Editor’s Note Your data may not be safe. How do you feel about it

Editor’s Note: Your data may not be safe. How do you feel about it? From: WIRED’s Gideon Lichfield wired@newsletters.wired.com To: ihadtopee@gmail.com Date: Jan 11, 2022 Subject: Editor’s Note: Your data may not be safe. How do you feel about it?

Digging into the best new stories on wired.com, and what they mean for our future. View this email in your browser | Manage newsletter subscriptions 01.11.22 Facebook is regularly pummeled for its lax data privacy, creepy algorithmic manipulation, and inability to curb disinformation and hate speech. Last fall, WIRED was just one among many media outlets that published excerpts from the Facebook Papers, a stash of leaked internal documents showing that the company knew full well that its automated content moderation systems performed far worse than it publicly claimed. By comparison, Amazon has kept its public image relatively unscathed, despite its history of exploiting its workers. But in fact, the company has been not unlike Facebook in its careless handling of your data. As Will Evans’ recent story for WIRED and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows, Amazon neglected its security division for years, and as a result its control over how customers’ data was stored and accessed was hopelessly weak. In 2018, around the time it emerged that tens of millions of Facebook users’ data had been leaked to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, Amazon learned that it had suffered a similar kind of breach, in which an outside company siphoned off millions of people’s personal records. That this news didn’t leak out at the time seems to have been mostly blind luck—that, and the fact that Amazon’s data breaches mostly only hurt sellers on the Amazon platform, while Facebook’s seemed to threaten democracy itself. Massive data leaks have sadly become utterly commonplace. But even when companies aren’t losing your data, they’re using it in all sorts of ways you might not expect, as we’ve explained in our reporting on how TikTok sniffs out your friends without your knowing, or the tricks shopping sites use to get you to spend more. (For more like that, see our “Dark Patterns” series.) I’m curious how you think about these issues as they relate to your life. Have you largely given up on trying to limit how your data is used, or have you been doing anything recently to bring it more under control? And do you have any requests for things WIRED could write to help you with those decisions? Let us know by hitting reply or sending an email to hello@WIRED.com. And meanwhile, here are eight other stories we’ve published in the past few weeks that I think you might enjoy. Gideon Lichfield | Global Director, WIRED Crime Prediction Keeps Society Stuck in the Past BY CHRIS GILLIARD | 6-MINUTE READ So long as algorithms are trained on racist historical data and outdated values, there will be no opportunities for change. When Mind Melds With Machine, Who’s in Control? BY KELLY CLANCY | 10-MINUTE READ Brain-computer interfaces are getting better all the time—and they’re about to land us in a philosophical quagmire. Reset Your Computer Once a Year for a Happier Life BY DAVID NIELD AND REECE ROGERS | 4-MINUTE READ It’s easier than ever to restore your Mac, PC, or Chromebook to factory conditions—and you’ll be surprised at how much zip it’ll add. The US Needs to Do Better for Bikes BY ADRIENNE SO | 6-MINUTE READ If the US is serious about solving climate change, it needs to treat bikes like car replacements and not toys. In Praise of Unglamorous American Invention BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN | 5-MINUTE READ Forget Blue Origin, Silicon Valley, and unicorns—small but mighty innovations are the true breakthroughs of human ingenuity. This AI Software Nearly Predicted Omicron’s Tricky Structure BY TOM SIMONITE | 5-MINUTE READ New algorithms that decipher complex sequences of amino acids offered an early view of the coronavirus variant. They could point the way to future drugs. Scientists Settled a Century-Old Family Drama Using DNA From Postcards BY GRACE BROWNE | 6-MINUTE READ Swiss forensic geneticists analyzed DNA recovered from postage stamps dating back to World War I and solved a century-old paternity puzzle. Video Games Already Do What the Metaverse Just Promises BY CECILIA D’ANASTASIO | 6-MINUTE READ Virtual hang-outs, digital currency, weddings? Online games have been making space for these things for decades.

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