All those first dates you have at Starbucks can turn into second dates now. The coffee chain and site of many, many awkward Match.com encounters has begun an offering called “Starbucks Evenings,” with liquor and small plate on the menu. So meet me for coffee can turn into meet me [Keep reading]
I’m very proud to announce that a team of NBC journalists I was on has won a Peabody award for an extended project called, “In Plain Sight,” about the struggles of ordinary Americans trying to survive under difficult economic circumstances. I wrote two pieces for the project: One on the [Keep reading]
“You don’t understand” said everyone who ever tried to take advantage of someone and take their money. Wall Street is a game designed to make traders rich by skimming money off the top of America worker’s tiny savings, inventing more and more complicated ways to do that. When someone finally [Keep reading]
If you make a product designed to help people protect their privacy, a shout-out from Edward Snowden is marketing gold. That’s what happened recently for the makers of Ghostery, a free Web browser plugin that shows users which companies are tracking their online habits. The tool, which lists third-party firms collecting [Keep reading]
Friend, brilliant reporter, true believer and now NY Times best-selling author Julia Angwin has a thrilling book out explaining the real-life consequences of privacy erosion, and her own personal journey in escaping Eyes in the Sky. She’s been good enough to provide me with a free excerpt, which I’ve broken [Keep reading]
Would you take out a loan from the company you work for? Plenty of new lenders are betting that you might. But even if you wouldn’t, a new crop of lending products is bound to impact your privacy. The National Consumer Law Center released a report recently called “Big Data: [Keep reading]
If you are really concerned about privacy, then you probably shouldn’t use Facebook. But if you are like a billion people on the planet, you’ve decided that Facebook’s tradeoff between sharing and privacy is worth it. That’s certainly reasonable. Plenty of non-Facebookers today complain that they miss out on a lot [Keep reading]
It’s the first nice Friday in about five months on the East Coast, and I just walked across a busy street and passed a mom pushing her 2 or 3 year old in a stroller, the child playing with the mom’s iPhone all the way. At least they were crossing [Keep reading]
If and when consumers begin receiving credit cards with embedded chips en masse from their banks, it’ll mark a significant change in the way Americans pay for things. Visa’s Chief Risk Officer, Ellen Richey, told me in an exclusive interview recently that for many consumers, the only change will be [Keep reading]
I talked to a friend recently who was surprised how popular get-out-of-debt stories are. He pays all his bills every month on time and can’t imagine not doing that. Lucky is he. And perhaps a bit naive. Not only do roughly half of credit card carry a balance, but plenty [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan