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LED BY FEI-FEI Li, the director of the Stanford University artificial intelligence lab and a newly minted Google employee, a team of academics recently explored a new way of tracking socioeconomic trends across the US. Rather than knocking on doors and asking questions, they pulled more than 50 million photos from Google Street View and fed them into neural networks. The results were promising. Simply by identifying the make, model, and year of automobiles appearing in the photos, the researchers said, their tech could accurately estimate the income, race, education, and voting patterns of citizens in particular precincts.

Here's a portrait of Hell: It's 2018. An anonymous hacker finds a way to get access to Slack's servers and decides to make off with everyone's chat logs and private messages. Then, that person decides to put it all in a 50 gigabyte .zip file and makes it downloadable on Pastebin. Just like that—probably overnight, and without any warning—every bit of petty shit you've ever typed into Slack is now the world's business. On Thursday, hacker Frans Rosén found a bug that let him—as well as less well-intentioned folks—log into anybody's Slack account using a malicious web page. Slack fixed the bug within hours. Will it be handled so quickly next time? That time you and your coworker gabbed about your boss's bad breath; the DMs you sent about picking up weed for a Friday night out; all the times you complained or boasted about traffic on your site… Everything could get out there. I can't say for sure that this will ever happen, but at this point it's safe to say that it's a possibility at the very least. There's only one thing to do, I guess: Don't talk trash on Slack.

Yahoo is sending out warnings to its users that their accounts may have been compromised. Yahoo’s chief information security officer is telling users that forged cookies may have been used to access their accounts between 2015 and 2016. "Our outside forensic experts have been investigating the creation of forged cookies that could allow an intruder to access users' accounts without a password," according to an email obtained by ZDNet. "Based on the ongoing investigation, we believe a forged cookie may have been used in 2015 or 2016 to access your account. We have connected some of the cookie forging activity to the same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the data theft we disclosed on Sept. 22, 2016."

For those of us who spend a lot of time on the Internet, there will be the occasional urge to simply disappear — delete your accounts, roll back your Google results and become invisible. At this particular moment in time, a lot of people seem to be interested in making that a reality — or at least in trying to completely cover up their tracks. Signal, a text and phone-call encryption app that comes with a recommendation from Edward Snowden, recorded a 400 percent jump in downloads after the election. And while landlords, colleges and potential employers have examined the social-media presence of applicants for years, there are signs that this kind of scrutiny is close to getting much more invasive. A person’s digital trail can also serve as the primary gateway to information used nefariously, opposition-research-style, in the online harassment of private individuals. But what does “disappearing” online mean, anyway?