Linked List: August 26, 2019

Monday, 26 August 2019

‘Apple Car(d)’ 

Horace Dediu:

The old cliche is that we were promised flying cars but ended up with x where x is something trivial or mundane. Perhaps the best “x” is “140 characters”. This statement is meant to de-value the technologies developed in the last few decades. Instead of building grand things, we build trivialities. The irony is that x is often wildly popular and ubiquitous. x also generates a lot of profits and is likely to change behavior. Indeed, the flying car alternatives are almost always better ideas.

Woman Wins 50K Ultra Marathon Outright, Trophy Snafu for Male Winner Follows 

Runner’s World:

When Ellie Pell took first overall, the surprised race organizers realized they had no trophy for the first place male.

What a great story.

Location Tracking Running Amok 

Dom DiFurio, writing for The Dallas Morning News:

Analysis from Fort Worth-based Buxton Live Mobile Insights sheds light on where Chick-Fil-A customers go on Sunday when the restaurant is closed. The company tracked location data from the mobile devices of customers on Chick-fil-A properties Monday through Saturday, and then studied where those same customers ate on Sundays.

Buxton told The Dallas Morning News it “purchases and analyzes consumer location data from multiple data aggregators where the data is collected from mobile devices which have pre-opted in to location services tracking.”

The story is ostensibly about fried chicken, but the fact that a marketing firm is tracking people like this is so fucked up. Whatever these people opted into, I’ll bet most of them have no idea how closely they’re being tracked. This is dystopian.

Facebook’s ‘Clear History’ Tool Is, of Course, Bullshit 

Tony Romm, reporting for The Washington Post:

The feature comes more than a year after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg first pledged to build a function called “Clear History” that he said would work much the same way a browser allows people to see and delete information about the sites they visited. The goal had been to empower users to “flush your history whenever you want,” he said in May 2018, admitting the company hadn’t been clear about all the ways it learns about its users.

But the implementation of those controls doesn’t exactly flush data, as Zuckerberg had promised. Instead, it disconnects information from being identified to a specific user, and it isn’t deleted outright.

Absolutely shocking. Get me to the fainting couch.

Facebook officials previously said users could “delete this information from your account,” a pledge that might have led users to believe Facebook would remove it entirely.

Who would have thought “delete” meant “delete”?