A Data Broker Sold Location Pings From Inside Gyms, Clinics, and Shelters
Internal documents show Clearstone Analytics packaged 'wellness visit' location data and sold it to insurers and marketers without meaningful consent.
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Inside Attention Factory: The Business of Manufacturing Momentum
Marketers used to buy ads. Now they buy conversations. Inside the growth operation turning obscure brands into things people can't stop talking about.
AI Slop Is Strangling the Hobby Forums That Trained It
Moderators of woodworking, aquarium, and ham radio communities describe a losing war against generated posts designed to farm ad revenue.
An AI Grief Startup Scraped Obituaries to Build Chatbots of the Dead
Everlume trained 'memorial companions' on scraped obituaries and funeral home guestbooks — without asking the families.
Internal Docs: A Gig Platform A/B Tested Lower Pay on Its Most Loyal Couriers
Dasherly's 'earnings sensitivity' experiments quietly showed veteran couriers lower offers to find the floor of what they'd accept.
A Parking App Leaked 2.1 Million License Plates, and Its Bug Bounty Was a Hoodie
ParkSwift stored plate numbers, payment tokens, and GPS history in an open database. The researcher who reported it got merch and a legal threat.
Leaked Chats Show a Ransomware Gang Running a Better Help Desk Than Its Victims
Six months of internal chat logs from the Vantablack ransomware group reveal salaried negotiators, performance reviews, and customer satisfaction surveys.
The Internet's Biggest Secret Isn't AI. It's Attention.
Everyone worried about bots and fake news. The real force shaping what billions of people see online is attention—and it has quietly become an industry.
This Smart Fridge Bricked Its Ice Maker Behind a $6.99 Monthly Subscription
Frostline pushed a firmware update that paywalled features owners already paid for. Then the jailbreaks started.
Meet the Companies Deciding What Goes Viral
Most people think viral content happens by accident. Behind many of the internet's biggest hits is an invisible industry built to make you pay attention.
School Surveillance Software Flagged a Student's Essay About 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
Records from three districts show GuardClass's AI flagged literature homework, LGBTQ support searches, and a chemistry study guide as threats.
Why Some Brands Grow Faster Than Everyone Else
The best product doesn't always win—the most visible one does. Why distribution, not quality, increasingly decides which companies break out.
The Company Behind the Internet's Attention Machine
Brands spend millions trying to get people to care. A new kind of company treats attention not as luck or virality, but as infrastructure.