Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Right now, there’s a good chance your digital life is multitudes bigger than it was just a few months ago. Over time, the global coronavirus pandemic has turned a lot of us—or at least everyone I know—into the type of person who , , and attends everything from to behind some sort of screen. There’s…
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…
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…
For the thousands of people and on George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department—or even for bystanders caught up in the demonstrations—arrests, injuries, and even are becoming commonplace in this moment. And just like protests we’ve experienced , confrontation with police comes coupled with risks to people’s lives through digital means,…
The media companies of tomorrow should look something like the record labels of today. In the record industry, talent is the driving force behind the business. Talent is the source of the reputation and the end of the line when it comes to driving financial returns. Without great, world-class talent, it doesn’t matter how well…
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…