Public Service Internet

"A California man has filed a class action suit against Fitbit, alleging that the company's sleep tracking is inaccurate and constitutes false advertising. "

Karen is a life coach and she's happy to help you work through a few things in your life. You interact with Karen through an app. When you begin, she asks you some questions about your outlook on the world to get an understanding of you. In fact, her questions are drawn from psychological profiling questionnaires. She - and the software - are profiling you and she gives you advice based on your answers.

"We've discussed the stupidity of privacy policies many times in the past. Honestly, it's an idea that serves no useful purpose, yet most sites are required to have one, and if you don't, people get all upset. But no one reads them, and most people incorrectly assume that if a site has any privacy policy, they must keep data private. "

People without Facebook accounts, logged out users, and EU users who have explicitly opted out of tracking are all being tracked, report says

"Big data opens up a hyper-personalised marketing opportunity - but creative treads a thin line between relevance and invasiveness"

"The Intercept's Micah Lee explains how to use Diceware's to generate a passphrase that can survive the NSA's trillion-guess-per-second cracking attempts -- but which can still be easily memorized. "

" Your activity tracker knows a ridiculous amount about you-from the wear on your running shoes to what coffee shop you'll stop at on your next ride. And that data's getting shared for financial gain. "

"Facebook's News Feed-the main list of status updates, messages, and photos you see when you open Facebook on your computer or phone-is not a perfect mirror of the world. But few users expect that Facebook would change their News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state."

Someone who knows things about us has some measure of control over us, and someone who knows everything about us has a lot of control over us. Surveillance facilitates control.

Dating service OkCupid has cheerfully admitted to manipulating what it shows users, a month after Facebook faced a storm of protest when it revealed that it had conducted psychological experiments.

OkCupid doesn't really know what it's doing. Neither does any other website. It's not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better.

"When a friend posted a photograph of charity worker Lindsey Stone on Facebook, she never dreamed she would lose her job and her reputation. Two years on, could she get her life back?"

"There are many articles circulating about all the privacy incursions of Facebooks new messenger app but I don't think they could all be true. "

"Barbie is having a digital makeover, with the release of an internet-connected version of the iconic doll."

"It has been 30 years since toys started talking back to kids - in the form of the cassette-playing robot bear Teddy Ruxpin"

"Smartphone users are always looking for free wi-fi but at what price does it come? Businesses are looking at ways to make the free wi-fi they offer work for them too. It can track our movements through our phones and reveal a great deal about us to those who have something to sell. "

Our electronic devices are getting smarter - many can now "talk" to each other and connect to the web. What happens when silently recruited into a bot net?

People with smart TVs from Samsung have been complaining that the electronics maker is inserting Pepsi ads during the playback of their own, locally stored movies.