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An hour a day

From today’s New York Times: Facebook reported dazzling first quarter results last week: Net income nearly tripled to $1.5 billion, and monthly active users hit a record 1.65 billion. But it’s a much...

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Don’t let WhatsApp nudge you into sharing your data with Facebook

This morning’s Observer column: When WhatsApp, the messaging app, launched in 2009, it struck me as one of the most interesting innovations I’d seen in ages – for two reasons. The first was that it...

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YouTube, dodgy content and the advertising business

There’s much hoo-hah about major corporations suddenly being scandalised by the discovery that their digital advertising appears alongside all kinds of objectionable YouTube videos. A sceptic might...

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Digital realities

From an interesting NYT piece on how Google is coining money by allowing firms to put product information in the space immediately below the search bar. Product ads that appeal to shoppers are also...

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Facebook: the Psychopaths ‘R Us channel

Yesterday’s Observer column: The old adage “be careful what you wish for” comes to mind. A while back, Facebook launched Facebook Live, a service that enables its users to broadcast live video to the...

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Zuckerberg’s virtual world

This morning’s Observer column: On Thursday 16 February, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and supreme leader of Facebook, the world’s most populous virtual country (population 2bn) published an epistle to...

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What’s coming in IoS 11

Ah, at last something interesting: In September, Apple will release new changes to Safari with iOS 11 called “Intelligent Tracking Prevention.” These changes will have large effects on the ad tech...

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The addiction industry

I’m writing something about smartphone addiction — a topic about which the surveillance-capitalists are strangely coy — when what should pop up but the website of Dopamine Labs. They are at least...

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Facebook’s biggest ethical dilemma: unwillingness to acknowledge that it has one

There are really only two possible explanations for the crisis now beginning to engulf Facebook. One is that the company’s founder was — and perhaps still is — a smart but profoundly naive individual...

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On not being evil

This morning’s Observer column: The motto “don’t be evil” has always seemed to me to be a daft mantra for a public company, but for years that was the flag under which Google sailed. It was a heading...

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Facebook’s new gateway drug for kids

This morning’s Observer column: In one of those coincidences that give irony a bad name, Facebook launched a new service for children at the same time that a moral panic was sweeping the UK about the...

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The ‘techlash’ goes mainstream

Well, well. This week’s Economist has both a Leader and a Briefing on the power of the tech giants and how they could be brought under control. My only question: what took them so long?

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In surveillance capitalism, extremism is good for business

This morning’s Observer column: Zeynep Tufecki is one of the shrewdest writers on technology around. A while back, when researching an article on why (and how) Donald Trump appealed to those who...

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Facebook’s sudden attack of modesty

One of the most illuminating things you can do as a researcher is to go into Facebook not as a schmuck (i.e. user) but as an advertiser — just like your average Russian agent. Upon entering, you...

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Why Facebook can’t change

My €0.02-worth on the bigger story behind the Cambridge Analytica shenanigans: Watching Alexander Nix and his Cambridge Analytica henchmen bragging on Channel 4 News about their impressive repertoire...

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What can be done about the downsides of the app economy?

Snippet from an interesting interview with Daphne Keller, Director of Intermediary Liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society: So how did Facebook user data get to Cambridge Analytica...

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“The business model of the Internet is surveillance” contd.

This useful graphic comes from a wonderful post by the redoubtable Doc Searls about the ultimate unsustainability of the business model currently dominating the Web. He starts with a quote from...

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Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg

This morning’s Observer column: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a good metaphor must be worth a million. In an insightful blog post published on 23 March, Doc Searls, one of the elder...

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Fixing Facebook: the only two options by a guy who knows how the sausage is made

James Fallows quotes from a fascinating email exchange he had with his friend Michael Jones, who used to work at Google (he was the company’s Chief Technology Advocate and later a key figure in the...

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Facebook’s Terms & Conditions in human-readable form

This morning’s Observer column: One of the few coherent messages to emerge from the US Senate’s bumbling interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg was a touching desire that Facebook’s user agreement should be...

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