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Say that you’re 70 and you unexpectedly learn that you require a surgery that will keep you in the hospital for a week. You adamantly don’t want any of your grandkids to find the will in your house that reveals who among them gets what. You suspect they’ll be snooping against your wishes. And you have 12 hours at home to prepare. You could pick a hiding spot that they probably wouldn’t guess but might find. You could put the will in a padlocked trunk and take the key with you. But what if they still find some way into the trunk? In fact, your grandson does find a way to remove the wooden bottom, look through its contents, replace them, and reseal the trunk without you even knowing.

Hiding something is one way to keep it secure. Overwhelming would-be snoops with plausible decoys is another way. Yet virtually no one’s email inbox is deliberately seeded with fake messages so that prying eyes cannot entirely know what is real. Imagine a startup called Plausible Deniability LLC.

A Q&A with Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

You just wanted to shop for a birthday gift in peace—instead, you got ads that follow you around the Internet, and coupons in your email that remember exactly which products you clicked on. So you shut down your computer, stick your hands into your pockets, and walk to the store. Here, among the throngs of shoppers, you may feel more anonymous than you do behind a screen unburdened by cookies and tracking pixels, and you can browse in peace. Except not really. If you brought your smartphone, its GPS probably tattled on you before you even walked through the doors. Take your phone out and it might start picking up inaudible sounds broadcast throughout the store to pinpoint your location and send you targeted ads. Surveillance cameras hidden in light fixtures track your movement through the aisles, and could even be using facial-recognition software to understand your preferences and habits and attach them to your personal profile. For the past five years or so, brick-and-mortar retail stores have been trying to catch up with their online counterparts in tracking and personalization. Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying the marketing and advertising industries for decades. I spoke to Turow about these transformations, the technologies that we might one day soon carry on or even inside our bodies that will make it easier to track us, and the retail industry’s predictions and pipe dreams for the future.

It was time to address the “questions and concerns about Peter Thiel as a board member and Trump supporter,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo, which was leaked to the website Hacker News. Keeping Thiel on the board was a reflection of Facebook’s commitment to diversity, Zuckerberg explained. “We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate...” he wrote. “Our community will be stronger for all our differences—not only in areas like race and gender, but also in areas like political ideology and religion.”(A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to me that the leaked memo, pictured below, is authentic.)

What remains surprising is that the world’s largest publisher refuses to acknowledge the business it’s really in. Facebook has not yet come to terms with its own power or, for that matter, with Thiel’s. Facebook tells the world that it’s a champion of the free press. And now it is telling its shareholders, users, and employees that Facebook stands by a man proud to shut those freedoms down.

[Commentary] Companies share information about us in any number of unexpected and regrettable ways, and the information and advice they provide can be inconspicuously warped by the companies’ own ideologies or by their relationships with those who wish to influence us, whether people with money or governments with agendas. To protect individual privacy rights, we’ve developed the idea of “information fiduciaries.”

In the law, a fiduciary is a person or business with an obligation to act in a trustworthy manner in the interest of another. Examples are professionals and managers who handle our money or our estates. An information fiduciary is a person or business that deals not in money but in information. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are examples; they have to keep our secrets and they can’t use the information they collect about us against our interests. Because doctors, lawyers, and accountants know so much about us, and because we have to depend on them, the law requires them to act in good faith—on pain of loss of their license to practice, and a lawsuit by their clients. The law even protects them to various degrees from being compelled to release the private information they have learned. The information age has created new kinds of entities that have many of the trappings of fiduciaries—huge online businesses, like Facebook, Google, and Uber, that collect, analyze, and use our personal information—sometimes in our interests and sometimes not. Like older fiduciaries, these businesses have become virtually indispensable. Like older fiduciaries, these companies collect a lot of personal information that could be used to our detriment. And like older fiduciaries, these businesses enjoy a much greater ability to monitor our activities than we have to monitor theirs. As a result, many people who need these services often shrug their shoulders and decide to trust them. But the important question is whether these businesses, like older fiduciaries, have legal obligations to be trustworthy. The answer is that they should.

[Jack M. Balkin is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project. Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard Law School.]

Fifty-six years after technology critics worried that television would revolutionize—and degrade—American politics, Donald Trump is the embodiment of their worst fears: He is a candidate who picks stunts over substance, who deliberately obfuscates rather than clarifies his thinking before the public, and who routinely tells blatant lies as part of a political performance that’s tailor-made for the modern spectacle of broadcast politics.

The ugliness of presidential campaigns predates Trump by generations, but it was never quite like this before.

In the past few years, the devastating effects of hackers breaking into an organization's network, stealing confidential data, and publishing everything have been made clear. It happened to the Democratic National Committee, to Sony, to the National Security Agency, to the cyber-arms weapons manufacturer Hacking Team, to the online adultery site Ashley Madison, and to the Panamanian tax-evasion law firm Mossack Fonseca. This style of attack is known as organizational doxing. The hackers, in some cases individuals and in others nation-states, are out to make political points by revealing proprietary, secret, and sometimes incriminating information. And the documents they leak do that, airing the organizations’ embarrassments for everyone to see.

In all of these instances, the documents were real: the e-mail conversations, still-secret product details, strategy documents, salary information, and everything else. But what if hackers were to alter documents before releasing them? This is the next step in organizational doxing—and the effects can be much worse. It's one thing to have all of your dirty laundry aired in public for everyone to see. It's another thing entirely for someone to throw in a few choice items that aren't real.

In a city or town, a quick look around will tell you the racial makeup of the community you're in. But on a webpage, there’s no easy way of telling who else is visiting. Some sites make it clear that they’re geared toward members of a certain race: The Root, for example, describes itself as a destination for “black news, opinions, politics, and culture.” Elsewhere, visitors have to guess a site’s target audience based on its content—or they may conclude that race doesn’t matter on most of the Internet. But that latter idea is one that a group of academic researchers who study race and the Internet have been pushing back against for decades. With training in different backgrounds—sociology, media studies, Unternet culture—they contend that the Internet is far from raceless; in fact, they say, most of the Internet is targeted at one demographic in particular.

Because of its history as a product of technology companies that are staffed overwhelmingly by white employees, the Internet is largely made by, and for, white people, the researchers argue. “Those with the most access and capital are more likely to control the culture of the Internet and reproduce it in their interests,” said Safiya Noble, a professor of information studies at UCLA who has published research about examining the role of race in social media and search engines. “The web is a white space and its sensibility otherizes non-whites.” Internet scholars have been kicking around this idea since the early days of the World Wide Web, but it’s a particularly difficult one to test experimentally. Unlike studies that catalog how discrimination leads to generations of segregation in physical spaces—redlining in major American cities, for example—it’s not as easy to detect similar patterns on the web.

The World Wide Web is nearing its end in Iran. The country announced it had completed the first of three stages that will eventually set up a “national Internet”—an intranet, really—controlled by the government, with all of its servers in the country. Iranians will only have access to content, services, and applications that are based in Iran. Iran already blocks access to some overseas-based social media, news outlets, and online stores. A national Internet would tighten the government’s grip on online content even more.

The BBC adds: "The government says the goal is to create an isolated domestic intranet that can be used to promote Islamic content and raise digital awareness among the public. It intends to replace the current system, in which officials seek to limit which parts of the existing internet people have access to via filters—an effort [Iranian Communications and Information Technology minister Mahmoud] Vaezi described as being 'inefficient.'"

Imagine the Earth at night—the vast and curving darkness, splotched with rivulets of light. It is a gorgeous sight, and a familiar one. Today, this image often plays as a beautiful cliché, a pre-metabolized testament to human invention and connectedness, as likely to appear in Koyannisqatsi as in a Kia commercial. For economists, though, this spectacle is more than a symbol: It is a powerful data set.

For the last few decades, and almost since astronauts first captured images of the nocturnal Earth, researchers have recognized that “night lights” data indirectly indexes the wealth of people producing the light. This econometric power seems to work across the planet: Not only do cities glow brighter than farmland, but American cities outshine Indian cities; and as a country’s GDP increases, so does its nighttime luminosity. Two years ago, a Stanford professor even used night lights data to show that North Korean leaders were passing the costs of international economic sanctions down to farmers and villagers. As foreign governments imposed sanctions, Pyongyang became brighter and light from the hinterlands waned. Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey—except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same.

[Commentary] The prize for the most wasteful post-9/11 initiative arguably should go to FirstNet—a whole new agency set up to provide a telecommunications system exclusively for firefighters, police, and other first responders. They would communicate on bandwidth worth billions of dollars in the commercial market but now reserved by the Federal Communications Commission for FirstNet. FirstNet is in such disarray that 15 years after the problem it is supposed to solve was identified, it is years from completion—and it may never get completed at all. According to the GAO, estimates of its cost range from $12 billion to $47 billion, even as advances in digital technology seem to have eliminated the need to spend any of it.