News Roundup, April 26
By Eli Siems
U.K. Parliament concluded an inquiry into algorithmic decision-making. James Davenport contributed.
“Buzzfeed is building a team of writers to sell you stuff you didn’t know you wanted,” mainly by producing familiar lists and slideshows about products and linking to partners like Amazon.com. They hope users will share these ads on social media as they would any other Buzzfeed piece.
Unroll Me, a service that unsubsribes users from mailing lists, has been scanning people’s inboxes for items like Lyft receipts and selling that data to interested parties.
A new class-action suit alleges that the Bose Connect app secretly gathers a broad swath of user data that the headphone company then share with third parties.
Lambda Legal has filed suit against Puerto Rico and Idaho for policies forbidding transgender people from changing the gender on their birth certificates.
A German court ordered Facebook to stop mining users’ WhatsApp data because the company had failed to obtain genuine user consent.