Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Tuesday, June 19th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Verizon and AT&T stop selling your location data.

Google rolls out a couple of cool new things.

Alexa is coming to your hotel.

Elon Musk is worried about sabotage and how Europe might kill meme culture.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Remember all those stories I did recently about data leaks from companies like Securus Technologies and Location Smart, companies which sell data about you from your cell phone, specifically location data.

Well they were only able to get this data to leak because A, their systems were janky, but

also B because the cell companies were willing to resell this data to them.

So kudos to Verizon for pledging today to stop selling customer location data to data brokers.

Verizon is the first major U.S. wireless carrier to do so and what would think all of the others will soon be following suit.

There is a little bit of wiggle room, as though Verizon is ending the sale of data to third-party brokers, it says it will continue

to share some location data because it doesn't want to disrupt beneficial services such

as fraud prevention.

Still Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon who has been leading the

crusade against the practice of selling your location data to third parties

applauded Verizon's move telling the Associated Press in a statement,

quote, Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies

off. In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint seemed content to keep selling their customers private information to these shady middlemen.

Americans privacy be damned, unquote. I can't see that being the case for much longer and indeed just before this recording AT&T said it too was ending sales of phone location data to third party brokers.

A couple of new products from Google today. If you use Android messages today you got a key feature that has probably made you jealous of i-messages for the last years, i.e. the ability to send and receive

messages from your PC. Actually, you can now send messages from any web connection.

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