The Breakdown
Is Your Favorite Podcast Tracking You?
Podcast listening is hard to track, but that doesn’t mean advertisers aren’t trying
Adrianne Jeffries
Investigative Reporter
Adrianne Jeffries worked with The Markup data journalism team to discover and tell stories about inequality, examine the power platforms exert, and explore the consequences of automating decisions. She left in October 2021.
Before joining The Markup, she worked as a reporter for The Verge, as managing editor at Motherboard, and as an editor and reporter at The Outline. She started writing about tech a decade ago as a reporter for what was then called ReadWriteWeb, and has also freelanced for The New York Times, Businessweek, and Zero Point Zero Production.
The Breakdown
What Are Ghost Kitchens?
You think you just ordered pizza from a mom and pop, but it might be from Chuck E. Cheese
The BreakdownElection 2020
Why Do Voting Machines Break on Election Day?
Power outages, paper jams, and ancient technology are more likely culprits than hackers
Google the Giant
To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo
The Markup obtained internal documents that coach new employees to avoid creating “very real legal risks” in using words like “market” and “network effects”
Google the Giant
Congressman Says The Markup Investigation Proves Google Has Created a "Walled Garden"
Comment comes as part of big tech CEO grilling by antitrust committee
Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Analyzed Google’s Search Results
Novel categorizations and “staining” techniques uncovered how much space on the search results page Google dedicates to itself
Google the Giant
Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google
The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results in our test to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page
Google the Giant
To Gmail, Most Black Lives Matter Emails Are “Promotions”
Google shuffled mass emails about racial justice into the marketing tab in our test, mirroring its categorization of political emails
Coronavirus
During the Pandemic, Grubhub Should Be Thriving. It’s Not
The crisis is a stark reminder that food delivery tech companies may have an unworkable business model
Coronavirus
Blind Users Struggle with State Coronavirus Websites
A Markup survey finds that many state webpages have serious accessibility issues
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