Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Given the company’s character and scale and long ethical rap sheet, it is reasonable to construe every message issued by the company formerly known as Facebook as a threat. The company surely doesn’t intend this, but the story of the company’s growth and success has by now been overtaken by the sum of the many,…
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…
Chrissy Teigen, the former queen of Twitter, has gotten into a lot of trouble lately on the very platform she once ruled. Teigen is famous because she’s a model, TV host, and bestselling cookbook author who is married to John Legend. (Disclosure: Legend sits on the board of Vox Media.) But her real claim to…
TikTok quietly updated its earlier this week in a way that allows the company to automatically collect extensive data on users in the United States —including data about their faces and their voice . The policy change, first spotted by , specifically states that TikTok “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
Facebook, which along with Google accounts for around 60% of advertiser spending online, has knowingly built some of its astonishing success on incorrect data, newly unsealed court documents allege. Incidentally, this may pose a problem for a business which generates of its revenue from selling ads. In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was…
.entry-header In December 2016, when then-President-elect Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to Trump Tower for a roundtable discussion, there was considerable debate about whether or not executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella should accept the invitation. I argued that they absolutely should in this Daily Update…
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…
When theologian Martin Luther debuted his Ninety-five Theses in 16th-century Germany, he triggered a religious Reformation — and also a media revolution. 1630 map of the Maluku Archipelago (Moluccas, or Spice Islands) The printing press, invented approximately 50 years before the 95 Theses, extended Luther’s reach from the door of the cathedral to the entirety…