PRIVACY: Google data collection research.

A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.

For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.

An idle Android device communicates with Google nearly 10 times more frequently as an Apple device communicates with Apple servers. These results highlighted the fact that Android and Chrome platforms are critical vehicles for Google’s data collection. Again, these experiments were done on stationary phones with no user interactions. If you actually use your phone the information collection increases with Google.

Google has the ability to associate anonymous data collected through passive means with the personal information of the user. Google makes this association largely through advertising technologies, many of which Google controls. Advertising identifiers—which are purportedly “user anonymous” and collect activity data on apps and third-party webpage visits—can get associated with a user’s real Google identity through passing of device-level identification information to Google servers by an Android device.

More at the link.

THIS IS A GOOD IDEA: New rules would force drugmakers to disclose their prices. “This will be controversial. Drugs’ list prices are much higher than the prices most consumers actually pay. But because every insurance plan is different, it’s hard to find a single alternative that would give patients a more accurate picture of their own price tag.”

Maybe they should be forced to offer the same price to everyone, instead of complicated and shady “discounts” to insurance companies. Or at least forced to disclose the lowest price they charge to anyone.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook apparently identifying posts with conservative content as spam.

More from Tyler O’Neil:

Ellis published an article in The Washington Examiner explaining why “Democrats are overreacting to the Michael Cohen guilty plea.” She argued that plea bargains are a legal fiction, are not confessions, and are not evidence of crimes or verdicts of guilt. Therefore, the Cohen plea did not implicate Trump in financial crimes.

Ellis shared the article on Facebook, and a friend took a picture of Facebook removing the post. Again came the same message: “We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn’t follow our Community Standards.”

Clarice Feldman recommends not jumping to conclusions, writing to American Thinker, “I also have no idea what is going on – whether (a) it is deliberate on FB’s part, (b) a glitch, (c) a concerted attack by leftists reporting anything to the right as against community standards or spam.”

Maybe people wouldn’t jump to conclusions, if Facebook operated transparently and without so much apparent bias against one side.

OUR ALLIES THE TURKS: The Pastor is Not the Only U.S. Hostage in Turkey.

While Golge and Kul, no less than Brunson, are victims of the Turkish government’s bizarre paranoia, the scientific community’s advocacy for these scholars has been dwarfed by religious organizations’ lobbying on behalf of Brunson. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal government body, has held several congressional briefings on the case of Brunson, and the pastor’s plight has made it into pending legislation, in addition to the Trump administration’s punitive measures. In contrast, Kul is absent from and Golge is rarely mentioned in congressional press statements — or in presidential tweets. The only official letter on Golge’s behalf came from the U.S. Helsinki Commission nearly a year ago. Notably, however, Philip S. Kosnett, then the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, visited Golge in prison in June.

Golge’s wife lamented in an NBC interview last month, “When I read the newspapers, I feel frustrated sometimes like they’re only trying to save Brunson but not us.” Similarly, Kul has wondered whether the disproportionate attention on Brunson has to do with the pastor’s faith, asking, “should I change my religion?”

Given that Golge has become an afterthought (and Kul not even that), it is not surprising that the three imprisoned Turkish employees of the U.S. mission in Turkey have not become a cause célèbre, either.

Well, here’s some publicity. Let’s hope they can do something with it.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A MISTAKE: Trump: No action on criminal-justice reform before midterms.

Related thoughts here.

MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT THE CONSTITUTION FORBIDS ANY RELIGIOUS TEST FOR PUBLIC OFFICE: If Trump and GOP don’t understand climate change, they don’t deserve public office.

SPENGLER: War of Attrition Against President Trump.

Precisely how does Bill Clinton’s main legal fixer turn up as Michael Cohen’s attorney in a plea bargain with a special prosecutor?

If you put that kind of plot line in a political thriller, the public would laugh you off the newsstand book racks. Nonetheless, we now have Lanny Davis, special counsel to the president for Bill Clinton during 1996-1998, declaring to CNN: “It’s my observation that Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump, ahead of time, knew about the hacking of emails, which is a computer crime.” On Tuesday Davis told MSNBC that Cohen knew about “the possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.”

There you have it, boys and girls: None of this has anything to do with paying off floozies who claimed to have done the dirty with a presidential candidate. No one cares about that. It’s about using the legal system to extract “confessions” from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen that will keep the Black Legend alive of a Russian hack of the 2016 elections.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE? Union President Accused of Sexual Misconduct. “An official with Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West accused union president David Regan of sexual misconduct in a lawsuit. Mindy Sturge, a former coordinator with SEIU-UHW, accuses Regan and the union of fostering ‘a discriminatory workplace’ and of inappropriately touching and texting female workers. The misconduct, the suit says, was pervasive throughout the labor organization. Sturge said the union ignored allegations of harassment and tacitly accepted hostile conditions for female employees.”

I hope the Justice Department will look into this pervasive assault on women’s employment rights.

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YOU’LL SEE MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING IN LONDON, WHERE THE DULY CONSTITUTED AUTHORITIES ARE TOO BUSY POLICING MEMES ON TWITTERS TO DO THEIR ACTUAL JOBS: ‘That’s what happens when you bring ACID!’: Shocking moment ‘vigilantes’ beat man with a bat then pour milk on him while he cowers on London street after ‘spotting he had corrosive liquid.’

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: ATF Data Undercuts Claim Gun-Controlled Cities Get Guns from Surrounding States.

OPEN THREAD: Thread away.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Flesh-eating’ STD allegedly reported in England.

NOW OUT: From Stephanie Slater, Edward Terry Sanford: A Tennessean on the US Supreme Court.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Avital Ronell and the End of the Academic Star.

Academe is not what it used to be. Once upon a time, the university was an efficient machine for converting a certain kind of cultural capital into financial capital. The most famous phenomenologist or the most famous Marxist theorist in the world might not be recognized in the wider public sphere, but the largess of the American university system could ensure that that scholar enjoyed a comfortable, even somewhat glamorous lifestyle. . . .

Shumway identified the rise of academic superstars with a larger shift in academic values: from “soundness,” represented by the generation of literary scholars who were most prominent before the 1970s, to “visibility,” represented by many of the same celebrity scholars who signed the letter in defense of Ronell (Butler, Žižek, Spivak). . . .

No new theoretical school has replaced High Theory, and the machinery of the academic star system has been forced to confront the uncomfortable reality of the shrinking job market. Long gone are the days when Ronell could deliver on her promises — and her threats — to make or destroy the career of a young scholar.

Plus: “What the signatories of the letter in Ronell’s defense most fear, I suspect, is that the university has less and less place for people like them.”

Their ideas are, for the most part, puerile and uninteresting, when they are intelligible at all. Their teaching is usually self-indulgent and irrelevant. They are the scholarly equivalent of the $180 wagyu steak sandwich, served to Wall Streeters when an economic bubble is at its height. Those excesses go away when the market falls, and the higher education market is in steep decline. And the sandwich is actually nourishing.

If only someone had warned them.

And what the academic world has in common with Harvey Weinstein’s world is a lack of objective standards, a huge reliance on overlapping back-scratching networks, and the consequent ability of powerful people to wreck careers. Or, for the right consideration, to advance them. It is probably not a coincidence that all this dirt — which has been around for a while — is coming out, now that the networks are dying.

RUDY GIULIANI: Impeaching Trump would mean ‘people’s revolt.’

SALENA ZITO: Facebook censored my column — and I still can’t find out why.

Related: “They censored an AP news source on me today, re-listed it much later.”

EVEN AS A TRANSHUMANIST MYSELF, THIS SEEMS A BIT PREMATURE: The Transhumanist Bill of Rights version 2.0. But not really too early to talk about stuff.

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Plus, Deals on DVDs.

AND AGAIN: Facebook Censors Articles From Salena Zito, Jenna Lynn Ellis, Saying They ‘Look Like Spam.’

BECAUSE SOCIALISM IS A SYSTEM THAT APPEALS TO WEASELS AND SUCKUPS: Why Are Democrats (And The Media) Still Trying To Rehabilitate Socialism?

VICTIMS OF STUDENT WHO FALSELY ACCUSED THEM OF RAPE SPEAK OUT AT HER SENTENCING: “I lost my scholarship, my dream of continuing to play football and now I am in debt $30,000.”

Let justice roll down like waters.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS: But The Washington Post’s income thrives in it. My latest column for The Daily Caller.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Google, Apple and 13 other companies that no longer require employees to have a college degree.