Link Log

About Half of U.S. Smartphone Owners Say They Spend Too Much Time Using It ⇥ pewresearch.org

William Bishop of Pew Research:

Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about right, while just 3% say they spend too little time using these devices.

Notably, 70% of smartphone owners in the U.S. aged 18–29 say they believe they use it too much. I am skeptical of public polling — maybe we are societally more approving of shaming our own device use — but this also tracks with what I hear casually from friends and family. Anecdotally, many people I know have expressed that they want to be on their phones less often.

But the editors of Andreessen Horowitz’s It’s Time to Build newsletter — hosted on Substack, a platform they are investors in — believe this behaviour actually indicates people are very happy. Ruby Thelot, professor of design and media studies at New York University and “astute tech observer”, says the heavy use of social media platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram — Andreessen Horowitz invested in both, and Marc Andreessen is on Meta’s board; none of this is disclosed — is simply evidence we love them:

People en masse are getting on social media, by choice. From 2016 until now, the number of social media users has grown from 2.5B to close to 6B people. Enshittification isn’t real. It’s three TikToks in a trenchcoat, and, maybe, a book deal. It’s good for discourse but does not describe actual reality and user patterns.

Returning to Instagram. The average daily usage showcases an increase in time spent on Instagram every day as well. Users are coming back for more, in a highly competitive attention arena, year after year.

There is a lot of assumption in these two paragraphs, and I think the “close to 6B people” is worth examining to start. Thelot attributes this statistic in the chart above to Backlinko. It cites no source, but a web search indicates to me this originates with Manochi’s DataReportal, which disclaims “‘user identities’ may not represent unique human individuals” because, as the company explains on the sixth slide of its report, it may count multiple social media accounts or business accounts as individual identities. These are not necessarily people, and Manochi says it is improper to compare figures year over year as Thelot does. (And, to be fair, which Manochi also does on slide 321.)

A lack of rigour is not unique to this data point.

Thelot next shows a chart indicating daily Instagram use rose from 25 minutes in 2017 to nearly 34 in 2026. This is, to Thelot, simply evidence that people like using it and want more. But, to return to the Pew poll above, it seems that people do not feel good about spending more time on their smartphones. Though Pew did not ask (PDF) about social media specifically, roughly half of respondents aged 18–29 said it negatively affects their productivity. And, according to slide 337 of that Manochi report, 30.7–44.0% of people say they use social media to “fill up spare time”, trending higher for younger generations. It is plausible that more younger people are spending increasing amounts of time on social media apps and they do not feel good about it. In other words, the time spent numbers are not a good proxy for enjoyment or value.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

Regardless of whether you call it “addiction” or some kind of compulsive behaviour, it is plausible many people dislike their own actions but struggle to change them. It is also possible these products are designed to take advantage of that to extract more time out of each user.

Apple’s John Ternus Era Begins ⇥ nytimes.com

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link)

John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years. The long-anticipated handoff, Mr. Cook has said, will be “perfectly smooth.”

[…]

This summer, Apple hired Nate Gatten from American Airlines to lead government affairs, replacing Kate Adams, who will retire this year. Laura Legros, a hardware engineering vice president and deputy of Mr. Ternus’s before retiring from Apple in 2022, has rejoined the company, three people familiar with her hiring said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Ms. Legros, who reports to Mr. Ternus, could act as his adviser and emissary to various parts of the company, the three people said.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple’s Phil Schiller is no longer going to run the App Store or oversee product events, reports Bloomberg. Schiller isn’t leaving Apple, but he is narrowing his responsibilities and working on unspecified projects.

Employees at Apple told Bloomberg that 66-year-old Schiller appears to be taking another step toward retirement.

Cook and Ternus each sent pretty anodyne company-wide memos about the transition. Cook’s tenure was the longest of any CEO in Apple’s history and he was the one who turned it from a successful company into a global behemoth.

The thing I have liked about Apple — one of the things that made me a longtime customer and someone who writes about the company — is that it has historically been a very simple kind of business: it designs products and sells them to people, mostly. Every one of its peers is a more complicated business. They often balance the needs of massive institutional and government customers, advertisers, or two-sided marketplaces.

That change began in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure and accelerated under Cook. Most software, including operating systems, was accounted for as part of device purchases, and was turned into a software-as-a-service model. Its subscription-based business became a revenue growth centre, which was important for Wall Street because it was a way to turn the company’s successful but inconsistent device sales into predictable money printers. And there are now ads and upsells throughout the operating systems, which are shown to all users regardless of how much other money they have already given Apple.

Ternus has inherited that Apple. Regardless of how much he gives off the vibe of a cool Californian — by way of Philadelphia — who just cares about the best stuff, he is also selling ad space and making sure more people upgrade to Apple One.

Travelling With a Separatist Alberta Group That Thinks the CBC Are ‘Federalist Scumbags’ Publishing ‘Drivel’ ⇥ mcsweeneys.net

Joel Dryden, in a CBC News article with the headline “On the Road With Pro-Independence Albertans, One Small Town at a Time”:

The restaurant owner, who gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has hit the road this summer to talk independence, travelling with a group of people who also support the idea of Alberta becoming its own nation.

[…]

On the back of the vehicle, a Bible verse printed in script: Jeremiah 29:7 — “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Mike Skerrett, in a 2018 McSweeney’s article with the headline “I Traveled to a Diner In Trump Country to Write Another Article On Whether the President’s Supporters Still Want to, Quote, ‘Smash My Libtard Face In'”:

I came to this diner, The No Safe Space Café, to get a taste of the Real America. This America exists outside the liberal echo chambers, somewhere with real diversity of thought: The opinions of straight, white, Christian men.

Chris Scott — the “restaurant owner” driving the separatist campaign bus with Dryden aboard — has previously called the CBC “liars, thieves and Federalist bootlickers” who publish “drivel”. Replace the U.S.-centrism of the McSweeney’s piece with a Canadian vibe, and is it really all that different?

‘Here’s What’s Coming’ ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Here is a list of headlines; perhaps you will spot a theme:

All of these since January — and I excluded most rewrites of articles by Mark Gurman, Ming-Chi Kuo, and other well-known Apple rumour writers. Also, my list does not include articles about products rumoured to be announced at specific events. They also have another thing in common: nearly all are by Ryan Christoffel, who seems to have taken up the 9to5Mac beat for making listicles of Apple products that could be updated in the future. Cool.

Careful readers might think I listed one of these articles twice — the “15+ new products this fall” one. But this is because Christoffel originally published it in May, and then changed the date on it to August after making a few changes.

I do not know who this is supposed to serve. Maybe this is a play for search engine traffic or A.I. chatbot citations. Maybe it works pretty well, too, and maybe I should be less cynical about these kinds of churned-out listicles in a time when A.I. search features are capturing traffic that used to go to third-party websites. Or maybe this is all just filler when there is nothing newsworthy but you need to publish a dozen or so articles daily.

Update: D. Griffin Jones, formerly at Cult of Mac, says on Bluesky:

It’s a secret third thing: Google Discover, Google News, Flipboard, Apple News, and other algorithmic aggregators. Articles like that tend to reach a much broader audience.

“One listicle a day” was our goal at Cult of Mac before I was laid off. It’s a tough time out there for independent blogs. The Google AI overview is devastating.

I obviously have no authority to give business advice. I would only point out that it is disappointing to hear about chasing referral strategies. One would think the pivot to video era would be treated as a cautionary tale and not something to repeat — if one, I suppose, is not responsible for staff and paycheques.

Society Runs on Stimulants ⇥ currentaffairs.org

Alex Skopic, at Current Affairs, wrote about the functional use and abuse of stimulants by people who are overworked. I stumbled upon it by way of the latest issue of Web Curios, and I think the general thrust of the article is something I find noteworthy enough to link to it. Alas, it is sloppy in the details.

The second paragraph is a good place to start. Skopic dumps a litany of numbers about declining affordability and the difficulties of modern life; among them:

[…] And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 21.6 percent of Americans now work longer than 40 hours a week, with a beleaguered five percent working as many as 60 hours. […]

The way this is phrased — “now work longer than 40 hours a week”, emphasis mine — may give the impression this figure is a new high, either historically or at least in recent memory. But it is not. This figure has been declining for at least twenty years. In 2005, the BLS reported 27.9% of people employed in nonagricultural jobs in the U.S. worked 41 or more hours; by 2015, that was down to 24.8%, compared to 21.6% in 2025. The same drop is also present for workers committing 60 hours per week or more: 7.2% in 2005, 6.3% in 2015, and 5.4% in 2025.

I am not selectively quoting here. I picked ten and twenty years ago for comparative convenience, but you can check the intervening years and find a clear trend. The misuse of this data point is a poor choice when there is perhaps an interesting narrative in reconciling the declining percentage of overworked U.S. adults with the proliferation of highly caffeinated beverages, mysterious energy shots, and powders and supplements of questionable substance.

This is the kind of sentence that made me begin searching up all kinds of stuff in this article. It raises doubts, making me do the kind of work all of us should probably do any time we read something, but do not because we decide we have better things to do. Well, I decided this is what I was going to do today. I am going to skip past the health claims because they are not in my wheelhouse — double-checking easily verified numbers is something I am more comfortable with — and I will jump to this part:

Monster Energy, for instance, seems to think it owns the word “monster.” In 2009, the company threatened to sue a small brewery in Vermont for selling a beer called the “Vermonster,” claiming it infringed their trademark rights. That was at least a beverage, but in 2020 they did the same thing with video game company Ubisoft, forcing them to change a game’s title from “Gods and Monsters” to “Immortals Fenyx Rising.” In 2023 they once again targeted the gaming industry, this time over an independent game called “Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals”; according to the developers, the drink company wanted them to “agree to never use a green & white logo on a black background for any game we ever make. So they own the colors green & white too apparently.” In all of these cases, Monster’s legal claim is shaky at best — but with a revenue of $7.9 billion in 2025, they have enough money to bankrupt anyone who tries to take them to court, so it doesn’t matter.

Monster Energy is an aggressive litigant when it comes to protecting its trademarks, but it does not always succeed. Glowstick Entertainment, makers of “Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals”, fought and won its trademark case. Also, I think it would have been useful for Skopic to cite cases where Monster Energy lost — or likely would have lost — but the defendant went out of business anyhow. For example, in a 2022 case against a store with “Monster” in its name, the energy drink company would have been unlikely to prevail (PDF). Even so, a search of state records showed the company was ultimately dissolved. No matter whether this was directly connected to the litigation, it is a stronger argument for having “enough money to bankrupt anyone who tries to take them to court” than this evidence-free article.

Also, it is kind of weird that Coca-Cola — a company which owns 21% of Monster Energy after the latter acquired Coke’s energy drink portfolio, has a line of teas and coffees, and whose namesake beverage used to contain cocaine and still contains caffeine — goes entirely unmentioned in this piece. Perhaps it is too obvious, or feels like too much of a stretch. But it is strange to dedicate a paragraph to Monster’s trademark battles, which has nothing to do with the thesis of this piece, and leave the Coca-Cola stone unturned.

I wish an editor took another pass on this article as I think there are points that could be clarified, facts that desperately need checking, and interesting narratives that could be teased out. Skopic notes, for instance, the supposed incompatibility of sleep with an economy based on relentless production and consumption. It is true that we cannot make or buy things in your sleep, nor can we provide revenue-generating services, but sleep itself is an enormous business. We are encouraged to spend thousands of dollars on beds and mattresses because less expensive options are insufficiently rest-promoting, and then we should spend more money to wake up and keep ourselves alert throughout the day.

I find all of this baffling, even as — perhaps especially as — a daily coffee drinker. I get that people have different relationships with caffeine and alcohol, so do not take this as anything greater than my feelings-based vibe, but I have never really understood these as functional products. Coffee, when made well using the kinds of beans that I like, is a delicious beverage regardless of its effects. Wine is sort of similar to me. They both have effects, of course, but I think of those as a kind of warning sign: if I have consumed so much coffee or wine that it noticeably changes how I feel, I have probably had too much. This makes them, unlike energy drinks, a delicious treat for me. Your mileage may vary.

World’s Most Powerful Person Does a Stupid Thing About a Lake ⇥ cbc.ca

An un-bylined Canadian Press report:

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as tensions with Canada worsen.

Elect stupid people and get stupid policies. This report contains a good explanation of the name’s history, and also has a deliciously petty map illustrating where the border is drawn.

Like the moronic Gulf of Mexico relabelling, expect digital mapping companies like Apple and Google to fall in line. MapQuest, a holdout on that change, also says it will keep the correct name. I still think maps should reflect government names regardless of whether they were assigned by a thumb elected by the world’s least responsible country, but I sympathize with MapQuest’s stance.

Update: Just like that, Google has updated its map to reflect “Lake America” when using a U.S. map, “Lake Ontario” in Canada, and “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” elsewhere. Google’s concession — and, soon, Apple’s — is a good reminder to all users that the U.S. may be the most powerful country in the world, but it is no longer a leader.

Update: Apple has also updated its map.

Apple Reverses Proposed Hide My Email Domain Change ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple, after previously saying it would move Hide My Email to the private.icloud.com subdomain:

After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

The whole point of an email address like this is that it can be used anywhere someone does not want to provide an address that can be tied to them or remarketed to, or if they want to be able to cut off communications. This change, if implemented, would have made these addresses basically useless. I am glad to see this was reversed.

E.U. Privacy Organizations Launch Initiative to Kill Cookie Consent Banners​ ⇥ cybernews.com

In September, the European Commission began pondering how to correct its 2009 privacy law that resulted in cookie permission banners littering the web, with the resulting proposal announced in November.

Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian:

EU officials said users would remain in control of their data on the internet, but new rules on cookies — the internet files that are stored on a user’s device so a website can remember them — would make life simpler by ensuring one-click consent. “I think we can all agree we have spent too much of our time accepting or rejecting cookies,” [Henna] Virkkunen said.

This was not the first time the Commission had attempted to correct for the permissions pollution that resulted from the e-Privacy Directive. In 2020, its efforts were focused on ineffective consent options like, as reported at the Verge, “a cookie consent policy with no obvious way to opt out of tracking”. I still see many websites, like the Verge itself, providing no meaningful consent for third-party tracking.

This time, though, the Commission said it was trying to make cookie consents less prevalent by allowing, for example, simple statistical cookies without any consent, and it was going to give users an option to decline tracking universally. When I looked into the changes in November, it seemed like this signal could be ignored by publishers and media companies who would be free to ask for consent anyway. As of May, it seemed this proposal was moving forward by requiring consent management platforms to respond to browser signals. By summer, however, things had changed.

Ernestas Naprys, Cybernews (“Article 88b” refers to the universal browser signal proposal):

Google suggested ditching Article 88b.

“Article 88b should be deleted. Retaining this provision risks anchoring the Omnibus to a proven-failed architecture, Google’s position reads.

“It will drastically impair the ability of most websites to monetize content and drive client acquisition. The resulting low consent rates and severely restricted data access.”

Meta suggested removing the entire Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive. This rule is why we have cookie banners in the first place, as it requires website operators to obtain clear user consent before storing or accessing their information.

It was not just U.S.-based companies that argued against better user privacy controls. According to noyb, French, German, and Polish representatives were in alignment with Google’s position, which ultimately led to its scrapping. All three countries are home to companies that would be affected by this regulation. None, however, are as big or as powerful as Google or Meta.

Privacy-defending organizations are understandably not impressed. They have launched Kill the Cookie Banner to drum up support for legal recognition of a browser signal. In the U.S., five state governments say the Global Privacy Control must be respected. At a browser level, it is only implemented in Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox, but it seems that Apple is working to add it to Safari, and it seems it is being actively worked on for Chromium, too. The European Commission should throw its weight behind this control, too.

‘Every Right on Red Frays the Social Contract a Little Further’ ⇥ defector.com

Felix Kent, Defector (gift link):

[…] I believed then and still believe that operating a car is too difficult for human beings. This is obviously not true at the level of making a car move. Making a car move is easy. A rat can make a car move. But the level of skill involved in driving really well is not dissimilar from that required to be a concert pianist, if the pianist-centered movies I’ve watched are to be believed. Now imagine that in most parts of the country leading a normal life required more or less constant piano playing. Now imagine that playing the piano badly killed people.

Just about everything we do to make driving a car easier instead seems to make people complacent. The lanes on roads are wider than they need to be to account for lateral imperfection, and then there are wide berms so that someone may drive completely off the road in relative safety. Cars that are enormous, heavy, hulking things do not allow drivers to feel their weight because of myriad assistance features that make it possible to steer with a single finger.

But driving is a skill. Like any skill, it is something people will have varying degrees of success learning. Some people simply cannot drive, whether on a temporary or permanent basis. We can bet the farm on autonomous vehicles which, though seemingly capable in warm and dry urban settings, are an expensive and individualized answer that exacerbates all the other problems of car dependency. It is also a risky bet as, like any technology, current performance is not indicative of future gains. Public transit, on the other hand, is a proven technology that, among other things, strengthens the social contract while giving everyone the ability to move around a city.

Nitter’s Developer Says X Sent a Cease and Desist ⇥ nitter.net

“zedeus”:

On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.

Nitter mirrors X; it powers websites like XCancel which remains online and functional as of writing. (Update: A few hours after I published this, XCancel says it was also told by X to shut down its service.)

This is not surprising but it is very stupid. Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must. Bafflingly, however, some argue they should face little responsibility for those choices.

Meet Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ⇥ cnbc.com

Jeffrey Kopp, of CNBC, wrote a short profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, whose name you may have heard even if you do not live in her district of Northern California. That is because her district covers such areas as San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so her rulings on the many cases heard there have a disproportionate impact on U.S. technology policy.

These policies should catch the attention of people in the U.S., of course; it is also a factor to be mindful of in the rest of the world. The boundaries and limitations surrounding the behaviour of some of the most impactful companies in the world are decided by a relative handful of people, among whom are the justices of the Northern District of California. This article is not a deep examination of such consequences — but I would love to read that story, if it exists.

Apple News Publisher Sign-in Required ⇥ mjtsai.com

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned:

  1. These notifications arrive on an approximately five-month schedule, perhaps a couple of weeks longer.

  2. News Publisher has little additional functionality that requires or would encourage signing in on a more regular basis if you do not use Apple’s special format.

    In my case, I cannot even see the articles I have published, nor are there analytics. I checked on a device that is not my own and I can see that recent articles are broadcasting to Apple News just fine from my website, but there is effectively nothing in News Publisher reflecting that.

  3. Apple News is still frighteningly limited from a publisher’s perspective. It launched eleven years ago and there is still no way to set a custom URL in News Publisher or, in fact, anywhere. That is, this website’s Apple News link is https://apple.news/TAjcS0c5sRV2HYftzmJ6UMQ instead of, say, https://apple.news/pixel-envy. It is not a function of size, either — here are the URL slugs of a few publishers you definitely recognize: ThfiauYLtQlOfqyiHkempkw, TVKIb0N6iSsOyGSnR4zF1Kw, and TUKgA_OjuTe20v1ndDwQjxQ. Catchy.

    This limitation also extends to the URLs of individual stories. It is the kind of basic functionality that exists on every other public-facing platform I can think of that a publisher might use, but Apple does not support because its “Services” business prints money anyway.

I still do not know what happens if I fail to sign into News Publisher five months from now, other than that my role becomes reduced to an editor. There is nobody else authorized with News Publisher, so I guess I simply lose administrator access forever if, every five months, I complete the necessary busywork of signing in.

Meta Figured Out How to Build a Mac App ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed.

Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release.

Meta’s other major Mac app is WhatsApp, and it comes in at over 650 MB (and over a gigabyte on Windows). Its iOS apps are no better: Instagram is 605 MB, Facebook is 491 MB, and even Threads is over 200 MB. I do not understand why since virtually everything displayed in these apps is served remotely.

Did Someone Wearing Meta Glasses Film You Today? Are You Sure? ⇥ theguardian.com

Maggie Harrison Dupré, in a Guardian article about Meta Glasses:

[…] Smartglasses bring the functionality of smartphones, cameras included, into every moment. Several people I spoke to said that even when the LED is functioning as intended it can be subtle and difficult to spot from far away, especially if you aren’t aware of how smartglasses work. Others shared that they sought out the glasses to capture more “natural” footage of those around them, explicitly because people act differently when they know they’re being recorded. As Meta themselves put in their advertising materials: “Record life as you live it – every detail, every angle.”

[…]

Meta refuted to the Guardian that the main purpose of the glasses is to make unnoticeable recordings. […]

Actually, it is the whole point of these things. What Meta probably intends to say is that the main purpose of these glasses is not to make creepy and gross unnoticeable recordings. However, they are absolutely intended to be a less-obvious way of shooting photos and videos “as you live it”, if you believe Meta’s own marketing. Sure, maybe someone recorded you today with their smartphone and you did not notice, but it is very obviously an effect of hidden camera glasses like these — and, perhaps, headphones — that such recordings become dramatically more covert.

Harrison Dupré quotes Ryan Clarkson in this article, an attorney who filed a sprawling class action lawsuit (PDF) against Meta alleging serious privacy violations. But virtually all its claims refer to the blockbuster article published by Svenska Dagbladet in March revealing that contractors in Nairobi were reviewing recordings without the explicit knowledge or consent of users — undeniably, in my view, a violation of their privacy and expectations. But so many of the examples in this article and others are entirely about the simple fact that images or videos were captured.

The U.S. Anti-China Tech Protectionism Racket From a Middle Power ⇥ karlbode.com

Karl Bode:

So prepare for a year of breathless and evidence-optional claims that Chinese AI is a dire threat to U.S. consumer privacy and national security, followed by an elaborate bipartisan train of bad policy and shitty new laws crafted by a clumsy coalition of technofascists, extremists, and competition-averse chickenshits.

A bit rant-ish for my liking, but the kind of thing that makes me worried about living in what our prime minister called a “middle power”. The success of A.I. models developed in China has caused much concern among U.S. hyperscalers.

In his recent essay, Mark Zuckerberg warned that “[a]ny policy that slows American model releases — even by a month — could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead”; by “foreign models”, he means those from China. Much of this section of the essay bemoans the already feeble restrictions in the U.S. on training and building A.I. models. Zuckerberg even says “falling behind in A.I. overall would almost certainly be a larger and longer term national security issue than any specific issue we’ll face in its development”. These talking points are ripped from the history Bode documents of the supposedly essential 5G “race”.

But if you live in a middle power, what matters are the knock-on effects of these battles that are about political and public relations more than they are about actual technology. For U.S. allies, it means a further entrenchment of U.S. companies in our technology landscapes.

After Regulator’s Investigation, Apple Will Make Changes to App Tracking Transparency Prompts in Germany ⇥ bundeskartellamt.de

From the Bundeskartellamt’s press release:

Under the commitments that have now been declared binding, Apple will align the consent prompts for its own offerings and for third-party apps much more closely. This involves removing possibly discouraging symbols and wording in Apple’s predefined requests for third-party providers. The design of the consent prompts will be neutral in terms of content, wording and layout. In addition, app publishers and content providers, such as media publishers, will be given more scope to explain to users what significance personalised advertising has for their offering and their business model.

The regulator helpfully offers an illustration of the differences between these prompts on the fourth page of its FAQs (PDF) about the case. There are many things they say could be deterrents in the App Tracking Transparency dialog, and I do not think Apple would deny that they are suggesting that users opt out of tracking. The definition of “tracking” Apple uses is self-serving, which would not matter so much if it did not also have a parallel desire to grow its advertising business.

A particularly damning finding in that comparison, to my eyes, is the way Apple puts “Ask App Not to Track” as the topmost button in the App Tracking Transparency dialog, but puts the option to “Turn Off Personalised Ads” at the bottom of it its own advertising prompt. Regardless of whether you believe one particular order is more suggestive of a primary and secondary action, the mere fact they are not in the same order is indicative to me of ill intent or, at the very least, sneakiness.

Apple had previously threatened to withdraw App Tracking Transparency in Europe because of financial penalties and what it called “intense lobbying” by European advertising companies. In a statement to 9to5Mac, however, it seems perfectly fine with making these changes.

One of the many changes Apple has agreed to make is that both prompts will contain “an accurate explanation of how data may be processed if the user gives their consent”. I am unsure what this looks like, but I hope it addresses a shortcoming of App Tracking Transparency, which is that it provides basically no information for users to make an informed choice about consent. What does it mean to allow tracking in App A compared to App B? This requirement may help clarify that. Then again, I also think it is grossly unfair to make users responsible for figuring out whether they should consent to persistent and invasive data collection on an individual level.

YouTube Will Mimic the Dishonest View Counts of Other Social Video Platforms On All Videos ⇥ support.google.com

Natasha of “Team YouTube:

Last year, we updated how we count public views for Shorts to better capture how viewers watch on YouTube. Now, we’re aligning all other video formats to this same standard for consistency across the platform. Beginning on 8/24/2026, a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play—from the very first frame. This standard will now apply globally across all formats.

YouTube does not provide an easy answer about how it counts “legitimate views” on non-Shorts videos right now — an article called “how engagement metrics are counted” does not actually say how — but I see many people referencing a rule of thumb of thirty seconds. Dropping this to a single frame on a platform that automatically plays every video is essentially a page view count, not a “view” by any stretch of the imagination.

Emma Roth, the Verge:

Instagram and TikTok similarly add a view to a video when it starts to play or replay, while X counts a view when a user watches a video for at least two seconds. […]

YouTube says it is keeping the old metric, now called “Engaged Views”, visible only to uploaders. The publicly disclosed numbers mean basically nothing about how many people actually watched something or enjoyed it, but at least that is now a consistently stupid number across all major platforms.

Google and Our Collective Memory ⇥ thewalrus.ca

Vass Bednar, the Walrus:

[…] the point has been made: looking after the information economy can no longer be a side project for underfunded institutions. Wikipedia is as miraculous as the Wayback Machine is indispensable. Still, we need to stop pretending volunteerism alone can hold up the public internet. We understand this duty more clearly in other domains. After all, roads aren’t governed by ride-sharing companies; payment apps don’t set monetary policy; cloud service providers don’t dictate national security frameworks (at least not yet). Yet we have been shockingly casual about governing our digital dependencies.

This paragraph is fantastic. But one of the things I found frustrating about this article as a whole is the lack of links or substantial proof. For example, I felt compelled to fact-check this claim:

The retrieval crisis has reached even Wikipedia, one of the world’s most significant volunteer-run public knowledge resources. For years, search engines sent billions of viewers to its pages. But now, AI systems scrape and ingest Wikipedia’s content directly when presenting their results, eliminating the need for users to click through. Wikipedia has become the infrastructure of its own demise: dwindling traffic means attention and donations no longer reliably flow back to the encyclopedia to keep it alive.

On a gut level, this feels like it should be true. An initial glance at the views of English Wikipedia’s main page, however, suggested it was not. But then I looked at total pageviews across English Wikipedia since January 2020 — as far back as it goes — and, indeed, page view have dropped from 7–8 billion per month in early 2024 — before Google launched A.I. Overviews — to 6–7 billion per month in 2026. Perhaps it is simply not this writer’s style, but I would prefer to have had concrete numbers to reference.

X’s Advertising Business Continues to Tank ⇥ techdirt.com

Sarah Perez, in a TechCrunch story about monthly active user numbers for Bluesky, Threads, and X, using data provided by Similarweb:

Instead, the data shows that X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down around 3% year-over-year in June, and X’s mobile daily active users dropped 7% in July to 123.7 million. (Of course, X remains a sizable social network with around 302 million monthly active users on its app as of June 2026 and a growing number of web visits, up 5.3% year-over-year in July to 4.7 billion.)

Similarweb’s data is janky as hell, and this number is a long, long way from SpaceX’s self-reported monthly active user count of 550 million on X alone. I am not saying either number is reliable, only that a gulf of 248 million users is an error not easily explained by rounding or estimation assumptions. Pre-takeover, Twitter had about 338 million monthly active users, according to an estimate by Insider Intelligence; in four years, the platform either declined by around 36 million monthly users or grew by over 200 million.

By the way, how is X doing from a financial perspective?

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

Let’s break all this down: In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million. That’s $713 million a quarter, gone. Elon has wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business over the exact period in which he promised investors he’d nearly triple it.

Musk said in his 2022 Twitter investor pitch that he would quintuple revenue by 2028, though advertising would represent just 45% of that for a total of $12 billion annually. But, then again, Musk says a lot of things that are not true, like how his heart goes out to you.