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Category Archives: E-Commerce

Amazon Becomes the First Company Ever to Lose $1 Trillion in Stock Value

Gizmodo: “Amazon, one of the first companies to join the prestigious $1 trillion dollar valuation club, just passed another, admittedly less desirable milestone. This week, Jeff Bezos’ Everything Store became the first publicly traded company to lose $1 tillion in market valuation. The mind boggling figures, first noted by Bloomberg, are the results of a… Continue Reading

Online Consumer Data Collection

CRS Report – Online Consumer Data Collection, October 31, 2022 – “Large amounts of consumer data can be collected, processed, and analyzedby operators of websites and mobile applications (apps) and third parties, which are entities otherthan the website or appprimary operator (e.g., data brokers). Operators collect data for multiple purposes, including providing services, selling user… Continue Reading

That customer service number? It could be a scam.

Washington Post: “…Get customer service numbers from official websites. Treat every phone number like a potential scam risk. Even if the number came from an official-looking email or text, verify it by checking it against the contact number listed on the company’s website before you call. Type in phone numbers rather than clicking links –… Continue Reading

Keep your family’s internet private with Total Cookie Protection on Firefox

Mozilla Distilled: “By the time a kid turns 13, more than 72 million pieces of personal data have been collected about them on the internet, according to a 2018 report. These can include name, date of birth, address, family members, where they hang out, the people they interact with, what they do in the classroom,… Continue Reading

How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers

“At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers, by Data & Society’s Labor Futures program director Aiha Nguyen and research analyst Eve Zelickson, offers insights into the changing nature of delivery work as a result of increased doorstep surveillance. Investigating the changing relationships between corporations, workers, and customers as a… Continue Reading

How Amazon Accelerated the Commodification of Literature

LitHub: “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos came up with the slogan “Get Big Fast” because he knew size was crucial to exacting ever lower prices from suppliers. Publishers have tried to respond to Amazon’s power by doing the exact same thing, accelerating their decades-long campaign of mergers and acquisitions to consolidate into an ever smaller number… Continue Reading

Google offers more control over the ads you see

ZDNet: “Google on [October 20, 2022] began rolling out a new tool that gives users more control over the ads they see when using Google products – without hampering the way products like Google Search, Discover, and YouTube actually work. My Ad Center, among other things, lets users block whole categories of ads they’re not… Continue Reading

RSS government

GovFresh, Luke Fretwell – “Defaulting to an open protocol to syndicate government information makes public communications universally accessible. Every government website should have an RSS feed. This ensures there is an open, universal standard for syndicating government information. The problem – While it’s important that government shares information via distributed outlets – social media, email… Continue Reading

Where Is All the Book Data?

Public Books: “Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This is a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books,… Continue Reading