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BussFeedNews: The methods described in three Facebook patent applications use your historical location data — and others’ — to figure out where you’ll go next. “Facebook has filed several patent applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your location data to predict where you’re going and when you’re going to …
Cnet: The agency approves new rules to help phone companies combat spam texts. But opponents have censorship concerns. “The one Democrat on the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel disagrees. She warned that the FCC is misleading the public about what the new classification will actually do. “Today’s decision offers consumers no new ability to prevent robotexts,” she …
United States Postal Service: A Sustainable Path Forward Report from the Task Force on the United States Postal System. December 4, 2018 – “On April 12, 2018, you [President Trump] signed Executive Order 13829, which established the Task Force on the United States Postal System to evaluate the operations and finances of the United States …
EFF: “The New York Times published a blockbuster story about Facebook that exposed how the company used so-called “smear merchants” to attack organizations critical of the platform. The story was shocking on a number of levels, revealing that Facebook’s hired guns stooped to dog-whistling, anti-Semitic attacks aimed at George Soros 1 and writing stories blasting …
TechCrunch – ‘Sorry’ means nothing since so does ‘We’re deleting’ A true apology consists of a sincere acknowledgement of wrongdoing, a show of empathic remorse for why you wronged and the harm it caused and a promise of restitution by improving ones actions to make things right. Without the follow-through, saying sorry isn’t an apology, …
Variety – “YouTube has concluded that its investments in original programming should have a home on the free, ad-supported side — not just tucked behind a paywall. In a shift in strategy, the Google-owned video platform said that starting next year it will move to make all of its new original programming available for free …
The Nation – Ad Hoc Nation – The unmaking of the steady job. Reviewed – Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, By Louis Hyman “…Today’s temps, permalancers, subcontractors, and underemployed do have an advantage that their predecessors didn’t: The effects of the gig economy permeate society more thoroughly and …
Dr. Matt Wood – “Today, I’m excited to share that, for the first time, the same machine learning courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now arevailable to all developers through AWS. We’ve been using machine learning across Amazon for more than 20 years. With thousands of engineers focused on machine learning across the …
Via LLRX – Technology giants didn’t deserve public trust in the first place – This commentary by Zachary Loeb synthesizes the increasingly frequent calls for oversight, regulation and even breaking up giant tech companies who have strayed way beyond their initial mission statements of “don’t be evil” and “helping you connect and share with the people …
Mozila: “Teddy bears that connect to the internet. Smart speakers that listen to commands. Great gifts—unless they spy on you. We created this guide to help you buy safe, secure products this holiday season.”
Quartz: “…big tech companies have amassed so much power that even Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for stricter regulations to be placed on them. Google owns 92% market share of internet searches, Facebook an almost 70% share of social networks. Both have a duopoly in advertising with no credible competition or regulation. Amazon, meanwhile, …
The Guardian: “After almost 600 booksellers withdrew 3.5m books from the secondhand marketplace in support of countries dropped by the website, it apologises for a ‘bad decision’. An “extraordinary and unprecedented” global protest from antiquarian booksellers has forced the Amazon-owned secondhand marketplace AbeBooks to backtrack on its decision to pull out of several countries. AbeBooks …
