Recommended Reads on the Mobile Beat This Week

A roundup of the best stories on mobile from other sites, collected by Rachel Metz, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for mobile.

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January 15, 2016

Foursquare CEO Steps Down as Valuation Plummets
This Wall Street Journal story details the struggles facing Foursquare, which started out as a hot location-sharing app in 2009 but is now facing lots of competition and hasn’t been able to transform into a profitable business. In addition to the leadership change, the company announced that it raised $45 million in new funding, which marks its second so-called “down round.”

Most People See Connected Devices as a Privacy Problem
A Fortune article discusses the results of a new Pew Research Center study about how Americans feel regarding privacy and information sharing.

Why Doesn’t Apple HealthKit Include Mental Health Tracking?
A Fast Company article explains why Apple’s health and fitness tracking service, HealthKit, doesn’t currently let users log mental-health data. One reason, according to this piece: there isn’t a lot of research finding a connection between mental health and data collected by your smartphone.

Data from Your Smartwatch Might Let Hackers Figure Out Your PIN Numbers
An article in Slate describes how a researcher at IT University of Copenhagen used deep learning to analyze accelerometer and gyroscope data in order to figure out a smartwatch wearer’s PIN number (spoiler: it seemed to work in some situations but still isn’t all that accurate).

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