My former thesis supervisor Konrad Kollnig has published a very good book “The App Economy”, which delves into the way big tech companies through the example of Apple and Google, are exerting their power within the realm of app economy and its impact bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/monobook-oa/...

Pepsi is a coke without dignity. Outside the US I can nowhere find a full sugar version. It's all full of sweeteners. I'm heartbroken to find out that this even is the case in Asia. #toughlife

Auditing Social Media Platforms: Public, Non-Public, and Alternative Data Access Methods under the DSA & GDPR for Public Interest Research Organised by University of Lausanne with @kollnig.net, Luka Bekavac, Simon Mayer More info: cpdp.be/20015 #CPDP.ai #CPDP2025 #TheWorldisWatching #DSA #GDPR

Book manuscript on app store power submitted, now off to the Bay Area for some inspiration. Let me know if you wanna grab coffee! ⭐

Looking for a new PhD to do some really exciting stuff. Application is under this link: vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

I'll be around London/Oxford/Edinburgh in the week of 3 March. Let me know if you'd like to connect. 📩

This is one of many things that I talk about in my book. With Trump upon us again, there's every incentive for the big tech companies to venture whatever area they please, including warfare. Why does that matter? It matters since these corps already hold so much power and allow little competition.

The US gov wants Google to sell Chrome to stop Google' monopoly in online search. But don't we all love Chrome? ❤️ Why then sell it ? Let me explain, having published the first in-depth research article about this with @zubair-shafiq.bsky.social and others, and recently given a talk about this. 🧵1/9

🚨 New pre-print – dark times for privacy. For 10+ years, Google has allowed #Android users to limit data sharing for online ads. We find that this does.. NOT much. The same goes for Californians, when they exert their LEGAL right to limit sale or sharing of their data. Link: arxiv.org/abs/2407.14938

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but it has already made google search pretty much entirely worthless. Endless garbage AI-generated articles that exploit SEO. Google often pulls the top answer from these articles and thus presents misinformation as definitive.

My first lectures at Maastricht Uni yesterday. Naturally, I put on the same clothes as in 2016 – when I first visited the law faculty here.

Project of the day: upgrading my old Gameboy batteries. They hold the save games and have a lifetime of about 20 years. So, it's been about time to swap them.

Spent the afternoon trying to find nice English café cups in Maastricht – to no avail. It's really sad that "quality dishes" have come down to this..

I often think I spend way too much time on Wikipedia. Should I worry? Can there be too much random knowledge?

Just created an account. Is BlueSky what Signal, Threema etc. are for messaging? The same 5 people of my network being on all the same alternative services, but no one else?