Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

Oh, wait. Scratch one more idea off the list. Now seeking funding via a just-launched Kickstarter, CatLand would give users the chance to care for a Tamagotchi-esque pet by sending check-ins to a location-aware mobile app.

So, if your cat is hungry, you can check in at a restaurant, and if it’s bored, you can take it to the park. CatLand’s creators said they’re still uncommitted to any one business model, since their first priority is just to get funded and get users. But it might eventually offer the ability for local businesses to sponsor special check-in hotspots that reward one’s digital kitty with more virtual points than check-ins at other, non-paying locales.

Silly? Yeah, a bit. But this piqued my interest for two reasons:

1. Foursquare, the former mayor of location-based gamification, is backing away from check-ins and moving toward local discovery; since it’s targeted at teenage girls, CatLand may be an interesting test case for check-ins as a niche product as opposed to a broad “Yelp-plus” service.
2. With the exception of a few apps like Quadstreaker and — more notably — Google’s alternate-reality game, Ingress, mobile games haven’t yet embraced location as an important element of play, either because it’s hard to implement or maybe because it’s just not fun for most types of games. So that’s two trends this silly Kickstarter project is bucking.

(And — unofficial third reason — just because this is about cute animals. We’re definitely gonna win that Webby next year, guys!)

CatLand’s Kickstarter page is here, and a video explaining the app in a bit more detail is below:

A number of companies are trying to better pinpoint mobile users’ online activity with new software and techniques they say could help advertisers track users across devices.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That may change. According to multiple sources, Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are in the world, serving up tweets from others around you — whether you follow them or not.

The feature, as I understand it, came out of the company’s recent hack week at the beginning of this month, where a few engineers worked on projects related to local discovery. A number of employees have been testing the feature in the Twitter app ever since.

The type of tweets you’d see, ideally, are the most relevant ones nearby, especially when they follow a trend or a flurry of closely connected activity. So a football game or a concert, for instance, may be a great use case here.

Or perhaps even more importantly, it could be used in completely unplanned, spontaneous instances.

Here’s an example, and a real kicker: I’ve been told that a few employees were testing the new feature in Boston last week, around the time that the brothers Tsarnaev allegedly carried out a series of horrific bombings during the city’s annual marathon.

When reached for comment, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said the company had nothing to share on the matter.

It’s fascinating to me that Twitter is toeing the waters of discovery through a local lens more explicitly than ever before. Currently and historically, the company already factors in location when suggesting content inside the Discover tab and also when serving you ads. It also goes without saying that to try this stuff out during the recent Boston tragedy — which was arguably watched by much of the world through Twitter just as intensely as it was over broadcast networks — is incredibly interesting, if only to imagine what possibilities it could hold for other mass events in the future.

The big question for me: Twitter, what took you so freaking long?

For a company that prides itself on its interest graph — the pulse of what everyone in the world is talking and thinking about — something like a localized version of discovery seems like a natural extension of what it means to use Twitter in a meaningful way.

Yes, Twitter makes much of the foo foo special moments its users have when connecting with people on the other side of the planet (or in some cases, connecting to others off our planet entirely). I won’t begrudge them that; it is pretty fantastic.

I’d argue, however, that Twitter could be infinitely more useful to me were I to open up the app and see something happening down the block: A yard sale, a car accident, half-off a tasty fried chicken sandwich. That’s Foursquare’s entire value proposition with its newly revamped, search-focused app. If done right, Twitter could potentially be even more powerful in this respect, feeding off the hundreds of millions of potential intent signals flowing through its pipes on a daily basis.

So this may have come out of a recent hack week project, but ideas like this have been in the works for a long time. People I’ve spoken to said that for years Twitter has kicked around just exactly what discovery is supposed to mean for the company. Does Twitter relegate it to the Discover Tab alone and “experiment” with how people use it, as product VP Michael Sippey said at our D: Dive into Mobile conference recently?

Or perhaps an even bigger coup: Does Twitter insert these local tweet suggestions into your main Twitter timeline directly? I hear Twitter has considered both options — again, for years people inside the company have agonized about the right way to handle this — but there’s no decision quite yet.

To insert suggested location-based tweets into your main timeline, however, is a really big deal for Twitter. Touching the holy grail that is the timeline — the list of people that users have selected to follow — isn’t something the company takes lightly. For one, it could tick off Twitter’s early user base, or alienate all the folks who have carefully curated their follow lists over time.

But here’s something to think about: Right now, Twitter isn’t worried about the longtime, early user base. The company is launching products on “Good Morning America.” It’s cooperating with the Grammys and the Oscars. It’s pushing products like Vine at Cannes. It’s making the head of comms into a consumer marketing director as well.

The service’s 200 million active users pales in comparison to Facebook’s billion. Twitter needs to go truly mainstream.

Ultimately, if that means changing some of the core elements of the product and peeving the hardcore Twitter users, I’d guess Twitter may soon be approaching the point that it is willing to make that choice. It has already chopped off the legs of its client developer base and shifted everyone’s attention to the official Twitter apps.

My impression here, though, is that even Twitter isn’t sure yet what it wants to do. It could again test how this feature works within the Discover tab and maybe move it into the timeline later. Or perhaps just keep it inside Discover. Or, in all possibility, scrap the feature as it stands entirely and try it a different way. Twitter doesn’t move that fast on major changes like these.

I will say, however, that I’m glad to see the company is at least looking at tweaking its formula, even if there’s potential to upset part of the user base.

Frankly, it’s about time.

If Kendall has his way, drunk college students — and drunk college nostalgists like Will Ferrell’s character from “Old School” — won’t be the only ones who go “streaking in the quad.”

Quadstreaker is a location app based not around nudity (though levels in the game are called “bare,” “undercover,” “commando,” etc.), but around connecting real-world “streaks” by physically visiting square areas on a map grid.

The point is to go lots of places in order to fill in your own world map and compete against friends.

An iPhone app made by a bootstrapped five-person startup from Seattle, Quadstreaker runs passively in the background, monitoring location at all times while trying not to draw on the battery too much (similar to the Moves activity tracker and social discovery app Highlight).

Unlike Foursquare, Quadstreaker doesn’t map the world by venues, but rather by these “quads” of location. And it’s a game, where each player’s tracked travels to date are displayed on a shareable “Lifeboard.” (But the location-based gameplay is nothing as complicated as Google’s Ingress.)

“I’ve designed Quadstreaker for me and people like me: Explorer-achievers who like maps, collecting — and a sense of completion,” Kendall explained.

Here’s Will Ferrell’s “We’re going streaking through the quad!” bit:

And here’s a demo video of the Quadstreaker app:

introducing quadstreaker from quadstreaker on Vimeo.

But auto apps are still far from high-tech perfection, and concerns about driver distraction still play a big part in how these apps work in cars.

BMW, for one, showed how location-notification app Glympse will soon work with BMWs and Mini Coopers, provided that the car has a $250 connective tether (an opt-in feature when you buy the car). Glympse, a Seattle-based app that launched in 2009, lets you pre-set a message about your whereabouts and put it on a timer.

Hop into your BMW, plug your smartphone into the connective wire and fire up Glympse. You can then tell the app that in a few minutes you want it to automatically send information on your exact location to your co-worker, or spouse or whoever it is you’re heading out to meet. Glympse has also partnered with Mercedes-Benz and Ford for this feature.

Cadillac’s just-unveiled CTS Sedan — General Motors’ luxury competitor to BMW and Mercedes-Benz — includes the most recent version of Cue, the company’s in-car communication and app system. It looks a little bit like an iPad installed in the dashboard. The updated Cue includes shortcuts for drivers, such as the ability to enter, manually or with voice, a full address to the built-in nav system instead of painstakingly entering city name, street name and so on.

And Ford today launched a competition for app developers to create a new fuel-efficiency app, citing an increasing focus on fuel economy. This comes just a few months after the auto maker announced it was opening up its in-car platforms to developers, as my colleague Liz Gannes reported. (General Motors has done the same.) Ford has also participated in a hackathon with Facebook, which led to the creation of a concept app that would prompt a “check in” for Ford vehicle owners once they arrive at a destination.

One reason for the increasing appearance of apps in vehicles is a shift in consumer mindset that has forced car makers to rethink their strategies.

Since the recession, more consumers are looking for cars with “luxury” features at less exorbitant prices. As Ford pointed out during a keynote event today, a recent Luxury Institute survey found 60 percent of respondents expect a luxury vehicle to cost less than $60,000 — much less than the former $100,000 price tag standard on fancy cars.

Adding mobile app integration is a relatively inexpensive way for auto makers to punch up the vehicles and offer more to discerning buyers.

Plus, the new demographics of car buyers, according to Jim Farley, executive vice president of global marketing at Ford, include more women, Hispanics — and millennials. “Millennials are entitled … with incredibly high expectations,” he said.

And millennials, as we well know, love their apps.

Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Brendon Kraham, manager of global mobile solutions at Google, identified a “disconnect” in the current car experience. “If I do a search on Google Maps on my desktop right now, I still have to duplicate that when I get in the car,” he said. (Naturally, he took the time to explain how Google Now, the company’s smart personal assistant application for Android phones, could provide a more seamless experience in and out of cars — but demurred when asked about self-driving cars or using Google Glass on the road.)

Facebook’s head of automotive and vertical marketing Doug Frisbie, who like Kraham spoke during the Ford keynote event, agreed. “Auto makers are acting like cellphone makers did in the early days: They’re all trying to make their own proprietary system. But consumers want something that works across all platforms.”

And there’s still the issue of driver distraction and whether all of the smartphones, touchscreens, automated voices, binging and buzzing while we’re driving actually amounts to a good thing. Some auto makers are proceeding with caution when it comes to this area.

Despite the many apps Ford’s SYNC system offers, for example, drivers still can’t create new status updates for social networks while driving. And while some car makers are loathe to give up control and precious dashboard space to third-party apps, BMW has allowed parts of Glympse’s interface — minus the mapping feature — to appear on the dashboard screen to mitigate driver distraction.

“Our philosophy is that mobile devices are just a part of our lives — and that’s going to happen,” Ford’s Farley said, when asked about driver distraction. “With new tech like voice recognition and a five-position switch on the steering wheel, well, we hope consumers will make the right decisions when it comes to controlling the vehicle.”

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

But four years on, Crowley finds himself in a different place. Foursquare is in the midst of a major brand and product transformation, and he’s rethinking how he wants to position his company in a crowded social space.

What was clear from his talk at SXSW on Monday was what he thought Foursquare hasn’t done well, along with some on what Foursquare wants to be.

The early emphasis, as he’s been wont to say over the past year, was placing far too much importance on badges, mayorships and the game-like aspects of the app.

“Foursquare is much more than mayorships and badges,” he said onstage on Monday. “It’s a perception issue. We’ve definitely been phasing a lot of that stuff out.”

That’s not what Foursquare wants to be in the future. The app has pivoted into the location-and-discovery space, aiming to direct users to points of interest based on time of day, check-in history and past data. That’s also where Foursquare hopes to make its money going forward, offering strong tool sets to local businesses and large national companies willing to pay for better analytics services.

That’s an uphill battle, considering how Foursquare rose to prominence in its early days. The avid “superuser” fan base would vie to be the “mayor” of a specific location — the person who had checked in the most. This, Crowley admits, was likely one of Foursquare’s early strategy stumbles, along with almost completely marginalizing the discovery capacity of the app.

Foursquare’s biggest mistake, in his words: “In terms of product, not putting search front and center from the beginning.” He also wants to reduce the amount of taps and friction for users to navigate the app, and to reimagine how badges and mayorships work in the real world.

The issue now is time and competition. Foursquare has 30 million users, a respectable amount of onboarding in the four years the app has been around. But major competitors like Google, Yelp and now Facebook are all delving deep into the local discovery space. Google has Google+ Local. Yelp is Yelp. And Facebook just unveiled Graph Search, an early tool with the potential for changing the way people find businesses of interest, through their friends.

Foursquare is also rumored to be in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital, though it’s facing skepticism from investors who are iffy on the pivot to discovery, and aren’t convinced that Foursquare’s business is growing fast enough.

Crowley, of course, continues to champion the “underreported” potential of his company, emphasizing the large growth Foursquare is seeing internationally in Japan, Brazil, Russia and Turkey, and the underestimated power of the company’s place database, home to more than 50 million points of interest. He even cites the potential of wearable computing, like Google Glass or smart watches.

“I’m bullish on making it easier for people to consume data about what’s going on around them,” Crowley said. Hopefully, for Crowley and his company, users are, too.

Last week, a fierce debate erupted over a range of social networks and in the media about a story we posted on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new decree that employees at the Silicon Valley Internet company would no longer be able to work from home.

In a sometimes awkwardly worded internal memo I posted from Yahoo HR head Jackie Reses, the company rolled out the new rule — pushed through by Mayer — which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities by June 1.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.

Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)

At first, she tried to change culture in ways that rained down tasty perks on employees — such as free food and smartphones. Mayer has also been practical, instituting please-be-here Friday afternoon FYI weekly meetings and stricter performance reviews.

But she is now inevitably doling out more unpleasant medicine to the troops, starting with the banning of work from home, which has caused a big ruckus both internally and externally.

Some inside the company are clearly appalled, especially since it might more severely impact working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,” read one email I got from an internal source, referring to the recent birth of Mayer’s baby.

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

Yahoo employees, as far as I can see from its company careers page, offers the typical Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account, where staff can pay “dependent care expenses, such as day care or after-school care, with pre-tax dollars.”

While it is fair to raise the issue of how employees will cope given the sudden change in HR policy, others also think that limiting work at home is a good idea because it galvanizes culture and creates a spirit of collaboration that has been missing at Yahoo for far too long.

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

That is actually a sentiment expressed by Google CFO Patrick Pichette at a recent talk in Australia, when asked about telecommuting at Google:

“The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”

That said, officially, many Googlers are allowed and even encouraged to work at home. The company told me when asked about work-from-home policies: “We do not have a formal policy and leave Googlers to use good judgment.”

It is the same for Facebook, which confirmed a “policy to provide flexibility as work permits.” In fact, one exec at the social network giant noted to me that its entire camera app was built from an engineer’s garage, with the group staying away from the office as long as they wanted to build it from home.

Business networking site LinkedIn also said it had “no formal policy at present,” but noted that many employees work from home full-time and part-time as the situation warrants and in consultation with managers.

It goes on and on like that throughout the tech scene, part of an ethos of letting tech talent make its own rules — from what they wear to when and where they work — that is deeply ingrained in the culture.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson said of the tech giant: “We do not ban [work from home] and many HP people do it … it is not at all an issue at HP and hasn’t been for years. Some folks have a regular schedule, while others can do it from time to time with the okay of their supervisors.”

An AOL spokesperson said the company doesn’t ban work from home.

A Netflix spokesperson referenced a well-known premium video company’s job deck, which stressed a “freedom and responsibility culture” and notes, “We don’t measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office. We do care about accomplishing great work.”

Twitter had a different twist, but still supports working from home. Said a spokesperson: “We believe there are significant tangible and intangible benefits when employees are working under the same roof. We also recognize that every so often it’s important to be able to work remotely, and we allow for that flexibility.”

A Cisco spokesperson said the networking company also allows it, but it has to be approved by a direct manager: “It is certainly utilized by those employees who earn it. And, of course, with our collaborative suite of technologies like Webex (with video) and telepresence it is the next best thing to being there in person.”

A Microsoft spokesman said that the software company “offers flexible work schedules for all employees.”

Perhaps one of the best companies for a long time in the telecommuting space has been IBM. From its corporate Web page, also touting the environmental benefits:

“IBM was one of the first global companies to pioneer programs to reduce employee commuting. It has sustained these programs for nearly two decades. Two key aspects are its (a) work-at-home program and (b) mobile employees program. Today, more than 128,000 (29 percent) of employees globally participate in one of these programs. In 2011, in just the U.S. alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.4 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.”

Startups are much the same.

Said an Airbnb spokesperson of the online housing rentals site: “It’s a flexible policy and managers determine what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”

At location startup Foursquare, a spokesperson said, “Our policy is to allow for ‘flexible work hours’ — and that applies to both the hours you work, and where you work from. While we don’t have any dedicated remote employees, our folks do work from home on occasion and we’re fine with that.”

Private social networking company Path is much the same, according to a spokesperson: “Path has a work-from-home policy. The manager and employee work out the details together.”

The only company I queried that did not respond immediately is Apple, which has been known for a long time to have much tighter rules with its employees. I will update when I hear from the company.

I also have emails in to Amazon, which is already known for flexible working policies.

But, overall, Mayer is forging new ground with her work-from-home ban. Whether that is enough to turbocharge the Yahoo culture is anybody’s guess.

With the launch of the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720 in Barcelona, the Finnish phone maker is hoping to change that.

“We are bringing elements of our high-end flagship Lumia devices to more prices and therefore to more people,” CEO Stephen Elop said during a press conference at its Mobile World Congress booth.

Expanding Windows Phone is especially important considering the company scrapped its Meltemi effort for low-end Linux and has introduced its last Symbian phones, leaving Windows Phone as the company’s only true smartphone platform.

But with a price of 139 Euros ($183), the Lumia 520 won’t bring Nokia into the bottom reaches of the Android market, which stretches into the sub-$100 range. There Nokia is counting on its Asha line, which it has been pitching as more entry-level smartphone than feature phone.

Nokia is also bringing improved camera and voice quality along with support for corporate email to a new basic phone, the Nokia 301. The phone also has built-in support for popular messaging program WhatsApp.

One interesting camera feature talks users through getting a good self-portrait with voice interaction. Taking a cue from Bump, Nokia is introducing “Slam,” a new means of sharing photos between nearby devices.

An even lower-end phone, the Nokia 105, shares design cues from the Lumia and Asha lines but at a 15 Euro price point aimed at the 2.7 billion people who don’t have a phone. Even at that price, it includes a flashlight, FM radio and weeks worth of battery life.

“You can charge this phone once a month and still rely on it,” said Nokia design head Marko Ahtisaari.

Beyond the new phones, Nokia noted that it plans to bring its Here location services to non-Nokia Windows Phones in some markets; it is also licensing its location technology to Mozilla for use with Firefox OS.

“By gaining scale we can increase the quantity and quality of the data we receive,” Elop said.

The company is also opening up more of its technologies on the imaging, music and location fronts to developers and announced a deal with DreamWorks Animation to create Nokia-exclusive entertainment software.

Nokia, Elop insisted, is getting bolder, a word he used frequently during Monday’s event.

“It hasn’t always been easy,” Elop said. “But without question we have remained focused on our strategy.”

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The move comes amid growing privacy concerns regarding the types of information collected by mobile devices and apps, including location and other personal data.

“The mobile world is expanding and innovating at breathtaking speed, allowing consumers to do things that would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago,” outgoing FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement. “These best practices will help to safeguard consumer privacy and build trust in the mobile marketplace, ensuring that the market can continue to thrive.”

Leibowitz announced on Friday that he will step down later this month.

The FTC report contains recommendations for those that create the mobile operating systems, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and BlackBerry, and for those that make apps for those platforms and for other players, such as mobile ad networks.

On the OS side, the FTC suggestions include making disclosures as consumers are taking potentially privacy-compromising actions such as sharing their location, as well as having a single place to view privacy settings and icons that show when information is being shared.

For app makers, the FTC recommends a clear, easily accessible privacy policy, as well as getting users to expressly provide consent when sharing information and better communication with the third parties the apps work with, such as ad networks and analytics companies, to make sure partners also support their privacy choices.

(Image courtesy of Geek Culture/The Joy of Tech)