Month: March 2023

Google’s Cautious Approach to Artificial Intelligence ⇥ wsj.com

Miles Kruppa and Sam Schechner, Wall Street Journal:

Now Google, the company that helped pioneer the modern era of artificial intelligence, finds its cautious approach to that very technology being tested by one of its oldest rivals. Last month Microsoft Corp. announced plans to infuse its Bing search engine with the technology behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, which has wowed the world with its ability to converse in humanlike fashion. Developed by a seven-year-old startup co-founded by Elon Musk called OpenAI, ChatGPT piggybacked on early AI advances made at Google itself.

[…]

Google’s approach could prove to be prudent. Microsoft said in February it would put new limits on its chatbot after users reported inaccurate answers, and sometimes unhinged responses when pushing the app to its limits.

Many in the tech commentariat have predicted victory for Microsoft products so often it has become a running joke in some circles. It released one of the first folding phones which it eventually unloaded on Woot at a 70% discount; it was one of many instances where Microsoft’s entry was prematurely championed.

Even after all the embarrassing problems in Google’s Bard presentation and demos and the pressure the company is now facing, I imagine its management is feeling somewhat vindicated by Microsoft’s rapid dampening of the sassier side of its assistant. While Microsoft could use its sheer might to rapidly build a user base — as it did with Teams — Google could also flip a switch to do the same because it is the world’s most popular website.

Today’s Startups Are Tomorrow’s Privacy Catastrophes ⇥ techcrunch.com

Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

A paucity of legislation and regulation have allowed American tech companies to thrive and grow, enriched by our personal information and data we created, including anything from where we go to what we buy, to the people we communicate with to the content we consume. If the adage that data is the new currency is true, it’s no wonder why tech companies keep getting richer. There are few rules for what companies can do with our information, but plenty of profit-making playbooks to work from. Every day a new tranche of startups have our data in their sights, but as consumers facing today’s technology, what hope do we have when the conditions for our security and privacy are worse?

The longer it takes before meaningful privacy legislation is passed in the United States, the more data on users from around the world is collected and exploited.

This Is What You Will Pay For ⇥ jaimebrooks.substack.com

Jaime Brooks:

Podcasts were supposed to help them do this. Spotify used to address investor concerns about the viability of their business model by comparing themselves to Netflix, a company that was successfully able to woo subscribers away from expensive licensed fare with their own original first-party content. For this to work, podcasts would have had to overshadow major label music on Spotify the way “House of Cards” and “Stranger Things” came to dominate users’ consumption habits on Netflix. That did not happen. All these years and acquisitions later, podcasts currently account for only seven percent of total listening hours on the platform. Spotify doesn’t compare themselves to Netflix anymore. Instead, they’ve taken to invoking YouTube, a business that revolves around selling advertising.

When I came across Jaime Brooks on Spotify, I worried about how the platform’s recommendation “algorithm” would hold up as generators become more popular and sophisticated. If it already struggles to understand that a forty-six second track by a brand new artist doesn’t belong anywhere near a “Mozart For Babies” compilation, I wondered, how will it contend with what’s coming? This was naïve of me. I was still thinking in terms of Netflix’s business model, where a flood of low-quality generative assets clogging up recommendation queues would likely trigger a wave of cancelled subscriptions. YouTube’s business model, on the other hand, cultivates lower expectations. While your average Spotify subscriber probably spends most of their time on the platform listening to the same music over and over again, YouTube is full of manipulative, low-quality media that succeeds in making money whenever it can successfully bait a user into sitting through a few minutes of it. Jaime would fit in well there.

I am not sure how much holds up in my rebuttal to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s 2019 blog post about his issues with Apple’s platform, though I think most of it is fair. But the argument which I keep thinking about is how Spotify should be the name-brand premium product to Apple’s store-brand generic offering in Apple Music, and it keeps undermining that factor. Repositioning itself as music’s YouTube is not doing that reputation any favours, particularly not when music has its YouTube already: it is called YouTube. Spotify can and should be better than this, and other streaming music products should be on watch to avoid the future described by Brooks and others.

Alas, Spotify is becoming more like TikTok.

Bill C–18, After Facebook and Google ⇥ ricochet.media

Andrea Houston, Ricochet:

Then there’s the question of what would happen down the road if Google and Facebook were no longer profitable? [Senator Paula] Simons told Ricochet that when she raised that question with staff in the Heritage ministry, she was told they “would turn to TikTok.”

“I said, ‘Wait a minute! TikTok doesn’t share news links,’” Simons recalled. “And staff said, ‘TikTok shares news stories in other ways. It talks about the news.’ I said, ‘Woah, wait a minute! That’s a fair-use argument.’…Then the official said to me, ‘Lots of Canadians get their news from TikTok.’”

Ominous.

The Erosion of Personal Privacy Through Expansive Warrants and Home Surveillance ⇥ politico.com

Alfred Ng, Politico:

The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of “suspicious activity” between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Larkin cooperated, and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 times in that time frame.

He thought that was all the police would need. Instead, it was just the beginning.

They asked for more footage, now from the entire day’s worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras — whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself.

According to Ng, that included video from cameras placed within Larkin’s home, plus his business at a separate address; Ring, owned by Amazon, complied with the warrant, but the police department said it did not receive any interior video.

I wrote about this exact issue a few years ago, back when Ring received just 536 warrants and complied with nearly 80% of them. The problem has only worsened since. A chart in Ng’s article indicates the company received 3,600 data requests in 2022 and, while it no longer discloses its compliance rate, it told U.S. Senator Ed Markey in July that it provided footage to police from doorbells without a warrant or the owner’s permission on eleven occasions in the first half of that year.

If you have a Ring camera, you can enable end-to-end encryption to prevent unauthorized access to your footage. Unfortunately, while that may protect owners’ rights, it does little for the rest of us living in a sea of others’ anxieties.

Netflix and the 1980s Video Game Market ⇥ currentaffairs.org

Rachel Ashcroft, Current Affairs:

But by December 1982, things had turned sour. The market was overrun with poor-quality games. Consumers regularly complained about low-budget titles with poor-quality graphics or stories that were too easy to complete. There was also an overabundance of video game consoles (the Intellivision, the ColecoVision, and so on) plus the rising threat of home computer systems such as the Apple II, which could play video games and help with homework. Atari revealed that its annual year-over-year sales increase had only been 10 percent, far less than the 50 percent it originally estimated. Wall Street investors panicked, and in 1983 Atari saw nearly half a billion dollars wiped from its value. Demand for video games plummeted. Toy manufacturer Mattel, once the third-largest video game maker, left the market entirely. Many smaller companies went bust and industry-wide losses totaled approximately $1.5 billion. The boom years of the early 1980s were officially over.

What does this retro tale of industry-wide economic bust have to do with modern-day entertainment? We can identify growing similarities with another medium which is still in its infancy: streaming video on demand (SVOD). […]

As you may have guessed, this is another entry in a popular genre — when is all this streaming video too much? is quickly becoming when are all these articles about all this streaming video too much? — but I appreciate Ashcroft’s specific take. There are more bad shows being made today than ever before, but there are more truly excellent shows, too; there is just more of everything. But similar pieces have been written for years and, while the pace of output on individual platforms may be less than it once was, the output remains relentless. I have occasionally mentioned this. Barring Ashcroft’s question of an industry-wide shift, all of us may wonder whether the world can simply bear the weight of so many more shows than anyone expected.

A Deceptive Pattern Ties Users’ Instagram and Facebook Posts ⇥ nytimes.com

Kalley Huang and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times:

The surge in Facebook activity is rooted in a new feature from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Last year, Meta introduced a prompt that popped up on Instagram when people posted a photo or story. The prompt asked Instagram users if they wanted to share their post to Facebook, too.

To make the prompt go away, users had to click a big blue button to agree to share their Instagram posts on Facebook, or a smaller hyperlink to opt out. Many people, including Ms. Underwood, clicked the more visible blue button — and then immediately forgot about it, according to interviews with more than a dozen Gen Z and millennial Instagram users. Reversing the setting requires clicking through multiple Instagram menus.

The relationship between the age range of users interviewed for this story — “Gen Z and millennial” — and the deceptive dialog seems tenuous. While Instagram generally skews younger than Facebook, there is no indication in this story that the prompt was targeted to a certain demographic on Instagram.

Anyway, just another day at the newly “privacy-focused” social company that is Meta, upholding principles like “reducing permanence” and safety.

A Brief Look at the Specialty Coffee Market Today ⇥ youtube.com

The main thing which struck me when watching this short video about the current specialty coffee market is how the price paid to producers in Kenya, for example, has declined in recent years. It was upsetting to learn that as the consumer price for specialty coffee has gone up pretty dramatically, at least around here. Instead of 340-gram bags, some specialty roasters are switching to 300-gram and even 250-gram bags at the same or higher price points. I can accept the cost increase, but I do so with the assumption producers are receiving a better rate. I welcome greater transparency.

Technological Optimism and Technological Pragmatism ⇥ davekarpf.substack.com

Dave Karpf:

And of course, as I’ve noted elsewhere, today’s tech barons are also proud techno-optimists. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel… it turns out the one thing that all of Silicon Valley’s billionaire-class agrees on is that life is headed in a good direction.

In its most innocent form, this generic optimism has a saccharine quality. (It’s The Secret, but with pitch decks and vanity metrics.)

More often, what I think is happening is that comfortable tech elites deploy ideological optimism as a shield. There is an agenda-setting function at work here. The problem with techno-optimism is the pragmatic questions that it forecloses. The problem is all that is obscured when we behave as though the world will naturally improve (so long as we collectively wish hard enough.)

This is a very good essay which gestures toward the gap between noticing problems, and either ignoring them or doing something about them. There are those who reflexively insist that criticism is antithetical to progress — that pointing out the failures of something new is a good way to kill the new thing. I reject that assertion. If the new thing has enough good qualities, its proponents should welcome criticism that will improve it. We should welcome negative forces which require rethinking things and causing them to get better.

TikTok Bans Are Ineffectual Without Real Privacy Oversight ⇥ gizmodo.com

Rachel Gilmore, writing for Global News on February 27:

The Canadian government is banning the use of the popular short-form video application TikTok on all government-issued mobile devices, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier announced on Monday.

Effective Tuesday, TikTok “will be removed from government-issued mobile devices,” Fortier said in a statement.

“Following a review of TikTok, the Chief Information Officer of Canada determined that it presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security,” she added.

This comes days after the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced it was beginning an investigation into TikTok’s practices. Bans on government devices have been reciprocated at the provincial and municipal levels.

Nick Logan, CBC News:

The government has not indicated it wants to widen the ban but there are discussions in the U.S. about banning TikTok outright and preventing ByteDance from doing business there.

Kristen Csenkey, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo’s Balsillie School of International Affairs, sees problems with this because of the app’s roles as both a social platform and a source of income for millions of people.

“We need to consider what the implications are,” she said. “It’s not just a technology or an app that’s just used for one purpose.”

Thomas Germain, Gizmodo:

Some 28,251 apps use TikTok’s software development kits, (SDKs), tools which integrates apps with TikTok’s systems—and send TikTok user data — for functions like ads within TikTok, logging in, and sharing videos from the app. That’s according to a search conducted by Gizmodo and corroborated by AppFigures, an analytics company. But apps aren’t TikTok’s only source of data. There are TikTok trackers spread across even more websites. The type of data sharing TikTok is doing is just as common on other parts of the internet.

You have probably seen me and others make similar arguments before, and the reality of this situation has not changed since. The way online advertising is structured has made it impossible to create privacy for users on a case-by-case or app-by-app basis. There is too much information being collected about too many people at all times to make that a viable response. Despite increasing attempts at legislation, the United States remains a haven for the kinds of businesses which depend on subverting our expectations of privacy. Even in countries like Canada — with provincial and national privacy laws — there is work to be done. Perfect is the enemy of good, as they say, so if a national ban of TikTok were a productive effort for improving individual privacy, I think it would be a worthwhile step to take. But it would only be theatre.

Even if there were a coordinated response in countries that view China as an antagonist — the U.S., Canada, E.U. nations, the U.K., and so on — to prohibit TikTok and its SDKs, it would be a waiting game until the next big app from a developer with connections to the Chinese government. In the meantime, that government could happily acquire vast amounts of individualized information from the existing online advertising and data broker markets. It would be a response that, at the very least, has the appearance of new Red Scare xenophobia, yet has little actual benefit to user privacy.

Also:

If the US government starts blocking traffic from going to a particular company, or country for that matter, it starts to look a lot like practices the US has spent years criticizing China for. The so-called “great firewall of China” sets up significant filters that censor and monitor the Chinese internet, keeping out businesses that pose threats to the nation’s economy and political control. If you ask the Chinese Communist Party why it does this, it will tell you it’s for the good of the Chinese people, and it protects national security concerns. It also limits free expression.

About that.

I Do Not Want to Log in to Your Website ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

One of the major problems with salesbros is that they think “always be closing” is a mantra to live by because they didn’t understand the point of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is that salespeople are nightmares. That’s why there’s always some silly pop-up chat at the bottom of every website now. No, Pamela — if that is your real name — I don’t want live assistance booking my yoga class. You are hogging valuable screen real estate.

Well said.

I feel bad every time I link to anything on Substack, in particular, because I do not think you deserve to be subjected to its desperate email prompt. It is a shame how popular it has become given how irritating it is to read blogs hosted there.