Tag Archives: Android privacy

Weekly output: free MLS Season Pass via T-Mobile, Twitter snuffs out transparency reports, MWC preview, spam calls, Android data-safety labels, fake reviews, mobile edge computing

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BARCELONA–Ten years after my first trip here for the telecom trade show then called Mobile World Congress, I’ve learned a lot about the event, the wireless industry and this lovely city. Alas, I cannot say as much about dealing with jet lag.

2/21/2023: Here’s How to Get a Free MLS Season Pass From T-Mobile, PCMag

I wrote up a quick explainer of this process after stepping through it on my own phone.

Story as seen in Safari on an iPad mini; lead art is a color-shifted image of Elon Musk2/22/2023: Twitter’s transparency reporting has tanked under Elon Musk, Fast Company

I can’t take credit for noticing that Twitter had not posted a transparency report since last July–the Washington Post’s Cristiano Lima brought that to my attention a few weeks ago–but I did get some justifiably-angry quotes from digital-rights experts about this latest casualty of Elon Musk’s chaotic reign. A few days later, Rolling Stone picked up on this subject and got some good quotes from former Twitter staffers.

2/22/2023: Episode 8 – Previewing MWC 2023, Liberty On the Line

I joined this Liberty Comms podcast–hosted by Liberty CEO Elena Davidson, with the other guests being telco analyst Charlotte Patrick and Telecoms.com editor Scott Bicheno–to talk about what I’m expecting from the event and share some MWC tips. Of course, my advice started with taking the metro.

2/23/2023: If You Think Phone Spam Is Bad in the US, Try Picking Up in Argentina, PCMag

I wrote up a study of spam calls–which can include both unwanted calls from legitimate businesses and outright fraud–among dozens of countries that found that U.S. callers actually don’t have things too bad.

2/23/2023: Don’t Trust the ‘Data Safety’ Labels on These Android Apps, PCMag

I got an advance on this Mozilla study of how the privacy labels in Google’s Play Store compare to the privacy policies of their developers, then updated the post with a comment from Google. Big surprise, Google was not happy with it. I imagine the company was even less happy with Gizmodo’s more scathing coverage of this study.

2/24/2023: Fake Online Reviews, CQ Researcher

My former Washington Post business-section colleague Kathleen Day quizzed me for this piece and quoted me once in it.

2/26/2023: The Interoperable Mobile Edge: New monetization opportunities for operators and enterprises via the Telco Edge Cloud, MEF Global Forum

I took part in a brief discussion at the Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s afternoon event with Summit Tech chief sales and marketing officer Doug Makishima, STL Partners principal consultant and edge practice lead Tilly Gilbert, and Bridge Alliance senior vice president Ken Wee about mobile edge computing–think cloud computing, except fast 5G connections let telecom firms push the remote processing much closer to the customer or device in question. As a student of digital privacy, I said I was most interested in “MEC” because of how it can allow personal data to be processed and then deleted much closer to its source than traditional cloud architectures often permit.

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Weekly output: Celona, streaming TV, social media moderation, Android 12, Google’s privacy pitch, Mark Vena podcast

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This afternoon, I went to a baseball game for the first time since Oct. 27, 2019. I also brought a much better camera than usual, thanks to my neighbor across the street loaning me a Panasonic point-and-shoot model with a 30x zoom, and you can now see the results in the Flickr album I just posted.

5/18/2021: Celona unveils ‘edgeless enterprise’ architecture, Light Reading

My new trade-pub client asked me to write up embargoed news from this business-wireless firm, allowing me to reacquaint myself with that branch of industry jargon.

5/19/2021: Streaming Services, WWL First News with Tommy Tucker

I spent about 40 minutes talking about streaming-TV services with this New Orleans radio station. A major theme of the host’s questions: Why is all this so complicated?

5/19/2021: Social media moderation, Al Jazeera

I made a rare phone-only appearance on the Arabic-language news channel to talk about reports of social-media companies suppressing Palestinian and Arabic voices.  I emphasized, as I have before, that on one hand, content moderation gets increasingly difficult as social platforms get larger; on the other hand, Facebook has a history of waiving its own rules only for right-wing voices in the U.S.

Screen grab of the article as seen in an Android phone's Chrome browser5/20/2021: Here’s what’s new in Android 12, from big changes to subtle tweaks, Fast Company

Google’s I/O developer conference returned in an online-only form after last year’s pandemic-forced cancellation, and in this post I covered the key features in the next version of its Android mobile operating system. The screen grab you see here was taken in a loaner Pixel 4 XL phone on which I’d installed the beta release of Android 12; if you have any questions about how this release works, please ask and I’ll try to answer them here.

5/20/2021: Google touts ‘privacy by design’ at I/O conference, but privacy from whom?, USA Today

Two years ago, I wrote a USAT column about the somewhat nebulous privacy pitch at Google I/O 2019; this column advances that story and finds more cause for optimism in Android than in Chrome.

5/21/2021: SmartTechCheck Podcast (5-20-21), Mark Vena

This week’s edition of this podcast from my tech-analyst pal at Moor Insights & Strategy initially featured two other tech journalists, but John Quain’s Starlink satellite-Internet connection dropped out too many times, leading Vena to decide to continue the podcast with just me and my fellow tech journalist (and baseball fan) Stewart Wolpin.

Weekly output: sneaky Android apps

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My extended July 4 weekend involved a possibly dangerous quantity of backyard fireworks, too much grilled food, three baseball games, and one World Cup victory for the United States. (U.S. Soccer, pay the women more.) I hope your holiday was comparable.

7/3/2019: These are the sneaky new ways that Android apps are tracking you, Fast Company

My first post for a publication that I’ve eyed for a while covers a presentation of a study on Android app privacy that I watched two weeks ago at a Federal Trade Commission event in Washington. On one hand, I was happy that this study and a second outlined at this FTC event found no evidence that Facebook’s apps were surreptitiously listening to people. On the other hand, I was angry to see so much deceit involved in apps trying to capture a phone’s location or identity. Who involved thought that kind of creeptacular sneaking around would be a sustainable business strategy?

Weekly output: 8K TV, privacy at Google I/O, Waymo

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A week after taking off for the Bay Area to cover Google’s I/O conference, I’m departing for Denver early Monday afternoon. This week’s excuse for propping up the airline industry: moderating a state-of-the-industry panel at the Pay TV Show, in return for which the conference organizers are covering my travel costs.

5/6/2019: Dark clouds invade forecast for 8K TV shipments, FierceVideo

My big takeaway from the IFA Global Press Conference two weeks ago was a dramatically more pessimistic forecast for 8K TV shipments from the research firm IHS Markit. It was refreshing to see analysts decline to get in line behind industry hype over a new product category.

5/8/2019: Google attempts a pivot toward privacy at I/O developer conference, USA Today

For the first time in my experience, USAT didn’t send any of its own reporters to Google’s developer conference, leaving this piece my client’s sole dateline from that event.

5/10/2019: Waymo Doesn’t Mind Being Boring, CityLab

I took a break from I/O Wednesday morning to attend a press event hosted by Waymo, the self-driving-car subsidiary of Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Said event did not feature any time as a passenger in one of Waymo’s autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans, because the company apparently still doesn’t have the California permit needed to offer rides to non-employees.

On top of those stories, I also launched a page on the Patreon crowdfunding site. Despite getting no more publicity than a post here Saturday evening and one appreciative tweet afterwards, this experiment already has a non-zero number of supporters pledging to chip in a couple of dollars a month. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.