Geoffrey Fowler

The eSight 3—which weighs less than a quarter of a pound and is operated by hand-held remote—captures the world through a camera system and then displays it on OLED screens that sit very close to the eyes. Legally blind people have some limited vision, and eSight’s displays are tuned to make use of it. By dialing up contrast and allowing users to zoom in, it can dramatically amplify sight without a surgical procedure.

Whatever you make of the outcome, the 2016 elections sucked many of us into a social media black hole that hasn’t left us much wiser or more empowered. So I’ve been hunting for nonpartisan online tools that actually help keep politicians of all stripes accountable. I found some potent new services, like the Internet Archive’s searchable database of everything President-elect Donald Trump says on TV. But I also found a remarkable disconnect between government—especially state and local—and the consumer-friendly apps we need to make it personalized, simplified and timely.

A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows. Don't bother. Go sign up for a public library card instead.

More than 90% of American public libraries have amassed e-book collections you can read on your iPad, and often even on a Kindle.

You don't have to walk into a branch or risk an overdue fine. And they're totally free. But libraries' current collection advantage, borne of those publisher contracts, isn't likely to last forever. Publishers may resolve their squabbles with Amazon or come to see paid subscriptions as a lucrative new market.

[Aug 12]

Here are four cold, hard realities of Facebook's privacy policies -- and what you can do about them right now:

1. You can't stop receiving ads on Facebook -- but you can keep Facebook from aiming specific ad topics at you.
2. As long as your browser keeps cookies, you can't stop Facebook from tracking you according to age, gender and where you live. But you can stop it and other companies from using that information to deliver ads.
3. You can stop Facebook from knowing your phone's location and limit it from using other information to target ads.
4. Unfortunately, all of these rules could change later.

[Commentary] Enough with complaining that young people these days are addicted to their phones. The question you should be asking is: What do they know that you don't? Believe it or not, there are advantages to using technology like a teen.

I asked a handful of 11- to 17-year-olds to tell me what apps and gear they couldn't live without. They taught me to question my own habits: Why do I use email to talk with friends? Why do I only share my best photos?

I found five practices that could change how you use technology.

1. Only 6% of teens exchange email daily, according to the Pew Research Center. They reserve email for official communications, or venues like school where alternatives are banned. Instead, teens use a fragmented set of messaging apps based on the people they want to communicate with.
2. There's also value in not having every single message stored on an email server. The idea is to just enable a regular conversation.
3. Today, 91% of teens post a photo of themselves on social media sites, according to Pew. The lesson for adults is that you can express things in images that would be time-consuming to write out, or read.
4. Adults assume that young people don't care about privacy. But look closer: Some 58% of teen social-media users say they cloak their messages, according to Pew, using inscrutable pictures and unexplained jokes to communicate in code. The lesson: You can be "public" without having embarrassing things on the permanent record.
5. And the reason teens are such avid early adopters isn't that they have an innate knowledge of tech -- it's that they aren't afraid to break it.