Harvey Rosenfield and Laura Antonini:

Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you’ve likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret “surveillance scores” – digital mug shots of millions of Americans – that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy.

People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences.

CoreLogic and TransUnion say that scores they peddle to landlords can predict whether a potential tenant will pay the rent on time, be able to “absorb rent increases,” or break a lease. Large employers use HireVue, a firm that generates an “employability” score about candidates by analyzing “tens of thousands of factors,” including a person’s facial expressions and voice intonations. Other employers use Cornerstone’s score, which considers where a job prospect lives and which web browser they use to judge how successful they will be at a job.

Brand-name retailers purchase “risk scores” from Retail Equation to help make judgments about whether consumers commit fraud when they return goods for refunds. Players in the gig economy use outside firms such as Sift to score consumers’ “overall trustworthiness.” Wireless customers predicted to be less profitable are sometimes forced to endure longer customer service hold times.

Auto insurers raise premiums based on scores calculated using information from smartphone apps that track driving styles. Large analytics firms monitor whether we are likely to take our medication based on our propensity to refill our prescriptions; pharmaceutical companies, health-care providers and insurance companies can use those scores to, among other things, “match the right patient investment level to the right patients.”

Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin

In Google’s early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 “blue links” that led to different websites. “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2004.

Today, Google often considers that “right place” to be Google, an investigation by The Markup has found.

We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.

41%

of the first page of Google search results is taken up by Google products.

Source: The Markup analysis

When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all.

A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

Brett Scott:

After much consideration, I’ve decided to break one of my key rules when talking about money, which is:

‘Never use substance metaphors to talk about money’

I have this rule because, while it may be printed upon physical objects (‘cash’), money is not a substance: it’s not ‘blood flowing through the veins of the economy’, or whatever other substance metaphor you may wish to use.

But, in this instance, I’m going to break the rule and use the metaphor of water to show you that bank deposits are never deposited into banks.

Depositing water deposits

The glass pictured above stores liquids. If I take a jug of water and pour water into this glass, I’m depositing water into it. After I’ve done that, I might say there is a ‘water deposit’ in the glass.

Admittedly we don’t often use that phrase to talk about water, but think for example of a geological metal deposit: in the beginning of the earth asteroids crashed and ‘deposited’ debris all over the planet, while volcanos ‘deposited’ lava, which nowadays leads us to discover ‘cobalt deposits’, ‘gold deposits’ or ‘iron ore deposits’.

Notice that the verb ‘deposit’ creates a noun of the same name: the exploding volcano ‘deposits iron deposits’, or the jug ‘deposits a water deposit’ into the glass.

Unherd:

We know that political bias warps cognition, sometimes catastrophically, and this is, I think, an example of that in action. Lepore read Feldman’s research and she misunderstood part of it, despite being an exceptionally intelligent person. Like many other Left-leaning Democrats, she is convinced that police brutality is a huge, under-acknowledged problem in the United States, and she therefore jumped to the conclusion that this wildly inflated ‘two-thirds’ figure was plausible.

The staff at the New Yorker who read her piece also, we must assume, considered it to be plausible. The sentence was printed and, as of the time of writing, has not been corrected. There has been no uproar on social media. I reached out to both the New Yorker and Feldman for comment, and have not received replies.

A small, troubling example of the effect of political bias on journalism.

Philip Reeve:

What makes a picture good? Not only because this is a very subjective question it is a hard one to answer. We will still try to do that and in the process we will also come across the following questions: why do you take pictures in the first place and: for whom

Mark Fischetti:

In the graphics that follow, Scientific American presents detailed explanations, current as of mid-June, into how SARS-CoV-2 sneaks inside human cells, makes copies of itself and bursts out to infiltrate many more cells, widening infection. We show how the immune system would normally attempt to neutralize virus particles and how CoV-2 can block that effort. We explain some of the virus’s surprising abilities, such as its capacity to proofread new virus copies as they are being made to prevent mutations that could destroy them. And we show how drugs and vaccines might still be able to overcome the intruders. As virologists learn more, we will update these graphics on our Web site 

Erin Griffith:

Start-ups that sell everything from mattresses to data-warehousing software have long used “making the world a better place”-style mission statements to energize and motivate their workers. But as the economic fallout from the coronavirus persists, many of those gauzy mantras have given way to harsh realities like budget cuts, layoffs and bottom lines.

That now puts companies with a “commitment” culture at the highest risk of losing what made them successful, said Ethan Mollick, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Thomas Smith:

June 9th, 2020 at 2:13 pm, I paid $13.87 to have bubble tea delivered to my house via the popular food delivery service Doordash. I can’t say I’m especially proud of this decision.

When I made the purchase, I expected that my little indulgence would remain between me and Doordash, since I hadn’t done anything to explicitly link the service to my other online accounts. Maybe the driver who delivered it would roll their eyes. Maybe Doordash’s recommendation system would say “Ah, that’s a juicy sale!” and suggest I repeat the order in a few days. But I assumed my purchase wouldn’t ripple much beyond that.

But I was wrong. Doordash (and hundreds of companies like it) aren’t just recording every purchase you make. They’re also sharing purchase data with other companies, who are using it to target ads. And as I would discover as a result of my extravagant bubble tea order, one of those companies is Facebook.

The result is that consumers can now access massive data dumps from several large companies, including Facebook. To get your own, you simply go to Facebook.com/your_information, click on Download Your Information, and follow the instructions. Often within a few minutes, you’ll be invited to download a giant zip file with everything Facebook knows about you.