Data

Smart TVs are like “a digital Trojan Horse” in…

48-page report urges FTC, FCC to investigate connected TV industry data harvesting. The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a “surveillance system” that has “long undermined privacy and consumer protection,” according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent

Data

Amazon wages secret war on Americans’ privacy

Amazon.com Inc has amassed a vast amount of sensitive personal information on its customers. Internal documents reveal how a former aide to Joe Biden helped the tech giant build a lobbying juggernaut that has gutted legislation in two dozen states seeking to give consumers more control over their data. In recent years, Amazon.com Inc has

Media

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world. In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which

Data

Zuckerberg’s Meta Endgame Is Monetizing All Human Behavior

Exploiting data to manipulate human behavior has always been Facebook’s business model. The metaverse will be no different. The announcement of Meta, the company’s VR and AR-forward rebrand, is the culmination of a vision that should have been obvious from the start. In 2021, Facebook’s colonization of social data has eclipsed the internet as we

Capitalism

Facebook Is Now Meta. And It Wants to Monetize…

Mark Zuckerberg’s turn toward the “metaverse” claims to put an extra digital layer on top of the real world. But Facebook’s new Meta brand isn’t augmenting your reality — it just wants to suck more money out of it. On Thursday, Facebook changed its name to Meta, as part of a broader shift toward the