The 59 Best Technology Journalism Stories Published in 2019

Here’s my compendium of the best tech reporting, writing, and commentary of 2019:

January

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them
Josh Constine, TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone
Joseph Cox, Motherboard (Vice)
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-tmobile

Explainer: What is a quantum computer?
Martin Giles, MIT Technology Review
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612844/what-is-quantum-computing/

February

The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America
Casey Newton, The Verge
Illustrations: Corey Brickley, Photos: Jessica Chou
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona

Russia to disconnect from the internet as part of a planned test
Catalin Cimpanu, ZDNet
https://www.zdnet.com/article/russia-to-disconnect-from-the-internet-as-part-of-a-planned-test/

When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online
Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/when-kids-realize-their-whole-life-already-online/582916/

NASA’s Opportunity Rover Dies on Mars
Jonathan Corum, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/13/science/opportunity-rover-mars-map.html

March

Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/17/facebook-is-next.html

Silicon Valley’s inequality machine
Greg Epstein, TechCrunch (ExtraCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/02/silicon-valleys-inequality-machine-anand-giridharadas/

I Rode an E-Scooter as Far From Civilization as Its Batteries Could Take Me
Joe Veix, Gizmodo
Photos, Brandon Tauszik
https://gizmodo.com/i-rode-an-e-scooter-as-far-from-civilization-as-its-bat-1833434599

Who Controls Diners’ Data? OpenTable Moves to Assert Control
Micah Maidenberg, The Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-controls-diners-data-opentable-moves-to-assert-control-11552644121

As Mark Zuckerberg Tightens Grip on Facebook, 2 Top Deputies Leave
Mike Isaac, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris-cox.html

April

Facebook still tracks you after you deactivate account 
Alfred Ng, CNET 
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-is-still-tracking-you-after-you-deactivate-your-account/

15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook
Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-15-months-of-fresh-hell/

China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority
Darren Byler, The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/apr/11/china-hi-tech-war-on-muslim-minority-xinjiang-uighurs-surveillance-face-recognition

A Programmer Solved a 20-Year-Old, Forgotten Crypto Puzzle
Daniel Oberhaus, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/a-programmer-solved-a-20-year-old-forgotten-crypto-puzzle/

May

Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
Paul Ford, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-defense-difficult-industry/

The Hidden Radicalism of Chris Hughes’s Call to Break Up Facebook
Nathan Heller, The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-hidden-radicalism-of-chris-hughess-call-to-break-up-facebook

A year after GDPR, how is Ireland tackling the data giants?
John Kennedy, Siliconrepublic
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/gdpr-ireland-dpc-investigations

June

Bodies in Seats: At Facebook’s worst-performing content moderation site in North America, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives
Casey Newton The Verge
Illustrations: Corey Brickley, Photos: Amelia Holowaty Krales
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa

Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech
Nitasha Tiku, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/

Amazon’s helping police build a surveillance network with Ring doorbells
Alfred Ng, CNET 
https://www.cnet.com/features/amazons-helping-police-build-a-surveillance-network-with-ring-doorbells/

YouTube looks to demonetization as punishment for major creators, but it doesn’t work
Julia Alexander, The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18744246/youtube-demonetization-steven-crowder-patreon-advertising-merch

Aggression Detectors: The Unproven, Invasive Surveillance Technology Schools Are Using to Monitor Students
Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao, ProPublica and Wired
Photos: Adrienne Grunwald
https://features.propublica.org/aggression-detector/the-unproven-invasive-surveillance-technology-schools-are-using-to-monitor-students/

July

Capital One Data Theft Impacts 106M People
Brian Krebs, KrebsonSecurity
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/capital-one-data-theft-impacts-106m-people/

The Tech Industry Is Building a Vast Digital Underclass
Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/doordash-tipping.html

My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing Food App Deliveryman
Andy Newman, The New York Times
Photos: Christopher Lee 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/nyregion/doordash-ubereats-food-app-delivery-bike.html

What happens when a country’s entire adult population is hacked?
Patrick Howell O’Neill, MIT Technology Review
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613973/what-happens-when-a-countrys-entire-adult-population-is-hacked/

How “stalkerware” apps are letting abusive partners spy on their victims
Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613915/stalkerware-apps-are-letting-abusive-partners-spy-on-their-victims/

My browser, the spy: How extensions slurped up browsing histories from 4M users
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/07/dataspii-inside-the-debacle-that-dished-private-data-from-apple-tesla-blue-origin-and-4m-people/

How Cyberweapons Are Changing the Landscape of Modern Warfare
Sue Halpern, The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-cyber-weapons-are-changing-the-landscape-of-modern-warfare

The Mechanical Turk: How a Chess-playing Hoax Inspired Real Computers
Jennifer Walter, Discover Magazine
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-mechanical-turk-how-a-chess-playing-hoax-inspired-real-computers

August

WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company, It’s a Soap Opera
Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/15/20806366/we-company-wework-ipo-adam-neumann

Inside DeepMind’s epic mission to solve science’s trickiest problem
Greg Williams, Wired UK
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deepmind-protein-folding

Yelp swaps restaurant phone numbers with Grubhub’s to boost referral revenue
Wes Schlagenhauf, The Hustle
https://thehustle.co/yelp-grubhub-restaurant-controversy/

Python is eating the world: How one developer’s side project became the hottest programming language on the planet
Nick Heath, TechRepublic
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-is-eating-the-world-how-one-developers-side-project-became-the-hottest-programming-language-on-the-planet/

September

Google claims to have reached quantum supremacy
Madhumita Murgla and Richard Waters, Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/content/b9bb4e54-dbc1-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17

Revealed: How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran
Kim Zetter and Huib Modderkolk, Yahoo News
https://news.yahoo.com/revealed-how-a-secret-dutch-mole-aided-the-us-israeli-stuxnet-cyber-attack-on-iran-160026018.html

He Who Must Not Be Tolerated
Kara Swisher, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/opinion/joichi-ito.html

The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism
Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/the-dark-side-of-techno-utopianism

Four Years in Startups
Anna Wiener, The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/four-years-in-startups

October

All Hands On Deck
Casey Newton, The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20756701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-leak-audio-ftc-antitrust-elizabeth-warren-tiktok-comments

The Sum of Zuckerberg’s Fears
Kara Swisher, The New York Times

Turkish ISP Blocks Social Media Sites Near Syrian Border
Paris Martineau, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/turkish-isp-blocks-social-media-syrian-border/

Bruce Schneier makes the case for “public interest technologists”
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/public-interest-at-scale.html

The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time
Katherine Miller, Buzzfeed News
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time

November

How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet
Lily Hay Newman, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/iran-internet-shutoff/

Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans
Rob Copeland, The Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-s-secret-project-nightingale-gathers-personal-health-data-on-millions-of-americans-11573496790

Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave
Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg
Images: Guy Martin
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-13/microsoft-apocalypse-proofs-open-source-code-in-an-arctic-cave

The Google Squeeze
Ben Thompson, Stratechery
https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/

The Architect of Modern Algorithms
Susan D’Agostino, Quanta Magazine
Photos: Cody O’Loughlin
https://www.quantamagazine.org/barbara-liskov-is-the-architect-of-modern-algorithms-20191120/

Will the future of work be ethical?
Greg Epstein, TechCrunch (ExtraCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/28/will-the-future-of-work-be-ethical/

December

How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online
Adi Robertson, The Verge
Illustrations by Alex Castro / 
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20980741/fake-news-facebook-twitter-misinformation-lies-fact-check-how-to-internet-guide

New crypto-cracking record reached, with less help than usual from Moore’s Law
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/new-crypto-cracking-record-reached-with-less-help-than-usual-from-moores-law/

Instagram still doesn’t age-check kids. That must change.
Josh Constine, TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/03/instagram-age-limit/

Larry Page is the tech world’s Dr. Manhattan
Casey Newton, The Verge 
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/12/4/20993633/larry-page-sergey-brin-quit-google-dr-manhattan-watchmen-strained-metaphor

Emotional Baggage
Zoe Schiffer, The Verge
Illustrations by Grayson Blackmon and Will Joel
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion

How Ring Transmits Fear to American Suburbs
Caroline Haskins, Motherboard (Vice)
Image: Hunter French
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywaa57/how-ring-transmits-fear-to-american-suburbs

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html