Tinder introduced a new feature to help LGBT users in countries with discriminatory laws, Techcrunch reported. The feature means the profiles of users who identify as LGBT will not show up on the app in those countries.

As part of the update, users who identify on the app as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer will no longer automatically appear on Tinder when they arrive in an oppressive state. This feature, which Tinder dubs the Traveler Alert, relies on your phone’s network connection to determine its location. From there it will give users the choice to keep their location private. If users opt-in to make their profile public again, Tinder will hide their sexual orientation or gender identity from their profile to safeguard the information from law enforcement and others who may target them, the company said. Once a user leaves the country or changes their location, their profile will become visible again.

It is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security when you’re told that your data is being stored anonymously. One academic found that it is very easy to identify the person the data refers to. Indeed, they could reidintify up to 99.8 per cent of Americans. They explained their solution to the New Scientist.

Data anonymization is supposed to be irreversible, but it’s relatively easy to reverse engineer the process, as Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye at Imperial College London and colleagues have found. This is because the more pieces of data you have about someone the more likely it becomes they are the only person who fits the bill. However, all is not lost. New techniques will help the fight for privacy, as De Montjoye explains… “We developed a machine learning model to assess the likelihood of reidentifying the right person. We took datasets and we showed that in the US fifteen characteristics, including age, gender, marital status and others, are sufficient to reidentify 99.98 per cent of Americans in virtually any anonymised data set.”

Theresa May will leave Downing Street Wednesday, ending her three-year tenure as British Prime Minister. The date has been set for weeks now, but the day has finally arrived. Mrs. May’s relationship with the tech industry has not been an easy one. Back in June, Sky News’ Rowland Manthorpe looked at the outgoing PM’s tech legacy, and it is worth reading once again today.

Mrs May was not interested in them – and these “citizens of nowhere” found little appealing about her. Over the next two-and-a-half years, there were occasional signs of a thaw. After the election of 2017, Mrs May attempted to revive her government with a new industrial strategy: that meant cash for AI projects and extra visas for coders. But on the biggest questions posed by technology – from the future of work to the fragility of democracy – she remained conspicuously silent. In October 2018, two years after it first became clear that democratic elections in the US and Britain had been manipulated using social networks, the chair of the UK’s fake news enquiry admitted that he had never been asked to discuss the issue directly with the prime minister.

Philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates run the Gates Foundation, which recently increased its stake in Serco Group Plc, a private, for-profit prison in the U.K.

The trust, the Gates foundation’s investment arm, added nearly 200,000 shares of Serco Group Plc in May…The foundation’s staff have no influence over the trust’s investment decisions, according to its website…Serco runs six for-profit prisons in the U.K., all of which are nearly filled to capacity.

The staff may have no influence, but surely either of the Gates have a say in the matter?

Rumors about a 16-inch MacBook continue to circulate. AppleInsider summed up the latest developments. It included talk of an LCD display and price point of over $3000.

The 16-inch screen is again said to be a LCD model, running at 3072 pixels wide, by 1920. Assembly duties are said to be performed by Quanta and Foxconn. Should the new model have the same pixel density as the existing MacBook Pro, that suggests the screen is approximately a 16.4-inch display on the diagonal. Any such device would have to be at some point in the manufacturing process now. Prior to the 2016 MacBook Pro, milled shells of the new case enclosure started appearing in April, for the October refresh. At present, it isn’t clear if the report by UDN is uniquely sourced, or a repeat of previous predictions by Ming-Chi Kuo or other venues. UDN also believes that the model will come in starting at about NT$90000, over $3000.

People who run corporate social media accounts do have a hard time. Even more so if it is a public body like the police. When things go wrong, people notice. They certainly noticed when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of British Columbia left the “cat filter” on during a Facebook live-stream of a press conference about a double murder, Sky News reported.

Sergeant Janelle Shoihet, from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of British Columbia, blamed “technical difficulties” for the error. She was giving a briefing about the murders of an American woman and her Australian boyfriend, who were found dead on a remote highway earlier this week. Tweeting about the incident she said: “Yes we are aware and addressing it as it’s an automatic setting. Thank you, we will rectify and issue a video shortly”.

For several days, Andy Newman worked as a deliveryman for apps like Uber Eats and Postmates, revealing an inside look at on-demand workers and how they can be exploited.

Nearly a third of delivery cyclists missed work because of on-the-job injuries last year, one survey found, and at least four delivery riders or bike messengers have been killed in crashes with cars this year. Riders on electric bikes face fines and confiscation, though that may change.

Maria Figueroa, director of labor and policy research for the Cornell University Worker Institute in Manhattan, called the food couriers “the most vulnerable workers in digital labor.”

Writing for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman writes about Apple’s COO Jeff Williams and how he contributes to Apple’s culture.

Williams has distinguished himself as a modest, disciplined, demanding leader in the current CEO’s style. He’s negotiated with suppliers, shipped hundreds of millions of devices a year from Chinese factories to the rest of the globe, and been a bit more hands-on with product development than Cook, they say. Williams attends weekly reviews of product and industrial design progress, subsequently briefing Cook for a final signoff, and has been the lead executive shepherding the Apple Watch to market.

A new report from Mircosoft researchers found that Google and Facebook secretly track users’ activity on porn sites. And they weren’t the only ones. Forbes reported that the researchers found that overall 93% of the porn sites they investigated leak user data to third parties.

While FaceApp was only ever accused (wrongly) of accessing photo galleries and user names, the nature of this latest social media exposure goes further, into the darkest recesses of the internet, because “analysis of 22,484 pornography websites,” the researchers say in their report, “indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party.” Despite privacy policies that “were written such that one might need a two-year college education to understand them,” and the false sense of security that private browsing might bring—”this only ensures browsing history is not stored on the computer”—the researchers found that Google and its ecosystem was tracking almost 75% of the porn sites, Oracle almost 25% and Facebook a still eye-watering 10%.