Daily Bafflements

• Today in billionaires: well, they’re in your presidential races, your global financial markets, your social media—and now even your lighthearted prime-time procedurals. Fox has announced its plans to produce “a comedic procedural about a socially inept billionaire who helps the LAPD solve crimes.” Sounds riveting.

• In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow asks, “Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy?” Doctorow warns that “Ashley Madison and OPM were tremors, not quakes. There are bigger, scarier databases with more info on more people, and they aren’t any better (or worse) protected than any of the ruptured databases we’ve seen this year”—and that every tiny tech company is in on the game of recklessly gathering your data, as Jacob Silverman cautioned on the Baffler blog. Pretty compelling arguments, coming as they do alongside news of the T-Mobile hack that exposed the data of 15 million customers.

• In case you weren’t among those caught up in the recent high-profile hacks, technology has found another way to intrude on your life—it’s called Peeple. The new app that the Washington Post is calling “the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’” will allow you to rate those you interact with—on dates, in job interviews, at the post office—on a numerical scale.