‘This Is Not the Way Everybody Behaves.’ How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork. – WSJ

Adam Neumann was flying high. Literally. His office-rental giant WeWork was months away from being valued at $47 billion. Revenue was doubling annually. And Mr. Neumann was zipping across the Atlantic Ocean in a Gulfstream G650 private jet with friends last summer, smoking marijuana. After the group landed in Israel and left the plane, the flight crew…

Read More

‘Shooting,’ ‘Bomb,’ ‘Trump’: Advertisers Blacklist News Stories Online – WSJ

Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more…

Read More

You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook. – WSJ

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…

Read More

Amazon, With Little Fanfare, Emerges as an Advertising Giant – WSJ

Amazon’s options for advertising include its delivery boxes. Photo: Amazon Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.25% handles nearly half of all online sales in the U.S., giving it a popular platform and a wealth of consumer data. Now it’s on track to become the next juggernaut of online advertising, and its rise threatens to upend Silicon Valley’s…

Read More

Google Has Picked an Answer for You—Too Bad It’s Often Wrong – WSJ

Going beyond search, the internet giant is promoting a single result over all others, and many are contentious, improbable or laughably incorrect Google handles 90% of the world’s internet searches, and it increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions. Here’s how the algorithms are—and aren’t—working Google became the world’s go-to source of information…

Read More

Struggling Americans Once Sought Greener Pastures—Now They’re Stuck – WSJ

WEST BRANCH, Mich.—When she graduated from high school, Taylor Tibbetts was a bright star in this small Northern Michigan town. She won an $18,000-a-year swimming scholarship to Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., and departed for her freshman year with high hopes. Once on campus, however, she felt overwhelmed by her courses and scared and isolated…

Read More