It’s been a tough year for tech. From the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal to concerns around Venmo’s creepy public transaction history to accidents caused by self-driving cars and the way stalker ads now chase us across the web, it’s increasingly hard not to feel that we’re at the mercy of an army of unfeeling machines exploiting us for commercial gain.

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British bank NatWest is trialling the use of a new NFC payment card with a built-in fingerprint scanner. The trial, which will include 200 customers when it begins in mid-April, will allow its participants to make NFC payments (called “contactless” in the UK) without needing to input a PIN or offer a signature.

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Skipped paying a fine in China? Walked your dog without a leash? These could affect your chances of buying an airline ticket if you were in China with the controversial social credit system. Millions have been barred from buying airline ticket and train tickets over the course of the years since implementation in certain areas in China.

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Randstad released the second edition of its Bonus Expectations survey this year, and 83% of Malaysia-based employees want a bonus this year, compared to 64% of them who received a bonus last year. But companies are playing it conservative with bonuses this year - so how can we resolve this issue?

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Having a four-year college degree has become a common requirement for many jobs around the world but according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, there are certain in-demand skills that students may not learn in college - namely, coding. Having a degree may not be a requirement in the future in certain sectors.

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No matter how cool your job is, there will be some repetitive or mundane task that gets you slipping into the dreaded state of boredom. So how do you reframe boring tasks so you don’t just get through them mindlessly?

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Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has come up with a decision-making process to avoid gut-based decisions called the “Mediating Assessments Protocol”, or MAP. Instead of making decisions on impulse, break down the components of your decision the way you would approach interviewing a job candidate.

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Managing money is hard. It gets even harder once you’re a parent. Via Quartz, here are a few ways to simplify the process as much as possible.

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There comes a time in every young person’s life when they need to sit down with their parents and face the uncomfortable facts of life — it’s time for The Talk. After all, how else will they learn the truth about where bills and credit scores come from? That’s right, you need to have the financial version of The Talk.

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Making the internet available and affordable does not get us all the way to universal access. It leaves behind the 20% of the world’s population that is illiterate. So could Siri, Alexa and other virtual assistants be the missing link in internet accessibility?

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