Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
While I think we can all agree that every app on our phone is probably an invasive little shit, I’d argue that weather apps deserve their own little corner in hell. We’ve seen weather apps sign folks up for services without their say-so, sneakily get location data from users who deliberately turned that function off,…
Android screenshots of the app Honey Quest, which uses technology that keeps tabs on the viewing habits of its users. At first glance, the gaming apps — with names like “Pool 3D,” “Beer Pong: Trickshot” and “Real Bowling Strike 10 Pin” — seem innocuous. One called “Honey Quest” features Jumbo, an animated bear. Yet these…
For a platform that likes to keep reminding us over and over and over again that it prizes our individual privacy, Facebook’s done a pretty piss-poor job of actually following through. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the company purposefully prevent any of us from opting out of this sort of data-mining machine, while…
Google’s push to become a privacy-positive company over the past year has been, depending on how you look at it, an act of , a brilliant , or straight-up . So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai the company’s latest moves in the privacy-protecting space on Twitter yesterday, the biggest surprise—at least to me—was the I…
It’s easy to feel right now. Cities across the country are seeing unarmed protesters by police officers who enjoy both the full support of the current and of the itself. Congress is, in 2020, whether to . And there’s ! Meanwhile, even the people who emerge from this moment unscathed physically will, undoubtedly, find their…
Among all of the other ills currently dumped on us by the current pandemic, swindlers and scam artists have come out in . And while we can’t speak to how many hucksters are out there trying to profiteer off the pandemic, now we have something of an idea. According to a released yesterday by Google’s…
With the , it shouldn’t be surprising that tech companies—specifically those in the app space—have swooped in left and right to . Want to monitor your blood pressure? . Mental health got you down? . And of course, there are apps to ease of the multimillion-dollar headache plaguing the country at large: . And none…
data preprocessed in process/process-data.js data processed in process/freebird/process-graphic.js asset wrapper : start ASSET : START If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project…
data processed in process/process-data.js These are the actual locations for millions of Americans. At the New York Stock Exchange … … in the beachfront neighborhoods of Los Angeles … … in secure facilities like the Pentagon … … at the White House … … and at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Palm Beach resort. One nation, tracked An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry…
Disclaimer: No advertisers were harmed in making this project On Thursday, Google reminded everyone who might have forgotten that “privacy is paramount to us” and announced an initiative called “Privacy Sandbox” that proposes paving over a few privacy pitfalls without suffocating its ad business. It takes a certain chutzpah for a company with such…