What I call the «Facebook phone number ad thing» has been in the news a lot. Facebook confirmed it uses your two-factor authentication phone number for advertising purposes. But let’s cut through the clickbait headlines.

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information.

Facebook is not handing out your phone number to advertisers. What is happening is if an advertiser already has a phone number, they can go to Facebook and say: «Please show an ad to the profile with this phone number.» The only difference now is that Facebook uses your two-factor authentication number for this, even if you haven’t put your phone number in your profile elsewhere. Still sh*tty though.

Republicans don’t want the government to interfere with things…until they use the government to interfere with things. Rural America is notorious for its lack of broadband, and Ajit Pai couldn’t care less.

The Federal Communications Commission today finalized an order that will prevent city and town governments from charging wireless carriers about $2 billion dollars’ worth of fees related to deployment of wireless equipment such as small cells.

The $2 billion savings is less than 1 percent of the estimated $275 billion that carriers will have to spend to deploy 5G small cells throughout the US. That level of savings won’t spur extra deployment «because the hard economics of rural deployment do not change with this decision,» Rosenworcel said.

As if apps collecting your personal data wasn’t bad enough, apparently websites in Safari can access your iPhone sensor data.

That mobile browsers offer developers access to sensors isn’t necessarily problematic on its own. It’s what helps those services automatically adjust their layout, for example, when you switch your phone’s orientation. And the World Wide Web Consortium standards body has codified how web applications can access sensor data. But the researchers…found that the standards allow for unfettered access to certain sensors. And sites are using it.

Does blue light from smartphones cause blindness? Short answer: No. Headlines claiming that the blue light from our smartphones have been making the rounds. As is usually the case with the media when it comes to science, there’s always greater context (or it’s just downright BS).

The American Academy of Ophthalmology spelled it out recently: No, Blue Light From Your Smartphone Is Not Blinding You. That was in response to a study published this summer that found blue light, plus a chemical naturally found in certain eye cells, could damage cells. The catch: researchers did not use any actual cells from our eyes, because our eyes have defenses against exactly this sort of damage. (They were studying a question unrelated to eye health; the Verge has more on the purpose and meaning of the experiment.)