It isn't a secret that tech companies collect your personal data and use it to make a buck. If you don't like it, stop using Facebook and Google. And the rest of the internet. California Gov. Gavin Newsom thinks there might be a better relationship: Charge companies to use your information and give some of the benefit back to you. He calls it a "data dividend."

The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon’s terms and conditions alone out loud takes approximately nine hours. Why would anyone read the terms of service when they don’t feel as though they have a choice in the first place?

Amazon is using an electric vest to help improve worker safety when dealing with automated systems and robots inside its warehouses, according to a report from TechCrunch. The Robotic Tech Vest, which is really just a pair of suspenders connected to a belt, signals to robots that a human is entering a space to avoid any sort of collision. The way the so-called vest works is by arming human workers with sensors that can communicate with robotic systems.

The first dot-com boom set the stage for a lot of the world we experience today. IPOs and insane valuations, tech companies without an obvious business model, the vague aroma of scams, all of it centered on Silicon Valley. Two crashes later, most of the big players are dead, merged, or dismembered. Yet some of the ideas—massive online social networks, web browsers as a software platform—have come to pass. So how did we get from the first boom to here?

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the champions of teaching tech in schools. For many, they are saving education. Apple cuts prices on their hardware for dot-edu email owners to make their products available to students. Google competes by selling cheap Chromebooks and provides a suite of education services to improve teamwork and collaboration. Microsoft has countless programs to empower classrooms with new technologies, such as teaching with Hololens.

BITCOIN TURNED 10 this month, and what a ride it’s been—initial obscurity; the kind of exponential price spike last seen by Dutch tulip peddlers; the rise of imitators based on its underlying blockchain technology; and, in the past year, a steep, steady decline in price. The old joke about the lifecycle of a Hollywood star applied to Silicon Valley: What is Bitcoin? Get me Bitcoin! Get me a Bitcoin type! What is Bitcoin?

As an emergency room physician, Richard Zane often considers how software can help him with patients. The problem is that engineers and doctors are from different worlds. Zane, who's also the chief innovation officer at UCHealth in Colorado, said that most technologists he's met have never seen the inner workings of a hospital and don't have a deep understanding of what doctors want and need.

Incriminating internal e-mails, an ugly P.R. campaign, explosive exposés, denials, and denunciations snowballed into more trouble for the social network. By Sue Halpern.

More than half of tech employees do not consider their workplace to be healthy, according to a Wednesday report from anonymous workplace review service Blind. A toxic workplace culture is among the top three reasons for employee burnout, a previous Blind report found, which can lead to turnover and poor health outcomes. Negative corporate cultures with low morale, excessive gossip, and high employee absenteeism rates can also increase the likelihood of project failure, TechRepublic's Moira Alexander wrote.

Mark Luckie, a digital strategist and former journalist, says he accepted the job offer from Facebook reluctantly. At first, he didn’t want to move to Silicon Valley from Atlanta, where he had been living, but he said his fiance was able to persuade him, telling him that the job presented an opportunity to make a difference on the influential social network.

There are those in the real-world Silicon Valley who think that HBO's "Silicon Valley," the network's long-running satire, is too critical of the tech industry. But in a new blog entry, no less than Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has a message for those people: lighten up. "I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they think it's just making fun of them," writes Gates.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that Facebook executives withheld evidence of Russian activity on their platform far longer than previously disclosed. They also employed a political opposition research firm to discredit critics. There’s a larger story here. America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of innovations – railroads, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated in mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to drive out competitors and corrupt American politics.

In a blog post Monday, the Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -3.39% co-founder wrote that the Emmy-winning comedy is one of the few pop-culture offerings to really get the tech world right. “If you really want to understand how Silicon Valley works today, you should watch the HBO series ‘Silicon Valley,’” he wrote.

Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation’s strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average.

If you really want to understand how Silicon Valley works today, you should watch the HBO series “Silicon Valley”.

Silicon Valley’s Chamath Palihapitiya, the tech investor behind the Social Capital venture firm, is telling clients that the start-up economy is has turned into a sophisticated—and dangerous—Ponzi scheme and the high-stakes losers are employees and limited partners. In a letter from Social Capital, Palihapitiya notes that “over the past decade, a subtle and sophisticated game has emerged between VCs, LPs, founders, and employees”, and someone has to foot the bill for it as VCs are “smart enough to transfer the risk”.

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV.

I think we can all agree that Silicon Valley needs more adult supervision right about now. Is the solution for its companies to hire a chief ethics officer? While some tech companies like Google have top compliance officers and others turn to legal teams to police themselves, no big tech companies that I know of have yet taken this step. But a lot of them seem to be talking about it, and I’ve discussed the idea with several chief executives recently. Why? Because slowly, then all at once, it feels like too many digital leaders have lost their minds.

Last week, news surfaced that Saudi Arabian officials were suspected to have killed US journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly torturing and dismembering him inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Across Washington, officials are now discussing ways to penalize the country for the killing, whether through sanctions or other methods. But that reaction could create unexpected problems for US tech companies, which have received billions in investment from Saudi Arabia in recent years.

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest private players —the so-called unicorns —have managed to put off public listings thanks to a market awash in private capital. Exhibit A: Uber Technologies, which landed a staggering $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in 2016. Yasir Al Rumayyan, managing director of the fund, is one of a dozen members on Uber’s board of directors.