How Ex-Facebook Data Experts Spent $75 Million On Targeted Anti-Trump Ads

The night before America’s election, Fast Company reported: On the internet, we’re subject to hidden A/B tests all the time, but this one was also part of a political weapon: a multimillion-dollar tool kit built by a team of Facebook vets, data nerds, and computational social scientists determined to defeat Donald Trump. The goal is to use microtargeted ads, follow-up surveys,…

Privacy Investigation Finds 5 Million Shoppers’ Images Collected At Malls Across Canada

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CTV News: Without customers’ knowledge, more than five million images of Canadian shoppers’ were collected through facial recognition software used by Cadillac Fairview, a parent company of malls across the country, according to an investigation by privacy officials. The federal privacy commissioner reported Thursday that Cadillac Fairview contravened federal and provincial privacy laws by…

How Microsoft is Looking To MetaOS To Make Microsoft 365 a ‘Whole Life’ Experience

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, some leaks about Microsoft’s “MetaOS” had a lot of us Microsoft watchers scrambling to figure out what this foundational layer is and how it will affect Microsoft’s various products and services in the future. Recently, I’ve unearthed some more details about the company’s high-level goals and lower-level product plans around MetaOS. MetaOS…

Should Microsoft Release an Edgebook?

“All the pieces are coming together for Microsoft to launch a direct competitor to Chromebooks…” argues an industry analyst writing for ZDNet:
Since adopting the Chromium rendering engine, Microsoft Edge has featured virtually perfect compatibility with Chrome, right down to being able to install extensions from the Chrome app store. It’s also enabled Microsoft to more easily support operating systems that Edge…