Externalities.

Until Chrome starts helping you guard your privacy, these browser extensions can take on the work.

Amazon and Google are happy to give users the option to pause tracking. Why can’t we stop it entirely?

Google knows more about you than you might think. Here's how to keep it from knowing your location, web browsing, and more.

Study finds adding a phone number to a Google account blocks all automated attempts, 99% of bulk attacks, and 66% of targeted attacks.

Some employees say Google is losing touch with its “Don’t be evil” motto. What happens when an empowered tech workforce rebels?

Is the increased use of commercial digital solutions proving to have unintended consequences for the museum sector?

This article was originally published by ProPublica on October 21st, 2016. When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we cont

A case currently making its way through the Supreme Court’s docket may have far-reaching implications for the future of privacy litigation. The case, Frank v. G

By Chris Hoofnagle - University of California, Berkeley | They claim not to sell data, but Facebook and Google have paid developers with data. This selling of your personal data is central to platform economics. Could quality signals change the terms of the bargain?

Why culturomics is bullshit.

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800–2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.

Garbage in, garbage out when it comes to big data analysis of language and culture.

DuckDuckGo says you can go right ahead and log out of Google, then enter private browsing mode, but you’ll still see tailored search results.

Rival browser maker DuckDuckGo found users got different results for the same search, even when they were logged out or using Incognito mode.

Two members of Congress asked for details of practices concerning the personal data of viewers younger than 13.

Interviews with over a dozen current and former Google employees highlight a commitment to privacy—and the inherent tensions that creates.

TL;DR: An undocumented API in Google home devices is easily exploitable. This command will reboot any on your local network: nmap –open -p 8008 192.168.1.0/24 | awk ‘/is up/ {print up};…