2019

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Google keeps a log of everywhere you go if you use Google apps and services on your phone. It has a creepy level of detail that might surprise you. Google makes it easy to find this information and limit how it can track you, though. Here’s how to do that.

 How to stop Google from storing your location history

Chinese border police are secretly installing surveillance apps on the phones of visitors and downloading personal information as part of the government’s intensive scrutiny of the remote Xinjiang region, the Guardian can reveal. The Chinese government has curbed freedoms in the province for the local Muslim population, installing facial recognition cameras on streets and in mosques and reportedly forcing residents to download software that searches their phones. An investigation by the Guardian and international partners has found that travellers are being targeted when they attempt to enter the region from neighbouring Kyrgyzstan.

 Chinese border guards put secret surveillance app on tourists' phones | World news | The Guardian

"Every time we wash our clothes an average of nine million [plastic] microfibres are released into the environment," she tells BBC News. "The way we wash our clothes affects this, as well as the way our clothes are made - but the more we wash our clothes, the more microfibres are released."

 Is Stella McCartney right - should we stop washing our clothes? - BBC News

On the day Deutsche Bank began making thousands of employees redundant, some managing directors at the company’s office in the City of London were being fitted for suits that cost at least £1,200, it has emerged. Tailors from Fielding & Nicholson, an upmarket tailor, were pictured walking out of the bank’s office with suit bags on Monday. Ian Fielding-Calcutt, the tailor’s founder, and Alex Riley were there to fit suits for senior managers in spite of plans to cut 18,000 jobs worldwide.

 Deutsche Bank bosses fitted for £1,200 suits as thousands lose their jobs | Business | The Guardian

Streaming online pornography produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as Belgium, according to a new report by French think tank The Shift Project.  Researchers found that overall online videos emit 300 million tonnes of carbon each year and a third of this comes from streaming videos with pornographic content.  The research, which was lead by engineer Maxime Efoui-Hess who specialises in computer modelling, found that the energy consumption of digital technologies is increasing by nine per cent a year. Sixty per cent of world data flows come from online video.

 Porn produces same amount of carbon dioxide as whole of Belgium, study finds | The Independent