The Best of Guardian Tech

Exclusive: investigation suggests Washington Post owner was targeted five months before murder of Jamal Khashoggi

Privacy scandals and antitrust issues dogged Facebook and Google and Amazon saw a rise in employee organizing

It is not yet clear how the power and possibilities of AI will play out. Here are the best-case scenarios for how it might help us develop new drugs, give up dull jobs and live long, healthy lives

From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automation

Finance minister warns monetary sovereignty of governments could be at risk

Fingerprints, facial recognition and other personal information from Biostar 2 discovered on publicly accessible database

With facial recognition technology getting more sophisticated each year, technology editor Alex Hern explores the issue of privacy. Also today: Jamie Grierson on Sunday’s terrorism attack in south…

An artificial intelligence guessed the sexuality of people on a dating site with up to 91% accuracy, raising tricky ethical questions

Chinese-owned social media app bans such content even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal

Worried about the data collected about you? A new generation of startups is making apps to put your privacy settings straight

Reading through all this intimate information I realised the dating app knows me better than I do. But what happens if this data gets hacked – or worse, sold?

Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’

Inventor of web calls on governments and firms to safeguard it from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity

The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race…

«“the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”»

In an exclusive global series, the Guardian lays bare the revolution and the wreckage that is engulfing the welfare state worldwide

Billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management has taken a ‘sizable state’ and intends to ‘push for changes’, reports Bloomberg News

The year ahead for the social media giants, podcasts and games – and will there be yet another hyped return for virtual reality?

«After trimming them all the way down to simply two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, the new Pros have an HDMI port and even an SD card reader. We really are back to the future.»

There are more than 100m Alexa-enabled devices in our homes. But are they fun time-savers or the beginning of an Orwellian nightmare

Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblower

As technology renders jobs obsolete, what will keep us busy? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari examines ‘the useless class’ and a new quest for purpose

The long read: When children first started flocking to YouTube, some seriously strange stuff started to appear – and after much outcry, the company found itself scrambling to fix the problem

Fuelled by hype and hysteria, the market in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies went from an obscure niche to a $3tn industry. Then the house of cards collapsed

Does the advent of machine learning mean the classic methodology of hypothesise, predict and test has had its day?

The Long Read: All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed