Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
[if (mso)|(IE)]> [if (mso)|(IE)]> It’s me again — Mr. Sunshine — with more wretched news about the rotting carcass of our once adequate industry. 1. Digital GangstersWe begin in Jolly Ol’ England where a committee of Parliament denounced Facebook and its leadership as “digital gangsters.” According to The New York Times… “…After 18 months investigating Facebook and…
ContentItemController, generated at 16:20:31 Fri Feb 22, 2019, by cds6 Facebook planned to use its Android app to track the location of its customers and to allow advertisers to send political advertising and invites to dating sites to ‘single’ people, confidential documents show. Facebook project teams developed technology to allow the company to track the…
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
Image: Pinterest The anti-vaccination movement has become so widespread that the World Health Organization added it to its list of the top threats to global health in 2019. Social media companies are drawing criticism for not doing more to prevent the spread of misinformation about vaccines and Pinterest has come up with a novel solution:…
It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room…
Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and the tech journalist Kara Swisher conducted a full 90-minute interview entirely on Twitter. The interview was meant to be an old-school “Twitter chat,” and users were instructed to follow along using the hashtag #KaraJack. It was a disaster. Attempting to follow a public conversation happening on Twitter is…
Facebook orchestrated a multi-year effort that duped children and their parents out of money, in some cases hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and then often refused to give the money back, according to court documents unsealed tonight in response to a Reveal legal action. The records are part of a class action lawsuit focused…
A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound…
Germany is about to remind Facebook Inc. that the tribulations of 2018 are far from over. In fact, they’re about to get even more real. The country’s Federal Cartel Office intends to ban Facebook from collecting user data from third parties, the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported. This will also prohibit data sharing between WhatsApp and…
Google has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery. Following publication of our…