Lying, tech tricks, and snares, oh my: This week at Gizmodo, our team of reporters and editors hit three different ways consumers are being ripped off, manipulated, or tracked in secret in their everyday doings on the web. Those include “surveillance scores” e-commerce companies use to charge different customers different prices for the same products, the Federal Communication Commission and its chair Ajit Pai’s continued bungling of an inquiry into unauthorized sales of mobile location data, and the myriad psychological exploits tech platforms use to juice engagement numbers.
But as we prepare to shuttle off June 2019 on its journey down the memory hole, don’t forget to catch up on all our other coverage of the past week. We’ve got news on a mysterious cosmic radio burst discovered from an unexpected region of space, metallic hydrogen, flopsweat on climate change at the Democratic primary debates, and how fast microbes in the ocean can colonize your skin. The io9 team also looked at the Marvel-Netflix partnership’s complicated (and often incongruous) legacy and what happens when fandoms turn toxic. Finally, we asked the tough questions: What if you don’t want to be a hologram when you die, and is there a fifth dimension?
All this and more, below: