But “Download Your Data” hardly tells you everything Facebook knows about you. Among the information not included:

information Facebook collects about your browsing history

information Facebook collects about the apps you visit and your activity within those apps

the advertisers who uploaded your contact information to Facebook more than two months earlier

ads that you interacted with more than two months prior

"What should concern you is that Amazon has expressed some degree of openness to granting third-party app developers access to transcripts of audio recordings saved by Alexa-powered devices — though the company says this would only be with users’ consent, according to the Verge. While this may seem shocking, Amazon is considering it because its biggest competitor in the VUI market, Google Home, is already giving developers access to this data. In the same ways that we’ve seen Facebook and Google slice and dice data unknowingly given up by consumers and sell it to third parties with varying results, the practice should always give users slight pause. No free app or service is ever actually free."

Welcome to the 21st Century.....

Where technology makes people lazy

If you have 15 minutes this is a really good watch. They cover attention spans and how social media sites now have more influence than Christianity and Islam.

There's also an interesting piece about the uselessness of snapchat being compared to a ball being passed back and forth over and over rewiring how young people develop.

In particular the discussion of making social media sites subscription based is interesting. Tristan posites that it would actually save users money because half of what eats up our data plans is ads anyway.

Apple's attempt to side step integrating a full touch screen in order to not cannabalize iPad sales is a failure. The Touch Bar is mostly useless to pros.

"Apple cannot say that the Touch Bar is a key part of the MacBook family if it is not supported throughout the MacBook Pro lineup. With no updates expected during 2018 (which implies that it’s going to be WWDC 2019 in June next year before there’s any new hardware) Apple’s commitment to pushing the envelope on laptop and desktop design is again being called into question."

Why can't OnePlus stay out of trouble?
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1244275

An interesting experiment using the Google Pixel portrait mode on a phone that doesn't come with it. In the end it ends up beating out some 2017 phones showing that software can outlast hardware.

As much as I love the Google Assistant it's gotta be able to do better than this in 2018 with sports stats.

LOL!

"How did this error come to be? We have written about how Google generates the direct answers that appear atop search results. Some are aggregated from the open web, and others come from a curated list of sources including Wikipedia. They are all done by algorithm with little human interference, which has led Google to effectively proclaim at different points in the past that all women are evil, Obama is planning a coup, the Earth is flat, and dolphins are aliens, which is especially funny if you own a Google Home device or a phone with Google Voice Assistant, because you can ask these questions and the device will read back these answers in a funny robot voice."

A great explainer on Apple's brand philosophy and where the reasoning for their strategy comes from.