Techmeme

Chavie Lieber / Vox:Toy brands increasingly develop packaging and prepare surprises so that toy unboxing, popular among kids on YouTube, will look good on camera  —  Kids are obsessed with YouTube unboxing videos.  The toy industry is taking notice. …

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:Popular people-tracking app Family Locator left real-time location data of more than 238,000 users exposed online for weeks via an unprotected database server  —  A popular family tracking app was leaking the real-time locations…

Ashley Rodriguez / Quartz:Pinterest had 250M MAUs in 2018, two thirds of them female; avg. US user generated $9.04, up 47% YoY, while avg. international user generated $0.25, up 22% YoY  —  Pinterest revealed a trove of data about its more than 250 million…

New York Times:A look at the battle between hacking tool vendors such as NSO Group and UAE-based DarkMatter as they compete for business from authoritarian governments  —  Sophisticated surveillance, once the domain of world powers, is increasingly…

Alissa Greenberg / Pacific Standard:A profile of PC4R, a crowdfunded charity that is helping refugees request funds for their pay-as-you-go mobile accounts via a Facebook group with 60K+ members  —  A Facebook-based refugee charity can be borderless and…

Tom Warren / The Verge:A look at an early version of Microsoft's new Chromium-powered Edge browser  —  This could be your new default browser on Windows  —  Microsoft is rebuilding its Edge browser on Chromium.  The software maker has been testing…

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:Source: Apple's planned game subscription service for iOS will only include paid titles, not freemium ones, and will pay developers based on user play time  —  - Devices take a back seat to video, news, gaming subscriptions  —…

John Herrman / New York Times:A profile of Citizen, a crime tracking app that notifies users in NYC, SF Bay Area, Baltimore, and LA when a crime or a major incident is reported near them  —  An app called Citizen promises “awareness” of nearby…

Clay Chandler / Fortune:Inside the rivalry between Southeast Asia's Grab and Go-Jek, the ride-hailing services evolving to provide everything from groceries to mortgages  —  The rival ride-hailing services are now dueling to deliver everything from…

Ashley Rodriguez / Quartz:What to expect from Apple on March 25: a paid news service, a video service with original content, a content hub in the TV app, a credit card, and no hardware  —  iPhones, iMacs, and other hardware are likely to take a backseat to…

New York Times:In its lawsuit over JEDI contract, Oracle claims an Amazon staffer who had a stint at Pentagon, and is now at AWS, shaped the $10B contract in Amazon's favor  —  Deap Ubhi is a restless guy.  At 26, he quit his job in private equity in…

Zheping Huang / South China Morning Post:A look at Chinese tech workers' struggle with burnout and work-life balance, as many are expected to work a “996” schedule, or 9am to 9pm six days a week  —  He is so focused on keeping his start-up alive that…

Edmund Lee / New York Times:Netflix's absence from Apple's media bundle portends a fight in content distribution; Goldman Sachs says the bundle could add $12B+ to Apple's Services business  —  The first skirmishes have already been fought in what could…

Reuters:Finland to investigate HMD after report found some Nokia 7 Plus phones sent user data to a Chinese server; HMD says it was a software packaging error, now fixed  —  HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finland's data protection ombudsman said on Thursday he would…

Washington Post:DHS watchdog report says FEMA exposed personal info of ~2.3M US disaster survivors, including some personal addresses and banking info, to a federal contractor  —  The Federal Emergency Management Agency shared personal addresses and…