health data to be used for the public good, and to protect patients’ privacy and rights to choose how their data is used and who gets to access it. This fight continues, but we’ve already had a major impact.

During the pandemic, alongside openDemocracy we took legal action to force the disclosure of secret contracts between tech giants and government, known as the ‘NHS Covid-19 data deals’. We also forced the government to drop a plan, known as GPDPR or the “GP Data Grab”, to force GPs to hand over their patients’ health records into a new data lake, without patients having any right to opt out, nor transparency on how their data would be used.

We fought a long battle to challenge the government’s plan to create the new FDP and to hand the £330m contract to Palantir. We exposed and challenged Palantir’s lobbying tactics, and their opportunistic use of the pandemic to dodge normal contract rules and gain a foothold in the NHS. Sadly, whilst we managed to force greater scrutiny of the deal, the government did ultimately hand the £330million contract to Palantir.

But we’re not giving up. We have worked to expose the facts behind dodgy claims made by NHS England about the benefits of Palantir’s kit. NHS England have now admitted the data they have published doesn’t back up the claims they’ve made about the FDP’s supposed benefit to the NHS.

The UK statistics watchdog has now opened an investigation into the way NHS England used these official statistics to make claims about the FDP it could not actually prove were accurate.

Foxglove’s work to support social media content moderators around the world as they fight for better pay and conditions is ongoing – but we’ve already been part of some hugely significant milestones.

Our work to support content moderators in Kenya began when we supported Daniel Motaung to take legal action after he was unfairly sacked from his job at Facebook’s East African content moderation hub, for raising concerns about safety and trying to start a union.

Daniel’s case continues. But he has already forced the issue of content moderators’ rights up the agenda and established that Facebook must face accountability in Kenyan courts. His fight became an inspiration for content moderators around the world, even appearing on the front cover of TIME magazine in February 2022.

In 2023, the entire workforce of the office where Daniel worked was unlawfully laid off so Meta could give the contract to a different outsourcing company, while effectively blacklisting all existing workers from their jobs. A Kenyan judge ruled that Meta, not the outsourcing company, was the “true employer” of their content moderators, the first judgement of this kind in the world.

Alongside Kenyan partners, Foxglove co-hosted a “content moderators summit” in Nairobi, bringing together over 150 social media content moderators from TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and ChatGPT. At this summit, content moderators resolved to form the first trade union for content moderators in Africa.

Foxglove has also supported content moderators in Ireland – including supporting them to tell their stories in the Irish parliament – and in Germany, where we co-hosted the first ever summit for content moderators.

In 2026, Foxglove supported two separate groups of TikTok workers in London to launch legal challenges against unlawful union-busting by the social media giant.

These case began after TikTok announced a mass redundancy of its content moderation workers, just seven days before they were due to vote on forming a union.

The second case involves another group of TikTok workers who were fired after showing strong support for their colleagues’ unionisation effort – and for organising to form a union amongst their own team.

Those cases are ongoing.

We are supporting Amazon workers in Coventry to fight for better pay and conditions against one of the World’s richest and most powerful companies. 

Together with the GMB trade union, we have supported strike action, and, in 2024, the vote on whether Amazon should be forced to recognise their trade union.

This battle brought home the sheer size and ruthlessness of Amazon and its billionaire boss Jeff Bezos. Amazon fought a dirty campaign and the vote was lost by the tiniest of margins – just 27 votes. It’s hard to imagine Amazon would have won if they’d played fair. 

That’s why we launched a legal challenge with over 900 Amazon workers challenging Amazon’s union busting, specifically their one-click-to-leave-the-union QR code. These tactics represent the beginning of a huge new attack on workers’ rights by big US tech companies.

Together with thousands of Foxglove supporters, we also called on the Labour government elected in 2024 to change the law to prevent a repeat of some of the dirty tricks. This was a success – legal changes in the Employment Rights Bill should prevent many of the tactics Amazon used against Coventry workers in this battle.