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Marketplace – And they’re learning a lot about us. “Back in 2014, when the Echo and its virtual assistant Alexa made their debut, it was called a “Star Trek computer for the home.” Over this past year, our homes have become our own personal Starship Enterprises, as more of us have turned to smart devices …
Bleeping Computer: “DuckDuckGo is rolling out an email privacy feature that strips incoming messages of trackers that can help profile you for better profiling and ad targeting. Users of the service get a free “@duck.com” email address that cleans messages of trackers and forwards them to your normal inbox. Currently in private beta, DuckDuckGo’s Email …
CNET: “You turned off location history on your Google account, so now your Google apps can’t track you, right? Not exactly. While disabling that setting sounds like a one-and-done, some Google apps are still storing your location data. Merely opening the Google Maps app or using Google on any platform for a search logs your …
NBCNews – “BookTok has sent old books back to the top of bestseller lists and helped launch the careers of new authors. Videos with the BookTok hashtag have been viewed a collective 12.6 billion times… BookTok’s impact on the book industry has been notable, helping new authors launch their careers and propelling books like Silvera’s …
BGR – “When compared to other email providers, Google’s Gmail does an incredible job of figuring out which emails are worthy of your attention and which ones are spam. That notwithstanding, it’s still easy to get bogged down with an overflowing inbox thanks to a seemingly endless stream of promotional emails that, while not technically …
CNET: “No, the Off-Facebook Activity tracking rumor is not a hoax. Here’s how to keep the social media platform from tracking your web browsing. If you haven’t been using the privacy feature Facebook introduced last year, now’s the time to start. It’s called Off-Facebook Activity and it lets you see and control data that apps and …
Forbes: “…Google is an early case study in my book Friction, where I show how they focused on minimizing user effort. Their home page was essentially white space with a search box in the middle—no confusion or distraction. This focus on the user’s intent stood in stark contrast to their competition. The big difference, though, …
CNET: “About 32 million people now use Brave’s ad-blocking browser each month. Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. Brave Search will become the default search engine in …
YouTube: “Read Sara’s article about the privacy settings on your smart speaker…In fact, over one-third of U.S. adults has a smart speaker. In 2014, Amazon debuted a simple but industry-changing product: the smart speaker. Technically the Amazon Echo was just a microphone attached to the internet that you installed in your home. But it let …
The New York Times: Each year, hundreds of thousands of workers churn through a vast mechanism that hires and monitors, disciplines and fires. Amid the pandemic, the already strained system lurched. “What happened inside shows how Jeff Bezos created the workplace of the future and pulled off the impossible during the pandemic — but also …
An FT Film written by James Graham: “We gave up our privacy to fight Covid-19, can we get it back? An FT film starring Lydia West and Arthur Darvill in collaboration with Sonia Friedman Productions and supported by Luminate. An interrogation scene explores how Covid-19 has exposed the tension between the need for data to …
Dark Patterns Tip Line: “Dark patterns are common in websites and apps we use everyday, but they’re sometimes hard to spot because they’re designed to deceive us. Through secretly obtaining personal information and making us do things we don’t want to do, dark patterns can create inconveniences or even serious harms. Every day, we’re exploited …
