Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Often top referrers to articles in our network include a mix of the usual suspects: Google search, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Drudge Report. But one day at the beginning of October I was looking at a story in Currents and noticed another referrer in the mix: SmartNews. SmartNews is an app that aggregates and…
Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely…
Mozilla’s user research, and research conducted by universities and independent experts, consistently shows that most people who use the web do not approve of many of the ways in which their personal data is collected and shared for targeted advertising. In fact, people consider some practices to be invasive, creepy, and even scary. User tracking…
Recode, a technology website that was among the first in a wave of journalist-led media startups, is being folded into sister site Vox.com, its parent company said Thursday. Vox Media publisher Melissa Bell said in a memo that Recode would relaunch as a section of Vox.com starting next year. Recode will continue to exist as…
There is a family friend, a man I’ve known for decades. A highly educated man with total financial security in his recent retirement. A man who always had a good story to tell or an interesting side of a conversation to hold up. Then, a few years ago, he got on Facebook. Reading his timeline…
ImageAndy Rubin, the creator of Android, left Google in 2014 with a $90 million exit package. The last payment is scheduled for next month.CreditCreditTomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg The internet giant paid Mr. Rubin $90 million and praised him, while keeping silent about a misconduct claim. Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, left Google in 2014 with a…
Illustration: Angelica Alzona (Gizmodo Media Group) When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think…
Image: Gizmodo Somewhere in the heart of Facebook HQ, a shadowy team toils behind the closed doors of what would appear to be an average conference room. This is Facebook’s War Room, and it’s the thin line standing between us and chaos. Gizmodo did not visit the War Room, but early Thursday morning, almost simultaneously,…
Back in August, I wrote a big post about the impossible choices that large internet platforms have to make concerning content moderation. A large part of the point of that post is that there is no perfect content moderation, and especially at scale, there are going to be large swaths of people who disagree with…
GMAIL’S “SMART REPLY” FEATURE OFFERS three options in a choose-your-own-adventure game at the bottom of received emails: “Got it.” “Got it, thanks!” and “Looks good!” are common choices. Sometimes the suggested responses are lightly ridiculous. An “I love you” email can prompt “It works!”—perhaps an overcorrection from an early bug when the algorithm was saying “I love…