Geek News

A user posted on the anonymous app Blind claiming that Lyft employees abused their access to customer data, from gathering info on exes to acquiring Mark Zuckerberg's personal info. A Lyft spokesperson confirmed to The Information that the company is investigating whether these incidents occurred. The anonymous user, who claimed to have worked at Lyft, painted a lurid picture of how employees abused their unusually high access to customer data. Some would look up their ex-romantic partners, while others check whether their significant others were headed where they said. This user claimed to have 'seen employees' do all this and more, including stalking attractive people they'd met while taking the multi-rider Lyft Line service. They'd even use the access to look up the 'rider ratings' and personal information of executives at Lyft and other companies -- one bragged about snagging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's phone number -- as well as Hollywood a...

Last week, Twitter missed the deadline Congress set to turn over information on Russia-backed meddling in the 2016 election. Today, the social media company posted a public update on their internal investigation. First, they found thousands of additional accounts associated with the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA). But most importantly, Twitter is emailing notifications to everyone in the US who inadvertently followed one or retweeted or liked one of their messages -- which is some 677,775 people. In effect, that's a simple measure of the impact that the IRA's accounts had. Twitter identified 1,062 additional accounts, bringing the total to 3,814; In the ten-week period before the 2016 election that the company studied, those IRA accounts posted 175,993 tweets. Only 8.4% were related to the upcoming elections, but that's still a wide impact that the Twitter platform unwittingly amplified. Twitter also identified 13,512 more automated Russian-l...