Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Facebook Inc. has spent the better part of a year telling its users, Congress and the readers of this paper that we’re in charge of our personal data and the ads we see. The network has streamlined its privacy settings, shared more details about how data is used and highlighted how its ad controls work. If we take advantage of all these privacy controls, it shouldn’t still feel as…
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…
Mercedes-Benz unveiled its dream of a fully autonomous multipurpose vehicle this week. The announcement was full of buzzwords—the modular Vision Urbanetic “enables on-demand, sustainable and efficient movement of people and goods” and “reduces traffic flows, relieves inner-city infrastructures and contributes to an improved quality of urban life.” Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that…
‘Sometimes our systems get it wrong’, says spokesperson for video streaming giant YouTube has been accused of preventing videos that contain LGBT+ related words from making money, by popular users of the video-sharing platform. At the same time they have also claimed that the video streaming were running adverts for gay conversion therapy and companies that were…
Apple Inc. this week took more jabs at Facebook Inc. over its privacy practices. But this time the iPhone maker went one step further, signaling it plans to encroach on the social-media company’s turf. As it touted its newest operating software for the mobile devices on Monday, Apple unveiled forthcoming features that collectively bear the…
The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman’s account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with “takes” arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. “Grace,” the 23-year-old woman, was…
Digital publishers are reckoning with the potential impact of Facebook’s planned changes to its news feed, with reactions ranging from trepidation to confidence to reflection on the folly of depending on the social network for web traffic in the first place. Facebook on Thursday said it will introduce changes to the feed in coming months to promote content shared…
Man’s Fragile Masculinity Is Immediately Insulted By His ‘Alexa’ Device Men’s Rights Activists (or MRAs) are of the belief that they, as (mostly white) dudes, are marginalized in modern society and discriminated against unfairly. They believe that feminism is a threat to their very well-being, and their fragile egos are insulted by the mere suggestion…
The solution for Post-it Notes lost under the desk and phone alerts silenced in meetings may be at hand. People who have tried and given up countless online calendars and list-making apps are making the Bullet Journal—a way of organizing and writing lists in a plain old notebook—a hit. The journal helps organize everything from…
Silicon Valley’s push into the physical world “is going to be a much longer, slower process, especially in the next couple of chapters,” said Andrew McAfee, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies technology’s impact on society. That timeline isn’t typical for Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the search engine—then called BackRub—in…