Category «E-Commerce»

Americans added a few hundred million smart devices to their homes in 2020

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, E-Records, Internet, Legal Research, Privacy

DuckDuckGo’s new email privacy service forwards tracker-free messages

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, E-Mail, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

Google knows where you are 24/7. Here’s how to make it stop

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Privacy, Search Engines, Social Media

TikTok is taking the book industry by storm, and retailers are taking notice

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries, Social Media

Gmail trick that everyone should be using for third party communications

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, E-Mail, Privacy

Facebook can track you across the web. Here’s how to stop it

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Internet, Privacy, Social Media

Google gets a new rival as Brave Search opens to the public

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

Alexa’s recording you. What’s she doing with it?

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 …

Subjects: AI, E-Commerce, Internet, Search Engines

We know what you did during lockdown

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

Dark Patterns Tip Line

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 …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Financial System, Internet, Privacy, Social Media