| Note: The Recode Daily will be on break for the Christmas holiday this week. We'll return in 2020. Here's what you're really opting into when you use free wifi in a store. Did you know that when you walk into a store your phone might be giving the retailer information as specific as what item you're standing in front of? You usually can only access in-store wifi through a "captive portal," which is a page that pops up when you first try to connect. Usually, it asks you to submit personal information, like an email address, and then to agree to terms and conditions before letting you access the internet. The thing is, when you log into wifi through a business's captive portal, you aren't just giving the business whatever personal information you submitted on the portal page. Here's a sampling of what stores can learn about you, if you use their free wifi: - How much time you spent staring at shoes
- Which websites you browsed
- What websites you visited after you left the store
- How to send you an ad later for those shoes you couldn't afford
This is all used to give businesses precise insights into their customers and to make it easier to market to them. It helps put brick-and-mortar businesses on a level playing field with their e-commerce rivals. And it may also help you, the customer. The only guaranteed way to truly opt out of being tracked through your mobile device: turn it off. For most of us, that's not a realistic option. What helps is knowing what you can control — and using that information to think twice before you log on to a free wifi network or download yet another app.
[Sara Morrison / Recode] 2019 was a historic year for female-founded unicorns. In 2018, 15 unicorns with at least one female founder were born. In 2019, there were 21 startups founded or co-founded by a female that became unicorns, passing the $1 billion valuation mark, according to Crunchbase News's analysis. Among the 2019 unicorn class were beauty and commerce companies Glossier, FabFitFun, The RealReal, Hims, Airwallex, ezCater, and Scale.
[Natasha Mascarenhas / Crunchbase News] The biggest tech failures of the 2010s. The staff at The Verge has had a front row seat to tech gadgets in the last decade. Some were hugely successful, defining how we live our lives, and some … not so much. The 2010s was a decade of wearables, tablets, drones, and burning batteries, "and of ridiculous valuations for companies that were really good at hiding how little they actually had to offer," The Verge writes. The decade has seen Google's product graveyard fill up, Apple deny some obvious missteps, and Microsoft writing off billions of dollars in losses. Check out the list of the 84 biggest fails in tech from the 2010s.
[The Verge Staff] ICYMI: 14 charts that explain tech in 2019. It's been a year of shattered expectations in tech. Established tech giants are facing a reckoning, as government anti-trust investigations and consumer protests jeopardize the status quo. Meanwhile, startup darlings are finding a public market that is no longer as forgiving of tech's high-growth, low-profit ethos. From tech jobs to TikTok, here's a summary of the year in tech in charts. - Tech IPOs have had a rough year: After a long drought of big-name tech IPOs, 2019 seemed like it was going to be a banner year. A crop of highly anticipated, highly valued tech companies — with marquee names like Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, and Slack — all listed on the public markets so that regular people could take a stake. The reception has not been kind.
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