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That’s the approach Google appears to be taking with the launch of Android Pay, a new mobile-payments system that closely mimics the Apple Pay platform launched last fall.

Scrambling to play catch-up, Google crucially has cut partnerships with a slew of big retailers including Macy’s, Best Buy, Walgreen, Whole Foods and McDonald’s

That list of retailers looks a lot like Apple Pay’s, and cutting those partnerships is something that the search giant’s flopped Google Wallet system failed to do when it was launched in 2011.

When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads

With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information

Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.

Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”

“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.

“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource

Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story.

why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.

Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.

The idea is obvious: If citizens are going to make even indirect decisions about policy, we need to know the facts about the problem the policy is meant to rectify, and to be able to gain some understanding about how effective that policy would be.

Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim.

Google is announcing that it wants to cut out the middleman—that is to say, other websites—and serve you content within its own lovely little walled garden. That sound you just heard was a bunch of media publishers rushing to book an extra appointment with their shrink.

Back when search, and not social media, ruled the internet, Google was the sun around which the news industry orbited. Getting to the top of Google’s results was the key that unlocked buckets of page views. Outlet after outlet spent countless hours trying to figure out how to game Google’s prized, secretive algorithm. Whole swaths of the industry were killed instantly if Google tweaked the algorithm.

Facebook is now the sun. Facebook is the company keeping everyone up at night. Facebook is the place shaping how stories get chosen, how they get written, how they are packaged and how they show up on its site. And Facebook does all of this with just as much secrecy and just as little accountability as Google did.

Mr. Strom, it turns out, has so little chance of outranking lead gen sites that he’s having a hard time finding a Web consultant to help him fight back. “I told him that it would just be a waste of his money,” says Craig Baerwaldt of Local Inbound Marketing, a search engine expert whom Mr. Strom tried to hire recently. “There are hundreds of these lead gen sites and they spend a ton of money gaming Google.”

because few people search beyond the first page online, snookering Google might be far more effective, especially because many people assume that the company’s algorithm does a bit of consumer-friendly vetting.

Yet if the example of locksmiths is any indication, the horde has the upper hand in certain service sectors, and it all but owns Google Places.

If Android is to be the core of your own personal swarm of screens and robots, it means that all of the data Google knows about you will come to the interactions you have with the stuff around you. The profile you build up at your computer and on your tablet will now apply to your television watching and your commuting, seamlessly

Sitting underneath all the interactions you have across these devices, Google's algorithms will be churning. The way Google thinks—its habits of data collection, analysis, and optimization—will become part of these experiences that have previously remained outside the company's reach.

Google's announcement that they will be determining "the most important" notifications to show you. Like Facebook's News Feed or Gmail's Priority Inbox, you'll see a selection of possible notifications, rather than all of them, when you glance at the phone. (A tap lets you see all of them.) That is to say, Google is asserting algorithmic control over the new interface frontier. And the software that determines what you see will be opaque to you. 

artificial-intelligence software.

Google says it has proof that a controversial machine it bought in 2013 really can use quantum physics to work through a type of math that’s crucial to artificial intelligence much faster than a conventional computer.

“It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” said Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

In a sign of escalation, Peter Schweizer, a right-wing journalist known for his investigations into Hillary Clinton, plans to release a new film focusing on technology companies and their role in filtering the news.

The documentary, which has not been previously reported, dovetails with concerns raised in recent weeks by right-wing groups about censorship on digital media — a new front in a rapidly evolving culture war.

The critique from conservatives, in contrast, casts the big tech companies as censorious and oppressive, all too eager to stifle right-wing content in an effort to mollify liberal critics.

People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen

It has been many months of allegations and arguments that the internet in general and social media in particular are pulling society down instead of lifting it up.

That has inspired a good deal of debate about more restrictive futures for Facebook and Google. At the furthest extreme, some dream of the companies becoming public utilities.

the World Wide Web came along and blew the gatekeepers away. Suddenly anyone with a computer and an Internet connection could take part in the conversation. Countless viewpoints bloomed. There was no longer a mainstream; instead, there was an ocean of information, one in which Web users were free to swim.

Where once Google delivered search results based on an algorithm that was identical for everyone, now what we see when we enter a term in the big box depends on who we are, where we are and what we are. Facebook has long since done the same thing for its all-important News Feed: you'll see different status updates and stories float to the top based on the data Mark Zuckerberg and company have on you. The universal Web is a thing of the past. Instead, as Pariser writes, we've been left "isolated in a web of one" — and, given that we increasingly view the world through the lens of the Internet, that change has frightening consequences for the media, community and even democracy.

Google has begun personalizing search results — something it does even if you're not signed into your Google account. (A Google engineer told Pariser that the company uses 57 different signals to shape individual search results, including what kind of browser you're using and where you are.)

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

Videos that could “misinform users in harmful ways,” such as ones that claim the Earth isn’t round or question the actors behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will no longer be recommended with as much prominence, the Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 1.62% unit said in a blog post Friday.

Though the factors underpinning YouTube’s recommendation system are largely unknown, its influence is apparent in the numbers. YouTube has said its recommendations drive more than 70% of users’ viewing time, and that it recommends more than 200 million videos daily on its home page alone.

Allow me to ask a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps?

the downsides of our app system — principally the control that Apple and Google, the dominant app store owners in much of the world, exert over our digital lives — are onerous enough to contemplate another path.

in recent months, Microsoft’s Xbox video gaming console, the popular game Fortnite and other game companies have moved ahead with technology that makes it possible to play video games on smartphone web browsers.

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.

“If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done

Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.

Greeks had the “first true alphabet”: a “universal” writing system that used a few letters to encode the infinite variety of all possible utterances. Similarly, all matter is written in a "language… of atoms."

Mysterious “meanings” still surround 100-year-old quantum mechanics equations

Their meaning/function/grammar is relational and sequential and word-like. The information encoded in matching sequential text-like compositions matters (DNA—>RNA, letters—>“social cartesian” lexicon).

a database of words from millions of books digitized by Google—4 percent of all books ever printed—could be one of the big ones. It's a fabulous source of ideas and evidence for theories about society, and it's fabulously democratic. Google offers a handy analyzer, the Ngram Viewer, which anyone can use to test an idea. A case in point: Yesterday, the social psychologist Rob Kurzban argued that the tool can distinguish between genuine scientific theories and intellectual fads.

Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. "I'm not thinking the way I used to," he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.... If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

force us to get smarter if we are to survive. "Most people don't realize that this process is already under way," he wrote. "In fact, it's happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity." He argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans' capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing "fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge." He also expressed hope that techies will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.

76% of the experts agreed with the statement, "By 2020, people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid."