By Kate Cox From Consumerist

It’s a big, busy world, and even with a smartphone in your pocket at all times it’s hard to read everything written about it in a week. Sometimes, useful info slips through the cracks. So, here are five interesting stories from the world of internet and technology news.

1.) Does internet advertising even work? Facebook is selling even more of its users’ data to advertisers — and in a sense, none of us are surprised. Advertising is pervasive on the web; the internet is basically made of advertising and at this point we are, collectively, used to it. So it must work, right?

Well, actually, maybe not so much, as The Atlantic points out. And if it does work at all, we still don’t know how.

2.) Online Privacy. Ha! Just kidding, you don’t have any. Or at least, nominally you do, but online tracking is getting creepier, writes Pro Publica, and the marriage of data collected offline with data collected online is creating a massive web of information that no consumer can escape.

3.) Comcast and the competition get snippy. A large group of technology companies — including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Sprint — wrote to regulators Monday encouraging them to block the Comcast/TWC merger. Comcast fired back claiming that “the size of the deal is not unprecedented” and that the merger wouldn’t substantially change its market share. Which seems… unlikely.

4.) Internet surveillance isn’t that hard — and tells you a lot about someone. The crew over at Ars Technica, in partnership with NPR, decided to learn just how much the NSA can tell about someone from their internet traffic.

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