Free Republic

Arizona sued Google this week, alleging the big tech company engaged in deceptive and unfair business practices to obtain users’ location data for advertising purposes in order to gain a profit. The 50-page complaint alleges Google tracks the location of its users even if the consumer had disabled the tracker. After a roughly two-year probe, Arizona says Google also makes it confusing and increasingly difficult for a consumer to opt-out of the tracking and information collection. “While Google users are led to believe they can opt-out of location tracking, the company exploits other avenues to invade personal privacy,” Arizona Attorney...

See how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19 As global communities respond to COVID-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19. These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

The researchers, who examined the brains of 199 females and 110 males, found that individuals with better wiring of the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex - two areas of the brain associated with the cognitive processing of task-relevant information - demonstrated better cognitive function. The university defined intelligence as the 'general mental capability that involves the ability to reason, to think abstractly, and to learn quickly from experiences,' and consulted graph theoretical network analysis methods to draw their conclusions. 'The different topological embedding of these regions into the brain network could make it easier for smarter persons to...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...