Apple Intelligence Is Inventing a Husband for Joanna Stern ⇥ techthings.cmail20.com

Joanna Stern, in her Tech Things newsletter:

Here’s a notification for you, Apple: There is no husband.

Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.

An Apple spokesperson told Stern the company’s A.I. services “were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases”, but here we are.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co

Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock: browse 2.0x faster

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2× faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.

Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:

  • Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers

  • Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads

  • Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts

  • Double battery life during heavy web browsing

  • Lower data usage when on the go

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad. and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Law Banning TikTok if It Is Not Sold ⇥ apnews.com

Mark Sherman, Associated Press:

The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company,holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.

The opinion (PDF) is predicated solely on data collection concerns. The justices did not even consider questions about TikTok’s recommendations system, finding that national security alone is worth a change in TikTok’s ownership.

This was a per curiam opinion, but both Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch elaborated separately. Sotomayor (I trimmed references in these excerpts but otherwise left them whole):

[…] The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. […] And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.” […] That, too, calls for First Amendment scrutiny.

Gorsuch:

First, the Court rightly refrains from endorsing the government’s asserted interest in preventing “the covert manipulation of content” as a justification for the law before us. […] One man’s “covert content manipulation” is another’s “editorial discretion.” Journalists, publishers, and speakers of all kinds routinely make less-than-transparent judgments about what stories to tell and how to tell them. Without question, the First Amendment has much to say about the right to make those choices. […]

These are two ideologically divergent justices similarly compelled by arguments for TikTok to moderate and recommend as it sees fit. Perhaps the court would have ultimately come down differently on these questions if the justices had spent more time considering them, but all this produced is understandable concern over user data. Requiring TikTok to be sold off or banning it is not very useful for correcting that misbehaviour, but that was not the question before the court.

P.E.I. Homeowner Captures Sound and Video of Meteorite Strike on Camera ⇥ cbc.ca

Stephen Brun, CBC News:

The timing of their departure that day last July proved lucky. Just seconds later, a meteorite would plummet onto the front walkway of [Joe] Velaidum’s home in Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, shattering on impact with a reverberating smack.

[…]

Luckier still, his home security camera caught both video and audio of the meteorite’s crash landing.

I am not sure what I expected a chunk of rock falling onto stone from space would sound like, but now I know.

We Do Not Need More Cynics ⇥ joanwestenberg.com

Joan Westenberg:

Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed.

But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.

The whole piece is good, but this part in particular is going to stick with me.

The TikTok Saga Has Gotten Even Stupider ⇥ torment-nexus.mathewingram.com

This week, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it is legal to require that TikTok be forced to divest from its parent company by January 19 or be banned. You may know this as the “TikTok ban” because that is how it has been reported basically everywhere. Seriously — I was going to list some examples, but if you visit your favourite news publication, you will almost certainly see it called the “TikTok ban”.

Pedants would be right to point out this is not technically a ban. All TikTok needs to do is become incorporated with entirely different ownership, with the word “all” doing most of the work in that phrase. Consider a hypothetical demand by a populous country that Meta divest Instagram to continue its operations locally. Not only is that not easy, I strongly suspect the U.S. government would intervene in that circumstance. No country wants another to take away their soft power.

Coverage of Supreme Court hearings is always a little funny to read because the justices are, ostensibly, impartial adjudicators of the law who are just asking questions of both sides, and are not supposed to tip their hand. That means reporters end up speculating about the vibes. Amy Howe, syndicated at SCOTUSblog,1 reports the justices were “skeptical” and “divided over the constitutionality” of the law. CNN’s reporters, meanwhile, wrote that they “appeared likely to uphold a controversial ban on TikTok”. While some justices were not persuaded by the potential for manipulation, they did seem to agree on the question of user data. I also think privacy is important, and perhaps for some intersecting reasons, but targeting a single app is the dumbest way to resolve that particular complaint.

Mathew Ingram wrote a great piece calling this week’s proceedings a slide into “even stupider” territory, which could refer to just about anything. How about NBC News’ reporting that the Biden Administration is looking into “ways to keep TikTok available in the United States if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect Sunday proceeds”? Yes, apparently the government which signed this into law with bipartisan urgency is now undermining its own position.

Alas, Ingram’s article has nothing do to with that, but it is worth your time. I want to highlight one paragraph, though, which I believe is not as clear as it could be:

We’ve had decades of fear-mongering about both American and foreign companies manipulating people’s minds, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but there’s no evidence that any of it has actually changed people’s minds. All of the Russian manipulation of Facebook and other platforms that allegedly influenced the 2016 election amounted to not much of anything, according to social scientists. I would argue that Fox News is a far bigger problem than Russia ever was. And even if the Chinese government forces TikTok to block mentions of Tiananmen Square (as it has forced Google to), it’s a massive leap to assume that this would somehow affect the minds of gullible young TikTok users in any significant way. In my opinion, people should be a lot more concerned about how Apple — despite all of its bragging about protecting the privacy of its users — gave the Chinese government effective control over all of its data.

I get the feeling the discussions about manipulating users’ opinions will be never-ending, as have those about, say, the influence of violence in video games. Two recent articles I found persuasive are one by Henry Farrell, and another by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, in the Atlantic, calling the internet a “justification machine”.

But to Ingram’s argument about Apple, it should be noted that it gave over control of data about users in China, not “all of its data”. This is probably still a bad outcome for most of those users, yes, but the way Ingram wrote this makes it sound as though the Chinese government has control over my Apple-stored data. As far as I am aware, that is not true.

  1. The publisher of SCOTUSblog is facing charges today of tax evasion through fraudulent employment schemes. ↥︎

Changes to Notification Summaries in New iOS 18.3 Beta ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple released iOS 18.3 beta 3 to developers this afternoon. The update includes a handful of changes to the notification summaries feature of Apple Intelligence.

Miller rounds up the key changes which, sadly, do not include an Apple logo beside the summary. This caught my eye:

Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.

This is the first time I can remember where Apple uses an app’s App Store category to change its system behaviour. The closest equivalent I can think of is background downloads in Newsstand publications.

New Data Set Reveals 40,000 Apps Behind Location Tracking ⇥ netzpolitik.org

Ingo Dachwitz and Sebastian Meineck, Netzpolitik:

A new data set obtained from a US data broker reveals for the first time about 40,000 apps from which users‘ data is being traded. The data set was obtained by a journalist from netzpolitik.org as a free preview sample for a paid subscription. It is dated to a single day in the summer of 2024.

Among other things, the data set contains 47 million “Mobile Advertising IDs”, to which 380 million location data from 137 countries are assigned. In addition, the data set contains information on devices, operating systems and telecommunication providers.

This is, somehow, different from the Gravy Analytics breach. The authors note this data set includes fairly precise location information about specific users, and they got all this in a free sample of one day of Real Time Bidding data. This is all legal — at least in the U.S.; German authorities are investigating and have threatened sanctions — able to be collected by anyone willing to either pay or become a participant in RTB themselves.

The Right’s Smear Campaign Against Wikipedia ⇥ citationneeded.news

Molly White:

When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more significant: the growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk’s involvement began with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks reveal his growing role in this broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia, and the right’s frustration with platforms that remain resilient against such control.

I first noticed this campaign about three years ago when clips of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on Fox News began circulating among the more reactionary corners of the web. While he has disparaged the site regularly since his long-ago departure, Sanger stepped up his attacks a few years ago after professional contrarians like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald gave him an uncritical platform to do so.

As White writes, there is plenty to criticize about Wikipedia. But Sanger, Musk, and others are jamming this into the same narrative they apply to everything because they are all intellectually lazy. The bananas thing is that it is Wikipedia — the site where you can check just about every edit for yourself. But because few people are actually going to do that and it is possible to produce seemingly damning screenshots, you can see how this nonsense can take shape.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Done With Politics ⇥ nytimes.com

Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac, New York Times:

Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive who has tried to keep a distance from politics, is warming to President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Zuckerberg is among several Big Tech executives who are expected to be front and center at Mr. Trump’s inauguration next week. He will be one of four hosts of a black-tie reception on Jan. 20, joining the longtime Republican donors Miriam Adelson and Todd Ricketts in hosting a party “celebrating the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance,” according to a copy of the invitation seen by The New York Times. The event was first reported by Puck.

In what way has Zuckerberg “tried to keep a distance from politics”? Some years ago, he was actively interested in issues of immigration, social justice, and inequality. His views were published in newspapers and magazines. He co-founded an organization advocating for better paths to citizenship.

I know all of these things because I read a different article by Schleifer and Isaac — one which carries a headline that is rapidly becoming infamous: “Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics”. It is even linked in a subsequent paragraph:

But he has undergone something of a political reinvention over the last year. He traveled to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last week. And has announced a series of changes at Meta since the election in November that have delighted advisers to Mr. Trump.

Journalists do not write the headlines; I hope the editor responsible for this one is soaked with regret. Zuckerberg is not “done with politics”. He is very much playing politics. He supported some more liberal causes when it was both politically acceptable and financially beneficial, something he has continued to do today, albeit by having no discernible principles. Do not mistake this for savviness or diplomacy, either. It is political correctness for the billionaire class.

‘We Have a Chance to Do Something Different’ ⇥ readtpa.com

Parker Molloy:

Look, I get it. We’ve all grown cynical about promises to “fix” social media. But this could be different. It’s not about creating a utopian new platform; it’s about building the infrastructure to ensure that no matter what platform you choose to use, it can’t be captured by billionaire interests.

Well said. I think it is important to be skeptical of efforts like Bluesky and Free Our Feeds — and I am. But we should avoid being so cynical when there are, at long last, exciting social media developments which do not benefit billionaires. Hope is not naïveté. Let us keep making things better, if not perfect.

Free Our Feeds ⇥ freeourfeeds.com

Aisha Malik, TechCrunch:

The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.

The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky were to end up in the hands of billionaires.

From the Free Our Feeds website:

Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.

But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

Signatories to this campaign include a mix of technologists, writers, business people, government officials, and celebrities. They have launched a $4 million GoFundMe campaign; among the top donors are Mutale Nkonde and Randy Ubillos.

People at Bluesky, like Paul Frazee, also seem enthusiastic:

📢 This is the big goal of Bluesky! 📢

Social networks should not be owned by own company! They should be a shared commons! Nobody should have sole power over them.

Bluesky itself is reportedly raising money right now, only a few months after a $15 million Series A. So much money so fast makes me worried about the company’s business long-term. But, while I admire the spirit of a crowd-funded alternative, I also question whether every contributor is fully aware of the risks. For its part, the organization says it will return pledges if it does not make its fundraising targets.

Will Oremus, Washington Post:

Mastodon’s [Eugen] Rochko told the Tech Brief on Monday that he was not consulted by the Free Our Feeds group and was not thrilled by its announcement.

“Personally, I think it’s a wasted opportunity to organize this huge effort with a $30 million fundraising goal just to rebuild … what already exists and flourishes today on ActivityPub,” the protocol that underlies Mastodon, Rochko said. He argued that Bluesky’s protocol, called AT Protocol, is designed in a way that gives Bluesky too much control over the system as a whole, meaning that “it will always be an uphill battle” to make it truly open.

Mind you, Mastodon instances are not invincible, either.

There is unlikely to be a singularly effective business model for these more distributed ideas about social networks. Some will likely become paid services; Bluesky is working on a subscription offering. Smaller Mastodon instances might survive on donations. Maybe there are simple ads on some others. The good news is that both AT Protocol and ActivityPub, as protocols, offer some degree of portability and self-sufficiency.

Bloomberg: ‘China Discusses Sale of TikTok U.S. To Musk’ ⇥ bloomberg.com

Bloomberg News:

Beijing officials strongly prefer that TikTok remains under the ownership of parent ByteDance Ltd., the people say, and the company is contesting the impending ban with an appeal to the US Supreme Court. But the justices signaled during arguments on Jan. 10 that they are likely to uphold the law. Senior Chinese officials had already begun to debate contingency plans for TikTok as part of an expansive discussion on how to work with Donald Trump’s administration, one of which involves [Elon] Musk, said the people, asking not to be identified revealing confidential discussions.

There are some strange things about this report, like how it carries no byline, which means its credibility rests entirely on how much you trust anonymous sources giving Bloomberg information about government activities in China. Also, Todd Spangler, of Variety, has a quote from TikTok saying it is “pure fiction”.

Then there is this paragraph, later in the article, which does not make very much sense to me:

A majority of the Supreme Court justices suggested the security concerns take priority over free speech, although they have yet to issue a formal decision. President-elect Trump, who takes office Jan. 20, has sought to delay the TikTok ban — which takes effect Jan. 19 — so he can work on the negotiations. He has said he wants to “save” the app and there’s been speculation he could take last-minute action to sidestep the ban.

The obvious question — of how someone who does not yet have power is able to take “last-minute action” to avoid a ban — goes unanswered in this article. Maybe I am missing something. Or, maybe Trump’s golden toilet seat was borne of the fires of Mount Doom.

This whole idea — if it even exists — is dumb as rocks. If you believe social media platforms should not overtly support a particular candidate or ideology, too bad — that is precisely how Musk used X during the last U.S. presidential election. If you are of the opinion that TikTok could be too compromised by government influence, Musk is working directly with the incoming administration. If you think Chinese government influence is a specifically corrupting force for TikTok, they have leverage over Musk thanks to Tesla’s manufacturing plant and sales in China. Think Musk is going to stand up to quasi-authoritarian bullies at home and abroad? Doubtful. This solves basically none of the concerns raised by detractors.

This report sounds, at best, like wishcasting by people who stand to benefit from Musk paying too much for TikTok’s U.S. operations. Little wonder why nobody wanted to put their name on it.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube Ad Blocker for Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock - best in class YouTube ad blocking

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads, and also blocks all YouTube ads; including all:

  • video ads

  • pop up banner ads

  • search ads

  • plus many more

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

You Never Want to See This Road Sign ⇥ theautopian.com

Lewin Day, the Autopian:

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is widely considered to be a dry and unemotional document. Published by the Department of Transportation, it outlines the basic specifications of all the street signs you could expect to see out on roads and highways across the United States. Most are familiar, but if you dive deeper into its pages, you can find some unsettling relics from darker times.

I wanted to see if there was anything similar in the Canadian equivalent of this manual, but it would cost me over $1,000 to find out. Disappointing.

Meta Reorientates Itself Around ‘Masculine Energy’ ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned.

[…]

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows these posts [announcing the themes] were both still live as of September 2024, the last time the announcement posts were archived. The chat themes that they were announcing were deleted this week, according to internal information obtained by 404 Media. We also confirmed that the themes are no longer active on Messenger. A “Pride” rainbow theme is still active.

Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel, and Kate Conger, New York Times:

That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.

If anybody is still committed to the idea that Meta changed its policies for principled speech reasons, this ought to shatter that belief. It created explicit carve-outs to permit discriminatory speech based on gender and sexual orientation, and Meta — as a company — is reinforcing that by reducing its public support for people who are transgender and non-binary, and making employees’ lives worse.

Riley Griffin, Bloomberg:

“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said during a nearly 3-hour-long conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan, published on Friday.

“It’s like you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy,” Zuckerberg said during the episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing,” he added, before discussing his passions for mixed martial arts and hunting invasive pigs in Hawaii.

danah boyd:

This isn’t simply toxic masculinity. It’s also the toxicity of pursuing the latest variant of masculinity. To feel whole. To feel worthy. To feel powerful. To have a purpose. This doesn’t have to be toxic. But the problem with masculinity is that it’s socially constructed. […]

If there was any doubt about what he means by “masculine energy”, Zuckerberg goes on to say “I think having a culture [in martial arts] that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits”, elaborating:

Rogan: I can see your point, though, about corporate culture. When do you think that happened? Was that a slow shift? Because I think it used to be very masculine. I think it was kind of hyper-aggressive at one point.

Zuckerberg: No, look — I think part of… the intent on all these things I think is good, right? Like, I do think that, if you’re a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it’s too masculine. It’s like there isn’t enough of the energy that you may naturally have, and it probably feels like there are all of these things that are set up that are biased against you. And that’s not good either, because you want women to be able to succeed and, like, have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what background or gender.

But I think these things can always go a little far, and I think it’s one thing to say “we want to be … welcoming and make a good environment for everyone”, and I think think it’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I kind of think we swung culturally to that part [of the spectrum] where it’s like “masculinity is toxic, we have to get rid of it completely”. It’s like “no, both of these things are good”.

Ridiculous backlash like this happens every single time some group without much power gets a little bit more. Men remain overrepresented in the U.S. workforce generally, and earn far more. Women are discriminated against when doing paid work from hiring onward. Sexual harassment remains a problem. The literature on this in both popular culture and academic circles is vast. A good introduction to the “masculine energy” at tech companies, in particular, is Emily Chang’s “Brotopia”. The idea that corporate culture has swung too far feminine and is placating women too much is laughable, let alone one which is sufficiently welcoming to people who are transgender, non-binary, or genderfluid.

Lion’s Refined Clarity ⇥ lmnt.me

Dan Counsell:

Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍

Kyle Halevi (I trimmed the URL):

@realmacdan I redrew more than just Lion, see here:

https://www.sketch.com/s/…

Louie Mantia:

There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every other field: squared. The pill shape distinguished itself. Removing that characteristic introduced a level of ambiguity that is unnecessary. The same can be said for so much in modern visual design (or lack thereof).

When Mac OS X Lion was released, John Siracusa wrote imagined “three dials labeled ‘color,’ ‘contrast,’ and ‘contour,'” saying “Apple has been turning them down slowly for years. Lion accelerates that process”. At the time, we had no idea how much closer to zero Apple would take those dials. Now, we know — and for the same apparent reason. Siracusa, again:

Apple says that its goal with the Lion user interface was to highlight content by de-emphasizing the surrounding user interface elements.

Alan Dye, introducing MacOS Big Sur:

We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on user’s content.

The thing about this explanation that frustrates most is that while we are sometimes merely viewing something, we are very often doing something with it. The reason there is a visual interface with controls and structure is because the computer is a tool.

You know how many stoves have implemented some form of touch-based controls which sometimes dim or recede? They always look more clever than they are to actually use. A physical knob is more utilitarian, and much better for its purpose. MacOS — and its users — would benefit from similar clarity and obvious controls, even if it comes at the cost of adding more shapes and colours.

The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg Lies to Joe Rogan’s Face’ ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, for the Verge, listened to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast so none of us need to. Lopatto does a good job in this article of walking through some of the claims made by Zuckerberg and the conspicuous things he omits. It is a good piece.

However, there is one paragraph for which I call for a correction. Zuckerberg spent considerable time complaining about Apple in ways well beyond the scope of his corporate interests. He whined about blue iMessage bubbles! But he does have more legitimate and relevant disputes, too.

Lopatto:

At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.

The 2018 Safari changes might have been what started Zuckerberg’s grudge, but they were not the trigger for Meta’s newspaper complaints or the multibillion-dollar cost to ad-supported social media companies. That was, of course, App Tracking Transparency, announced in 2020 and launched the following year.

Elon Musk Is Trying to Oust the British Prime Minister ⇥ youtube.com

Anna Gross and Joe Miller, Financial Times:

Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter.

Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US president-elect Donald Trump, is probing how he and his rightwing allies can destabilise the UK Labour government beyond the aggressive posts he has issued on his social media platform X, the people said.

Private Eye editor Ian Hislop appeared on Andrew Marr’s LBC show to discuss Musk’s absurd claims:

I mean, it is almost impossible to avoid him, and he has enormous power, because of a) his money, and b) his reach to people who have been persuaded over the last five years or so that the mainstream media hasn’t covered any stories.

Hislop says the award-winning story Musk is using to cause this frenzy was broken on the front page of the Times and has been covered for a decade or more. As Hank Green said, everything is a conspiracy theory when you do not trust anything and, as Mike Masnick said, when you do not bother to educate yourself.

I shudder to think what nonsense is coming for the Canadian election likely happening this year. It is going to be a nightmare.

Ads in Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location ⇥ 404media.co

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

Hackers claim to have compromised Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel which has sold masses of smartphone location data to the U.S. government. The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples’ precise movements, and they are threatening to publish the data publicly.

You remember Gravy Analytics, right? It is the one from the stories and the FTC settlements, though it should not be confused with all the other ones.

Cox, again, 404 Media:

Included in the hacked Gravy data are tens of millions of mobile phone coordinates of devices inside the US, Russia, and Europe. Some of those files also reference an app next to each piece of location data. 404 Media extracted the app names and built a list of mentioned apps.

The list includes dating sites Tinder and Grindr; massive games such as Candy Crush, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells; transit app Moovit; My Period Calendar & Tracker, a period tracking app with more than 10 million downloads; popular fitness app MyFitnessPal; social network Tumblr; Yahoo’s email client; Microsoft’s 365 office app; and flight tracker Flightradar24. The list also mentions multiple religious-focused apps such as Muslim prayer and Christian Bible apps; various pregnancy trackers; and many VPN apps, which some users may download, ironically, in an attempt to protect their privacy.

This location data, some of it more granular than others, appears to be derived from real-time bidding on advertising, much like the Patternz case last year. In linking to — surprise — Cox’s reporting on Patternz, I also pointed to a slowly developing lawsuit against Google. In a filing (PDF) from the plaintiffs, so far untested in court, there are some passages that can help contextualize the scale and scope of real-time bidding data (emphasis mine):

As to the Court’s second concern about the representative nature of the RTB data produced for the plaintiffs (the “Plaintiff data”), following the Court’s Order, Google produced six ten-minute intervals of class-wide RTB bid data spread over a three-year period (2021-2023) (the “Class data”). Further Pritzker Decl., ¶ 17. Prof. Shafiq analyzed this production, encompassing over 120 terabytes of data and almost [redacted] billion RTB bid requests. His analysis directly answers the Court’s inquiry, affirming that the RTB data are uniformly personal information for the plaintiffs and the Class, and that the Plaintiff data is in fact representative of the Class as a whole.

[…]

[…] For the six ten-minute periods of Class data Google produced, Prof. Shafiq finds that there were at least [redacted] different companies receiving the bid data located in at least [redacted] countries, and that the companies included some of the largest technology companies in the world. […]

This is Google, not Gravy Analytics, but still — this entire industry is morally bankrupt. It should not be a radical position that using an app on your phone or browsing the web should not opt you into such egregious violations of basic elements of your privacy.