Tag: small business news

The Gmail-enhancing superpower you didn’t know you needed

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For a service that’s all about interacting with other (alleged) humans, Gmail does a curiously poor job of putting people front and center. Sure, the Gmail inbox is all about communication—but have you ever found yourself staring at an email and struggling to remember what you know about the person who sent it or exchanges you’ve had in the past? If you interact with enough mammals over email, it’s bound to happen. And Gmail just doesn’t have particularly powerful tools for providing the on-demand context you need to successfully navigate your way out of that situation. Up until a matter of months ago, in fact, Gmail didn’t have any real form of integration with its companion Google Contacts service. Late last year, Google added a Contacts panel into the website’s sidebar, which was a significant step—but the information in that panel is still pretty limited and lacking. You can see basic contact info for people who emailed you and a list of past emails involving them, and that’s about it. If you want any additional details, you’ll have to stop what you’re doing, click away from the message, and move over to a whole other page to find it. Read More …

How the online echo chamber gave us the Arizona election audit

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Reporting on the audit of the 2020 presidential election now going on in Maricopa County, Arizona, National Memo’ s Steven Rosenfeld writes that one floor observer was overheard saying, “I hope they are fake ballots, because I am seeing so many Biden.” After the November 7 election, Trump supporters wondered how Biden could possibly have won when all they’d seen for months were reports of packed Trump rallies, yards filled with Trump signs, and excited Facebook posts about Trump and his upcoming win. They were honestly shocked when Trump lost. They simply couldn’t connect up their own experience with the result of the election. They live within a right-wing echo chamber where opposing viewpoints are rarely heard. They saw the widespread support for Biden only through the lens of right-wing misinformation and disinformation. They dismissed Biden’s continual lead in the polls as “fake.” Facebook, the go-to social media platform for Trump supporters in 2020, did a lot to contribute to the echo chamber. When the social network’s algorithms pick up on a user’s interest in right-wing content, it serves them more and more of it, and filters out other opinions. All through the campaign, many Trump supporters saw nothing but news posts and shared memes about Trump’s achievements as president, his huge rallies, and his mockery of Joe Biden and the Democrats. And right-wingers were, and remain, the most energized group on Facebook, even as Donald Trump remains expelled from the platform after he helped incite an insurrection on January 6. The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. Dan Bongino 2. Franklin Graham 3. Read More …

Citizen’s dystopian new feature is mass surveillance disguised as public safety

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O n October 26, 2020, police killed Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philadelphia, as his mother stood on the sidewalk, pleading for his life. Over the next few days, the neighborhood erupted in protest, and my phone lit up with alerts from Citizen, a public safety app. Writers for the app monitor and transcribe police scanner chatter, which is then converted into push notifications. There was a break-in at Rite Aid, a burglary at a nearby liquor store, a dumpster fire one block over, a trash fire 900 feet away. As local news has been decimated by budget cuts and layoffs, apps such as Citizen and Nextdoor have ascended to fill the void. Citizen in particular has increasingly positioned itself as a news organization. “We act fast, break news, and give people the immediate information they need to stay safe,” reads an overview on the company’s LinkedIn profile . Citizen often ranks higher than The New York Times among news apps in the Apple App Store. In theory, the platform democratizes reporting; it allows anyone with a smartphone to post comments and videos to a neighborhood network. But in practice, these alerts and the neighborhood commentary attached to them often read like police stenography and amplify existing biases Read More …

This hilarious game mimics all the insane ways companies trick you into giving up your data

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Yes or no: Do you agree to the terms and conditions of this website? Would you like to not receive our newsletter? If you don’t want to receive our newsletter, would you rather have bad breath and no friends? Those are a few of the easier questions in “ Terms & Conditions Apply ,” a new online quiz game that spoofs the modern web’s dark patterns . Too often, the act of rejecting cookies or dismissing newsletter sign-up prompts can feel like a video game, with hidden buttons to press and cryptic menus to decipher. So Jonathan Plackett, a creative technologist at the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, teamed up with The Guardian puzzle columnist Alex Bellos to build an actual puzzle game out of it. [Image: Wieden + Kennedy] The game’s goal is to reject all notification prompts, cookies, and terms of service agreements, and while its 29 questions start out simple enough, they quickly take a turn toward the farcical. One question pays homage to the “ two-door riddle ” from Labyrinth , while several others involve buttons that move around when you try to click them. [Image: Wieden + Kennedy] In reality, websites employ much subtler tricks to secure the outcomes they want. Last year, a group of university researchers found that when a site made users click onto a secondary menu page to opt out of data collection, consent rates increased by 22% . Another study, by Deloitte , found that 43% of websites tried to “nudge” users toward accepting cookies through “strategic use of font size, color, and level of complexity” in their prompts. The good news is that workarounds exist. Browser extensions such as I Don’t Care About Cookies for desktop and Hush for iOS will automatically hide the prompts that ask you to allow tracking or sign up for newsletters. In other words, you can opt out of playing the game entirely. Give Terms & Conditions Apply a try by visiting the site in your browser . The creators promise they won’t track you. Read More …

Haven is dead, but JPMorgan still wants to transform healthcare

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In February, JPMorgan, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway ended Haven, a buzzy joint venture that sought to improve patient outcomes through better primary care and that shook up the entire healthcare world. Now, the banking giant is launching its own version of Haven: Morgan Health. Dan Mendelson, a healthcare consultant who previously served as the associate director for health at the Office of Management and Budget under the Clinton administration, will head up JPMorgan’s new health company. He says that Morgan Health will have the same goals as Haven did, in terms of improving quality, access, and cost, but differ in its approach. “The Haven experience focused us on primary care, digital medicine, and specific populations. . . . You can see this as a continuation of the work that was started at Haven,” he said in an interview with healthcare industry publication Becker’s Hospital Review . Haven was attempting to build a system from the ground up, he says. Instead of taking that approach, Morgan Health will focus on collaborating with outside partners to create a new health program for the bank’s 165,000 employees and their families. The goal of the new venture is to reinvent how employees receive their healthcare Read More …