Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Among all of the antitrust probes facing Google right now, the case dropped on Wednesday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stands out for a few reasons. First, it focuses on the tech giant’s dominance in digital ads, rather than focusing on search the way that the Justice Department and more than 30 states have…
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…
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…
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
Google is the dominant player in online advertising, one reason the U.S. Justice Department is laying the groundwork for potential antitrust action against the tech giant. It has a 37% share of the $130 billion U.S. digital ad market, according to research firm eMarketer, but understanding Google’s full clout requires a deeper look at the sector. Google…
Here’s an argument you hear a lot: the gigantic cash burn rates at the likes of Tesla and Uber are nothing new, because today’s established tech greats also churned through tons of cash in their early years. In fact, we keep hearing from champions of these glamor stocks on business TV shows and pundits’ blogs…
Two employee activists at Google say they have been retaliated against for helping to organize a walkout among thousands of Google employees in November, and are planning a “town hall” meeting on Friday for others to discuss alleged instances of retaliation. In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who…
“Data is the new oil” is one of those deceptively simple mantras for the modern world. Whether in The New York Times, The Economist, or WIRED, the wildcatting nature of oil exploration, plus the extractive exploitation of a trapped asset, seems like an apt metaphor for the boom in monetized data. Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm)…
Google’s New York office is shown in lower Manhattan on March 5, 2018 in New York City. Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty) Hot on the heels of a report that Amazon is planning to split its HQ2 between Arlington, Virginia and New York’s Long Island City, Google is reportedly looking to expand its own presence in…
Jihadi rapists. Muslim invaders. Faked mass shootings. Pizzagate. Somebody browsing highly partisan websites in recent weeks could have seen articles about all of these subjects — and on the same pages seen cheerful green ads for the Girl Scouts, bearing the slogan “Helping Girls Change the World!” Such juxtapositions, documented by a Washington Post review…