Month: January 2024

A Survey of Popular Apps Currently Compatible With Apple’s Vision Pro ⇥ macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

You see, iPhone and iPad apps are compatible with Apple Vision Pro and made available to its users by default. Developers have to affirmatively opt-out, using App Store Connect if they don’t want their apps to show up in the device’s App Store.

As it turns out, it’s possible to tell if a developer has opted out by using App Store API endpoints. So, with a little help, we built a shortcut to check some of the most popular apps on the App Store. […]

Of forty-six popular apps — all of which you will recognize — all but seventeen have been opted out of compatibility mode. None have a native VisionOS app. One important caveat noted by Voorhees is that all of this could change by February 2. Apple only began allowing submissions of Vision Pro apps last week so it is also possible some of these big-name developers have not submitted new versions, or they are holding native versions until Vision Pro release day.

Still, it is an interesting survey of where things stand right now, particularly for the large list of first-party apps which will be shipping in compatibility mode. Some of them, like Reminders and Stocks, are presumably lower priority applications that do not benefit as much from a spatial experience. But Maps, in particular, seems to me like an application that will be completely different as a VisionOS app and needs more development time.

‘The Tyranny of the Algorithm’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Kyle Chayka, in the Guardian, describes the universalized interior design trends of what he calls post-recession “hipster coffee shops”:

Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.

This is an excerpt from Chayka’s new book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture”, out this week. I have put myself on the waiting list for it at the library and I am looking forward to reading it, but I am already skeptical of the argument it will make based on what is presented here.

Based on the title, you can probably predict it references Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, which is a questionable start. Where Friedman proposes an economic playing field he says has been levelled somewhat by globalization and technology, Chayka argues a similar effect has occurred in cultural and expressive terms primarily through algorithmically promoted, sorted, and filtered ideas. On its face, this will be a compelling investigation. I think the role played by automated systems in our understanding of current events needs ongoing serious longform exploration. There have been plenty of books about individual companies, and there have been article-length vibes-based stories, but the only deep exploration in this vein I can remember is Cathy O’Neil’s excellent “Weapons of Math Destruction” from 2016. Chayka seems to present a more recent evaluation.

Unfortunately, my first glimpse of it is this Guardian story. While the book has a more generic title, this excerpt is specifically about the apparent influence of Instagram and Australian café culture on coffee shops and restaurants. Chayka writes that it is not any specific aesthetic quality which is disputable but “the fundamental homogeneity, which became more and more entrenched” in otherwise unrelated areas. But this just sounds like it is describing trends accelerated by the web, not necessarily something impressed upon us by what photos are on someone’s social media feed. The world is full of incongruous architectural, language, branding, and fashion choices — but, then again, it has been for a long time before social media or even the internet. I am curious to read how Chayka expands upon this argument.

Later in this excerpt, there is one more thing I found notable. Chayka, regarding businesses’ use of Instagram:

The effect May observed could be called “follower inflation”. High follower numbers correlate less and less to actual engagement over time, as the platform’s priorities change or the same content tricks stop working. It’s a familiar feeling for all of us who have been on Instagram over the past decade. While it might hurt your ego to receive fewer likes on a selfie, it’s a real financial problem when that follower footprint is how a business makes money, whether it’s a cafe attracting visitors or an influencer selling sponsored content.

What is not established in this piece is whether a business being popular on Instagram necessarily correlates with being popular in real life. Photogenic business features and art exhibitions are something I have written about before, and I still think there is lots to be explored therein. I am sure photo walls and brightly-coloured decor is attractive and lures people in. What keeps them coming back and spreading the word, on the other hand, is a place worth visiting beyond the aesthetics. Some of my favourite places to visit in Calgary have terrible social media presence, but they are constantly busy because they are good.

The New TV ⇥ lrb.co.uk

James Meek, London Review of Books:

The​ arcs of the New Hollywood and the new TV are alike. The early optimism of Easy Riders fades when it turns out that American auteurs inspired by the French New Wave aren’t the future of popular big-screen entertainment: instead it’s the merch-rich, tech-heavy, super-franchisable kidult melodramas of the Star Wars series, with their exuberant faux-alien decors, portentous dialogue and reliable income stream. Some of the same processes are happening in TV.

And, now, in streaming services which, as Meek writes, are content to drown users in expensive shows that often fail to fulfill their potential. I particularly liked the part of this essay about the era of prestige television shows defined by anti-heroes.

U.S. Apple Developers Can Now Offer Non-App Store Purchasing Option ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple is making major changes to its U.S. iOS App Store policies, and developers are now able to direct customers to a non-App Store purchasing option for digital goods. Apple is allowing apps to feature a single link to a developer website that leads to an in-app purchase alternative, but Apple plans to continue to collect a 12 to 27 percent commission on content bought this way.

Clover says it and Apple says it but I feel compelled to emphasize this one point: this is a U.S.-only capability. In the Netherlands, Apple permits dating apps — and only dating apps — to use a similar entitlement, or a different one that permits in-app purchases with another payment system. Soon, Apple will be enabling sideloading for E.U. users, a capability I could see coexisting with the Dutch entitlements, and it seems likely Japanese regulators could demand the same.

Developers sure will have a lot of paperwork to complete in the near future if they want to take advantage of these additional capabilities. Apple is creating this bureaucracy because it says this is how it gets paid to develop iOS; Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found, on page 114 of her decision (PDF) Apple’s arguments were “pretextual, but not to the exclusion of some measure of compensation”. I find that line questionable mainly because Apple has developed MacOS continuously for over twenty years without taking a commission on digital purchases. But who am I to question that?

I do believe the App Store costs money to run and, also, that Apple would like to make it profitable. In addition to a payment infrastructure, Apple pays for hosting, marketing, DRM — whether developers want it or not — and developer events in-person and online. I do not know if this costs anywhere close to its App Store revenue and I question the merits of it, but this argument seems like a nominally defensible, though not P.R.-friendly, justification for a commission if these are the terms by which the App Store will operate. (Judge Rogers came to more-or-less the same conclusion.)

The snag is that Apple needs to make the App Store uncompetitive by design because no third-party app distribution platform would have extra costs. I think I would prefer if the App Store needed to compete on its own merits, but it could mean other knock-on effects. Maybe Apple would charge separately for all of the other developer programme features, for example, or increase the price of a developer membership.

In the interim, this is the messy system we have. Instead of one App Store around the world — with minor asterisks — there will now be different permissions depending on which geographically-restricted features a developer chooses to use. And Apple has created a bureaucracy to ensure it captures all the money it believes and has argued it is owed. Many developers would be right to question that, but should not be surprised when E.U. sideloading rules are similarly un-Mac-like.

Fusus Allows Police to Monitor Public and Private Camera Feeds Across Cities ⇥ 404media.co

Jon Schuppe and Bracey Harris, reporting for NBC News in December 2020 from Mississippi:

The move made Jackson, which has struggled to keep up with advances in high-tech crime-fighting, one of two dozen places in the country where police agencies inked deals this year with Fusus, a small Georgia company that aims to make it easier for American law enforcement agencies to build networks of public and private security cameras.

[…]

The company helps police departments build networks of public and private cameras. The service includes devices — black boxes the size of Wi-Fi routers — that convert video from just about any kind of camera into a format that can be fed, live or recorded, into a police surveillance hub. Fusus contracts with police departments, which typically sell, subsidize or give the devices to private users. Documents obtained through government records requests show Fusus listing packages from $480 to $1,000 a year per device.

Zac Larkham, OpenDemocracy, September 2023:

Fusus has been attempting to expand into the UK, opening an office in London’s Canary Wharf in March this year and hiring former officers from the Met to approach councils and police forces. It has approached Tower Hamlets and Hackney borough councils and the Met, City of London and Merseyside police forces to sell products that integrate CCTV and surveillance networks, according to Freedom of Information requests.

Kensington and Chelsea Council and Merton Council also confirmed they had also been in contact with Fusus when approached by openDemocracy, with Kensington and Chelsea running a 60-day trial starting earlier this month.

Bobby Hristova, CBC News, October:

Hamilton police was one of over a dozen Canadian police agencies in attendance at the Real Time Crime Center Operations and Tech Integration conference in Mississauga, Ont., in early October, CBC Hamilton has learned.

Some of those in attendance saw a demo of Fusus — a paid service that makes it easier for police to access privately owned security camera footage from residents and businesses.

I linked to a couple of pieces about Real-Time Operations Centres in July.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media, in November:

404 Media has obtained a cache of internal emails, presentations, memos, photos, and more which provide insight into how Fusus teams up with police departments to sell its surveillance technology. All around the country, city councils are debating whether they want to have a system that qualitatively changes what surveillance cameras mean for a town’s residents and public agencies. While many have adopted Fusus, others have pushed back, and refused to have the hardware and software installed in their neighborhoods.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

More than a hundred local police departments, sheriff’s offices, and cities have set up an AI-powered camera system, with nearly 200,000 connected cameras belonging to residents and businesses around the country able to provide “direct access” to law enforcement, according to a 404 Media analysis of a set of scraped data.

404 Media has assembled a spreadsheet of Fusus data it obtained. The scale is surprising to me, considering it requires private camera owners to purchase hardware costing at least $350, plus $150 per year, in order to allow Fusus access to their cameras’ feeds. According to this sheet, however, over 187,000 camera feeds are “integrated”.

Initiatives like these are fascinating because they represent a break from falling societal trust in institutions in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. (PDF); something like this requires significant public buy-in. While people generally are more confident in local institutions — like city governments and police — I would be shocked if many people agreed to provide live camera access directly to their local police service if asked. It should be noted the data published by 404 Media is inherently self-selecting, which means people are wilfully opting in to mass surveillance and paying to participate. This should not be confused with an authoritarian police state in which participation in a system like this would be mandatory. Here, it is not. The obligations of a police state are certainly objectionable, of course, but so is mass surveillance on its own grounds — even when it is purely voluntary.

Given inflated media reports of crime, I have little wonder why this sector has been so successful.

WhatsApp’s User Base Appears to Be Growing in the U.S. ⇥ bigtechnology.com

Alex Kantrowitz, in a Big Technology article with the headline “WhatsApp is Finally Starting to Dominate in the United States. Here’s Why.”:

Suddenly, everyone in the U.S. seems to be using WhatsApp. The app — once seen as an international phenomenon — grew daily users in the U.S. by 9% in 2023, according to Apptopia, and is gaining steam among the iPhone crowd.

Nine percent growth is nothing to sniff at, but framing it as “starting to dominate” and stating that it is being used by seemingly “everyone in the U.S.” is an over-egged pudding if ever I saw one.

Kantrowitz has some theories about why it is growing; here is one I found plausible:

A record number of Americans took vacations in 2023, with many traveling abroad. Hot spots like Mexico City, Santorini, and the Amalfi Coast were overrun with American tourists, a product of stimulus cash crossed with a desire for revenge travel. Outside the States, these travelers learned that WhatsApp is a vital communication tool for people and businesses. And after the international introduction, they kept using it, keeping in touch with contacts abroad and seeking to connect with U.S. businesses in a similar way.

It would not surprise me if this was a significant catalyst for WhatsApp’s growth, though whether it is maintained is a different story. WhatsApp truly is the communications fabric for much of the world. I use it for chatting with family throughout Europe and, just this weekend, I made dinner reservations for later this year.

Kantrowitz’s other theories include WhatsApp marketing campaigns and growing business users, both of which make sense to me, and increased interest in cross-platform compatibility, which is less convincing. Kantrowitz writes “most of WhatsApp’s users in the U.S. are iPhone owners”, according to the company. If you believe market share data from Statcounter or Counterpoint, the iPhone has a plurality of the U.S. smartphone market. If there were an even distribution of WhatsApp users, more of them would be iPhone owners, so cross-platform compatibility within the U.S. seems less necessary. However, if you believe CIRP, the iPhone’s market share in the U.S. has been declining and now sits at 39%.

Artifact Is Shutting Down ⇥ medium.com

Kevin Systrom announced the decision to shut down Artifact on Medium:

While we’ve made this decision, we wanted to make sure that we allowed the community time to adjust. So, today we’ve decided to slim down the app’s complexity and operations by removing the ability to add new comments and posts. This type of content requires a fair amount of moderation and oversight and we will not have the staff going forward to support these features. Your existing posts, however, will remain visible to you on your own profile self-view. In the meantime, Artifact will continue to operate the core news reading capability through the end of February.

Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Artifact last January, but I did not get into using it until — and this is true — earlier this week. It is unfortunate this did not pan out as successfully as Systrom and Krieger’s last idea.

How Threads Will Integrate With the Fediverse ⇥ plasticbag.org

Tom Coates attended an event of some kind thrown by Meta in December in which the company laid out its fediverse plans for Threads:

Threads itself has only been around for a few months now and it still towers over the rest of the Mastodon community in terms of users. It’s based on the Instagram user base, and Instagram users can opt in to use Threads with a single tap. Because of that — as of a recent earnings report — Meta can currently claim around 160 million total users and about 100 million MAUs. So, again, Threads ‘integrating’ with the fediverse is maybe not the way to think about it, and Threads attempting to engage with it without entirely crushing it is closer to the mark.

Given that paragraph, you might be surprised by the overall optimistic tone of this piece. I found myself nodding along with Coates’ description of the challenges of trying to fit the Meta model into the fediverse, and vice versa. It is not impossible, it is going to require a lot of work, and it sounds like Meta wants to make a good faith effort. I do not much like Threads as an application, but I know many people are now active there and I would like to see their posts on my own terms.

Then again, I am reminded of the time Facebook launched a fakey email service which used email addresses for its own internal messaging capabilities. Fun fact — it was called “Project Titan”, which seems to be a name reserved for only the best projects.

Platformer Is the Latest Newsletter to Leave Substack ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton, Platformer:

In emails, comments, Substack Notes and callouts on social media, you’ve made your view clear: Platformer should leave Substack. We waited a day to announce our move as we finalized plans with Ghost and began our migration. But today we can say clearly that we agree with you.

[…]

We didn’t ask Substack to solve racism. We asked it to give us an easy, low-drama place to do business, and to commit to not funding and accelerating the growth of hate movements. Ultimately we did not get either.

Platformer is not the biggest publication on Substack — that remains Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter — but it is the one Substack uses in its marketing images. It is also one of several newsletters which has either left the platform or is in the process of migrating in this wave of protest. In 2022, Grace Lavery moved; in 2021, Jude Doyle did.

Newton used this opportunity to correct the record on some phrasing from Monday’s issue he came to regret. He also clarifies what makes Substack different, including its recommendation and social components, and dedicates a section of this newsletter to common questions and answers about why this is important. Those growth features are how I was able to assemble my own list of a dozen large — that is, thousands of readers — pro-Nazi publications hosted on Substack earlier today without looking very hard. Newton may have submitted a list of six of the very worst — of which Substack banned five — but there are plenty more out there, and they are not hiding.

‘I Made This’ ⇥ hypercritical.co

John Siracusa:

In its current state, generative AI breaks the value chain between creators and consumers. We don’t have to reconnect it in exactly the same way it was connected before, but we also can’t just leave it dangling. The historical practice of conferring ownership based on the act of creation still seems sound, but that means we must be able to unambiguously identify that act. And if the same act (absent any prior legal arrangements) confers ownership in one context but not in another, then perhaps it’s not the best candidate.

I ruminated on similar themes earlier this week, and last month, and before that — and I will probably keep linking to and writing about this subject. In the abstract, one thing I appreciate about this moment is how challenging this technology is. It requires us to think deeply about what we want from intellectual property law, technology, and art.

Of course, the people tossing out bottomless funding do not seem to care much for thinking about questions like these. They are preoccupied with putting “e/acc” in their Twitter handle and promoting this stuff relentlessly, as they always have.

Sleeve, a Now Playing and Last.fm Scrobbler for MacOS ⇥ replay.software

Unnecessary backstory: in this year’s instalment of “Classics Week”, Anthony Fantano highlighted the excellent Gorillaz album “Demon Days”. It has been a while since I last played it, so I gave it a spin and it was an instant nostalgia tunnel to 2005. I joked about needing a glassy album cover on my desktop and Christopher Downer pointed me to Sleeve.

Sleeve is a simple but useful widget for your desktop, similar to Bowtie. It shows your currently-playing song and it is a Last.fm scrobbler. As it happens, Sleeve was updated a few months ago. Just six U.S. dollars for a lovely piece of indie software that does a handful of things very well. My only complaint is a lack of wet floor effect.

The Internet Archive Now Hosts DatPiff’s Collection of Rap Mixtapes ⇥ archive.org

In April, the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott said DatPiff would be uploading every mixtape it had because the site was going in a “different direction”. The resulting library of hundreds of thousands of records is an overflowing treasure chest.

Andre Gee, Rolling Stone:

No one at DatPiff divulged much about what happened with last year’s server crash or their new plans for their platform. They developed an app in 2019, but it’s no longer on the App Store or Google Play store. It’s unclear what Datpiff 2.0 will look like in a digital ecosystem where streaming providers and platforms like SoundCloud have become the primary venues for artists to upload their music. But what’s surer, for now, is that their upload to The Internet Archive will protect a generation of music.

We are so lucky the Internet Archive exists.

Substack Is Not Infrastructure ⇥ garbageday.email

Matt Birchler:

Substack is not open source, they are proprietary software. Substack is not infrastructure, they are a brand that is directly tied to the people using them to publish. Go to any Substack blog and you’ll see the Substack logo and terms and conditions. Subscribe to a writer’s newsletter, and boom, you’ve got a Substack account that you’ll now use to subscribe to anything else (and they’ll make sure to suggest things to make sure you do). No one is talking about Digital Ocean starting up a subscription service where you pay them a flat fee and get full access to all websites using them as a provider. I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just saying this is how social platforms work, not how infrastructure services work.

Ryan Broderick has decided to move Garbage Day:

None of this had to happen. Ghost, a Substack competitor, has almost no real moderation to speak of, but no one seems to care. You know why? Because it’s not trying to jam all of its users into one feed to compete with Twitter or whatever. Substack, meanwhile, has insisted on adding more social features over the last three years, instead of making their email product better. Which is still missing tons of pretty basic features. And so they, predictably, ended up creating a poorly moderated network that was attractive to extremists. […]

There was a time when Substack seemed more utilitarian than the way it now presents itself. It has social network components; it has recommendation engines; its homepage is primarily aimed at readers and promotes the wide range of newsletters published on the platform. It has a “Staff Picks” category.

Substack knows who its writers are, it knows they publish some worrisome stuff, and it works both sides — to the extent there are opposing sides on the issue of whether Nazis should be permitted to broadcast their views using this popular broadcasting platform. To Casey Newton, of Platformer, Substack said it would be removing some Nazi-supporting newsletters. To the perpetually JAQ-ing Jesse Singal, someone leaked the full email from Substack’s founders to Newton as fodder for a broader misleading free speech argument, and a question of whether five Nazi newsletters is such a big deal.

Nazis surely use other platforms; sometimes, they may broadcast their deeply hateful views. But most platforms that are comfortable associating their brand with what is published and promoted within will respond to hate speech by removing those posts or those users. The problem is, of course, the Nazi, but it is a problem to hang out a shingle as a business open to treating all ideas as equally open for debate. Infrastructure companies, on the other hand, tend to avoid associating themselves with those who use their services in such a direct manner.1 Substack tries to have it both ways. As a result, it is affecting its own reputation and that of the writers who use the platform.

  1. Worth noting many web hosts also deny services for all kinds of reasons and, if notified of misbehaviour, will terminate accounts. This famously happened to Nazi forum Stormfront. ↥︎

Finally, a Grocery Cart That Can Prevent an Ad-Free Moment of Existence ⇥ defector.com

Alex Bitter, Business Insider:

Instacart will test ads on its Caper smart shopping carts at Bristol Farms grocery stores in Southern California, it said on Monday. These carts, designed by an AI startup Instacart acquired in 2021, have been tested in Kroger, Schnucks, Geissler’s, and Wakefern. The new ads will appear on a screen just above the handle on the carts, and the ads will even be personalized based on an individual shopper’s choices.

It is not as though most supermarkets are a pleasant ad-free existence today. In addition to the visual noise of shelves of product packaging, many chains yell ads at you over the in-store announcement system, and permit shelf-level marketing signage.

Albert Burneko, Defector:

This is one of those new technologies that’s useful primarily as a viewfinder on a dismal present and a future determined to be even more miserable. Nobody anywhere will like the smart carts. Nobody, anywhere, will find them not-obnoxious. Everybody who does more than a couple of moments of thinking about it will be horrified by the idea of humanity digging gigantic devastating holes in the ailing planet and mining out its contents for the purpose of putting tablet computers onto grocery carts so that they can perform a service repulsive to literally everyone. Nobody — nobody nobody nobody! — wants to live in a society characterized by inescapable omnipresent advertising for consumer products; no one yet born has yearned to have video advertisements take up ever more of their field of vision.

These “A.I.-powered smart shopping carts” — as they are nauseatingly described on Caper’s website — are pitched as a way to both generate revenue through advertising and reduce employment costs. It is the product of a bleak imagination. To be fair, it is unlikely I will be seeing these in my local grocery stores; the places I shop are nowhere near as fancy as Bristol Farms. But, still, nobody wants this.

Airline Safety Requires Constant Dedication ⇥ nytimes.com

Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times (via Jason Kottke):

Both incidents could have been much worse. And that everyone on both airliners walked away is, indeed, a miracle — but not the kind most people think about. They’re miracles of regulation, training, expertise, effort, constant improvement of infrastructure, as well as professionalism and heroism of the crew.

[…]

As the facts come in, there will be more questions as to what went wrong — United Airlines and Alaska Airlines have both found loose bolts on the grounded Boeing airliners. That coast guard plane in Japan was in the wrong place. But progress comes by acknowledging these failures and working to make them even less likely in the future.

One of my all-time favourite series is “Mayday” which, through dramatizations of disaster investigations, shows how necessary it is to learn about every factor contributing to a tragedy. These investigations are rarely shown as blaming anyone, but the relevant authorities still seem to hold parties accountable for their mistakes and, just as important, attempt to prevent similar errors.

Update: Felix Salmon also wrote about this at Axios.

Using the Wayback Machine and Google Analytics to Find Hidden Web Connections ⇥ bellingcat.com

Justin Clark, Bellingcat:

[…] Bellingcat has developed a lightweight open source research tool — Wayback Google Analytics — which automates the collection of tracking codes and discovery of relationships between websites using copies of sites maintained by The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This will help researchers sidestep recent changes to how Google manages its analytics data.

This is one of those things that is worth bookmarking now because you might find yourself needing it months-to-years down the road. Via Andy Baio, naturally.

Lina Khan’s FTC Gets Results Against Data Broker X-Mode ⇥ ftc.gov

In 2020, Joseph Cox of Vice published an investigation into HYAS, explaining how it received precise location data from X-Mode; I linked to this story at the time. The latter company, now Outlogic, obtained that data from, according to Cox’s reporting, an SDK embedded “in over 400 apps [which] gathers information on 60 million global monthly users on average”. It sold access to that data to marketers, law enforcement, and intelligence firms. Months later, Apple and Google said apps in their stores would be prohibited from embedding X-Mode’s SDK.

Even in the famously permissive privacy environment of the United States, it turns out some aspects of the company’s behaviour could be illegal and, in 2022, the FTC filed a complaint (PDF) alleging seven counts of “unfair and deceptive” trade. Today, the Commission has announced a settlement.

Lesley Fair of the FTC:

[…] Among other things, the proposed order puts substantial limits on sharing certain sensitive location data and requires the company to develop a comprehensive sensitive location data program to prevent the use and sale of consumers’ sensitive location data. X-Mode/Outlogic also must take steps to prevent clients from associating consumers with locations that provide services to LGBTQ+ individuals or with locations of public gatherings like marches or protests. In addition, the company must take effective steps to see to it that clients don’t use their location data to determine the identity or location of a specific individual’s home. And even for location data that may not reveal visits to sensitive locations, X-Mode/Outlogic must ensure consumers provide informed consent before it uses that data. Finally, X-Mode/Outlogic must delete or render non-sensitive the historical data it collected from its own apps or SDK and must tell its customers about the FTC’s requirement that such data should be deleted or rendered non-sensitive.

This all sounds good — it really does — but a closer reading of the reasoning behind the consent order (PDF) leaves a lot to be desired. Here are the seven counts from the original complaint (linked above) as described by the section title for each:

  • “X-Mode’s location data could be used to identify people and track them to sensitive locations”

  • “X-Mode failed to honour consumers’ privacy choices”

  • “X-Mode failed to notify users of its own apps of the purposes for which their location data would be used”

  • “X-Mode has provided app publishers with deceptive consumer disclosures”

  • “X-Mode fails to verify that third-party apps notified consumers of the purposes for which their location data would be used”

  • “X-Mode has targeted consumers based on sensitive characteristics”

  • “X-Mode’s business practices cause or are likely to cause substantial injury to consumers”

These are not entirely objections to X-Mode’s sale of location data in a gross violation of their privacy. These are mostly procedural violations, which you can see more clearly in the analysis of the proposed order (PDF). The first and fifth counts are both violations of the rights of protected classes; the second is an allegation of data collection after users had opted out. But the other four are all related to providing insufficient notice or consent, which is the kind of weak justification illustrating the boundaries of U.S. privacy law. Meaningful privacy regulation would not allow the exploitation of real-time location data even if a user had nominally agreed to it. Khan’s FTC is clearly working with the legal frameworks that are available, not the ones that are needed.

Sen. Ron Wyden’s office, which ran an investigation into X-Mode’s practices, is optimistic with reservations. Wyden correctly observes that this should not be decided on a case-by-case basis; everyone deserves a minimum standard of privacy. Though this post and case is U.S.-focused, that expectation is true worldwide, and we ought to pass much stricter privacy laws here in Canada.

Assigning Copyright Liability for the Output of ‘A.I.’ Systems ⇥ techdirt.com

Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times (syndicated at Ars Technica):

AI models are “trained” on data, such as photographs and text found on the internet. This has led to concern that rights holders, from media companies to image libraries, will make legal claims against third parties who use the AI tools trained on their copyrighted data.

The big three cloud computing providers have pledged to defend business customers from such intellectual property claims. But an analysis of the indemnity clauses published by the cloud computing companies show that the legal protections only extend to the use of models developed by or with oversight from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Ira Rothken, Techdirt:

Here’s the crux: the LLM itself can’t predict the user’s intentions. It simply processes patterns based on prompts. The LLM learning machine and idea processor shouldn’t be stifled due to potential user misuse. Instead, in the rare circumstances when there is a legitimate copyright infringement, users ought to be held accountable for their prompts and subsequent usage and give the AI LLM “dual use technology” developers the non-infringing status of the VCR manufacturer under the Sony Doctrine.

It seems there are two possible points of copyright infringement: input and output. I find the latter so much more interesting.

It seems, to me, to depend on how much of a role machine learning models play in determining what is produced, and I find that fascinating. These models have been marketed as true artificial intelligence but, in their defence, are often compared to photocopiers — and there is a yawning chasm between those perspectives. It makes sense for Xerox to bear zero responsibility if someone uses one of its machines to duplicate an entire book. Taking it up a notch, I have no idea if a printer manufacturer might be found culpable for permitting counterfeiting currency — I am not a lawyer — but it is noteworthy anti-duplication measures have been present in scanners and printers for decades, yet Bloomberg reported in 2014 that around 60% of fake U.S. currency was made on home-style printers.

But those are examples of strict duplication — these devices have very little in the way of a brain, and the same is true of a VHS recorder. Large language models and other forms of generative “intelligence” are a little bit different. Somewhere, something like a decision happens. It seems plausible an image generator could produce a result uncomfortably close to a specific visual style without direct prompting by the user, or it could clearly replicate something. In that case, is it the fault of the user or the program, even if it goes unused and mostly unseen?

To emphasize again, I am not a lawyer while Rothken is, so I am just talking out of my butt. These tools are raising some interesting questions is all I want to highlight. Fascinating times ahead.

Substack Clears the Absolute Lowest Bar ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton, Platformer:

Substack is removing some publications that express support for Nazis, the company said today. The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.

As part of the move, the company is also terminating the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology and that Platformer flagged to the company for review last week.

The headline and dek of this article paint a picture in my mind that Substack will remove all Nazi publications when they are reported because it is an inherently violent ideology, but Newton clarified via email that it is something which will be decided on a case-by-base basis.

Molly White [sic]:

i spoke personally with hamish mckenzie last week, and came out of the conversation with very little faith in the company’s approach to moderation. i’m glad they caved on this point (or promised to cave?), but i am not optimistic something similar won’t happen yet again

The problem I have long had with Substack’s moderation policies is not necessarily about how many publications it hosts which are discriminatory, hateful, or full conspiracy-brained idiocy — though I do object to how many of those users make money from Substack — it is its downright welcoming attitude toward all those things. McKenzie dusted off the doormat for the “people [who] do hold those [Nazi] and other extreme views” despite disliking them. It is one thing to have a permissive attitude toward speech. It is quite another to treat people writing Nazi-supporting newsletters as just some users among many, so long as they are not advocating for violence or death threats.

Update: Five. Substack will remove five newsletters that “violate our existing content guidelines, which prohibit incitements to violence based on protected classes”. I appreciate Platformer digging into this and pressuring Substack, but they are truly clearing the lowest possible bar.