Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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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…
If you’re fed up with apps and websites using shitty psychological tactics—aka dark patterns—to coerce you into clicking, then good news: there’s finally a way to put them on blast. Consumer Reports teamed up with a cavalcade of researchers and policy wonks to roll out the Dark Patterns Tip Line on Tuesday, a project that…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
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…
We don’t need to tell you that things are skewing shitty right now. Thanks to the current pandemic, Americans are losing long-loved relatives, , and losing the freedom to do most things . Understandably, plenty of folks are undeniably than they’ve been in recent memory. Another bummer? It turns out that the folks being hit…
Heads up, fellow T-Mobile customers: You might want to take a look at your mobile carrier’s privacy policy. As by the Wall Street Journal, the company’s latest update to its privacy policy is set to automatically enroll paying phone subscribers into an ad-targeting program that will see their data shared with unnumbered advertisers starting next…
About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…
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…
On Monday, Google released a few more details on its proposed tracking alternative to third-party cookies, a “privacy-first” technology that, from any angle, seems like just another way for the company to maintain its stranglehold on digital ad sales. Google’s calls its new creation “Federated Learning of Cohorts” (FLoC, for short), and promises that it’s…
Even if you aren’t knee-deep in tech news all the time, chances are you’ve heard a tech critic mention the so-called “attention economy,” or as I like to call it, the “cash-for-eyeballs” economy. It’s a concept that, at least in theory, makes a lot of sense: Companies like Facebook make their multi-billion dollar empires, in…