… Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the […] Read more »
The Struggle Comes Home: Attacks on Democracy in the United States
… The great challenges facing US democracy did not commence with the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Intensifying political polarization, declining economic mobility, the outsized influence of special interests, and the diminished influence of fact-based reporting in favor of bellicose partisan media were all problems afflicting the health of American […] Read more »
Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
… At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those […] Read more »
How Data Privacy Blunders and Conspiracy Theories Helped Fuel the ‘Techlash’
Smartphone addiction, data privacy blunders, and a growth-at-all costs mentality has led to public backlash against the tech industry that some refer to as “techlash.” That rising skepticism was the focus of heated debate at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference on Tuesday in Aspen, Colo. Is the tech industry good, bad—or […] Read more »
How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. … In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, […] Read more »
Partisan Politics Drives Americans’ Attitudes On Surveillance
Today, the Annenberg School for Communication released a report entitled “Divided We Feel: Partisan Politics Drive Americans’ Emotions Regarding Surveillance of Low-Income Populations.” It is the first national survey that examines Americans’ emotional responses to surveillance practices that disproportionately affect low-income populations. In the US, low-income individuals and people of […] Read more »