Ad-tech, digital marketing, and the surveillance economy are worth billions and billions of dollars. It all hinges on the ability to target ads and you can't target ads without tracking users and their devices.
Epic Games is current waging war on Apple and Google over the right to distribute apps to mobile users. There's been a ton of excellent coverage of the issues, but it's usually missing one key perspective; what do we as users get from the App Stores?
On July 15th, 2020, Twitter was hit with the most visible hack of a social network of all time. 130 of the top accounts tweeted out a bitcoin scam. A month after, have we learned anything? What's the impact of continuing to use Twitter?
The President has promised to ban TikTok in the United States for national security reasons. Is that the case? Are there real security & privacy concerns or is this purely a political move?
Is a social network focused on dancing, lip syncing, and fun a threat to national security just because of who owns it? Is TikTok a threat to national security? Do you need to worry about it you or your family using it?
COPPA was passed in the US in 1998 but a recent ruling against YouTube for violating the decades old law means big changes for creators.
Keeping a personal website up to date is always tricky. The technical pieces are simple, it's be satisfied with the design and making the commitment to focus on the site when there is a ton of other, maybe more interesting work to be done. Needless to say, this is my restarting this site!
Facebook was recently called out for listening to users audio messages on Facebook Messenger. They aren't alone. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have admitted to having contractors analyze audio from their voice assitants (and Microsoft's Skype service). What's the impact
Facebook held its annual F8 developer conference this week and—in addition to the usual product updates—they repeatedly talked about creating and enabling private spaces. What's stopping them? 15 years of poor information management.
Since May of 2016 Facebook has been prompting some new users for their email passwords. Yes, their email passwords. WTF?
You're building out a digital identity for you kids almost from the day they are born. But it's not just you, the clubs they belong to, schools they attend, and sports they play are all contributing. What's the impact to your child? To their digital future?
Facebook continues to do anything they can to build data profiles on users. This week it was revealed that they shifted their Onavo efforts to a new "research" project where they targeted 13-35 year olds via 3rd party market research companies. Lots of questions and issues here...