Day: 1 February 2022

Life360 Says It Will Stop Selling Precise Location Data ⇥ themarkup.org

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, the Markup:

The family safety app Life360 announced on Wednesday that it would stop selling precise location data, cutting off one of the multibillion-dollar location data industry’s largest sources. The decision comes after The Markup revealed that Life360 was supplying up to a dozen data brokers with the whereabouts of millions of its users.

Good. But Life360 says it will keep selling precise data to Arity, and “aggregate” data to Placer.ai. This is all at the company’s behest — there is nothing legally preventing it from beginning similar data marketing agreements.

Enough About Joe Rogan ⇥ talkingpointsmemo.com

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

This may sound like I’m “bothsidesing” this, putting the quackish cranks on an equal footing with those trying to rebut them. I’m not. Or at least I hope I’m not. But this is all part of some larger collapse of public trust and cultural disintegration which transcends the offenders and those trying to police them. It’s not disinformation. It’s more mundane. Rogan is just a meathead who has a knack for entertaining and interesting conversations — clearly on the basis of his massive listenership — who should do better but won’t. And that refusal to do better, to sweat some details, and the trouble it gets him into is a significant part of his attraction to many listeners.

[…]

There are limits to what we can do to prevent people from lying to people who want to be lied to.

This is all true, and I agree with the overall thrust of Marshall’s argument. I just wonder how we are able to begin climbing out of this trust hole? Societal problems with confidence in institutions and experts are decades old and worse in some places than others, and progress on countering it will be slow when there is still a voracious and lucrative market for those who take advantage of it.

Software Paper Cuts ⇥ matthewbischoff.com

Matthew Bischoff (via Michael Tsai):

The more insidious thing about these bugs is that they’re rarely reported by users or caught by automated testing tools because they’re too small to complain about or too obscure to write tests for. Great QA testers can find and file these types of bugs, but they usually flounder at the end of a long backlog of new features. This means that if you’re an engineer on a piece of software, you’re the person who’s best able to notice and fix these bugs. Yes, you might have to convince your boss or your product manager to set aside some time every so often to do so, but I promise your users will be grateful, and your product will improve in meaningful ways if you do.

I promise that users notice these bugs all the time and, especially in products that do not have a more technically literate audience, they become sources of confusion and dissatisfaction. They make software feel brittle. Product managers, please encourage your developers to hunt down and resolve these bugs every single day. Chip away at the list until nothing remains, and you will end up with software that feels like users can rely on it.