29 August 2019

Google to pay security researchers who find Android apps and Chrome extensions misusing user data


Google said it will pay security researchers who find “verifiably and unambiguous evidence” of data abuse using its platforms.

It’s part of the company’s efforts to catch those who misuse user data collected through Android apps or Chrome extensions — and to avoid its own version of a scandal like Cambridge Analytica, which saw millions of Facebook profiles scraped and used to identify undecided voters during the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

Google said anyone who identifies “situations where user data is being used or sold unexpectedly, or repurposed in an illegitimate way without user consent” is eligible for its expanded data abuse bug bounty.

“If data abuse is identified related to an app or Chrome extension, that app or extension will accordingly be removed from Google Play or Google Chrome Web Store,” read a blog post. “In the case of an app developer abusing access to Gmail restricted scopes, their API access will be removed.” The company said abuse of its developer APIs would also fall under the scope of the bug bounty.

Google said it isn’t providing a reward table yet but a single report of data misuse could net $50,000 in bounties.

News of the expanded bounty comes in the wake of the DataSpii scandal, which saw browser extensions scrape and share data from millions of users. These Chrome extensions uploaded web addresses and webpage titles of every site a user visited, exposing sensitive data like tax returns, patient data, and travel itineraries.

Google was forced to step in and suspend the offending Chrome extensions.

Instagram recently expanded its own bug bounty to include misused user data following a spate of data incidents,


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Google to pay security researchers who find Android apps and Chrome extensions misusing user data


Google said it will pay security researchers who find “verifiably and unambiguous evidence” of data abuse using its platforms.

It’s part of the company’s efforts to catch those who misuse user data collected through Android apps or Chrome extensions — and to avoid its own version of a scandal like Cambridge Analytica, which saw millions of Facebook profiles scraped and used to identify undecided voters during the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

Google said anyone who identifies “situations where user data is being used or sold unexpectedly, or repurposed in an illegitimate way without user consent” is eligible for its expanded data abuse bug bounty.

“If data abuse is identified related to an app or Chrome extension, that app or extension will accordingly be removed from Google Play or Google Chrome Web Store,” read a blog post. “In the case of an app developer abusing access to Gmail restricted scopes, their API access will be removed.” The company said abuse of its developer APIs would also fall under the scope of the bug bounty.

Google said it isn’t providing a reward table yet but a single report of data misuse could net $50,000 in bounties.

News of the expanded bounty comes in the wake of the DataSpii scandal, which saw browser extensions scrape and share data from millions of users. These Chrome extensions uploaded web addresses and webpage titles of every site a user visited, exposing sensitive data like tax returns, patient data, and travel itineraries.

Google was forced to step in and suspend the offending Chrome extensions.

Instagram recently expanded its own bug bounty to include misused user data following a spate of data incidents,


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Instagram may allow creators to syndicate IGTV videos to Facebook


Following the departure of Instagram’s founders, Facebook is working to more closely integrate the photo-sharing app with its flagship social network. It’s already added its brand name next to Instagram’s, and is working to make both platforms’ messaging products interoperable. Now, Facebook is prototyping a means of syndicating Instagram’s IGTV video to Facebook’s video site, Facebook Watch.

In another find from noted reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong, Instagram was found to have under development a feature that would allow Instagram users to post their IGTV content to both Instagram as a preview, as well as to Facebook and Watch — the latter by toggling an additional switch labeled “make visible on Facebook.”

Wong says the feature is still in the prototype stage, as the buttons themselves aren’t functional.

This move, should it come to pass, could prompt more video creators to use IGTV, given that it would boost their videos’ distribution by also including Facebook as a destination for their content. The videos could also be part of an ongoing, episodic series, Wong had found.

This, in turn, could help IGTV — an app which hasn’t quite taken off as a standalone video platform. Today, IGTV takes inspiration from TikTok and Snapchat’s vertical video. It’s meant to engage Instagram users with longer-form, portrait mode video content but within Instagram and in a separate IGTV app. But IGTV has often been filled with poorly cropped and imported web video, rather than content designed specifically for the platform.

Meanwhile, the IGTV app has struggled to rise to the top of the App Store’s charts the way its parent, Instagram has. Today, it’s ranked No. 159 in the Photo & Video category on the App Store, and unranked in the Overall top charts.

To address some of the issues that creators have complained about, Instagram this week rolled out a few changes to the upload experience. This included the new ability to select the 1:1 crop of an IGTV thumbnail for the creator’s Profile Cover as well as the ability to edit which 5:4 section of the IGTV video shows in the Feed.

IGTV will also now auto-populate Instagram handles and tags on IGTV titles and descriptions, and will now support the ability to longer video from mobile. With the latter change, IGTV has increased the minimum threshold to upload on mobile to one minute, and is allowing mobile uploads up to 15 minutes.

Instagram declined to comment on the possible syndication of IGTV content to Facebook and Facebook Watch.


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Instagram may allow creators to syndicate IGTV videos to Facebook


Following the departure of Instagram’s founders, Facebook is working to more closely integrate the photo-sharing app with its flagship social network. It’s already added its brand name next to Instagram’s, and is working to make both platforms’ messaging products interoperable. Now, Facebook is prototyping a means of syndicating Instagram’s IGTV video to Facebook’s video site, Facebook Watch.

In another find from noted reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong, Instagram was found to have under development a feature that would allow Instagram users to post their IGTV content to both Instagram as a preview, as well as to Facebook and Watch — the latter by toggling an additional switch labeled “make visible on Facebook.”

Wong says the feature is still in the prototype stage, as the buttons themselves aren’t functional.

This move, should it come to pass, could prompt more video creators to use IGTV, given that it would boost their videos’ distribution by also including Facebook as a destination for their content. The videos could also be part of an ongoing, episodic series, Wong had found.

This, in turn, could help IGTV — an app which hasn’t quite taken off as a standalone video platform. Today, IGTV takes inspiration from TikTok and Snapchat’s vertical video. It’s meant to engage Instagram users with longer-form, portrait mode video content but within Instagram and in a separate IGTV app. But IGTV has often been filled with poorly cropped and imported web video, rather than content designed specifically for the platform.

Meanwhile, the IGTV app has struggled to rise to the top of the App Store’s charts the way its parent, Instagram has. Today, it’s ranked No. 159 in the Photo & Video category on the App Store, and unranked in the Overall top charts.

To address some of the issues that creators have complained about, Instagram this week rolled out a few changes to the upload experience. This included the new ability to select the 1:1 crop of an IGTV thumbnail for the creator’s Profile Cover as well as the ability to edit which 5:4 section of the IGTV video shows in the Feed.

IGTV will also now auto-populate Instagram handles and tags on IGTV titles and descriptions, and will now support the ability to longer video from mobile. With the latter change, IGTV has increased the minimum threshold to upload on mobile to one minute, and is allowing mobile uploads up to 15 minutes.

Instagram declined to comment on the possible syndication of IGTV content to Facebook and Facebook Watch.


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‘The Operators’: Finance in startups with Duda CFO Stephanie Hsiung and Zeus Living’s Head of Finance Mark Kang

Can we choose to fall out of love? | Dessa

Can we choose to fall out of love? | Dessa

What's the best way to get over heartbreak? Rapper and writer Dessa came up with an unconventional approach after a chance viewing of Helen Fisher's TED Talk about the brains of the lovestruck. In a wryly funny talk, she shares how she worked with a neuroscientist to try to get her brain to fall out of love with her ex -- and shares wisdom about romance that she gained along the way.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

Facebook rolls out new business tools for Messenger, kills the ‘Discover’ tab


Facebook today is formally rolling out a new suite of tools for its 40 million active businesses on Messenger, including appointment booking, lead generation, and others announced earlier this year at its F8 developer conference. As a part of these changes, Facebook will also begin to phase out the Discover tab in Messenger — a feature that became home to both games and businesses following last fall’s redesign.

Today, Facebook says the Discover tab will be pulled from the Messenger app over the next several months. Instead, it will invest in making sure Facebook users are directed to interact with businesses via Messenger in other ways.

“We want to make it more seamless for people to reach out to businesses on Messenger in places where they’re already looking to connect,” explains Facebook, of its decision to kill off the Discover feature. “We will put more investment into tools to connect people and businesses – including updates to m.me linksweb plugins, various entry points across our family of apps, as well as ad products – that lead to Messenger,” the company says.

In terms of its new business tools, the lead generation product will launch as a Messenger template within Facebook Ads Manager this week. The template lets businesses create automated experiences to help qualify their leads in Messenger, then continue conversations in the app or integrate with existing CRM tools to track the leads further.

The feature has been in beta following F8, but will now be publicly available.

Appointment booking was announced at F8, too, but is only now launching into beta with select developers and businesses. This feature allows businesses to accept appointment requests and make bookings in real-time through Messenger. It also integrates with existing calendar booking software, and can help Messenger conversations be turned into in-store traffic, as well as online and phone appointments, the company says.

The feature will be launched globally to all developers later in the year.

Another update mentioned today involves plans to launch improved event reporting in Messenger later this year, which will allow businesses to report and track their Messenger conversations.

Plus, Facebook says it’s updating the Standard Messaging window for businesses to 24 hours (which is how long they have to respond to inquiries from customers.) This brings it in-line with WhatsApp’s window.

messenger biz 2

After 24 hours, businesses can still use sponsored messages to re-engage customers, and message tags (e.g. updates on purchases, event reminders, changes to their account, and now in closed beta, “human agent,” which will let agents respond to issues that need resolution after the standard messaging window closes.)

Messenger’s Subscription Messaging beta program, meanwhile, is changing today as well.

It’s now going to be limited to “vetted news organizations.” This came about because some businesses were using the feature in violation of Facebook’s guidelines, the company admitted. The feature is designed to send regular news updates to subscribers. The timing of this change is somewhat interesting, as Facebook is preparing to relaunch efforts to feature top news stories on its social network, this time vetted by journalists and featuring content Facebook pays for. There’s room for some interoperability here between the news product and subscriptions/updates, but it’s not clear if or how that will come to pass.

Of course, the biggest Messenger consumer news from F8 — a desktop app for Mac and PC — hasn’t yet come to pass, but is expected sometime this year.

 

 


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Juul introduces new POS standards to restrict sales to minors


Juul Labs, the e-cigarette behemoth partially owned by Altria, has today announced a new POS age-verification system that it will require all Juul retailers to comply with by May 2021.

The Retail Access Control Standards program, or RACS for short, raises the standard for age-restricted POS systems, automatically locking the POS each time a Juul product is scanned until a valid, adult ID is scanned. The system also looks for bulk purchases (four four-count packs of Juul Pods is the legal limit for a single transaction) and locks when the fifth Juul Pod pack is scanned, automatically removing the fifth pack from the customer’s cart.

Thus far, more than 50 retail chains, which represents 40,000 outlets, have committed to switching over to RACS, with 7,000 stores in the process of switching now and 15,000 to have implemented the technology by 2019’s end. The deadline for switching over to the RACS system is May 2021, at which point Juul will only sell its products to RACS-compliant retailers.

The company recognizes that overhauling a POS can be costly and difficult, and is offering $100 million+ in incentives to retailers who switch over. For retailers with newer POS systems, the switch might only require a software update, while others may need to update their hardware, as well.

Now, the system isn’t foolproof. After an ID is scanned, all personal information is automatically deleted from the system, which means that bad actors/unauthorized resellers could amass a bulk amount of Juul products by visiting various stores or returning to the same store multiple times.

However, this is likely just the beginning for the RACS program, which for the first time gives Juul much more control around how their products move through the market, ultimately limiting the opportunity for Juul products to end up in the hands of minors.

Alongside the introduction of RACS, Juul is also expanding the Track & Trace program it piloted in April in the Houston area.

Track and Trace allows teachers, parents, law enforcement and otherwise responsible adults to log the serial number of confiscated Juul devices, giving Juul the information it needs to track that device through the supply chain and identify the store where it was sold.

Using Juul’s 2,000 shopper-strong secret shopper program, the company can then specifically target those stores and shut down the illegal sale of Juul devices to minors.

Today, Track and Trace is expanding nationwide in the U.S.

While these are major steps in combating underage use of Juul products, the company itself admits that it believes youth vaping numbers will continue to rise.

From the release:

It is our expectation that this year’s survey, unfortunately, will likely show continued growth in youth use of vapor products in the U.S. If this turns out to be the case, it will be due in part to the fact that:

  • When this year’s NYTS data was collected, T21 laws were being passed in a dozen states but had not been implemented
  • Little to no category-wide actions have been taken as FDA is finalizing its guidance that, once implemented, should impose additional restrictions on the sale and marketing of certain flavored vapor products — actions that we voluntarily imposed on ourselves last November

In November 2018, Juul announced its Youth Prevention Plan ahead of the FDA’s crackdown on e-cig products. It included the ban of flavored Juul pod sales in convenience stores and other Juul-approved retailers, limiting the sale of non-tobacco and non-menthol flavored pods to its online storefront. Juul says this represented 50 percent of its revenue at the time. The company also took down its Facebook and Instagram pages, and revamped its Twitter to ditch any promotional or marketing content from the platform.

Still, even with the many steps the company has taken to limit youth use of the product, one of Juul’s biggest obstacles is the sale of counterfeit and infringing products, which may include dangerous and/or unknown chemicals. The company hired former Apple employee Adrian Punderson to help lead the fight against counterfeits in February.

As of December 2018, Juul was reportedly valued at $38 billion, estimated to own more than 70 percent of the e-cig market.


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Apple expands access to official repair parts for third-party shops


Apple just announced a new program to make it easier to repair out-of-warranty iPhones. In addition to Apple Authorized Service Providers, independent third-party repair shops will be able to access official repair parts and tools.

There are currently three options when you break your screen or other parts of your iPhone. You can go to an Apple store and give your iPhone to Apple employees. You can go to an authorized store (such as Best Buy stores in the U.S.), which means your iPhone will be repaired by Apple-certified technicians. Or you can go to a normal repair shop.

Authorized Service Providers already have access to official parts and tools. If your iPhone is under warranty, you can get a free repair and Apple pays back the authorized repair shop directly.

But until today, if you were a non-authorized repair shop, you couldn’t get official parts. It could result in mixed experiences with parts that don’t perform as well as official parts.

Starting today, any repair shop in the U.S. can get a free online certification in order to access the new repair program. After that, you can buy genuine parts and tools. You can also access the same repair manuals and diagnostics as authorized repair shops.

Apple says that it’ll expand the new program to more countries in the future. The company is already testing the program with 20 shops in North America, Europe and Asia.

This is great news for customers as it should improve the overall quality of repairs. Apple is essentially lowering the entry barrier to qualify to official parts.

If you want to make sure that your device is repaired using genuine parts or if your device is still under warranty, you should still go to an authorized repair shop or an official Apple store. It’s going to be hard to tell if third-party repair shops are using genuine parts as nobody is forcing them to switch to the new program.


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Climate activists plan to use drones to shut down Heathrow Airport next month


A UK group of climate activists is planning to fly drones close to Heathrow Airport next month in a direct action they hope will shut down the country’s largest airport for days or even longer.

The planned action is in protest at the government’s decision to green-light a third runway at Heathrow.

They plan to use small, lightweight “toy” drones, flown at head high (6ft) within a 5km drone ‘no fly’ zone around the airport — but not within flight paths. The illegal drone flights will also be made in the early morning at a time when there would not be any scheduled flights in the air space to avoid any risk of posing a threat to aircraft.

The activists point out that the government recently declared a climate emergency — when it also pledged to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 — arguing there is no chance of meeting that target if the UK expands current airport capacity.

A press spokesman for the group, which is calling itself Heathrow Pause, told TechCrunch: “Over a thousand child are dying as a result of climate change and ecological collapse — already, every single day. That figure is set to significantly worsen. The government has committed to not just reducing carbon emissions but reducing them to net zero — that is clearly empirically impossible if they build another runway.”

The type of drones they plan to use for the protest are budget models which they say can be bought cheaply at UK retailer Argos — which, for example, sells the Sky Viper Stunt Drone for £30; the Revell GO! Stunt Quadcopter Drone for £40; and the Revell Spot 2.0 Quadcopter (which comes with a HD camera) for £50.

The aim for the protest is to exploit what the group dubs a loophole in Heathrow’s health and safety protocol around nearby drone flights to force it to close down runways and ground flights.

Late last year a spate of drone sightings near the UK’s second busiest airport, Gatwick, led to massive disruption for travellers just before Christmas after the airport responded by grounding flights.

At the time, the government was sharply criticized for having failed to foresee weaknesses in the regulatory framework around drone flights near sensitive sites like airports.

In the following months it responded by beefing up what was then a 1km airport exclusion zone to 5km — with that expanded ‘no fly’ zone coming into force in March. However a wider government plan to table a comprehensive drones bill has faced a number of delays.

It’s the larger 5km ‘no fly’ zone that the Heathrow Pause activists are targeting in a way they hope will safely trigger the airport’s health & safety protocol and shut down the airspace and business as usual.

Whether the strategy to use drones as a protest tool to force the closure of the UK’s largest airport will fly remains to be seen.

A spokeswoman for Heathrow airport told us it’s confident it has “robust plans” in place to ensure the group’s protest does not result in any disruption to flights. However she would not provide any details on the steps it will take to avoid having to close runways and ground flights, per its safety protocol.

When we put the airport’s claim of zero disruption from intended action back to Heathrow Pause, its spokesman told us: “Our understanding is that the airport’s own health and safety protocols dictate that they have to ground airplanes if there are any drones of any size flying at any height anywhere within 5km of the airport.

“Our position would be that it’s entirely up to them what they do. That the action that we’re taking does not pose a threat to anybody and that’s very deliberately the case. Having said that I’d be surprised to hear that they’re going to disregard their own protocols even if those are — in our view — excessive. It would still come as a surprise if they weren’t going to follow them.”

“We won’t be grounding any flights in any circumstances,” he added. “It’s not within our power to do so. All of the actions that have been planned have been meticulously planned so as not to pose any threat to anybody. We don’t actually see that there need to be flights grounded either. Having said that clearly it would be great if Heathrow decided to ground flights. Every flight that’s grounded is that much less greenhouse gas pumped into the atmosphere. And it directly saves lives.

“The fewer flights there are the better. But if there are no flights cancelled we’d still consider the action to be an enormous success — purely upon the basis of people being arrested.”

The current plan for the protest is to start illegally flying drones near Heathrow on September 13 — and continue for what the spokesman said could be as long as “weeks”, depending on how many volunteer pilots it can sign up. He says they “anticipate” having between 50 to 200 people willing to risk arrest by breaching drone flight law.

The intention is to keep flying drones for as long as people are willing to join the protest. “We are hoping to go for over a week,” he told us.

Given the plan has been directly communicated to police the spokesman conceded there is a possibility that the activists could face arrest before they are able to carry out the protest — which he suggested might be what Heathrow is banking on.

Anyone who flies a drone in an airport’s ‘no fly’ zone is certainly risking arrest and prosecution under UK law. Penalties for the offence range from fines to life imprisonment if a drone is intentionally used to cause violence. But the group is clearly taking pains to avoid accusations the protest poses a safety risk or threatens violence — including by publishing extensive details of their plan online, as well as communicating it to police and airport authorities.

A detailed protocol on their website sets out the various safety measures and conditions the activists are attaching to the drone action — “to ensure no living being is harmed”. Such as only using drones lighter than 7kg, and giving the airport an hour’s advance notice ahead of each drone flight.

They also say they have a protocol to shut down the protest in the event of an emergency — and will have a dedicated line of communication open to Heathrow for this purposes.

Some of the activists are scheduled to meet with police and airport authorities  tomorrow, face to face, at a London police station to discuss the planned action.

The group says it will only call off the action if the Heathrow third runway expansion is cancelled.

In an emailed statement in response to the protest, Heathrow Airport told us:

We agree with the need to act on climate change. This is a global issue that requires constructive engagement and action. Committing criminal offences and disrupting passengers is counterproductive.

Flying of any form of drone near Heathrow is illegal and any persons found doing so will be subject to the full force of the law. We are working closely with the Met Police and will use our own drone detection capability to mitigate the operational impact of any illegal use of drones near the airport.

Asked why the environmental activists have selected drones as their tool of choice for this protest, rather than deploying more traditional peaceful direct action strategies, such as trespassing on airport grounds or chaining themselves to fixed infrastructure, the Heathrow Pause spokesman told us: “Those kind of actions have been done in the past and they tend to result in very short duration of time during which very few flights are cancelled. What we are seeking to do is unprecedented in terms of the duration and the extent of the disruption that we would hope to cause.

“The reason for drones is in order to exploit this loophole in the health and safety protocols that have been presented to us — that it’s possible for a person with a toy drone that you can purchase for a couple of quid, miles away from any planes, to cause an entire airport to stop having flights. It is quite an amazing situation — and once it became apparent that that was really a possibility it almost seemed criminal not to do it.”

He added that drone technology, and the current law in the UK around how drones can be legally used, present an opportunity for activists to level up their environmental protest — “to cause so much disruption with so few people and so little effort” — that it’s simply “a no brainer”.

During last year’s Gatwick drone debacle the spokesman said he received many enquiries from journalists asking if the group was responsible for that. They weren’t — but the mass chaos caused by the spectre of a few drones being flown near Gatwick provided inspiration for using drone technology for an environmental protest.

The group’s website is hosting video interviews with some of the volunteer drone pilots who are willing to risk arrest to protest against the expansion of Heathrow Airport on environmental grounds.

In a statement there, one of them, a 64-year-old writer called Valerie Milner-Brown, said: “We are in the middle of a climate and ecological emergency. I am a law-abiding citizen — a mother and a grandmother too. I don’t want to break the law, I don’t want to go to prison, but right now we, as a species, are walking off the edge of a cliff. Life on Earth is dying. Fires are ravaging the Amazon. Our planet’s lungs are quite literally on fire. Hundreds of species are going extinct every day. We are experiencing hottest day after hottest day, and the Arctic is melting faster than scientists’ worst predictions.

“All of this means that we have to cut emissions right now, or face widespread catastrophe on an increasingly uninhabitable planet. Heathrow Airport emits 18 million tons of CO2 a year. That’s more than most countries. A third runway will produce a further 7.3 million tons of CO2. For all Life — now and in the future — we have to take action. I’m terrified but if this is what it will take to make politicians, business leaders and the media wake up, then I’m prepared to take this action and to face the consequences.”


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SurfShark VPN Makes Torrenting Easy and Secure, Now 76% Off


With a good torrent client and fast internet, you can enjoy TV shows, movies, music, and more. The only problem is, the world of torrenting can be a little shady. If you want to stay protected, get SurfShark VPN. This impressive service gives you access to over 500 torrent-friendly servers. In addition, your connection is protected by military-grade encryption. You can pick up a two-year subscription now for $69 at MakeUseOf Deals.

Safe Torrenting

Although torrenting is often associated with piracy, there is loads of legit content that is distributed this way. No matter what kind of content you want to access, SafeShark VPN has you covered.

Available for Windows, Chrome, Firefox, Android, and iOS, this service offers complete online protection. By running your traffic through masking servers, the VPN helps you stay anonymous. These servers are spread around the world, meaning you can find a fast local connection or go abroad to bypass restrictions.

In addition, SurfShark keeps no logs and protects your privacy with AES-256-GCM encryption. SurfShark’s CleanWeb feature blocks ads and malware, and the built-in kill switch ensures your IP address won’t leak if your Wi-Fi drops.

As a subscriber, you get unlimited bandwidth and connection speeds on unlimited devices. SurfShark also provides 24/7 customer support.

Two Years for $69

Order now for $69 to enjoy two years of secure torrenting with SurfShark VPN, worth $290.

Read the full article: SurfShark VPN Makes Torrenting Easy and Secure, Now 76% Off


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You Can Now Personalize Yelp Based on Your Interests


Yelp now lets you personalize its app based on your interests. Until now, everyone would have seen the same results based on their location. But now, those who take a couple of minutes to indicate their preferences to Yelp, will see search results geared to them.

How to Personalize the Yelp App

As outlined in a post on the Official Yelp Blog, you can now personalize Yelp based on your interests. You tell Yelp what sort of food you eat and what sort of activities you like doing, and Yelp will deliver search results based on your preferences.

As an example, Yelp explains that “a gluten-free pet owner who likes hiking and brunch will see a very different homescreen and search experience than a vegetarian parent who loves donuts, farmer’s markets and breweries.”

To personalize Yelp, you just need to indicate your preferences. These include your dietary preferences (such as vegan or gluten-free), food and drink preferences (which cuisines you enjoy eating), and favorite things to do (such as music bars and farmers’ markets).

Once done, the app will update in realtime, surfacing businesses and activities more likely to appeal to you. If your interests change, you can update your preferences and the app will adapt. You’ll also be able to see why Yelp is showing you specific results.

Download: Yelp for Android | iOS

It’s Time to Update the Yelp App

The option to personalize Yelp is coming to iOS first, so keep updating the app until you see the feature. Meanwhile, the new Search functionality is already available on Android, with the full experience becoming available over the next year.

Yelp endured some bad press a few years ago, with claims businesses could manipulate their ratings for money. However, more recently, Yelp has sought to improve its listings with gender-neutral bathrooms and health inspection data for restaurants.

Read the full article: You Can Now Personalize Yelp Based on Your Interests


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Alphabet’s legal chief, David Drummond, comes under the spotlight following new allegations about his personal conduct


Alphabet Chief Legal Officer David Drummond is at the center of a media firestorm, following a new Medium post authored by a former Google employee who was engaged in a years-long relationship with Drummond more than 10 years ago.

Though the extramarital affair was originally reported on last fall by the New York Times in the broader context of Google’s permissive workplace culture, the former employee, Jennifer Blakely, says in a new and far more detailed account of their relationship that Drummond was a serial philanderer, leaving his wife for Blakely, then leaving Blakely and the son that he fathered with her for another now-former Google employee.

She adds that Drummond also had “an affair with his ‘personal assistant’ who he moved into one of his new homes.”

We reached out to Google, asking for comment either from the company or Drummond, and have yet to hear back.

It’s an enormously unflattering portrait and it comes at a delicate time for Google, which found itself at the center of the #metoo movement last year, after the Times revealed that another former executive, Andy Rubin, had been awarded a handsome exit package following a sexual misconduct claim that the company reportedly found credible.

In addition to accusing Drummond of neglecting her, Blakely also accuses him of being an absentee parent to the child who she suggests they tried for years to have, writing that “[m]onths or years would go by where he wouldn’t see [their son] or respond to my calls or texts with updates and pictures of him or even ask how he was doing, let alone how he might help out, knowing full well I was alone and in desperate need.”

Elsewhere in her post, Blakely says that following a custody battle over the boy that she won when he was four-and-a-half-years old, “David began providing ample child support.”

According to several sources familiar with the situation, it’s more nuanced than Blakely describes and was not a particularly happy union, though these same individuals acknowledge that much of her account is true. Drummond, who was Google’s general counsel back in 2001 when they met, was married when he began an affair with Blakeley, who’d been hired into Google’s legal department as a senior contracts manager. Though Google merely discouraged managers from having affairs with subordinates at the time (it wasn’t against the company’s code of conduct), when Drummond finally told the company in 2007 that Blakeley was pregnant with his child, she was moved into a role in the company’s sales department, far from the company’s legal department.

Blakely writes she had “zero experience in sales” and that it was a hard transition to make: “I did my best to keep up but I was floundering and became depressed at work.”

She left the company roughly one year later, in 2008. She says she and Drummond and their son were living together by that time, adding that seven months later, he broke up with her via text, saying he was “never coming back” to their shared home.

“And he didn’t,” she writes.

Drummond’s star has continued to rise at Google, where he has now spent 17 years and currently serves as its senior vice president of corporate development, as well as the chief legal officer for Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Google has made numerous changes in the face of criticisms that male executives at the company have not faced consequences in the past for sexual misconduct at work — criticisms that boiled into fury last year, prompting an organized walk-out by tens of thousands of Google employees last November.

Among them: Google no longer force employees to settle disputes with the company in private arbitration, including in cases of sexual harassment or assault; employees can now lodge complaints relating to harassment and other misconduct via a dedicated website; an and they can bring colleagues to support them to meetings related to investigations.

Still, Google has never commented specifically on Blakely’s allegations and it will be curious to see if this newest salvo forces its hand.

The affair, and others at the company, don’t seem to have forced dramatic changes to its official code of contact, in any case.

According to a section titled: “Friends and Relatives; Co-Worker Relationships,” it cautions employees  that “romantic relationships between co-workers can, depending on the work roles and respective positions of the co-workers involved, create an actual or apparent conflict of interest. If a romantic relationship does create an actual or apparent conflict, it may require changes to work arrangements or even the termination of employment of either or both individuals involved. Consult Google’s Employee Handbook for additional guidance on this issue.”


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‘Behind the Screen’ illuminates the invisible, indispensable content moderation industry


The moderators who sift through the toxic detritus of social media have gained the spotlight recently, but they’ve been important for far longer — longer than internet giants would like you to know. In her new book “Behind the Screen,” UCLA’s Sarah Roberts illuminates the history of this scrupulously hidden workforce and the many forms the job takes.

It is after all people who look at every heinous image, racist diatribe, and porn clip that gets uploaded to Facebook, YouTube, and every other platform — people who are often paid like dirt, treated like parts, then disposed of like trash when worn out. And they’ve been doing it for a long time.

True to her academic roots, Roberts lays out the thesis of the book clearly in the introduction, explaining that although content moderators or the companies that employ them may occasionally surface in discussions, the job has been systematically obscured from sight.

The work they do, the conditions under which they do it, and for whose benefit are largely imperceptible to the users of the platforms who pay for and rely upon this labor. In fact, this invisibility is by design.

Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA, has been looking into this industry for the better part of a decade, and this book is the culmination of her efforts to document it. While it is not the final word on the topic — no academic would suggest their work was — it is an eye-opening account, engagingly written, and not at all the tour of horrors you may reasonably expect it to be.

After reading the book, I talked with Roberts about the process of researching and writing it. As an academic and tech outsider, she was not writing from personal experience or even commenting on the tech itself, but found that she had to essentially invent a new area of research from scratch spanning tech, global labor, and sociocultural norms.

“Opacity, obfuscation, and general unwillingness”

“To take you back to 2010 when I started this work, there was literally no academic research on this topic,” Roberts said. “That’s unusual for a grad student, and actually something that made me feel insecure — like maybe this isn’t a thing, maybe no one cares.”

That turned out not to be the case, of course. But the practices we read about with horror, of low-wage workers grinding through endless queues of content from child abuse to terrorist attacks, while they’ve been in place for years and years, have been successfully moderated out of existence by the companies that employ them. But recent events have changed that.

“A number of factors are coalescing to make the public more receptive to this kind of work,” she explained. “Average social media users, just regular people, are becoming more sophisticated about their use, and questioning the integration of those kinds of tools and media in their everyday life. And certainly there were a few key political situations where social media was implicated. Those were a driving force behind the people asking, do I actually know what I’m using? Do I know whether or how I’m being manipulated? How do the things I see on my screen actually get there?”

A handful of reports over the years, like Casey Newton’s in the Verge recently, also pierced the curtain behind which tech firms carefully and repeatedly hid this unrewarding yet essential work. At some point the cat was simply out of the bag. But few people recognized it for what it was.


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