Exclusive: Giovanni Mendoza, who was crushed to death in a Model S, believed misleading claims by the world’s richest man about a feature his family’s lawyer says is “not ready for primetime.”

Young men with few prospects of attracting a mate have historically threatened the internal peace and stability of societies. In some contemporary societies, such involuntary celibate-or <i>incel</i>-...

Alt: Image: a woman says "they 're watching us" while standing in front of a bush. She is not being paranoid. THEY are ALWAYS watching; ALWAYS listening. You won't be paranoid either once you just accept that THEY are like the air. It’s legal for Google to listen to you and it is doing it all the time. Yes. Your phone is technically always listening. Google Assistant is always active so it can pick up the ‘wake words’ it’s programmed to recognize and start carrying out voice commands. This doesn’t mean Google ignores everything else you say. It may also be on the lookout for other “keywords” it can use to improve your marketing profile. This is why you see ads about things you talk about even though you haven’t searched for them on your phone. It's still a problem if you’re an iPhone user because even though it doesn’t have a monopoly over data on Apple devices, many popular apps are from Alphabet.That said, Apple isn’t a saint either. It has also faced lawsuits for illegally recording people with Siri. In fact Tim Apple is actually worse because he controls a closed ecosystem. Big tech companies will argue it’s just improving your online shopping experience, but it’s still a huge privacy concern. You can’t trust strangers with everything you say every day, never mind a company that’s able to make money off it. As if that wasn’t worrying enough, it gets worse: This also means a cybercriminal could listen to your phone’s recordings if they hack into your Google account or steal them from Google’s servers in a data breach.

Is there room for another kind of decentralized social media?