Andrew Orr

Scooters are apparently a fad again with middle schoolers. Scooter startups are getting VC cash and attention from big companies like Alphabet. The smart scooters are also tracking your kids and selling their data.

A new blog post from the organization’s Northern California branch analyzes all of the data-collection practices of Spin, Bird, and Lime. To put it mildly, these companies’ policies all seem a bit reckless. For example, all three startups have persistent user tracking, meaning they are following users’ every move from the time they use the scooter until the end of the session. As the ACLU writes, this means it will know if you’re going to a “political protest, or to a religious service, or to see a medical specialist.” And, of course, these companies are keeping this data for an undisclosed amount of time while reserving the right to share it with third parties.

I’ve been interested in ReGen villages for a couple years now. It’s a high-tech, eco-friendly village located in the Netherlands. Vertical farms will provide food, food waste is turned into fish food for local aquaculture, houses filter rainwater, and there’s a village OS platform that uses AI to manage various systems.

The neighborhood works differently than most. Because of the expected arrival of self-driving cars in coming years, and to encourage walking and biking, the houses aren’t designed with parking; a new bus line along the edge of the neighborhood, with a dedicated bus lane, can take residents to the town of Almere or into Amsterdam.

It sounds like a great place to live, and projects like this should be a model for the future. More sustainability and more environmentally-friendly designs.

LG screen issues may spell trouble for Apple. The supplier has cut its investment plans out of concern for the global smartphone market. It recently posted a second quarterly loss in a row because of bad display prices.

LG said it would trim investment by 3 trillion won ($2.7 billion) from what was planned by 2020, without revealing its total or previous capex targets. It also warned that it could adjust production in South Korea and China in response to trade disputes between Washington and Beijing.

The investment cut would not impact plans to “speed up the shift” from LG’s mainstay liquid crystal display (LCD) business toward next-generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels, the company said.

This isn’t doom and gloom for Apple, but it does mean the company will have to keep relying on Samsung for OLED iPhone X screens.

It involves scraper bots and the ways in which retailers use them against rivals.

For retailers, scraping can be a two-way street, and that’s where things get interesting. Retailers want to see what their rivals are doing, but they want to prevent rivals from snooping on them; retailers also want to protect intellectual property like product photos and descriptions, which can be scraped and reused without permission by others. So many deploy defenses to subvert scraping. One technique: showing different prices to real people than to bots. A site may show the price as astronomically high or zero to throw off bots collecting data.

Machines making machines and fighting other machines. How perverse.

Twitter is home to alt-right trolls, neo-Nazis, and then there’s Alex Jones. Will Oremus writes about Twitter’s free speech problem (problem is my opinion).

The Twitter executive leading these moderation efforts is Vijaya Gadde, the company’s legal, public policy, and trust and safety lead. I recently interviewed Gadde on Slate’s technology podcast, If Then, where we discussed Twitter’s current approach to harassment, hate speech, and misinformation; whether the social network’s very structure encourages these problems; and why conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are still allowed to have Twitter accounts.

If you want to see a good example of platform moderation, look to r/AskHistorians on Reddit. Twitter and Facebook need to pay attention.

Have we reached peaked smart home? Craig Lloyd writes that we have, and there are a couple of things holding the industry back, like competing standards, expensive devices, and problems with voice control.

There’s a problem with the smarthome industry—multiple problems, actually. And after experiencing a huge boom over the last few years, smarthome as a whole has reached a plateau of sorts.

Don’t get us wrong; smarthome technology is a really exciting market, and it’s become so popular that big players like Amazon and Google have dived head first into offering comprehensive smarthome product lines. The thing is, smarthome in general still has a long way to go.

Jaron Lanier is a VR pioneer, musician and author and he’s been around Silicon Valley for most of his life. He has a new book called Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and he takes a look at social media that was supposed to “connect humanity” but instead divides us. His argument is to delete social media accounts.

“If info-consumers see the world through agent’s eyes, then advertising will transform into the art of controlling agents, through bribing, hacking, whatever,” Lanier wrote, presciently. “You can imagine an arms race” between armor-plated agents and hacker-laden ad agencies. Lovely . . . An agent’s model of what you are interested in will be a cartoon model, and you will see a cartoon version of the world through the agent’s eyes.”