
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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When law enforcement requests it, Google usually hands over location and search data collected through its smartphone apps. Will that now be used against people seeking abortions in some states?
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BeReal asks users to post one candid unedited photo a day. It can't be "liked" or shared. There are no algorithms or ads. And teens are increasingly choosing a feed that is intentionally boring.
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A group of activists who have taken on some of the biggest right-wing personalities online have now launched a campaign to try to defund Fox News' online operation.
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Federal regulators accuse the company of violating a 2011 agreement over the treatment of users' personal data, including phone numbers and email addresses.
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The video streaming site Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, is in the limelight after the accused Buffalo shooter used it to livestream the massacre.
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The mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket was streamed live online. In about two minutes, it was taken down. But then it began reappearing on the Internet.
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Google-owned Waymo and Cruise, owned by General Motors, are now offering robot-driven cars to ferry passengers in San Francisco. (Story first aired on All Things Considered on May 5, 2022.)
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New rules will require social media networks in the European Union to more closely monitor hate speech and other illegal content posted on their platforms.
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Before Twitter accepted Musk's $44 billion offer, he has floated numerous ideas for changing the social network. Not all of those proposals have been welcomed by experts.
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The easing of pandemic restrictions has not been good for Netflix. The streaming service reported a decline in subscribers. The company also blames password sharing.