Why It Still Feels Like Facebook Is Tracking You, Even After All the Privacy Measures – WSJ

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…

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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…

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Driverless Hype Collides With Merciless Reality – WSJ

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…

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One Website’s Facebook Apocalypse Is Another’s Opportunity to Shine – WSJ

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…

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Silicon Valley Stumbles in World Beyond Software – WSJ

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…

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