Tech companies aren’t transparent about what they do with our photos – we asked experts about best baby-pic practices Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular risk you’re trying to protect your child against, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article. Last week’s column covered how to opt yourself out of tech companies using your posts to train artificial intelligence. You’ve got the cutest baby ever, and you want the world to know it. But you’re also worried about what might happen to your baby’s picture once you release it into the nebulous world of the internet. Should you post it? Continue reading...

Even if you haven’t knowingly opted in, companies are still scraping your personal information to train their systems Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular site or social network, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article. The competition to make the latest, greatest, most advanced artificial intelligence thing has turned an already data-hungry tech industry ravenous. Companies looking to build out their AI-powered search engines, smart email composers or chatbots are scraping your posts and personal data and using them to train those systems, which need ever-increasing amounts of text and images. Continue reading...

Agency accuses Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies of sharing troves of user information with third-parties Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms. The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states. Continue reading...

Paulomi Debnath has shared a kiss with her husband every morning for 18 years. Ron Hill ran every day for more than 52 years. When does an enjoyable habit become a compulsion? Anyone who spotted the run Tom Vickery uploaded to exercise tracking app Strava on 18 February last year might have been a little confused. The 30-minute sprint appeared to have taken place right in the middle of the Channel, not far from Guernsey and heading towards the west coast of France. The run was also, curiously, a ruler-straight line, appearing on Vickery’s public profile as an unbending, inch-long streak of orange in the blue swathe of the app’s virtual sea. Oh, and it was at a world record-breaking pace. Of course, anyone who knows Vickery wouldn’t have been surprised at all. The 38-year-old triathlon coach from Cambridge was on a two-day ferry trip to Bilbao for a holiday and this rather speedy jog was simply another run on his then nearly four-year daily running streak on Strava. Determined not to break his streak on board the ship, Vickery had risen at 5am to run up and down the deck for his allotted 30 minutes, and the boat’s progress through the water meant he appeared to be running faster than any long-distance runner in the world. Continue reading...