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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Michael Hirshon ‘We’ve Got an Uber Driver Who’s Got a Gun’
Uber officially bans drivers from carrying firearms—but the company’s business model prevents it from enforcing such a ban. The results can be deadly.
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frantic00 / shutterstock/ Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic The Sneaky Genius of Facebook's New Preventive Health Tool
The feature looks likely to fill gaps in care—and to further draw users into Facebook’s ecosystem.
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Erik McGregor/Getty The Schism at the Heart of the Open-Source Movement
Developers are protesting after revelations that the source-code repository GitHub contracted with ICE. But if you restrict access to open-source code, is it still open?
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Matt Rourke / AP The New Payday Lender Looks a Lot Like the Old Payday Lender
Apps promising to “advance” a user’s wages say they aren’t payday lenders. So what are they?
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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.
