Mike Elgan

The right to be forgotten concept is the right to free oneself from being stigmatized for events that happened in the past. It sounds like a great idea. For example, let’s say a person gets drunk as a teenager and causes an accident. The local papers pick up the accident, the trial and the sentencing. […]

You heard about the most recent Uber scandal, right? The San Francisco-based ride sharing service has been plagued by accusations of anti-competitiveness, user privacy violations, driver exploitation, sexism and more. The most recent controversy started when Buzzfeed reported that Uber senior vice president Emil Michael was quoted as saying at a Silicon Valley dinner that […]

The rate at which science and technology are improving the ability to extract data from photos and videos is truly astounding. A few years ago, search engines, like Google Image Search, gained the ability to match color sets. You can upload or link to a picture and have Google show you a bazillion other images […]

The Guardian newspaper recently reported some pretty shocking allegations about the anonymous messaging app Whisper. In summary, the paper called out Whisper for tracking users, especially “newsworthy” ones, often capturing and recording the locations of users who have not opted in to the app’s location feature and sharing user data with third parties, including the […]

Having reinvented information gathering, social interaction, business, finance and many other areas of human life, Silicon Valley now wants to reinvent food. The whole venture-funded, startup-driven, engineering-focused system that brought us Apple, Google and Facebook is now turning its attention to inventing meat grown in a lab from cow stem cells, artificial salt, 3D-printed fruit […]

Everybody’s talking about the new social network in town. It’s called Ello. And it’s billed as the anti-Facebook. Ello promises to never show ads, never collect personal data and never require your “real name.” Some fear they’ll never make money, either, and wonder if it’s worthwhile to invest time cultivating a community in a doomed […]

The foundation of Microsoft’s success as a company is Windows. When PCs went mainstream in the 1990s, Windows was top dog. Microsoft grabbed the lead way back then and hung on to it ever since. With Windows as the foundation, Microsoft built empires around its Office productivity suite and other application software platforms, along with […]

Day Planner-style organizers became a thing when I was in college. This was just a few years before “Smart Wizards” hit and long before Personal Digital Assistants and smartphones emerged as how people kept track of their contacts, to-do lists and calendars. If you’re under the age of 30, here’s what an organizer looks like. […]

The Chinese government is turning up the pressure on American technology companies and restricting their ability to compete with Chinese companies within the enormous Chinese domestic market. I don’t want to form a nationalist pitchfork-carrying mob to denounce them evil feriners. But any reasonable person would have to admit that there’s a point at which […]

Everyone’s an expert on social media and blogging. Half the people on Twitter, it seems, are social media experts of one kind or another. Over the past decade, I’ve read gigabytes of advice on how to “succeed” on social media and blogging, and I’ve never even once read a post or article that really nailed […]

The culture of Google+ has changed in the past three months. It’s a very different place now. And if you’re a serious user of the platform, you need to adapt and change how you do things if you want to survive and thrive. First I’m going to tell you why and how it’s different now. […]

The post-PC world isn’t a single world, but two worlds as it turns out. There’s the Apple version of the post-PC world. And then there’s the Google version. We didn’t know about Google’s version until the company unveiled it at Google I/O developers conference last week. The Apple version of the post-PC world is one […]