German chancellor Angela Merkel has come up with a way for President Obama to atone for years of wiretapping her cellphone: posing for a couple of selfies. Last night, Saturday Night Live poked fun at the president’s impromptu portrait with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and UK prime minister David Cameron, the nonsensical sign language farce perpetrated at Nelson Mandela’s memorial, state surveillance, and of course the issues plaguing the Healthcare.gov website. As for that much-publicized handshake with Cuban leader Raúl Castro, the president has a perfectly reasonable defense: he thought it was Edward James Olmos.

Privacy advocates scored a major victory in Boston this week when the city’s police department announced it would indefinitely suspend its use of automated license plate readers. The Boston Globe reports that the 14 devices currently in use let the BPD scan as many as four million vehicles a year, compiling the resulting date, time, and GPS coordinates into a massive database of private citizens’ movements around the city. Commissioner William Evans aims to review the policy surrounding license plate readers “so he knows that it’s being used effectively and that it doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy,” said spokeswoman Cheryl Fiandaca.

The decision follows an inquiry by investigators at MuckRock that asked the BPD for its scan data in January, 2012. When the unredacted data was finally released in July, it revealed the precise GPS data and license plate numbers for over 40,000 different vehicles, prompting the department to freeze the program while it figures out how to proceed.

“You can’t help but wonder whether the real purpose is simply to collect droves of data.”

What’s particularly embarrassing for Boston Police is how ineffective the scanners appear to be at producing actual arrests. The Globe reveals that the license plate with the highest number of scans was flagged for lapsed insurance over 90 times, while a stolen Harley Davidson was spotted 59 times between October 2012 and March 2013, nearly always at the same time of day. Said the ACLU’s Kade Crockford, “you can’t help but wonder whether the real purpose is simply to collect droves of data about where innocent people are driving, in case it might be useful for investigations later.”

Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios has quite a job to fill, producing original video content as part of the company’s quest for absolute living room dominance. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a live-action show based on the Halo universe, and in October it added a street soccer reality show called Every Street United to the lineup. Now, Deadline Hollywood is announcing that a still-untitled comedy about retired pro skaters is making its way to the Xbox One sometime in the future.

The project is being executive produced by skater and MTV regular Rob Dyrdek and written by Ian Edelman, creator of How to Make it in America. It’s no surprise that Microsoft is targeting skateboarding given its long history of video game tie-ins, and with the company working on “literally hundreds of ideas,” we’re expecting to hear about a lot more shows in the next few months.

Last month, institutional investors in AT&T and Verizon asked the two companies begin to issue the kinds of transparency reports popularized by internet businesses like Twitter and Google. Today, AT&T is issuing its response to the request, reports the New York Times, and unsurprisingly, it’s not too excited about the idea. To AT&T, its response to law enforcement requests represent “ordinary business operations,” outside the purview of ordinary shareholders, so it’s excluding the request from the ballot for next spring’s annual shareholder meeting. The policy the company cites is designed to prevent shareholders from “probing too deeply into matters of a complex nature upon which [they]… would not be in a position to make an informed judgment.”

Companies like Google are actively pushing the DOJ

The response also notes that while shareholders were motivated by nonstop news coverage of the NSA’s vast surveillance efforts, the company couldn’t release the details of secret requests even if it wanted to. (A fact Google publicly skewered in its most recent transparency report.) But while that may be true, companies like Google are actively pushing the DOJ for the ability to publish data on secret FISA requests, and there’s nothing stopping AT&T from publishing figures on ordinary law enforcement requests. Nothing other than AT&T’s board of directors, that is. Head over to the Times to read the company’s entire response.