The most popular messaging apps have hundreds of millions of users, but how secure are they really? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been finding out,producing a “secure messaging scorecard” to rate them on a range of criteria.

Are messages encrypted in transit, and encrypted so the provider can’t read them? Can you verify contacts’ identities? Are past communications secure if your keys are stolen? Is the code open to independent review, is the security design properly documented, and has the code been audited?

“Many companies offer ‘secure messaging’ products – but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto,” explains the EFF.

“This scorecard represents only the first phase of the campaign. In later phases, we are planning to offer closer examinations of the usability and security of the tools that score the highest here.”

What’s interesting is that the apps that score seven green ticks are the likes of ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal, SilentPhone, Silent Text and TextSecure. Yet for most mainstream users, what defines their choice of messaging app is not “how secure is it?” but rather “which one are my friends using?”

BBM, Facebook chat, Google Hangouts, Kik Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Viber don’t score well on the EFF’s criteria, for example. Apple’s iMessage actually does pretty well, with five out of seven ticks.

Even so, will the EFF’s new research encourage those mainstream messaging apps to beef up their security? Or are we going to continue seeing a divide: security-conscious people messaging other security-conscious people on the niche apps, while everyone else continues using the popular apps?

The comments section is open for your thoughts: I’d be interested to hear how important security is in your choice of messaging app, and whether you’ve tried to persuade friends to switch from one to another on those grounds. If so, did they?

Also on the radar today:

• WireLurker is a new malware family that targets Macs and iOS devices, infecting the former in order to reach the latter – including non-jailbroken devices. “It is the first known malware that can infect installed iOS applications similar to a traditional virus,” claims Palo Alto Networks.
• Musician Aloe Blacc has published an opinion piece on Wired strongly criticising US streaming music service Pandora after he earned less than $4,000 for his co-writing share of a song streamed more than 168 million times. “If songwriters cannot afford to make music, who will?”
• The Verge has tested an early production model of Will.i.am’s Puls smartwatch, and isn’t impressed. To say the least. “It’s objectively the worst product I’ve touched all year... The Puls feels like a Kickstarter concept product that never should have made it to production.” Ouch.
• Snapchat is getting into music, video and news. Or at least preparing to. Digiday claims the messaging app is in talks with Comedy Central, Spotify, Vice, BuzzFeed, CNN, the Daily Mail, ESPN, Cosmopolitan magazine, National Geographic, People magazine and Vevo.
• A crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo by Code.org aiming to provide “an hour of code for every student” is already up to $2.8m of pledges, with Mark Zuckerberg already having chipped in. “Our schools teach kids how to dissect a frog and how weather works. Today, it’s equally fundamental to learn to ‘dissect an app’, or how the Internet works...”
• I actually don’t mind Russell Brand, but the “Parklife” meme – essentially someone realised that his more verbose sentences perfectly suit someone shouting “PARKLIFE” at the end, as if he was delivering Phil Daniels’ lines in the Blur song – has been making me smile a lot this past day.

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What stories have piqued your interest, and what do you think of the pieces linked to above? The comments section is open for your views.

Even if you’re not that angry about the rise of free-to-play (or “freemium”) gaming in the world of smartphones and tablets, the latest episode of South Parkpromises to be a hoot.

It takes aim at the trend of games funded by in-app purchases of virtual items, and judging from reports, nails the flaws of some of the more cynical cash-in titles.

VentureBeat has a good summary of the pitch to characters Terrence and Phillip, who are thinking of starring in their own mobile game:

1.Entice the player with an easy game loop.

2. Compliment the player with flashy casino slots-like rewards and graphics.

3. Train players to spend the in-game currency.

4. Then offer players the chance to spend real money for that in-game currency.

5. Then make the game about waiting, but let them pay to avoid waiting.

It also notes the similarity between the spoof game in South Park, and the very real games based on rival shows The Simpsons and Family Guy. The episode is likely to provoke wry smiles even among defenders of freemium as a business model, but I suspect it may become a rallying point for its critics.

What do you think? If you’ve seen the full episode, do its jabs hit home? And more generally, are you seeing examples of freemium games that aren’t as cynical as the formula above, or do you think the model can’t help but fall into this pattern? The comments section is open for your views.

Also on the tech radar this morning:

• Encouraging news for anyone who wants Twitter to be doing more to help users – women in particular – who are being harassed on the social network. The company is working with nonprofit group Women, Action & the Media on a better way for people to report harassment, from hate speech to doxxing.
• A great piece on Google’s Spotlight Stories short films technology, described as “immersive shorts”, which is being pitched to Hollywood. The action is shot in 360 degrees, then the viewer gets to control the point-of-view. “Something that uses advanced tech to reframe storytelling itself,” as Medium’s Steven Levy puts it.
• PewDiePie isn’t regretting turning off comments on his YouTube videos. “Before I turned off my comments, I think things were going downhill. So, making that change, I feel like we’ve been going back up, and it’s been making me really happy, and it’s been making me really enjoy what I do.” A worrying statement for YouTube, given that he’s its biggest star.
• The latest on the WireLurker malware for Macs and iOS devices uncovered earlier this week in 467 Mac apps. Apple now says it is blocking those apps in order to prevent people installing them, and then having their mobile devices infected. I suspect there may be less on-stage jabs at Android for malware at the company’s next launch.
• Tablet maker Nabi, which focuses on children, has a couple of big new devices. Literally big: they’re 20 and 24-inch tablets. The theory being that multiple children can play together on one device. Having seen my two sons’ differing tastes (currently Angry Birds for one and Toca Boca for the other) I’m wondering if there’s a split-screen mode.

What stories have piqued your interest today? Jump in below the line with your recommendations, as well as your thoughts on the stories above.

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The way Facebook curates the news feed of its users – through an algorithm designed to prioritise 300 updates a day out of 1,500-plus that you could see from friends and pages that you follow – has often been controversial.

Now the social network says it’s giving more control back to those users, or as it put it in a blog post: “more ways for you to control and give feedback on your News Feed”.

How so? It’s all about the news feed settings page, which now makes it easier to unfollow individual friends, pages or groups, as well as re-follow those they’ve unfollowed in the past.

From now, they can also provide more feedback when hiding something from their news feed, including choosing to see less stories from that user, page or group. The idea, seemingly, is more manual curation to tune the settings that Facebook uses to decide those 300 stories a day.

Is this a good move, and if you use Facebook, will you use the new features? But will this fly over the heads of most of Facebook’s 1.3 billion users, given that many still don’t even know their feed is being bossed by an algorithm in the first place? The comments section is open for your views.

Also on the technology news radar today:

• Apple has launched a new web tool, but this time it’s nothing to do with removing Bono from your iPhone. Instead, it’s to deregister old phone numbers from its iMessage system. Very useful if, for example, you’ve switched from iOS to Android at some point.
• DARPA is putting $11m of funding into a tool called PLINY that it describes as “Autocomplete for programmers”. Which doesn’t mean inserting random, occasionally-comical errors into their code, thankfully. It aims to draw on past code: “We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears...”
• Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaine has come out strongly against harassment within the games world. “Over the past couple of months, there’s been a small group of people who have been doing really awful things. They have been making some people’s lives miserable, and they are tarnishing our reputation as gamers. It’s not right...”
• Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is on the rise, and now it’s apparentlyraising $1.5bn at a valuation of $40bn – a huge round that would fund the company’s continued efforts to expand into the West.
• Vanity Fair has a good piece on how Amazon ended up such a divisive entity within the book publishing world, including its dispute with publisher Hachette. “In general terms, Hachette has claimed that the dispute is about money, whereas Amazon has claimed that it is about e-book pricing. These may sound like the same thing, but they’re not. At the same time, it is likely that the dispute is about both.”

• The European Space Agency is continuing to explore the potential to 3D print a Moon base from “lunar material”. Here’s its latest video on how it might work:

The UK’s next general election looks like it may be dominated by the topic of immigration, thanks to the rise of UKIP and the desire of the established political parties to head off a drain in supporters by edging closer to its policies.

If there’s a looming threat to British jobs, though, isn’t it more likely to come from robots rather than immigration? A new report published by Deloitte, the Oxford Martin School and the University of Oxford hints at exactly that.

It claims that 35% of existing UK jobs are at “high risk of replacement in the next 20 years” from technology, automation and robotics, with lower-paid jobs more than five times as likely to be replaced than higher-paid jobs.

“Unless these changes coming in the next two decades are fully understood and anticipated by businesses, policy makers and educators, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment,” warns Deloitte’s senior partner Angus Knowles-Cutler.

Yet the report also suggests that in London specifically, 73% of businesses are planning to increase their overall headcount, to bring in the new skills and roles required by technology advances.

Even so, are we sleepwalking into a dangerous situation if we don’t put the correct educational elements in place to retrain people for these new kinds of jobs? Is this just a problem for politicians, or does the technology industry have social responsibilities too?

The comments section is open for your views.

Some other stories on the technology radar today:

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the core of his company: “There is Windows, there is Office 365, and there is Azure. That’s it.” Although I can’t help wondering where gaming fits into this: Nadella has made it clear that he’s not intending to sell Xbox, and spending $2.5bn on Minecraft-maker Mojang is a clear statement of intent. So does gaming fit under “Windows” then?
• There’s another iOS security issue being discussed: Masque Attack. Uncovered by security firm FireEye, it involves replacing iOS apps installed on a device with malware. It follows the recent discovery of the Mac-to-iOS WireLurker malware. “Masque Attacks can pose much bigger threats than WireLurker,” claims the company.

• Like Facebook, Google has launched a campaign to raise money to fight Ebola. It’s promising to donate $2 itself for every $1 donated. “These organizations are doing remarkable work in very difficult circumstances to help contain this outbreak, and we hope our contribution will help them have an even greater impact,” wrote CEO Larry Page.
• There’s a new Raspberry Pi computer in town: the Model A+. It’s smaller and consumes less power than the existing Model A, and will sell for just $20. “When we announced Raspberry Pi back in 2011, the idea of producing an ‘ARM GNU/Linux box for $25’ seemed ambitious, so it’s pretty mind-bending to be able to knock another $5 off the cost while continuing to build it here in the UK...”

• The latest concern for celebrities, politicians and business leaders hoping their private information doesn’t get leaked: DarkHotel. Attackers who lurk on hotel Wi-Fi networks waiting for high-profile guests to check in then log in. “This is NSA-level infection mechanism,” said security firm Kaspersky Lab.
• Finally, Maker Club is a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo trying to raise $10,000 for a kit for children that helps them “learn to code, design and build 3D printed robots”. “All the parts for the robots are interchangeable, like Lego, so once you’ve got the hang of things, there’s almost nothing you can’t invent...”

What other stories have you seen this morning? Make your recommendations – as well as chewing over the stories above – in the comments section.

The default stance on King’s Candy Crush Saga mobile game in the Guardian’s comments section seems to be “It’s rubbish and cynical, and the people who play it are fools”. It gets quite a kicking whenever we cover it.

And yet... Candy Crush Saga has been phenomenally popular, with tens of millions of daily players who don’t give two hoots about online anger over freemium business models or copying older games.

You or I may not be a fan of Candy Crush Saga, but our mums, dads, aunts, uncles, cousins and cats (okay, most of the above) are likely to be several hundred levels down its rabbit-hole.

There’s a real split in perception between the people who talk about Candy Crush on the Guardian and other websites – who hate it – and the people who are playing it out there in the world and loving it.

Anyway, its sequel is out now: Candy Crush Soda Saga. Released yesterday for Android and iOS, it’s still about swapping sweets to make matches, but now with the inclusion of “soda” bottles (i.e. fizzy pop) that fills up the screen to complete each level.

Can it repeat the success of Candy Crush Saga – a game so popular and lucrative that it was the single biggest factor in its publisher going public earlier this year? Or is King in danger of being the next Zynga, overworking a formula that – once you’ve given your mobile life up to it once – may put you off starting again?

The comments section is open for your views.

Also on the tech radar today:

• The latest chart of YouTube channels sorted by how many new subscribers they have, courtesy of OpenSlate and Tubefilter. PewDiePie may have just passed 32m subscribers, but he added another 757,982 in October alone.
• Apple is going to face a federal lawsuit over complaints that users who switched from iOS to Android stopped getting their text messages. The company has just launched a web tool to sort this out, but the lawsuit will proceed.
• Mozilla is having a busy week: its latest announcement is a site called MozVR: a virtual reality website about, well, virtual reality websites. “MozVR is where we will share experimental VR Web experiences, provide resources, and showcase work from developers in the growing VR web community,” explains the company.
• Important news for Windows users: what Ars Technica describes as “a potentially catastrophic vulnerability in virtually all versions of Windows” has been discovered, with a patch already available. The bigger picture: “Tuesday’s disclosure means that every major TLS stack – including Apple SecureTransport , GNUTLS,OpenSSL, NSS, and now Microsoft SChannel – has had a severe vulnerability this year.”
• Finally, as a more positive follow-up to yesterday’s fears about robots taking our jobs, here’s a beautiful time-lapse animation of Androids having a snog fromAndroid Jones.

The current generation of games consoles feels like a relatively open battle: Sony’s PlayStation 4 is perceived to have had the edge over Microsoft’s Xbox One so far, but latest figures from the latter suggest the race is far from won.

“As we head into the busy holiday season Xbox One led generation 8 console sales in the US for the past two weeks,” wrote Microsoft’s corporate vice president of devices and studios, Yusuf Mehdi, yesterday. “Shortly, we will have sold in to retailers more than 10 million Xbox One consoles.”

To be clear, the first sentence relates to the US only, but the latter is global shipments. The releases of Halo: the Master Chief Collection and Sunset Overdrive have brought some bona-fide buzz to Xbox One at exactly the right time, ahead of the holiday-shopping season.

PlayStation 4 hit 10m sales in August, although that’s sales rather than shipments to retailers (which is the Xbox One figure). So Sony remains ahead, but Microsoft is at least gaining ground. How do you see this battle spinning out in the long term, though?

If you’re a gamer and have chosen one (or both) of these consoles, how happy are you with your choice, and what would you like to see Sony or Microsoft do in the next couple of years to take it forward? Let’s not forget Nintendo: is the Wii U finding its niche in the current console market?

If you’re not a gamer, are any of these devices appealing to you in their other guise – as home entertainment systems – or are you more likely to have a box powered by Apple, Google, Amazon or other tech firms sitting under your TV? The comments section is open for your thoughts.

Also on the technology radar this morning:

• Twitter has opened up about some of the changes it’s planning to make in the coming months: the ability to record, edit and share videos natively on Twitter; better ways to show users what they’ve missed when they log back in, and “an instant, personalised timeline for new users who don’t want to spend time cultivating one on their own”.
• There’s a new round in the row between Taylor Swift and streaming service Spotify: her label says it’s been paid “less than $500,000” for US streams of her songs in the last year, while Spotify counters that it’s paid her label and publishers $2m globally in that period. “We paid Taylor’s label and publisher roughly half a million dollars in the month before she took her catalogue down...”
• More big news from Microsoft: plans to open up its .NET and Visual Studio to more developers, including open sourcing the full server-side .NET Core stack, and expanding it to run on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows. The vision: to reach developers “whether you are a startup, a student, a hobbyist, an open source developer or a commercial developer, and no matter the platform you are targeting or the app you are creating”.
• Good news for gamers: “Playing action video games substantially improves performance in a range of attentional, perceptual, and cognitive tasks”. Call of Duty is good for your brain! Although I can sadly report that having children that don’t sleep well substantially reduces your performance at action games. And, to be honest, the full gamut of attentional, perceptual, and cognitive tasks...
• Samsung’s Oculus Rift-powered Gear VR will go on sale in the US in Decemberfor $249 with a Bluetooth joypad bundled in, or $199 standalone. Are you excited about strapping a phablet to your face and exploring virtual worlds?

• But while we’re on Samsung, boo hiss to the company for making its startling corporate-diversity rap video private, after it was reported by tech sites. “Samsung, we 280,000 humans, 40% 112,000 women, you don’t have to worry after giving birth...” I suspect it’ll be returning in a few mashups imminently.

What else? The comments section is open for your thoughts on the above, and other links you’ve spotted today.

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Apple’s new Health app – and the HealthKit platform that lets other companies’ health and activity-tracking apps tie into it – was one of the big new features in its iOS 8 software, which launched a couple of months ago.

Health is capable of collecting, storing and analysing a range of personal data, but there are clear privacy implications here – for Apple and any company involved in this space, from Google and Microsoft to the growing number of smaller fitness-focused app and device makers.

According to Reuters, the US Federal Trade Commission is alive to the issues. It reports that the FTC is “seeking assurances from Apple that it will prevent sensitive health data collected by its upcoming smartwatch and other mobile devices from being used without owners’ consent”.

The report also claims that Apple is stressing during the conversations that it will not be selling health data to third parties like advertisers, with spokesperson Trudy Muller telling Reuters that “we designed HealthKit with privacy in mind”.

This is less an Apple issue than it is a wider regulatory challenge, when health data is heavily protected if it’s gathered in a medical context, but much more of a grey area when it’s gathered by an app and/or device.

So, questions: if you’re using health-tracking apps and gadgets, are you thinking about the privacy of your data? Have you dug into the providers’ privacy policies and found anything reassuring or worrying?

And if you don’t use these apps and devices, is privacy one of the reasons? What are your concerns, and how would you like to see technology firms and regulators alike approaching the issue? The comments section is open for your thoughts.

Some more stories ripe for discussion today:

• Hachette and Amazon have settled their long-running dispute, agreeing that the book publisher will have “full responsibility” for setting its ebook prices on Amazon’s Kindle Store. Watch now for the ripples as other publishers react.
• Samsung is apparently spending “tens of millions” developing a new shortform video service codenamed Volt, which would try to take on YouTube with exclusive content and, possibly, music. Although YouTube has plenty of both, so it would be a tough challenge.
• This is a really interesting use of Oculus Rift and virtual reality: Canadian environmental group Dogwood Initiative is using the technology to show what an oil tanker spill near Vancouver might look like, and how it would affect the city.
• “The men are coming to Pinterest” reports TechCrunch. Apparently men now account for a third of all new signups to the site, whose gender split has traditionally been 70-30 or 80-20 in favour of women. And in countries like India, Japan and South Korea, the split is now 50-50.
• Finally, Tubefilter and OpenSlate have published their latest chart of the top 100 games channels on YouTube. It’s another reminder of just how popular games are on the service, with 4.6bn views for the top 100 alone. No surprises for guessing who’s top: PewDiePie.

What else? The comments section is open for your thoughts on the stories above, and your suggestions of other links worth reading.

Facebook may control the social graph of 1.3 billion people, but now it has ambitions to stretch deeper into the workplace, according to the Financial Times’ report on plans for “Facebook at Work”.

This isn’t about getting around corporate firewalls to ensure you can see which Frozen character your friends are, though. It’s a proper move to compete with services from Google Drive and LinkedIn to Slack, and become a serious working tool.

“The Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents,” claimed the FT.

“The new site will look very much like Facebook – with a newsfeed and groups – but will allow users to keep their personal profile with its holiday photos, political rants and silly videos separate from their work identity.”

It might be a sensible move for Facebook, but how will workers (and bosses) feel about their data being shared and stored on the social network? Workplace collaboration in the cloud isn’t an alien concept for many businesses now, but I wonder how Facebook providing this will be received.

What do you think? The comments section is open for your thoughts.

Also on the technology radar today:

Spotify and Uber team up for in-car music

Uber is holding a press call with a “special partner guest” later today, but their identity is out: streaming music service Spotify. You’ll apparently be able to control the music played in your Uber car from your smartphone, with the tunes delivered from Spotify to the driver’s handset.

Facebook to crack down on ‘overly promotional’ page posts

If you’ve liked Facebook pages that tend to pump out contests or “please buy our thing” posts, expect to see them less in your feed from January. “Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time,” explains the social network.

Accusations of Tor smearing campaign

A piece by Yasha Levine on PandoDaily, outlining the response from the Tor community to a previous article examining the relationship between the online anonymity tool and US intelligence agencies.

Google’s Project Tango tablet hits the Play store

Project Tango is one of Google’s most interesting initiatives around mobile: 3D sensors and all manner of other tech to understand the world around you. Now the first tablet can be bought, although seemingly only if you ordered it at Google’s I/O conference earlier in the year.

Kung Fu Robot crowdfunding campaign

Kung Fu Robot was one of the most characterful children’s apps I saw in the last couple of years. Now its makers are trying to raise $19,500 to turn it into a hardback comic anthology and a new app.

Porn stars explain net neutrality

From Funny Or Die, an alternative take on the debate that’s sparking up again in the US this month. Sort-of safe for work (SoSFW?) in that they’re nude, but the bits your boss might be cross at are safely masked out.

This year has seen plenty of debate about the portrayal of women in games, but now Swedish trade association Dataspelsbranchen is launching an intriguing new project to analyse the topic.

What’s more, the government-backed research could end in some kind of labelling scheme, although news site The Local stresses that it’s currently unclear whether this would be a rating for every game based on how well or poorly it portrays gender equality and diversity, or a badge for games that do it well.

“I do not know of any other project in the world asking this question and of course we want Sweden to be a beacon in this area,” said Dataspelsbranchen’s Anton Albiin, who also had an answer for questions about whether focusing on this area would inhibit developers’ creativity.

“Of course games can be about fantasy but they can be so much more than this. They can also be a form of cultural expression - reflecting society or the society we are hoping for. Games can help us to create more diverse workplaces and can even change the way we think about things.”

Swedish government-funded innovation agency Vinnova thinks the research is worth a 272,000-kronor grant: so note for accuracy’s sake, this is a project to explore how the idea of these ratings would work, not a firm commitment (yet) to introduce them.

What do you think about the idea of some kind of ratings system based on how games deal with issues of diversity? If it happens, should it be all games, or more a badge of quality? And what impact might it have if a game is given a negative rating in the former case? The comments section is open for your views.

What else is on the technology radar this morning?

Uber under fire for journalist ‘dirt digging’ claims

No, not journalists digging dirt on Uber: the other way around. Comments made by Uber’s Emil Michael at an event suggested the company might hire researchers to look into “your personal lives, your families” of critics in the media, including tech site PandoDaily’s boss Sarah Lacy. Here’s her blistering response.

Snapchat launches Snapcash payments feature

Disappearing-messages app Snapchat has a new feature called Snapcash, through a partnership with mobile payments firm Square. Users will store their debit card details, and then be able to send cash “directly to your friend’s bank account”. There are surely some uses for this that don’t involve paying for naked snaps. Aren’t there?

WireLurker may have been closed down

iOS malware WireLurker has been sending ripples through the Apple community since being uncovered earlier in the month. Now Chinese authorities claim thatsites hosting it have been shut down, and three arrests made. But worrying aboutMasque Attack malware is the new worrying about WireLurker malware, by now.

Is Nokia ‘the new Polaroid’?

That doesn’t sound like a positive comparison, but Polaroid has been reinventing itself by licensing out its brand to other companies to make products. Now it seems Nokia – the Nokia left in Finland working on non-smartphone products, not the bit sold to Microsoft – is considering a similar strategy.

Fitbit data is being used in a court case

Could that fitness tracker attached to your pocket / worn on your wrist / sloshing around in your washing machine while you swear like a trooper be vital evidence? Forbes has a story on what appears to be the first court case relying on data from a Fitbit fitness tracker.

A manifesto for startup accelerators

Paul Smith runs the well-respected Ignite startup accelerator in Newcastle, and has published an interesting post on Medium outlining some of the ways companies can judge whether an accelerator is going to help them. “There’s a need amongst accelerators for accountability and transparency, so this is a first attempt at some basic terms that all programmes should feel confident agreeing to...”

What else have you been reading this morning? The comments section is open for your links and feedback on the stories above.

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The story that broke earlier in the week about an Uber executive threatening to investigate critical journalists’ private lives rumbles on, with the company providing a couple of official responses yesterday.

First, chief executive Travis Kalanick went on a tweetstorm with 13 tweets addressing the issue, although while it concluded with a direct apology to Sarah Lacy, the journalist targeted in the original comments, as Valleywag points out, there were several questions he didn’t answer.

As time has gone by, journalists have been focusing on another aspect of theoriginal BuzzFeed report that kicked off this debate – the claim that an Uber exec had “accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies” without their permission.

Uber has now published a blog post which it says aims to “make very clear our policy on data privacy, which is fundamental to our commitment to both riders and drivers”. It refers to a “strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data” except for “legitimate business purposes”.

Technology journalists are, unsurprisingly, questioning whether Uber’s radar for what constitutes “legitimate business” has been malfunctioning for some time. But how are you feeling about Uber and other companies of its type, in regards to privacy?

Do you worry about the way your data fits into the “sharing economy”, or do the benefits of services like Uber and Airbnb trump any concerns that your records will be used against you in the future? Is this a specific issue between journalists and Uber, or is this controversy going to put non-hacks off using the company too?

The comments section is open for your thoughts.

What else is worth discussing in tech today? Some links:

11 things revealed by the Apple Watch SDK

Apple launched its SDK for developers wanting to make apps for its first smartwatch, and The Verge has been filleting its documentation to learn more about the Apple Watch. For example, it’ll be closely tied to the iPhone; there’ll be two resolutions for the devices; seemingly no support for video; and a brand new font called San Francisco.

John Lydon spent £10k on freemium iPad games

The Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd frontman had a severe free-to-play habit. “I wasted – you’re the first to know this – 10,000 fucking pounds in the last two years on apps on my iPad,” he told the Telegraph. “I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante. And like an idiot I didn’t check myself...”

Twitter opens up its full archives

Twitter announced that it has now indexed every public tweet since 2006, using a search service that “efficiently indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms”. The blog post goes intolots of engineering detail, but it’ll be interesting to see what people do with the archive now.

Vainglory MOBA game launches for iOS

Hardcore gamers and free-to-play games are often pitched in opposition to one another, yet one of the most hardcore genres – multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games like League of Legends and Dota 2 – are freemium. Now developer Super Evil Megacorp is trying to make the genre work on iOS with its Vainglory game: shown off at Apple’s last iPhone launch, and now available.

Auto-lacing shoe technology is on Kickstarter

I’ve been finding out that teaching another human being – my seven year-old son – to tie shoelaces is a harder task than I thought. Maybe by the time he’s an adult, shoelaces will tie themselves though. Witness this Kickstarter campaign that’s trying to raise $650k for “the very first auto-lacing shoe technology”. Do they do children’s sizes?

LittleBits launches a $249 Smart Home Kit

One of the most interesting companies around at the moment is littleBits, with its electronics kits. The latest is the Smart Home Kit, which costs $249 and promises to “turn any household object into an internet-connected device: instead of buying a bajillion different smart products, you can reinvent the things you already have.”

What else? The comments section is open for your own links, thoughts on the stories above, and (especially) for your advice on tempting surly seven year-olds away from velcro.

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