
Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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The latest Internet hype is about a thing that doesn't really exist. Some collectors are spending millions of dollars on these digital items called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
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Former Parler CEO John Matze was stripped of all of his shares in the alternative social media company after a dispute with co-founder Rebekah Mercer. The company was nearing a $1 billion valuation.
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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Apple's Tim Cook are fighting over iPhone privacy rules. At stake is the future of how iPhone user data is used by data brokers and advertisers.
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The proposed settlement applies to 89 million TikTok users in the U.S. whose personal data was allegedly tracked and sold to advertisers in violation of state and federal law.
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The announcement came just as Google reached a deal with Australian publishers and as the president of Microsoft urged U.S. regulators to copy Australia's proposal.
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The conservative social network is relaunching under new leadership and on new technology, a month after being de-platformed. It says it will not rely on Big Tech for its operations.
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The invite-only app lets you eavesdrop on chats between celebrities, journalists and tech savants. Oprah, Elon Musk and White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain have all joined.
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TikTok will still undergo a national security review by federal officials, but any outright ban, or pressure to sell to an American company, will not be a priority of the Biden White House.
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Rob Monster, the chief executive of Epik, says his company's deals with websites Parler, Gab, BitChute and others is an act of free speech advocacy. Others say Epik is supporting hate speech.
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John Matze was ousted as the social media company struggles to find a way back online, with Big Tech companies cracking down on the site after the riot at the Capitol.