Business, Spoken

It’s the simple bargain that made companies like Google and Facebook into giants: in exchange for the convenience of running your life from a smartphone, you hand over gobs of data on your every activity. It zips up into the cloud where algorithms do…well it’s hard to be exactly sure, but everyone's at it. Oh, except Apple. Tim Cook has aggressively positioned the company as uninterested in collecting user data, and boasts that it sets Apple apart. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Officially, the online search giant Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” According to two new reports—one from the Wall Street Journal and one from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, the company doesn’t just organize. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You may not know how you know it, but you probably know today is Amazon Prime Day—a 30-hour-long, made-up shopping holiday from the online retail giant, where 85 million Prime subscribers get access to hundreds of thousands of discounts through Amazon’s site. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You're probably used to pop-ups on websites begging you to sign-up for an email newsletter, enter a contest, or watch an ad. But tomorrow the web will be plastered in a different sort of pop-up as some the tech's biggest companies fight to maintain a free and open internet. Last May, the Federal Communications Commission began the process of dismantling the net neutrality rules it adopted in early 2015. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hello, and welcome to Who Extorted It Better? Time to meet our contestants! One is an avid user of Twitter, frequent golfer, and the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth: Donald Trump! The other is a major international news organization full of great journalists and run by bean-counting execs who helped put Donald Trump in office: CNN! Ready? Aaaaaaaannnd extort! Ooh, strong opening move from the president, hinting that if CNN continued its critical coverage of his administration, well, Trump might have his regulatory agencies withhold approval of a merger between... Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Shortly before am on February 23, 2016, an incendiary email landed on a nonprofit listserv, blasting a federal program that many of the listserv’s members rely on to bring high-speed internet to low-income and rural Americans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When most people think about diversity, they think recruiting and hiring, and it ends there. They are mistaken. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Bärí A. Williams (@bariawilliams) is head of business operations, North America, at StubHub. She previously served as lead counsel for Facebook and created its supplier diversity program. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday, one day after Facebook had announced that two billion people use its service every month, ProPublica released a bombshell investigation into the company's hate-speech censorship guidelines. The report included documents that revealed that Facebook's rules often end up protecting the rights of those in power over those who are powerless. These two revelations are inextricably entwined, each enabling and necessitating the other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For months now, social media companies have been grappling with how to minimize or eradicate hate speech on their platforms. YouTube has been working to make sure advertisers' content doesn't show up on hateful videos. Instagram is using AI to delete unsavory comments. And earlier this week, ProPublica reported on the internal training materials Facebook gives to the content managers who moderate comments and postings on the platform on how to calculate what is and isn’t hate speech. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The net neutrality debate can seem complicated. But at its heart, the issue rests on two simple realities: First, for more than a decade, the status quo in the US has been an open internet that supports thriving innovation among websites, apps, and new digital services. Second, innovators and consumers are dependent on a few large broadband providers that serve as gatekeepers to the internet. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Terrell McSweeny (@TMcSweenyFTC) is a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices