In December, The Markup revealed that Life360 was one of the largest sources of raw location data for the industry. Its customers included X-Mode, a location data broker that sold data to U.S. military contractors; SafeGraph, a company that Sen. Ron Wyden has flagged as a “data broker of concern”; and Cuebiq, one of the largest location data brokers in the industry. It needed for them to be publicly shamed before this change was made. No-one pays this amount of money for data without having some really good use for it.

In 2020, location data sales made up nearly 20 percent of Life360’s revenue, netting the company $16 million, according to its financial records. It made an additional $6 million through its deal with Arity, a “mobility data and analytics” firm owned by Allstate, which is disclosed as a data partner in Life360’s privacy policy.

I'll bet that many large-scale free services fund their services through some or other sale of their user data.

See https://themarkup.org/privacy/2022/01/27/life360-says-it-will-stop-selling-precise-location-data

#technology #privacy #location

This is essentially a 7" display which your phone can connect to via Bluetooth. The display then mounts on top of the dashboard and can be interacted with, as if you had CarPlay or Android Auto on your car's head unit.

It will, by default, use it's built-in speaker for sound output, but it also has an FM transmitter so that the audio can play through your car speakers (will work if your radio is so old it does not have Bluetooth, but audio may not be great). Otherwise, if your car head unit has an AUX input, you can connect a cable to that.

It's by no means perfect, as can be seen from the review, but it is an option worth considering if there is nothing else.

Why not just use your phone on a holder? Well the screen is a bit bigger, orientation is correct, and more importantly CarPlay and Android Auto are optimised for minimal touch operation vs a phone screen interface.

See https://www.engadget.com/intellidash-pro-carplay-android-auto-150100414.html

#technology #hardware #cars #carplay #androidauto

Apple Inc. is planning a new service that will let small businesses accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The upcoming feature will turn the iPhone into a payment terminal, letting users such as food trucks and hair stylists accept payments with the tap of a credit card or another iPhone onto the back of their device.

But the big question is, given Apple's reluctance for competition against their own products, will they still allow the new Mastercard app which will be a direct competition to this? Apple's app will likely work with Apple Pay, and Mastercard's will likely work with Mastercard itself.

See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/smartphones/431680-iphones-will-soon-accept-tap-payments.html

#technology #ios #payments #NFC #Apple

Higher education institutions are actively looking for ways to adapt to rapidly improving technology and enable students to use advances in computing to study, collaborate, and learn in new ways. Many institutions have been using open source software to exchange knowledge more easily, ensure a better learning experience, and handle administration with fewer worries.

Universities usually have complex and unique systems. From a technological point of view, this makes it harder for universities to adopt technologies not built with their specific requirements in mind.

6 Reasons expanded upon in the article are:

• Improve hybrid and remote learning
• Ensure complete data privacy and compliance
• Provide better student experience
• Custom technology
• Automation

See https://opensource.com/article/22/1/universities-open-source-software-rocketchat

#technology #collaboration #FOSS #opensource #education

South Africa’s TV White Spaces (TVWS) project has been proven to be commercially viable, and the Wireless Access Providers’ Association (WAPA) is looking to move to scale projects in the future.

The project is set to deliver faster and broader broadband connectivity in the rural regions of South Africa. TVWS are the gaps within the lower frequency spectrum range between the 470-694MHz (excluding 606-614MHz) on which analogue TV broadcasts are currently transmitted.

The CSIR’s tests showed that while using the spectrum, a download speed of 54Mbps could be reached over a 4km distance with a direct line of sight, and dropped to 42Mbps at a distance of 717m with a restricted line of sight.

See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/431408-good-news-for-south-africas-tv-white-spaces-project.html

#technology #southafrica #tvws #rural #broadband

IBM SPSS Modeler is a data mining and text analytics software application. The program is used to build predictive models and conduct other analytic tasks. While SPSS Modeler is available for Linux, it’s proprietary software. What are the best free and open source alternatives?

The article covers: RapidMiner, Orange and KNIME.

See https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-open-source-alternatives-ibm-spss-modeler/

#technology #datamining #alternativesto #opensource #analytics

Browser cookies, especially cross-domain cookies, make it easy to track people across the internet and collect data for targeted advertisements. That’s why many browsers now block third-party cookies, from Firefox to Vivaldi, and Google has been trying to build a replacement that addresses some privacy concerns. The company’s first attempt didn’t work out well, so Google is trying again with Topics API.

Similar to the earlier FLoC design, it uses your browser to locally generate groups that advertisers can target, but now it’s based on specific topics instead of grouping people that share an interest in multiple topics together. Even though the new technology might be an improvement over FloC, it likely won’t be much more popular.

It does cost real money to host any online service, so we either get it "free" with adverts that ideally do not track us, otherwise some donates to cover the service, or we pay subscriptions. Once a service scales up to the size of Google services, donations usually don't cover it. But ultimately, both FLoC and Topics API are probably better than the cookies we have right now. Ban advertising, and large chunks of popular services will just disappear off the Internet.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/google-topics-api/

#technology #cookies #tracking #google

Flock was based on Chromium a good 10+ years ago. It fully integrated various social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and a few more, along with RSS, and even had a media bar which integrated Flickr and some similar media sharing. The point was you did not have to go visit each and every separate site to see updates from your friends. This was all "on tap" in a vertical sidebar next to whatever other browsing you were doing.

I suspect though this was also Flock's undoing, as back then Facebook, Twitter, etc were all fairly open and 3rd parties could connect easily the feeds. Today, Facebook, YouTube, etc want to be sure you must visit their actual page otherwise you won't see the adverts, inserted posts in your feed, etc. Much of this functionality that allowed you to interact via a 3rd party became crippled over time.

I still miss Flock's browser today...

See https://youtu.be/59isa3lKhjY

#technology #flockbrowser #socialnetworking #retro

The report is the result of two surveys taking in over 2,000 managers and more than 4,000 employees across the US, UK, France, and Germany. It found that 59 per cent of employers state that not having enough skilled employees is having a major or moderate impact on their business.

I can imagine the impact is surely even greater in 3rd World Countries, unless miraculously the digital training is far better in 3rd World Countries... My opinion (no facts) is possibly that external consultants "sell" transformational improvements to managers (who don't fully understand these themselves), and employees have to grapple at the coal-face with the changes. I've similarly seen external turnaround strategists coming in, and disrupting working processes, which end up destabilising a company. Sometimes solid incremental improvements can be better for many companies.

See https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/25/employers_in_denial_over_success/

#technology #digitaltransformation #skills #training