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"Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They're not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X's own foray into expiring content called "fleets", when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can't tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it's gone."

"Can AI and analytics be used in a way that improves operational efficiency without jeopardizing our ethical principles? The answer is "yes" - if moral objectives and constraints, now often treated as an afterthought, are considered from the outset when designing models. We will discuss a recent attempt to combine ethics, analytics, and operational efficiency in the world of organ allocation and examine the lessons it holds for other areas of health care and beyond."

"Have you been looking forward to somniferous alkaloid compounds customized to your personal metabolic dependency profile? Good news! 23andMe is selling everyone's DNA to the pharmaceutical industry. GSK Plc will pay 23andMe Holding Co. $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications."

"Parents tell Guardian Australia that "playing" on Omegle is something kids do at parties, at sleepovers. It just takes one of the group to have a screen with internet access and before long they are chatting to strangers all over the world."

"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"I'm now realising that complete openness was limiting. Privacy is a cloak, under which we are at liberty to explore the intricacies of the self, beholden to no audience other than ourselves. I have grown up in a generation that overshares in order to be heard. Only through the slow, gruelling process of learning to be private am I really beginning to listen to myself."

"But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don't have to be a tech wizard to do it. In mid-January this year, Kashmir Hill, a talented American tech reporter, used three bits of everyday consumer electronics - Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker - to track her husband's every move. He agreed to this in principle, but didn't realise just how many devices she had planted on him. He found only two of the trackers: a Tile he felt in the breast pocket of his coat and an AirTag in his backpack when he was looking for something else. "It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning," he said when she showed him the ones he missed."

"Activists swiftly warned that the policy as it was published would backfire. The policy was vague and had been put together without much input from the communities most vulnerable to harassment and doxxing, the activists argued. They had little faith in Twitter's reporting and appeals process, which they described as unreliable, automated and allowing for little discussion about the enforcement of policies."

"WhatsApp users are to be given the option to have their messages disappear after 24 hours, a change that drew immediate criticism from children's charities. In a blog post announcing the change, WhatsApp, which has 2 billion users, said its mission was to "connect the world privately"."

"Costco customers at four of the retailer's Chicago-area warehouses may have had their payment information compromised after employees discovered five card-skimming devices during routine PIN pad inspections at the end of August. "We promptly removed the skimmers, notified law enforcement, and engaged a forensics firm to analyze the devices," A Costco spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. "It appears that these skimmers had the ability to capture information on the magnetic stripe of a payment card, including name, card number, expiration date, and CVV.""

"We all fear our smartphones spy on us, and I'm subject to a new type of surveillance. An app called TapCounter records each time I touch my phone's screen. My swipes and jabs are averaging about 1,000 a day, though I notice that's falling as I steer shy of social media to meet my deadline. The European company behind it, QuantActions, promises that through capturing and analysing the data it will be able to "detect important indicators related to mental/neurological health"."

"It is high time the Congress and Biden administration placed reasonable democratic constraints on online advocacy of violence and extremism. The choice is clear: we can either protect our democracy from extremism or lose it. In the real world, your postal carrier is prevented by law from reading your mail and selling your information to recruiters who wish to spam you with violent extremist material. Those same protections must be extended to Facebook and other companies."

"The slightly misleading name for this resource is "personal data." Whether handed over intentionally or unwittingly, it captured by social media, cookies, and the internet of things captures, second-by-second now, granular details of behavior, temperament, and even thinking. It is an enormously valuable asset because it can be used to draw inferences not just about the expected future behavior of the producing subject."

"The problem is, a lot of those electronics were being used to monitor students, even combing through private chats, emails and documents all in the name of protecting them. More than 80% of surveyed teachers and 77% of surveyed high school students told the CDT that their schools use surveillance software on those devices, and the more reliant students are on those electronics, unable to afford supplementary phones or tablets, the more they are subjected to scrutiny."

"Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as "tattleware" or "bossware", represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together work-from-home policies out of thin air. In April last year, Google queries for "remote monitoring" were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they'd continued to surge by another 243%."

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "