Quartz

Google's systems didn't see Beto O'Rourke's ads as political

Google has been treating Beto O'Rourke's campaign ads as if they weren’t political content, raising questions over whether Google is capable of keeping its already anemic promise of transparency for political ads. Google has promised to put ads it receives from candidates for US federal political offices in its political ad archive, for transparency’s sake. But the Beto ads were missing from the archive. Google’s own rules don’t allow any political content in Gmail ads, but Beto’s campaign ads kept showing up there.

In the twisted world of prison communications, voicemail is an innovation

For people in prisons and jails, voicemail can still be very useful. Corrio is a Washington state-based company co-founded by Alex Peder, a former inmate himself, that offers a service that lets inmates call a special number assigned to them and then record a voice message that gets texted as a link to any person the prison or jail has allowed them to contact. It connects the facility’s network to Corrio’s private switch network, and a person on the outside can send a regular text to the inmate, as well as record voicemails.

Your digital identity has three layers, and you can only protect one of them

When it comes to your digital profile, the data you choose to share is just the tip of an iceberg. The first layer is the one you do control. The second layer is made of behavioral observations. The third layer is composed of interpretations of the first and second.