Podcast Episode 6: The Brandy Lawson Interview, The News and Facebook Rants

This week we follow up on two stories from last week, the Pipdig P3 plugin and Jetpack suggestions found within the WordPress plugin dashboard. We also take a look at quite a few privacy concerns with Grammarly, malware in the healthcare industry, and we discuss privacy concerns with Facebook. I also talk to Brandy Lawson, a digital agency entrepreneur in Phoenix, Arizona. Brandy is passionate about helping coaches, speakers, and authors who are making an impact on the world. I had a wonderful conversation with Brandy at WordCamp Phoenix that I think you’ll really enjoy.

Here are approximate timestamps in case you want to jump around:
0:37 – The pipdig story followup
8:30 – Jetpack plugin suggestions
14:00 – Mika Epstein blog post
17:30 – Grammarly privacy concerns
27:05 – Healthcare malware
34:00 – Marcus Hutchins update
36:05 – Facebook privacy concerns
54:55 – The Brandy Lawson interview

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This week in the news we cover:

• There are new developments with the the pipdig P3 plugin including some unusual steps taken by Kualo, pipdig’s hosting provider to support some of the customers who were resold hosting by pipdig. A Twitter moment curated by Andrey Savchenko gives a great overview of the entire pipdig story.
• The Jetpack plugin suggestion story we covered last week about Jetpack suggestions in the plugin dashboard had some additional the passionate community discussion about these changes. Jetpack removed suggestions for paid upgrades, leaving suggestions for free features.
• We talk about powerful post written by Mika Epstein about her job on the wordpress.org plugin team.
• A Reddit user uncovers some concerns with the Grammarly Terms of Service.
• There is a concern about information security in healthcare, as well as an alarming story about a computer virus created by researchers in Israel capable of adding tumors into CT and MRI scans.
• Marcus Hutchins, the malware researcher that stopped the WannaCry outbreak, continues to face legal challenges in the United States.
• Facebook has a series of privacy woes, asking for new users’ email passwords for authentication and some app developers leaking user data. We also analyze Facebook’s transparency report and discuss possible implications of the data.
• Malicious actors are using a number of Facebook groups as a marketplace for illegal data and services.

You can find me on Twitter as @mmaunder, Kathy as @kathyzant, and Brandy Lawson as @thefieryfx. Please don’t hesitate to post your feedback in the comments below.