conversations

A marketing company claims it can listen in to private conversations in peoples' homes and gather data for targeted advertising. It's not clear if Cox Media Group (CMG) is "revealing" a poorly kept secret or exaggerating its capabilities to boost ... business. The claims were made by CMG's marketing team in a pitch to other marketers. The details were revealed through a leak to 404 Media. (Source: 404media.co ) According to the report of the leak, CMG promoted the technology as "Active Listening" and asked potential clients "What would it mean for your business if you could target potential ... (view more)

Google says its messaging service Hangouts will close by November. Users who want to download past conversations may need to act sooner than that. Google Hangouts launched in 2013 and was designed to be a simple form of instant messaging that worked ... regardless of what operating system or platform the users were on. That simplicity was somewhat undermined by Google's chopping and changing as it developed various services. (Source: arstechnica.com ) Google originally had two messaging tools: Messenger as part of the ill-fated and Google+ Messenger social network, and Talk. It then merged ... (view more)