Sara M. Watson
Washington Post
Boston, MA, United States
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Past articles by Sara:
Russia’s Facebook ads show how Internet microtargeting can be weaponized
The time to regulate online advertising is now. → Read More
Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism
“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that... → Read More
Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism
“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that... → Read More
Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism
“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that... → Read More
How Virginia Heffernan is reinventing tech criticism
Virginia Heffernan’s Twitter bio once described her as “something like a critic.” Her reluctance to fully embrace the title is understandable, given that most of what passes as technology criticism today tends either towards gadget reviews or curmudgeons... → Read More
Sara M Watson Bits of me essay
How close does personalized online advertising get to us as our real persons? Technology critic Sara M. Watson describes a disconcerting encounter with her other ME. → Read More
‘The issue formerly known as privacy’
Control over data profiles is about power, not privacy → Read More
Why iOS QuickType won’t predict ‘abortion’
How will we know when our conversation partners are autocompleting our conversations? “Talk later?” Last year Michael Keller (now on Al Jazeera’s interactive team) investigated a massive corpus of misspelled words to determine whether and how iOS would spell-check them. He uncovered a list of sensitive words — kill words — like “abortion” and “bullet,” for which iOS offered no suggestions when… → Read More
Stepping Down: Rethinking the Fitness Tracker
Wearable devices encourage 10,000 steps a day, but that's not a very dynamic understanding of health → Read More
Ask The Decoder: How private is private browsing, really?
All the major browsers have some form of private browsing: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera. Here’s how Google describes the incognito browsing function: “If you don’t want Google Chrome to save a record of what you visit and download, you can browse the Web in incognito mode.” You can use this mode on desktop and mobile Chrome browsers. Google describes incognito mode in cute… → Read More
Ask The Decoder: Stalked by socks
When ‘delightfully curated’ ads follow us around the Web → Read More
Introducing the Living With Data series
A field guide to the data and algorithms that shape our world → Read More
Data Science: What the Facebook Controversy is Really About
The Facebook contagion study raises a lot of questions. But what does it mean for this thing we call data science? → Read More
Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization
Why customized ads are so creepy, even when they miss their target → Read More
You Need a Right to Use Your Data
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. On Thursday, Nov. 14, Future Tense will host an event on how technology affects obesity at the New America office in Washington, D.C. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website. We... → Read More