Is A/B Product Testing Turning Us into Silicon Valley’s Lab Rats?

The Tech Industry Says It's Helping Us Shape the Future, But Our Clicks Could Entrap Us

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, so that all of Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.

Everybody’s doing it. In fact, you’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook.

With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test …

How the Internet and E-Commerce Are Hacking Protectionism

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Consider two distinct worlds only a few miles from each other. One world is that of Jennifer and Nicole, recently featured in The New York Times, who have worked all their lives …

Why the U.S. Should Stop Lecturing the World About “Internet Values”

Clueless Optimism and Bull-Headed Arrogance Make the World Safe for Big Tech, Not Real People

The World Wide Web might have been invented by a Briton working for a European research organization, but let’s face it: The internet is American. The world’s richest tech firms …

This Isn’t a First Amendment Issue, Twitter

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Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it would be using new tools to curb hate speech and harassment on its site. The news came on the heels of a …

It’s Not Your Grandparents’ Fault They Keep Getting Scammed Online

We Could Be Doing a Much Better Job of Educating Senior Citizens About Cybersecurity

In June, a collective “awwwwwh” reverberated across the Internet, as the story of a polite British grandmother who included “please” and “thank you” in her Google searches gave everyone the …

How Yahoo Destroyed Its Value

The Internet Pioneer’s Long Journey to the Graveyard Was Shaped by Repeated Misjudgments in Mergers and Acquisitions

On July 25, Verizon announced plans to buy Yahoo’s internet assets plus some real estate for less than $5 billion in cash. Yahoo, which went public in 1996, had spent …