There may be strong psychological reasons to forbid children and teenagers from using smartphones.

The article says "children", but clearly intends teenagers as well; the French prohibition on using smartphones in school includes high school. If we want teenagers to become capable people, we should not infantilize them by calling them "children".

I think the same kind of argument applies to portable phones. They may not be designed to be so addictive, but we should not get our children in the habit of letting Big Brother track them. We hope they will grow up to be activists for good causes, which means they will have something to hide, though not a shameful something.

A zip code, a birth date, and a sex are enough to uniquely identify most people in the US. This defeats most data anonymization schemes. Many other collections of data also permit deanonymization.

I think there is a way to do crowdsourcing of recommendations without enabling any person to be identified. The trick is not to save a long list of things that one contributor liked.

Suppose each person anonymously contributes many separate triples of things which person liked. "I liked A, B, and C." "I liked A, B, and D." "I liked A, C, and D." (The software wouldn't have to submit all the n!/(3! * (n-3)!) combinations of three of the n things you liked.) This may be enough to make somewhat useful recommendations; but if the system does not know when various triples are from the same person, its data are not enough to identify any person.

I would rather have privacy than personalized recommendations. I reject Netflix entirely for several reasons, but preserving my privacy would be enough reason by itself.

American Petroleum Institute asked the EPA for a list of favors, and Saboteur Pruitt gave it almost all of them.

Other agencies are giving the oil companies plenty of other gifts. This is the culmination of a decades-long lobbying campaign which includes government agencies set up specifically for the oil lobby.

If you are young, the goal they are working for will probably result in killing you. And they have reason to know this.

"While rightwing papers call for better regulation of social media, history shows us that when such crackdowns happen it is often the left that suffers the most."

Spies-for-hire that work for businesses to hamper organized criticism go beyond just snooping. Sometimes they try to stir up disputes within the organizations.