Let’s make one thing completely clear: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 live as much of a “screen-free” life as possible. Not only does the academy discourage giving kids gadgets to stare at, it also discourages screens as background noise, a bit akin to second-hand smoke. [Keep reading]
This is the latest, “It’s spooky, but is it wrong?” privacy story. Stores listen for customers’ cell phones as they probe for WiFi hot-spots, then use that information to observe foot traffic in the store. Perhaps the data is anonymized, but consumers, I’m sure, won’t be comfortable with it. Earlier [Keep reading]
Of course they did. U.S. spies spent years infiltrating virtual gaming worlds like Worlds of Warcraft, “hunting” for terrorists and vacuuming up oodles of data, according to a report Monday by ProPublica, the N.Y. Times, and The Guardian. In fact, there were so make virtual reality spies bumbling around places [Keep reading]
Some UPS shipping customers are experiencing delivery delays, which have come during what might nearly be the worst time of the year — holiday preparations. There’s a cascade of complaints on the UPS Facebook page from consumers complaining about missing packages. Complaints are spilling out onto other web locations, too. [Keep reading]
Here’s the first of several stories I expect to see like this. A security researcher claims he can hack his way into commercial drones and make them take instructions from him. Think of it as a flying botnet. Now there’s an appetizing idea! (H/T to Threatpost and Dennis Fisher for [Keep reading]
Nearly one-quarter of young Americans bank primarily by smartphone, claims a new survey released by Ally Bank. In a telephone poll taken in September, 23 percent of Americans aged 18-34 said they were “primarily using mobile devices” to do their banking, up from 15 percent last year. Add in other [Keep reading]
The U.K. is aflutter with talk that smartphones might be the reason Britons are having 20 percent less sex than they did a decade ago. The research isn’t as tidy as all that — the 20 percent part is sound, the smartphone part is largely a guess. But then, I’ll [Keep reading]
A small but sizable minority of employers in the most conservative regions of the country use online search tools to screen out job applicants based on religion, a practice that is likely illegal, according to a study published Wednesday by Carnegie Mellon University. The study also found no evidence of [Keep reading]
Angry about that $3,500 “fine” levied against a woman who wrote a negative review against a company? You should really be angry at America’s credit bureaus. Here’s why. You probably saw the story last week about a couple that was hit with a $3,500 “fine” for writing a negative review about [Keep reading]
Home Depot’s Twitter timeline was full of what seemed like endless apologies on Thursday afternoon after the firm tweeted a picture that it now calls a “dumb tweet,” and others are calling racist. “We are deeply sorry for the dumb tweet and have deleted it,” the firm Tweeted dozens of [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan