Sidney Fussell
Airbnb Has a Hidden-Camera Problem
The home-rental start-up says it’s cracking down on hosts who record guests. Is it doing enough?
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Alistair Grant / AP Google’s Totally Creepy, Totally Legal Health-Data Harvesting
Google is an emerging health-care juggernaut, and privacy laws weren’t written to keep up.
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Sorbis / Shutterstock / The Atlantic Why Politicians Want Your Smart-TV Data
Your Roku or Vizio device knows a whole lot about you. All that information is highly valuable for campaign advertising.
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Andrew Burton / Getty Images Did Body Cameras Backfire?
Body cameras were supposed to fix a broken system. What happened?
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Eric Gay / AP The Endless Aerial Surveillance of the Border
New reports suggest that drone activity at the southern border is spreading to nearby cities, erasing the line between police procedures and immigration enforcement.
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Jeff Chiu/ AP Images How an Attempt at Correcting Bias in Tech Goes Wrong
Google allegedly scanned volunteers with dark skin tones in order to perfect the Pixel phone’s face-unlock technology.
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Amazon The World Wants Less Tech. Amazon Gives It More.
The world’s largest online retailer is diving headfirst into the techlash.
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Willie B. Thomas / Getty Algorithms Are People
The secret sauce of search engines gives tech companies an abundance of plausible deniability.
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Carol Yepes / Getty YouTube Videos Are a Gold Mine for Health Researchers
“Digital exhaust” from online life could be transformed into health insights. Should it be?
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Anthony Kwan / Getty Why Hong Kongers Are Toppling Lampposts
For protesters, claims of Chinese surveillance are politically useful, even when they can’t be proved.
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Andrew Harnik / AP Facebook Wants a Do-Over on News
This time around, the company would rather you focus on the humans.
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Jae C. Hong / AP Why It’s So Hard to Stop Marketing Guns in Video Games
Video games don’t cause mass shootings, but they do serve as insidious advertisements for weapons.
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Tony Avelar / AP Images People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Actually Work
The secrecy surrounding AI products makes even basic information about them a scandal.
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Michael Dwyer / AP The Endless, Invisible Persuasion Tactics of the Internet
Online shopping turns your brain against you, but you can fight back.
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Eric Lafforgue / Art In All Of Us ... The Parent Hack
The latest sensor-enabled technology treats parenting as something to be hacked.
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Kirill Kudryatvsev / AFP / Getty FaceApp Is Everyone’s Problem
It feels good to call out people for being duped by the Russian app, but the individualist framing of privacy is the bigger culprit.
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Mark Lennihan / AP What Amazon Thinks You’re Worth
Shoppers were offered a $10 credit in exchange for handing over their browser data. It’s an investment that pays dividends for Amazon.
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Alastair Grant / AP Photo The AI That Could Help Curb Youth Suicide
For many reasons, parents and teachers may fail to intervene when they spot LGBTQ teens in trouble. Can Google help?
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Bryan Cox / AP ICE and the Ever-Widening Surveillance Dragnet
ICE agents have used facial-recognition technology on state driver’s-license photos, turning a public database into a de facto criminal database.
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Grey Villet / The LIFE Picture Collection / ... How Stonewall Reversed a Long History of Justifying Police Surveillance
Entrapment schemes targeting gay men continue across the country, but the Stonewall resistance changed their meaning.
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Alex Wong / Getty Images The Strange Politics of Facial Recognition
Everyone seems to have found common ground on the emerging technology. That’s exactly what its makers want.
