My calendar for the coming week looks strange: There isn’t a single work appointment on it. I plan to celebrate that by not shaving tomorrow.

12/10/2018: Congress will grill Google’s CEO this week — here’s what to expect, Yahoo Finance

The House Judiciary Committee–in particular, certain of its Republican members–obliged me by living up so completely to this preview of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai’s Tuesday appearance there.

12/10/2018: Microsoft is asking the government to regulate the company’s facial recognition tech, Yahoo Finance

Microsoft president Brad Smith came to the Brookings Institution last week to make an unusual plea: Please regulate us before we get dragged into a race to the bottom with ethically-unbounded vendors of facial-recognition technology.

12/13/2018: Google Maps will now help you find Lime scooters, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance on this news from one of Lime’s publicists; by itself, this new feature isn’t a huge development, but covering it allowed me to discuss broader failings in both Google and Apple’s navigation software.

12/13/2018: On privacy, Google CEO’s congressional hearing comes up short, The Parallax

I wrote about several security and privacy questions that should have been asked during Pichai’s grilling but never came up. The single worst omission: Not a single representative even mentioned the name of a non-Google search engine.

12/14/2018: Primer: How to lock your online accounts with a security key, The Parallax

I’ve had the idea of an explainer about “U2F” security keys on my to-do list for a while. In the time it took for me to sell the piece, Microsoft and Apple finally began moving to support this particularly secure two-step verification option.

12/16/2018: Post-Dispatch, Tribune haven’t caught up with EU rules, Gateway Journalism Review

My former Washington Post colleague Jackie Spinner wrote about how the sites of some U.S. newspapers continue to block European readers instead of complying with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. She gave me a chance to critique this self-defeating practice–I’d earlier griped about it in a Facebook comments thread with her–and I was happy to give her few quotes.