For more than 60 years, Canadian Tire money staked a legitimate claim as Canada’s unofficial second currency. At one point, a study showed half the country collected it. The coupons even made the Canadian Oxford dictionary.
[…]
Ultimately, experts speculate, Canadian Tire money fell victim to a world moving faster and smarter than ever. The coupon return on a purchase, once five per cent, depreciated to 0.4 per cent by the 2010s. Cash, at Canadian Tire and everywhere else, fell out of favour. And a digital rewards program gave the company an asset even more valuable than loyalty: data, on what and when and how often you buy.
This story yanked me right back to my childhood, finding Canadian Tire money jammed in the glove box and centre console of the family car. It was a loyalty program, sure, but one that had a unique charm and tactility that one does not get from a plastic card or by tapping their phone.
Thomas Germain, for BBC News, looked at the efforts of Ethan Zuckerman and others to study YouTube. Their findings are sometimes expected — most videos have been viewed fewer than 500 times — but often notable. Most videos are not edited, have no monetization, and have no requests for viewers to like, comment, and subscribe.
So, what is YouTube, anyway? A place for people like you and I to watch a relatively small number of headliners? Germain:
This narrative misses a critical piece of the picture, says Ryan McGrady, the senior researcher in Zuckerman’s lab, who participated in the scraping project. YouTube is a free service that was built from the ground up by a private company, and it could be argued that Google should be able to run the platform as such. But when you examine how people are actually using YouTube, it looks less like TV and more like infrastructure, McGrady says.
[…]
YouTube is one of the internet’s de facto repositories, the first place many of us go when we have videos we want to post or store online. It’s also a place where local authority meetings are broadcast, for example, providing a vital opportunity for public accountability in ways that weren’t possible before it existed. It isn’t just a “platform”, McGrady says, it’s a critical piece of infrastructure, and that’s how it should be regulated. “For companies that own so much of our public sphere, there are some minimum expectations we should have about transparency.”
I think it is generally a mistake to treat the popularity of corporations like these as a basis to treat them as infrastructure. They are at the very top of a deep stack. Fulfilling the law, the answer to this question should be “no, YouTube is not infrastructure”.
Even so, there is something appealing about this argument because video is special. It is cumbersome; it requires complex arrangements to serve it efficiently and reliably. But some of those barriers are becoming less foreboding, giving us more places to post and watch videos. It was not so long ago that YouTube was the only name in general-purpose video hosting. Yet you can now publish to most any social network. Instagram and TikTok host a different type of video but, for lots of people, they are just as relevant as YouTube. Alternatives like Rumble and X are appearing for the perpetually aggrieved set who are convinced their broadcasts would be censored elsewhere. Yet there is nothing else quite like YouTube.
I still believe it would be difficult and unwise to govern YouTube like it is infrastructure, even if it seems to have that role. And, so, the best thing we can do is to stop treating YouTube like infrastructure. It should not be the place to stream or archive government or board meetings. It should not be treated as a video host by other businesses. It is not a good destination for your important family video. It is a place to put those things to share them, if you would like, but it is not an archival choice. YouTube needs to have the ability to moderate videos because there are things expected of infrastructure but not appropriate for a general-purpose entertainment platform. As such, we need to stop seeing it as a video repository.
Update: As if to prove YouTube is still unique, Facebook says it is going to begin deleting old live broadcasts. For comparison, YouTube archives live videos indefinitely. It would be so great if there were alternatives not focused on boosting mindless reactionaries.
Priced originally at $65, it’s currently on sale for $39 (plus shipping) — no coupon is required.
How Comics Were Made follows the intensive, magical, and industrial journey a newspaper comic takes from a cartoonist’s hand through the transformative production process to make it ready to appear as ink on newsprint—and behind, onto digital displays. The book richly illustrates the stages through never-before-seen printing artifacts dating back as far as the 1890s, original artwork from cartoonists like Bill Watterson, Lynn Johnston, Garry Trudeau, and Charles Schulz.
Author Glenn Fleishman uses historic images, preserved items, and industrial films to reconstruct nearly forgotten processes of the metal relief era of printing, as well as more modern periods, as newspaper and printing in general shifted into photographic reproduction using flat metal offset printing, and then, ultimately, digital processes from drawing tablets to laser-etched plates. The story is told through historic and modern interviews. Glenn interviewed over 40 cartoonists and others in the comics world, including rare talks with Trudeau and Watterson.
If you love comics and history or know someone who does, How Comics Were Made provides a unique lens from the dawn of newspaper cartoons to the present.
(The current deep discount stems from the book being printed and warehoused in Canada. With tariffs possible by March, the author is eager to have the book reach an audience before it becomes unaffordable to import.)
Last year, a media investigation revealed that a Florida-based data broker, Datastream Group, was selling highly sensitive location data that tracked United States military and intelligence personnel overseas. At the time, the origin of that data was unknown.
Now, a letter sent to US senator Ron Wyden’s office that was obtained by an international collective of media outlets — including WIRED and 404 Media — claims that the ultimate source of that data was Eskimi, a little-known Lithuanian ad-tech company. Eskimi, meanwhile, denies it had any involvement.
The letter was apparently sent by Datastream, which means it either has no idea where it got this extremely precise location information, or Eskimi is being dishonest. That is kind of the data broker industry in a nutshell: a vast sea of our personal information being traded indiscriminately by businesses worldwide — whose names we have never heard of — with basically no accountability or limitations.
Something very useful from the Atlas of Type: a huge list of type foundries. Only a handful of Canadian designers on this list, including the legendary Canada Type and Pangram Pangram, but I was particularly excited to learn about Tiro Typeworks. They have a vast library of type for scientific and scholarly works — if you are reading this on MacOS, you probably have STIX Two installed — and they have also produced typefaces with vast language support, including for syllabics. Given their contributions to type design and the OpenType format, I feel like I used the word “legendary” above much too soon.
Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou has told The Verge that this morning’s window where Netflix appeared as a “participating” service in Apple TV — including temporary support for the watchlist and “continue watching” features — was an error and has now been rolled back. That’s a shame. The jubilation in our comments on the original story was palpable.
Netflix sincerely apologizes for giving people what they want.
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In November 2023, two researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and their supervisor published “Dazed and Confused”, a working paper about Google’s reCAPTCHAv2 system. They write mostly about how irritating and difficult it is to use, and also explore its privacy and labour costs — and it is that last section in which I had some doubts when I first noticed the paper being passed around in July.
I was content to leave it there, assuming this paper would be chalked up as one more curiosity on a heap of others on arXiv. It has not been subjected to peer review at any journal, as far as I can figure out, nor can I find another academic article referencing it. (I am not counting the dissertation by one of the paper’s authors summarizing its findings.) Yet parts of it are on their way to becoming zombie statistics. Mike Elgan, writing in his October Computerworld column, repeated the paper’s claim that “Google might have profited as much as $888 billion from cookies created by reCAPTCHA sessions”. Ted Litchfield of PC Gamer included another calculation alleging solving CAPTCHAs “consum[ed] 7.5 million kWhs of energy[,] which produced 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution”; the article is headlined reCAPTCHAs “[…] made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google”. In a Boing Boing article earlier this month, Mark Frauenfelder wrote:
[…] Through analyzing over 3,600 users, the researchers found that solving image-based challenges takes 557% longer than checkbox challenges and concluded that reCAPTCHA has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of human time valued at $6.1 billion in wages while generating massive profits for Google through its tracking capabilities and data collection, with the value of tracking cookies alone estimated at $888 billion.
I get why these figures are alluring. CAPTCHAs are heavily studied; a search of Google Scholar for “CAPTCHA” returns over 171,000 results. As you might expect, most are adversarial experiments, but there are several examining usability and, others, privacy. However, I could find just one previous paper correlating, say, emissions and CAPTCHA solving, and it was a joke paper (PDF) from the 2009 SIGBOVIK conference, “the Association for Computational Heresy Special Interest Group”. Choice excerpt: “CAPTCHAs were the very starting point for human computation, a recently proposed new field of Computer Science that lets computer scientists appear less dumb to the world”. Excellent.
So you can see why the claims of the U.C. Irvine researchers have resonated in the press. For example, here is what they — Andrew Searles, Renascence Tarafder Prapty, and Gene Tsudik — wrote in their paper (PDF) about emissions:
Assuming un-cached scenarios from our technical analysis (see Appendix B), network bandwidth overhead is 408 KB per session. This translates into 134 trillion KB or 134 Petabytes (194 x 1024 Terrabytes [sic]) of bandwidth. A recent (2017) survey estimated that the cost of energy for network data transmission was 0.06 kWh/GB (Kilowatt hours per Gigabyte). Based on this rate, we estimate that 7.5 million kWh of energy was used on just the network transmission of reCAPTCHA data. This does not include client or server related energy costs. Based on the rates provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Energy Information Administration (EIA), 1 kWh roughly equals 1-2.4 pounds of CO2 pollution. This implies that reCAPTCHA bandwidth consumption alone produced in the range of 7.5-18 million pounds of CO2 pollution over 9 years.
Obviously, any emissions are bad — but how much is 7.5–18 million pounds of CO2 over nine years in context? A 2024 working paper from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency estimated residential properties each produce 6.8 metric tons of CO2 emissions from electricity and heating, or about 15,000 pounds. That means CAPTCHAs produced as much CO2 as providing utilities to 55–133 U.S. houses per year. Not good, sure, but not terrible — at least, not when you consider the 408 kilobyte session transfer against, say, Google’s homepage, which weighs nearly 2 MB uncached. Realistically, CAPTCHAs are not a meaningful burden on the web or our environment.
The numbers in this discussion area are suspect. From these CO2 figures to the value of reCAPTCHA cookies — apparently responsible for nearly half of Google’s revenue from when it acquired the company — I find the evidence for them lacking. Yet they continue to circulate in print and, now, in a Vox-esque mini documentary.
The video, on the CHUPPL “investigative journalism” YouTube channel, was created by Jack Joyce. I found it via Frauenfelder, of Boing Boing, and it was also posted by Daniel Sims at TechSpot and Emma Roth at the Verge. The roughly 17-minute mini-doc has been watched nearly 200,000 times, and the CHUPPL channel has over 350,000 subscribers. Neither number is massive for YouTube, but it is not a small amount of viewers, either. Four of the ten videos from CHUPPL have achieved over a million views apiece. This channel has a footprint. But watching the first half of its reCAPTCHA video is what got me to open BBEdit and start writing this thing. It is a masterclass in how the YouTube video essay format and glossy production can mask bad journalism. I asked CHUPPL several questions about this video and did not receive a response by the time I published this.
Let me begin at the beginning:
How does this checkbox know that I’m not a robot? I didn’t click any motorcycles or traffic lights. I didn’t even type in distorted words — and yet it knew. This infamous tech is called reCAPTCHA and, when it comes to reach, few tools rival its presence across the web. It’s on twelve and a half million websites, quietly sitting on pages that you visit every day, and it’s actually not very good at stopping bots.
While Joyce provides sources for most claims in this video, there is not one for this specific number. According to BuiltWith, which tracks technologies used on websites, the claim is pretty accurate — it sees it used on about twelve million websites, and it is the most popular CAPTCHA script.
But Google has far more popular products than these if it wants to track you across the web. Google Maps, for example, is on over 15 million live websites, Analytics is on around 31 million, and AdSense is on nearly 49 million. I am not saying that we should not be concerned about reCAPTCHA because it is on only twelve million sites, but that number needs context. Google Maps is more popular, according to BuiltWith, than reCAPTCHA. If Google wants to track user activity across the web, AdSense is explicitly designed for that purpose. Yes, it is probably true that “few tools rival its presence across the web”, but you can say that of just about any technology from Google, Meta, Amazon, Cloudflare, and a handful of other giants — but, especially, Google.
Back to the intro:
It turns out reCAPTCHA isn’t what we think it is, and the public narrative around reCAPTCHA is an impossibly small sliver of the truth. And by accepting that sliver as the full truth, we’ve all been misled. For months, we followed the data, we examined glossed over research, and uncovered evidence that most people don’t know exists. This isn’t the story of an inconsequential box. It’s the story of a seemingly innocent tool and how it became a gateway for corporate greed and mass surveillance. We found buried lawsuits, whispers of the NSA, and echoes of Edward Snowden. This is the story of the future of the Internet and who’s trying to control it.
The claims in this introduction vastly oversell what will be shown in this video. The lawsuits are not “buried”, they were linked from the reCAPTCHA Wikipedia article as it appeared before the video was published. The “whispers” and “echoes” of mass surveillance disclosures will prove to be based on almost nothing. There are real concerns with reCAPTCHA, and this video does justice to almost none of them.
The main privacy problems with reCAPTCHA are found in its ubiquity and its ownership. Google swears up and down it collects device and user behaviour data through reCAPTCHA only for better bot detection. It issued a statement saying as much to Techradar in response to the “Dazed and Confused” paper circulating again. In a 2021 blog post announcing reCAPTCHA Enterprise — the latest version combining V2, V3, and the mobile SDKs under a single brand — Google says:
Today, reCAPTCHA Enterprise is a pure security product. Information collected is used to provide and improve reCAPTCHA Enterprise and for general security purposes. We don’t use this data for any other purpose.
[…] Additionally, none of the data collected can be used for personalized advertising by Google.
Google goes on to explain that it collects data as a user navigates through a website to help determine if they are a bot without having to present a challenge. Again, it is adamant none of this data is used to feed its targeted advertising machine.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, because Google does not disclose exactly how reCAPTCHA works, its promise requires that you trust the company. It is not a great idea to believe the word of corporations in general. Specifically, in Google’s case, a leak of its search ranking signals last year directlycontradicted its public statements. But, even though Google was dishonest then, there is currently no evidence reCAPTCHA data is being misused in the way Joyce’s video suggests. Coyly asking questions with sinister-sounding music underneath is not a substitute for evidence.
The second problem is the way Google’s privacy policy can be interpreted, as reported by Thomas Claburn in 2020 in the Register:
Zach Edwards, co-founder of web analytics biz Victory Medium, found that Google’s reCAPTCHA’s JavaScript code makes it possible for the mega-corp to conduct “triangle syncing,” a way for two distinct web domains to associate the cookies they set for a given individual. In such an event, if a person visits a website implementing tracking scripts tied to either those two advertising domains, both companies would receive network requests linked to the visitor and either could display an ad targeting that particular individual.
You will hear from Edwards later in Joyce’s video making a similar argument. Just because Google can do this, it does not mean it is actually doing so. It has the far more popular AdSense for that.
ReCAPTCHA interacts with three Google cookies when it is present: AEC, NID, and OGPC. According to Google, AEC is “used to detect spam, fraud, and abuse” including for advertising click fraud. I could not find official documentation about OGPC, but it and NID appear to be used for advertising for signed-out users. Of these, NID is most interesting to me because it is also used to store Google Search preferences, so someone who uses Google’s most popular service is going to have it set regardless, and its value is fixed for six months. Therefore, it is possible to treat it as a unique identifier for that time.
I could not find a legal demand of Google specifically for reCAPTCHA history. But I did find a high-profile request to re-identify NID cookies. In 2017, the first Trump administration began seizing records from reporters, including those from the New York Times. The Times uses Google Apps for its email system. That administration and then the Biden one tried obtaining email metadata, too, while preventing Times executives from disclosing anything about it. In the warrant (PDF), the Department of Justice demands of Google:
PROVIDER is required to disclose to the United States the following records and other information, if available, for the Account(s) for the time period from January 14, 2017, through April 30, 2017, constituting all records and other information relating to the Account(s) (except the contents of communications), including:
[…]
Identification of any PROVIDER account(s) that are linked to the Account(s) by cookies, including all PROVIDER user IDs that logged into PROVIDER’s services by the same machine as the Account(s).
And by “cookies”, the government says that includes “[…] cookies related to user preferences (such as NID), […] cookies used for advertising (such as NID, SID, IDE, DSID, FLC, AID, TAID, and exchange_uid) […]” plus Google Analytics cookies. This is not the first time Google’s cookies have been used in intelligence or law enforcement matters — the NSA has, of course, been using them that way for years — but it is notable for being an explicit instance of tying the NID cookie, which is among those used with reCAPTCHA, to a user’s identity. (Google says site owners can use a different reCAPTCHA domain to disassociate its cookies.) Also, given the effort of the Times’ lawyers to release this warrant, it is not surprising I was unable to find another public document containing similar language. I could not find any other reporting on this cookie-based identification effort, so I think this is news. In this case, Google successfully fought the government’s request for email metadata.
Assuming Google retains these records, what the Department of Justice was demanding would be enough to connect a reCAPTCHA user to other Google product activity and a Google account holder using the shared NID cookie. Furthermore, it is a problem that so much of the web relies on a relative handful of companies. Google has long treated the open web as its de facto operating system, coercing site owners to use features like AMP or making updates to comply with new search ranking guidelines. It is not just Google that is overly controlling, to be fair — I regularly cannot access websites on my iMac because Cloudflare believes I am a robot and it will not let me prove otherwise — but it is the most significant example. Its fingers in every pie — from site analytics, to fonts, to advertising, to maps, to browsers, to reCAPTCHA — means it has a unique vantage point from which to see how billions of people use the web.
These are actual privacy concerns, but you will learn none of them from Joyce’s video. You will instead be on the receiving end of a scatterbrained series of suggestions of reCAPTCHA’s singularly nefarious quality, driven by just-asking-questions conspiratorial thinking, without reaching a satisfying destination.
From here on, I am going to use timecodes as reference points. 1:56:
Journalists told you such a small sliver of the truth that I would consider it to be deceptive.
Bad news: Joyce is about to be fairly deceptive while relying on the hard work of journalists.
At 3:24:
Okay, you’re probably thinking “why does any of this matter?”, and I agree with you.
I did agree with you. I actually halted this investigation for a few weeks because I thought it was quite boring — until I went to renew my passport. (Passport status dot state dot gov.)
I got a CAPTCHA — not a checkbox, not fire hydrants, but the old one. And I clicked it. And it took me here.
The “here” Joyce mentions is a page at captcha.org, which is redirected from its original destination at captcha.com. The material is similar on both. The ownership of the .org domain is unclear, but the .com is run by Captcha, Inc., and it sells the CAPTCHA package used by the U.S. Department of State among other government departments. I have a sneaking suspicion the .org retains some ties to Captcha, Inc. given the DNS recordsof each. Also, the list of CAPTCHA software on the .org site begins with all the packages offered by Captcha, Inc., and its listing for reCAPTCHA is outdated — it does not display Google as its owner, for example — but the directory’s operators found time to add the recaptcha.sucks website.
About that. 4:07:
An entire page dedicated to documenting the horrors of reCAPTCHA: alleging national security implications for the U.S. and foreign governments, its ability to doxx users, mentioning secret FISA orders — the same type of orders that Edward Snowden risked his life to warn us about. […]
Who put this together? “Anonymous”.
if you are a web-native journalist, wishing to get in touch, we doubt you are going to have a hard-time figuring out who we are anyway.
This felt like a key left in plain sight, whispering there’s a door nearby and it’s meant to be opened. This is what we’re good at. This is what we do.
The U.S. “national security implications” are, as you can see on screen as these words are being said, not present: “stay tuned — it will be continued”, the message from ten years ago reads. The FISA reference, meanwhile, is a quote from Google’s national security requests page acknowledging the types of data it can disclose under these demands. It is a note that FISA exists and, under that law, Google can be compelled to disclose user data — a policy that applies to every company.
This all comes from the ReCAPTCHA Sucks website. On the About page, the site author acknowledges they are a competitor and maintains their anonymity is due to trademark concerns:
a free-speech / gripe-site on trademarked domains must not be used in a ‘bad faith’ — what includes promotion of competing products and services.
and under certain legal interpretations disclosing of our identity here might be construed as a promotion of our own competing captcha product or service.
it frustrates us indeed, but those are the rules of the game.
The page concludes, as Joyce quoted:
if you are a web-native journalist, wishing to get in touch, we doubt you are going to have a hard-time figuring out who we are anyway.
Joyce reads this as a kind of spooky challenge yet, so far as I can figure out, did not attempt to contact the site’s operators. I asked CHUPPL about this and I have not heard back. It is not very difficult to figure out who they are. The site has a shared technical infrastructure, including a historic Google Analytics account, with captcha.com. It feels less like the work of a super careful anonymous tipster, and more like an open secret from an understandably cheesed competitor.
5:05:
Okay, let’s get this out of the way: reCAPTCHA is not and really has never been very good at stopping bots.
Joyce points to the success rate of a couple of reCAPTCHA breakers here as evidence of its ineffectiveness, though does not mention they were both against the audio version. What Joyce does not establish is whether these programs were used much in the real world.
In 2023, Trend Micro published research into the way popular CAPTCHA solving services operate. Despite the seemingly high success rate of automated techniques, “they break CAPTCHAs by farming out CAPTCHA-breaking tasks to actual human solvers” because there are a lot more services out there than reCAPTCHA. That is exactly how many CAPTCHA solvers markettheirservices, though some are now saying they use A.I. instead. Also, it is not as though other types of CAPTCHAs are not subject to similar threats. In 2021, researchers solved hCAPTCHA (PDF) with a nearly 96% success rate. Being only okay at stopping bot traffic is not unique to reCAPTCHA, and these tools are just one of several technologies used to minimize automated traffic. And, true enough, none of these techniques is perfect, or even particularly successful. But that does not mean their purpose is nefarious, as Joyce suggests later in the video, at 11:45:
Google has said that they don’t use the data collected from reCAPTCHA for targeted advertising, which actually scares me a bit more. If not for targeted ads, which is their whole business model, why is Google acting like an intelligence agency?
Joyce does not answer this directly, instead choosing to speculate about a way reCAPTCHA data could be used to identify people who submit anonymous tips to the FBI — yes, really. More on that later.
5:49:
2018 was the launch of V3. According to researchers at U.C. Irvine, there’s practically no difference between V2 and V3.
Onscreen, Joyce shows an excerpt from the “Dazed and Confused” paper, and the sentence fragment “there is no discernable difference between reCAPTCHAv2 and reCAPTCHAv3” is highlighted. But just after that, you can see the sentence continues: “in terms of appearance or perception of image challenges and audio challenges”.
Screenshot from CHUPPL video.
Remember: these researchers were mainly studying the usability of these CAPTCHAs. This section is describing how users perceive the similar challenges presented by both versions. They are not saying V2 and V3 have “practically no difference” in general terms.
At 6:56:
ReCAPTCHA “takes a pixel-by-pixel fingerprint” of your browser. A real-time map of everything you do on the internet.
This part contains a quote from a 2015 Business Insider article by Lara O’Reilly. O’Reilly, in turn, cites research by AdTruth, then — as now — owned by Experian. I can find plenty of references to O’Reilly’s article but, try as I might, I have not been able to find a copy of the original report. But, as a 2017 report from Cracked Labs (PDF) points out, Experian’s AdTruth “provides ‘universal device recognition’”, “creat[ing] a ‘unique user ID’ for each device, by collecting information such as IP addresses, device models and device settings”. To the extent “pixel-by-pixel fingerprint” means anything in this context — it does not, but it misleadingly sounds to me like it is taking screenshots — Experian’s offering also fits that description. It is a problem there are so many things which quietly monitor user activity across their entire digital footprint.
Unfortunately, at 7:41, Joyce whiffs hard while trying to make this point:
If there’s any part of this video you should listen to, it’s this. Stop making dinner, stop scrolling on your phone, and please listen.
When I tell you that reCAPTCHA is watching you, I’m not saying that in some abstract, metaphorical way. Right now, reCAPTCHA is watching you. It knows that you’re watching me. And it doesn’t want you to know.
This stumbles in two discrete ways. First, reCAPTCHA is owned by Google, but so is YouTube. Google, by definition, knows what you are doing on YouTube. It does not need reCAPTCHA to secretly gather that information, too.
Second, the evidence Joyce presents for why “it doesn’t want you to know” is that Google has added some CSS to hide a floating badge, a capability it documents. This is for one presentation of reCAPTCHAv2, which is as invisible background validation and where a checkbox is shown only to suspicious users.
Screenshot from CHUPPL video.
I do not think Google “does not want you to know” about reCAPTCHA on YouTube. I think it thinks it is distracting. Google products using other Google technologies has not been a unique concern since the company merged user data and privacy policies in 2012.
The second half of the video, following the sponsor read, is a jumbled mess of arguments. Joyce spends time on a 2015 class action lawsuit filed against Google in Massachusetts alleging completing the old-style word-based reCAPTCHA was unfairly using unpaid labour to transcribe books. It was tossed in 2016because the plaintiff (PDF) “failed to identify any statute assigning value to the few seconds it takes to transcribe one word”, and “Google’s profit is not Plaintiff’s damage”.
Joyce then takes us on a meandering journey through the way Google’s terms of use document is written — this is where we hear from Edwards reciting the same arguments as appeared in that 2020 Register article — and he touches briefly on the U.S. v. Google antitrust trial, none of which concerned reCAPTCHA. There is a mention of a U.K. audit in 2015 specifically related to its 2012 privacy policy merger. This is dropped with no explanation into the middle of Edwards’ questioning of what Google deems “security related” in the context of its current privacy policy.
Then we get to the FBI stuff. Remember earlier when I told you Joyce has a theory about how Google uses reCAPTCHA to unmask FBI tipsters? Here is when that comes up again:
Check this out: if you want to submit a tip to the FBI, you’re met with this notice acknowledging your right to anonymity. But even though the State Department doesn’t use reCAPTCHA, the FBI and the NSA do. […] If they want to know who submitted the anonymous report, Google has to tell them.
This is quite the theory. There is video of Edward Snowden and clips from news reports about the mysteries of the FISA court. Dramatic music. A chart of U.S. government requests for user data from Google.
But why focus on reCAPTCHA when the FBI and NSA — and a whole bunch of other government sites — also use Google Analytics? Though Google says Analytics cookies are distinct from those used by its advertising services, site owners can link them together, which would not be obvious to users. There is no evidence the FBI or any other government agency is doing so. The actual problem here is that sensitive and ostensibly anonymous government sites are using any Google services whatsoever, probably because they are a massive corporation with lots of widely-used products and services.
Even so, many federal sites use the product offered by Captcha, Inc. and it seems to respect privacy by being self-hosted. All of them should just use that. The U.S. government has its own analytics service; the stats are public. The reason for inconsistencies is probably the same reason any massive organization’s websites are fragmented: it is a lot of work to keep them unified.
Joyce juxtaposes this with the U.S. Secret Service’s use of Babel Street’s Locate X data. He does not explain any direct connection to reCAPTCHA or Google, and there is a very good reason for this: there is none. Babel Street obtained some of its location data from Venntel, which is owned by Gravy Analytics, which obtained it from personalized ads.
Joyce ultimately settles on a good point near the end of the video, saying Google uses various browsing signals “before, during, and after” clicking the CAPTCHA to determine whether you are likely human. If it does not have enough information about you — “you clear your cookies, you are browsing Incognito, maybe you are using a privacy-focused browser” — it is more likely to challenge you.
None of this is actually news. It has all been disclosed by Google itself on its website and in a 2014 Wired article by Andy Greenberg, linked from O’Reilly’s Business Insider story. This is what Joyce refers to at 7:24 in the video in saying “reCAPTCHA doesn’t need to be good at stopping bots because it knows who you are. The new reCAPTCHA runs in the background, is invisible, and only shows challenges to bots or suspicious users”. But that is exactly how reCAPTCHA stops bots, albeit not perfectly: it either knows who you are and lets you through without a challenge, or it asks you for confirmation.
It is this very frustration I have as I try to protect my privacy while still using the web. I hit reCAPTCHA challenges frequently, especially when working on something like this article, in which I often relied on Google’s superior historical index and advanced search operators to look up stories from ten years ago. As I wrote earlier, I run into Cloudflare’s bot wall constantly on one of my Macs but not the other, and I often cannot bypass it without restarting my Mac or, ironically enough, using a private browsing window. Because I use Safari, website data is deleted more frequently, which means I am constantly logging into services I use all the time. The web becomes more cumbersome to use when you want to be tracked less.
There are three things I want to leave you with. First, there is an interesting video to be made about the privacy concerns of reCAPTCHA, but this is not it. It is missing evidence, does not put findings in adequate context, and drifts conspiratorially from one argument to another while only gesturing at conclusions. Joyce is incorrect in saying “journalists told you such a small sliver of the truth that I would consider it to be deceptive”. In fact, they have done the hard work over many years to document Google’s many privacy failures — including in reCAPTCHA. That work should bolster understandable suspicions about massive corporations ruining our right to privacy. This video is technically well produced, but it is of shoddy substance. It does not do justice to the work of the better journalists whose work it relies upon.
Second, CAPTCHAs offer questionable utility. As iffy as I find the data in the discussion section of the “Dazed and Confused” paper, its other findings seem solid: people find it irritating to label images or select boxes containing an object. A different paper (PDF) with two of the same co-authors and four other researchers found people most like reCAPTCHA’s checkbox-only presentation — the one that necessarily compromises user privacy — but also found some people will abandon tasks rather than solve a CAPTCHA. Researchers in 2020 (PDF) found CAPTCHAs were an impediment to people with visual disabilities. This is bad. Unfortunately, we are in a new era of mass web scraping — one reason I was able to so easily find many CAPTCHA solving services. Site owners wishing to control that kind of traffic have options like identifying user agents or I.P. address strings, but all of these can be defeated. CAPTCHAs can, too. Sometimes, all you can do is pile together a bunch of bad options and hope the result is passable.
Third, this is yet another illustration of how important it is for there to be strong privacy legislation. Nobody should have to question whether checking a box to prove they are not a robot is, even in a small way, feeding a massive data mining operation. We are never going to make progress on tracking as long as it remains legal and lucrative.
Germany’s antitrust watchdog has been investigating Apple’s app privacy framework since 2022. On Thursday, releasing preliminary findings from this probe, the Bundeskartellamt (FCO) said it suspects the iPhone maker may not be treating third-party app developers as equally as the law requires.
The antitrust watchdog said it believes Apple’s behavior could amount to self-preferencing. Apple is banned from preferring its own services and products in Germany since April 2023, when it became subject to special abuse controls aimed at regulating big tech’s market power.
The Bundeskartellamt says a ruling to Apple’s appeal over the April 2023 decision is expected in March. So far, its findings over App Tracking Transparency remain “preliminary”; it says “Apple now has the opportunity to comment on the allegations”.
Zac Hall, of 9to5Mac, received a statement from Apple reading, in part:
Apple has led the way in developing industry leading technologies to provide users great features without compromising privacy. App Tracking Transparency gives users more control of their privacy through a required, clear, and easy-to-understand prompt about one thing: tracking. That prompt is consistent for all developers, including Apple, and we have received strong support for this feature from consumers, privacy advocates, and data protection authorities around the world.
This does not meaningfully address the German authority’s concerns, which are based on the way Apple defines “tracking” as exclusively a third-party phenomenon. Apple collects highly granular data about users’ interactions with its internet services and associates it with their Apple ID. It allows precise ad targeting. I would expect people to have more comfort around first-party collection than third-party, but Apple’s own definition of “tracking” excludes these behaviours.
Apple this month started advertising on X for the first time in more than a year. The company had stopped advertising on the social media platform in November 2023 following controversial remarks made by its owner Elon Musk.
Translation: Apple is participating in a nakedly corrupt government by giving money to co-president Elon Musk, an increasing level of cooperation which will continue to be justified on the basis it is a disproportionately influential public corporation with shares held by retirement funds and, therefore, should continue blurring the lines between diplomacy and obsequiousness.
Apple doesn’t have to end up with the best large language model around to win the AI wars. It can be in the ballpark of the best or partner with the leaders to get what it needs. But it can’t fail at the part that is uniquely Apple: Making those features a pleasure to use, in the way we all expect from Apple. Right now, that’s where Apple is failing.
I get why Apple wanted to rush these things out. I disagree with it since it betrays a lack of confidence in the time it takes to thoughtful and polished software — but I get it. Yet we can only judge the products that have shipped, and what we can use right now is disappointing because it feels sloppy.
As Snell writes, Apple has a chance to move A.I. features beyond a blinking cursor in a chat bot — like a plain language command line. Very little of what is out today is a thoughtful implementation of these features. Cleanup in Photos is pretty good. Most of the other stuff — summaries of phone calls, Notification Summaries, Writing Tools, Memory Movies in Photos, and response suggestions in Mail and Messages — are more cumbersome than they are elegant.
Shopify’s general counsel said the company took down musician Kanye West’s online store because of the potential for fraud, not because it was selling a Nazi T-shirt, an internal staff announcement obtained by The Logic reveals.
In the message, which was posted on Shopify’s Slack Tuesday morning, general counsel Jess Hertz said the swastika-emblazoned T-shirt listed for sale by West was “a stunt” and “not a good faith attempt to make money.” This, Hertz added, “brought with it the real risk of fraud.” It was for this reason, she added, that the store had been closed.
Here is the thing: choosing not to support Nazis, even tacitly, is a pretty comfortable stance to take. You are in good company if you just say no to Nazi stuff. Nobody gets points for providing infrastructure to sell Nazi merch. What Shopify’s general counsel is indicating is that it would be happy to operate this store so long as orders for these shirts would actually be fulfilled.
Apple Inc. is renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on its Maps app, following an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on his first day in office.
[…]
Apple is making the change Tuesday for customers in the US, but said it would soon roll out the shift for all users globally. Apple offers its Maps app on most of its devices, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac, and recently launched a web version to better compete with Google Maps.
In the United States, Google Maps labels it “Gulf of America”; in nearly every other region, it is shown as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”. However, in Mexico, it is displayed as “Gulf of Mexico” only. So far, Bing and MapQuest have not updated their maps, as Gurman writes. Neither has Mapbox. OpenStreetMap is currently displaying “Gulf of Mexico” everywhere but in the U.S., but that has been a contentious choice.
All of these digital map distributors have choices. The best choice, given the circumstances, is to display “Gulf of America” only in the U.S. and, I suppose, in any other country pledging loyalty to this jingoistic change. Google’s decision seems like an acceptable alternative, and it is what I hope Gurman means in reporting the change will be seen by “all users globally”. (Update: I like Steve Jamieson’s suggestion to “localize it [in the U.S.] as ‘Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)'”. Then, everywhere else, reversing the order or dropping the “Gulf of America” part makes sense. But I fear a compromise is not what this president has in mind, and it will put any company that attempts this at risk of being singled out.)
I do not think it makes sense to be mad at mapmakers updating their labels to correctly reflect official naming changes, nor do I think it is helpful to file bug reports against the name. I do think people should continue mocking the stupidity of this renaming as it is a minor symptom of a nationalistic verve.
By the way, the big mountain in Alaska is still showing as “Denali”, even in U.S. Google Maps. The National Parks Service has fully removed its page on the history of the mountain’s name; it simply redirects to a page that makes no mention of it. Is it good when a country is desperately burying its history? Asking for a neighbour.
Yesterday, the Associated Press found itself locked out of an Oval Office press event for refusing to bow to presidential pressure to change its style guide. The reason? The AP won’t refer to the Gulf of Mexico exclusively as the “Gulf of America,” as newly-renamed by executive order.
This may seem like a relatively minor dispute on the surface. After all, what’s in a name? But that’s exactly what makes this such a perfect example of how authoritarianism creeps into our lives — it starts with something that might feel insignificant before snowballing into something much worse.
In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgement.
I am still unsure copyright law or, for that matter, robots.txt are the best tools for creators to control A.I. training, but this ruling sure seems to complicate the fair use justification upon which the entire field is currently based.
Last week, the Washington Post broke the news that the U.K. government is demanding access to iCloud accounts with Advanced Data Protection enabled. Joseph Menn, the Post:
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. […]
This phrasing is, it turns out, somewhat ambiguous, as Myke Hurley points out in the latest episode of “Upgrade”, starting at about 39:15; this transcript is adapted from David Smith’s:
The BBC is the only outlet that, from what I can see, has done their own reporting on this. I’ve been reading a bunch of them, and everybody’s reporting the same thing. The BBC’s reporting is different. They are saying that the U.K. wants to have access to the data in Advanced Data Protection if it was needed in the same way that a law enforcement agency can request iCloud data from anyone where needed.
Zoe Kleinman, in the BBC News article Hurley references:
It’s also important to note that the government notice does not mean the authorities are suddenly going to start combing through everybody’s data.
It is believed that the government would want to access this data if there were a risk to national security – in other words, it would be targeting an individual, rather than using it for mass surveillance.
Authorities would still have to follow a legal process, have a good reason and request permission for a specific account in order to access data – just as they do now with unencrypted data.
A small point of correction to Hurley: the Financial Times story also relies on its own reporting. The Times plays it down the middle and without reference to either mass surveillance nor targeted unlocking.
Reading all three stories is actually a good exercise in interpreting what each outlet’s sources disclosed and was deemed important. Yet the varying interpretations strike me as a distinction without much difference. Hurley is likely correct in understanding the BBC story as more accurate, but to comply with those demands is to create the “blanket capability” necessarily. What I believe to be the case — reading between the lines and without a copy of the technical capability notice — is that the U.K. government is asking Apple to create a back door in the Advanced Data Protection process and then, if it has a warrant for one of those accounts, it can ask Apple to decrypt this data. This is both technically a “blanket capability” and still, in policy, individually targeted.
Regardless of specifics, this demand — as noted by both Hurley and co-host Jason Snell — is still very bad. It applies to global data demands, meaning Apple cannot simply turn off Advanced Data Protection for U.K. users, and there is a narrow path by which Apple may dispute it.
The UK government’s approach here is particularly insidious. While Apple can appeal the order, their appeal rights are bizarrely limited: They can only argue about the cost of implementing the backdoor, not the catastrophic privacy and security implications for billions of users worldwide. This reveals the UK government’s complete indifference to the fundamental right to privacy.
The best case scenario is for the U.K. government to drop this demand. But these demands for encrypted data will keep coming. I expect the businesses I entrust with my data — like Apple and Backblaze — to stand by their end-to-end encryption promises. In this case, however, I am not sure what that looks like. It is hard to imagine arguing anything is too costly for one of the richest companies in the world.
Even though a 2023 class action suit filed by authors against Meta has been shaky so far, some of the details in what is left of the suit are stunning. Apparently, Meta downloaded a hundred terabytes of pirated books, according to documents recently unsealed.
Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again, because allegedly the new facts “contradict prior deposition testimony.”
Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the “decision to use LibGen occurred” after “a prior escalation to MZ,” authors alleged.
It should surprise nobody that A.I. is trained on illicit material. Even if you believe A.I. training through bulk web scraping is a perfectly legitimate expression of free use, it is obviously going to run across things which are posted illegally. There are entire blockbuster movies on video platforms; photos and books get reshared without permission constantly.
If Meta or any other A.I. company had bothered to license this data from its copyright holders, it would be less likely to ingest pirated material. That would, of course, be expensive and slow. But Meta, as of writing, posted the world’s seventh highest earnings in its 2024 fiscal year: over $71 billion. I think it can afford to pay for the data it harvests.
The federal government has reversed its advertising boycott of Meta spending nearly $300,000 for campaigns on the company’s Facebook and Instagram social media platforms.
The reversal comes despite Meta’s continued ban on posting news from Canadian media sites.
This was retaliation for Meta’s restriction on news links in Canada which was, itself, a response to link tax legislation. But what a time to resume spending on a platform publicly and loudly aligning itself with a government that really does want to take over our country. It sure sucks that one of the most effective ways for the Canadian government to advertise to Canadians is necessarily through the U.S. duopoly.
To use Kagi as your default search engine in Safari, you have to install Kagi’s Safari extension.
So I installed the extension and entered a search in the Safari address bar. Note below how Safari says “Search Google” and “Google Search”, even though I’m supposed to be using Kagi.
[…]
Why does this happen? It turns out that Safari has no extension API to set a new search engine. The workaround for the lack of an API is a kind of hack: Safari extensions instead use the webNavigation onBeforeNavigate API to detect a connection to your default search engine, and then they redirect to your custom search engine using the tabs update() API. This technique is not unique to the Kagi extension. Other Safari extensions such as xSearch must do the same thing, because there’s no better way.
Even though Chrome is made by Google, it lets you pick another search engine. Even though Edge is made by Microsoft, it doesn’t lock you into Bing, and you can add any search URL template that you want. Apple is not encumbered with its own search engine to push, yet it seems to be constrained by its desire for revenue sharing, so Safari users get stuck with fewer choices that are arguably lower quality and less private.
One other possibility is that Apple’s nominal desire for simplicity in preferences led to the company ignoring requests for an arguably niche feature like a custom search engine. Yet Safari preferences are complex and messy in other ways, and the company has — thankfully — retained legacy features like user stylesheets. Even if revenue sharing discouraged Apple from developing this feature, how many people are actually going to set a custom search engine, and would they have a meaningful impact on its beloved Google revenue stream? My guesses: very few, and I doubt it. Yet here we are, over twenty years after Safari’s launch, and we can generously choose between five search engines, of which three — Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo — are dependent on the same index.
Apple’s reluctance to add this feature to Safari is one of the main reasons I am so thankful for DuckDuckGo’s bang operations, of which there are hundreds just for other search engines. It is not identical to configuring a custom search engine — a query is still being passed through DuckDuckGo before being sent to the third-party engine — but it is frequently useful.
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Engineers at Apple have been exploring a mobile robot that can follow users around their homes, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the skunk-works project is private. The iPhone maker also has developed an advanced table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around, they said.
On first glance, these ideas are weird, right? I can see the appeal of things like these, especially for people with disabilities or who are older. But they do not really fit my expectations of a typical Apple product, which are often designed for mass markets, and to recede into a lived environment instead of being so conspicuous. Yet Gurman followed up in August with news this is something the company is actually interested in.
Then last month, on its Machine Learning Research blog, Apple published a post describing “ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot”, and a companion paper that helps explain the forced acronym. Embedded in the post is a video that, indeed, shows a table-mounted lamp that responds to a user’s gestures. It is really quite something.
This is nominally research about making a robot’s movements less — uh — robotic. The result is a lamp that more than one publication has compared to the charming Pixar intro. It is very cool — but it is still very weird. Apple almost never shows works-in-progress, and what is posted to its research blog does not necessarily correlate to real-world products. Also, I am not accustomed to this much whimsy in anything Apple has released for at least a decade. It is refreshing.
In addition, Unread can call any shortcut, with attributes pertaining to an article or a link inside an article. Write a shortcut that saves an article to another bookmarking or read later service, that saves links to your own link management system, that drafts a social media post, or that sends a link to a friend.
On a Mac and on an iPad with a hardware keyboard, you can set a custom keyboard shortcut for each article action and for each shortcut.
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.
This order was based on capabilities granted by the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, though the Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, allows the U.K. government to make similarly broad access demands. That there are at least two wide-ranging laws that compel technical workarounds to end-to-end encryption belies the government’s claim of supporting users’ privacy.
I want to nitpick the final sentence I quoted above from Menn’s article:
[…] Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.
Based on its wording, it is possible this is a rephrasing of something Menn was told by a source, so I do not want to put too much weight on it. Menn also discusses the privacy implications to users later in the article. But it does not make sense to think of this as a “defeat for tech companies”. It poisons the well. Tech companies are — correctly — facing more of the kind of scrutiny expected of any world-dominating market leaders. It is not just industry giants and criminals who are concerned about such extraordinary access.
The UK Investigatory Powers Act, dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” by critics when it was passed in 2016, was updated last year in the final weeks of the Conservative government before July’s election.
Under the legislation, which has been widely criticised by human rights campaigners and privacy activists as well as Silicon Valley tech companies, recipients of technical capability notices are not allowed to acknowledge their existence or warn users that their security had been weakened, unless the Secretary of State grants permission to do so.
Establishing this as a fight between tech companies and governments minimizes the widespread opposition from experts in privacy and security. In turn, that minimizes the effects it will have on actual users. We should expect our information is secured against third-party access. Given the number of companies involved in storing and transmitting user data, there ought to be no difference between a warrant to access someone’s personal data on a drive in their physical possession and one for a server in a data centre. Those legal protections ought to be similarly strong.
However, I wonder if there is any room for compromise. Maybe I will regret writing this. Here is the thing: the higher security offered by Advanced Data Protection only applies to collaborative features in limited cases, but one of those is Notes, which has a substantial feature set these days — a user can embed pictures and attach documents. I think it makes sense if Advanced Data Protection could apply to documents shared with all users within, say, the same iCloud Family. I do not know that it makes sense to extend those protections to a larger and less connected group. I expect there are some limits to the number of users a note can be shared between, given limits on similar iCloud features and Shared Albums, though I could not find any relevant documentation. There are good reasons a group of otherwise disconnected people might want shared access to a very secure document; I can think of use cases among dissidents, activists, and journalists, for example. But I can also see how sharing could lead to abuse.
In any case, the reported demands by the U.K. government are an extraordinary abuse of their own. It has global implications for both U.K. access and, I would venture, access by its allies. As a reminder, U.S. and U.K. spy agencies routinelyshared collected data while avoiding domestic legal protections. This order explicitly revives the bad old days of constant access.
NowSecure has conducted a comprehensive security and privacy assessment of the DeepSeek iOS mobile app, uncovering multiple critical vulnerabilities that put individuals, enterprises, and government agencies at risk. These findings highlight the immediate need for organizations to prohibit the app’s use to safeguard sensitive data and mitigate potential cyber risks.
NowSecure’s most pressing concerns have little to do with the app’s country of origin, and a lot more to do with basic things like HTTP requests:
The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels. Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over internet.
Beyond security concerns tied to the DeepSeek iOS app, there are indications the Chinese AI company may be playing fast and loose with the data that it collects from and about users. On January 29, researchers at Wiz said they discovered a publicly accessible database linked to DeepSeek that exposed “a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.”
You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.
I think it is reasonable to approach the bleak reality in which many now live — or, for some of us, will soon — differently depending on our style. “Posters post”. Some people work things out by brain dumping. Some people — me included — have a brain fried by too much news, too fast, all the time, and we are just trying to cope. None of that is bad or wrong.
However, Rose is correct in writing that information needs to eventually be turned into action. That might look different for different people, but it rarely looks like a sick dunk hinging on a technical definition. I do not think stop posting, start acting is easy, nor is it right for everyone. But we need to recognize there are far more people who, despite disagreements, have common goals in opposition to far-right authoritarians than there are those who agree with them.
Update:Sandy Allen has good advice on what can help.
To build a very large operation that still resembles a boutique one required decades of sustained control. Foster has controlled the work, and controlled his image, and controlled the images made by him: a Foster + Partners project will almost always have its accompanying Norman Foster sketches, often made retrospectively, rather than in the heat of design. They’ll be annotated by Foster, in a spiky hand that some of his colleagues have learned to imitate. These images may show a building’s future users spreading their arms above their heads, in a gesture of joyous abandon that it’s hard to imagine Foster ever having made.
I know I just wrote about the mistakes of idolizing business leaders. True enough, there are some pretty odious people named in this article, and some of Foster’s more aspirational qualities are called into question. This is a great profile nonetheless: well-written, comprehensive, and full of wonderful details.
My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.
[…]
But: the beauty of the open web and the approach embraced by Tapestry and Reeder is that there are plenty of potential use cases to satisfy everyone. Crucially, this includes people who are not like me. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here because the web isn’t built like that.
I, too, think an all-in-one client would be a nice addition to my home screen. This is the advantage of separating the data layer from its presentation, however — there exists plenty of opportunity for different takes. I am currently testing Flashes, an app which connects to Bluesky or other (hypothetical) AT Protocol systems and shows only photo and video posts. I do not want to follow the same people for both text and photography, but that is okay because Bluesky has enough filtering options to create a different experience in different apps. I could see a similar app pulling together photos from different ActivityPub-based services, too.
Recently I read about a massive geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics, which exposed more than 2000 apps, both in AppStore and Google Play, that secretly collect geolocation data without user consent. Oftentimes, even without developers` knowledge.
I looked into the list (link here) and found at least 3 apps I have installed on my iPhone. Take a look for yourself!
This made me come up with an idea to track myself down externally, e.g. to buy my geolocation data leaked by some application.
Unfortunately, it is very expensive for a typical person to buy this kind of data. Still, “Tim” spent some time dissecting the HTTPS requests from a single game. You probably will not be surprised by how much is revealed even with App Tracking Transparency preventing access to a user’s advertising identifier, yet it is quite something to see it all displayed like this.
I know advertising is an important revenue stream — often the only revenue stream — for many products and services. This, though, is not just advertising. It is a staggering abuse of trust happening all the time with — in many regions — almost no control or transparency. Absorbing or resharing this much private information should be criminal.
Prior to this, screens were large and encumbered. Classic TVs were housed in cabinets and were more furniture than centerpieces. They’ve become slimmer and larger over the decades but for the most part are still primarily active devices. One turns on a TV to watch something. A TV doesn’t necessarily reach out to you. It’s a consumption device. It generally is turned off.
Now, a small screen, or a larger one as a tablet, sits positioned. A phone is usually on, 24/7, 365 days a year. A person may choose to have it in a cradle propped up for display. Screens and battery have made it such that always-on is a feature, and no longer a decision. It acts as a supposed gateway to connection: access to the broader world as you know it.
This is a great piece, with a bunch of lovely ideas. There are plenty of people I know who say they want to use their phones less often, and have come up with techniques for making their phone time more intentional. If this does not describe you, that is fine; I have no judgement of anyone’s technology use unless their doing so puts me at risk. Please do not use your phone while driving.
These can be little changes, like keeping your phone in your bag or pocket in the elevator, or — as Hamid does — placing it face-down instead of face-up. One change I really appreciate is turning off my history on YouTube, which also blanks its homepage. Because I am logged out and, therefore, cannot see any subscriptions, this change means I need to deliberately search. It means my YouTube use becomes very specific. I never have any guilt about my time on YouTube, but I like the idea of making it an intentional decision instead of an idle one.
The web has always been in a state of flux, but the rate of change around how people connect has accelerated over the past few years. Centralized systems have shown their weakness and siloed content has as much a chance of surviving as “You’ve got mail!”.
Tapestry was built with this change in mind. Your content comes from a lot of different places, and how that data is retrieved from a feed is entirely customizable. Our goal was to put RSS, social media, podcasts, and more into a flexible and easy-to-read timeline. Tapestry syncs this variety of feeds across devices in a way that is seamless, secure, and easy to understand.
I am not sure I want all of these things inside a single app’s timeline. I typically want to treat reading web feeds as a discrete task, for example, and I would use a dedicated podcast client instead. But I like the idea of a merged social media feed. Some people have accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog, while others are on only one of those services. I would often like to see all of them at the same time.
Tapestry reminds me of Twitterrific in a lot of ways, and is conceptually similar to the new Reeder. I do not care for the default font and I am a little peeved the system font is behind a paywall, but it is making me consider a subscription so maybe it is working as intended. What I would really like — and I do not mean to sound ungrateful or demanding — is a MacOS client. There are many excellent Mastodon clients for iOS, and the first-party Bluesky app is good as well. But the MacOS Bluesky client ecosystem is disappointingly weak, especially if you still use an Intel-based model.
The good news is that this is a burgeoning category of apps. That makes me very excited. The material published on social media has been tied for too long to the platforms themselves. That is true in part because of advertising revenue, but also because platform owners do not trust users. Instead of being allowed control over our experiences, we are required to endure the changes du jour. A social web built on open protocols is an opportunity to change all of that. Bring it on.
Adobe has updated the Acrobat AI Assistant, giving it the ability to understand contracts and to compare them for you. The company says it can help you make sense of complex terms and spot differences between agreements, such as between old and new ones, so you can understand what you’re signing. With the AI Assistant enabled, the Acrobat app will be able to recognize if a document is a contract, even if it’s a scanned page. It can identify and list key terms from there, summarize the document’s contents and recommend questions you can ask based on what’s in it.
Raise your hand if you would sign a contract — a legally binding document — based on the way an A.I. system understands it. Anyone? If this flags anything at all, you will probably need to check with a lawyer for a reliable opinion, and they cost way more than five dollars per month. No judge is going to sympathize with a misunderstanding because Adobe’s A.I. product summarized it all wrong.
The ‘Twitter Files’ Authors Only Pretend to Care About Power
Do you remember the “Twitter Files”?
I completely understand if you do not. Announced with great fanfare by Elon Musk after his eager-then-reluctant takeover of the company, writers like Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss were permitted access to internal records of historic moderation decisions. Each published long Twitter threads dripping in gravitas about their discoveries.
But after stripping away the breathless commentary and just looking at the documents as presented, Twitter’s actions did not look very evil after all. Clumsy at times, certainly, but not censorial — just normal discussions about moderation. Contrary to Taibbi’s assertions, the “institutional meddling” was research, not suppression.
Now, Musk works for the government’s DOGE temporary organization and has spent the past two weeks — just two weeks — creating chaos with vast powers and questionable legality. But that is just one of his many very real jobs. Another one is his ownership of X where he also has an executive role. Today, he decided to accuse another user of committing a crime, and used his power to suspend their account.
What was their “crime”? They quoted a Wired story naming six very young people who apparently have key roles at DOGE despite their lack of experience. The full tweetread:1
Here’s a list of techies on the ground helping Musk gaining and using access to the US Treasury payment system.
Akash Bobba
Edward Coristine
Luke Farritor
Gautier Cole Killian
Gavin Kliger
Ethan Shaotran
I wonder if the fired FBI agents may want dox them and maybe pay them a visit.
In the many screenshots I have seen of this tweet, few seem to include the last line as it is cut off by the way X displays it. Clicking “Show more” would have displayed it. It is possible to interpret this as violative of X’s Abuse and Harassment rules, which “prohibit[s] behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups of people with abuse”, including “behavior that urges offline action”.
X, as Twitter before it, enforces these policies haphazardly. The same policy also “prohibit[s] content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place”, but searching “Sandy Hook” or “Building 7” turns up loads of tweets which would presumably also run afoul. Turns out moderation of a large platform is hard and the people responsible sometimes make mistakes.
But the ugly suggestion made in that user’s post might not rise to the level of a material threat — a “crime”, as it were — and, so, might still be legal speech. Musk’s X also suspended a user who just posted the names of public servants. And Musk is currently a government employee in some capacity. The “Twitter Files” crew, ostensibly concerned about government overreach at social media platforms, should be furious about this dual role and heavy-handed censorship.
It was at this point in drafting this article that Mike Masnick of Techdirt published his impressions much faster than I could turn it around. I have been bamboozled by my day job. Anyway:
Let’s be crystal clear about what just happened: A powerful government official who happens to own a major social media platform (among many other businesses) just declared that naming government employees is criminal (it’s not) and then used his private platform to suppress that information. These aren’t classified operatives — they’re public servants who, theoretically, work for the American people and the Constitution, not Musk’s personal agenda.
This doesn’t just “seem like” a First Amendment issue — it’s a textbook example of what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
So far, however, we have seen from the vast majority of them no exhausting threads, no demands for public hearings — in fact, barely anything. To his extremely limited credit, Taibbi did acknowledge it is “messed up”, going on to write:
That new-car free speech smell is just about gone now.
“Now”?
Taibbi is the only one of those authors who has written so much as a tweet about Musk’s actions. Everyone else — Fang, Shellenberger, Subramanya, and Weiss — has moved on to unsubstantive commentary about newer and shinier topics.
This is not mere hypocrisy. What Musk is doing is a far more explicit blurring of the lines between government power and platform speech permissions. This could be an interesting topic that a writer on the free speech beat might want to explore. But for a lot of them, it would align them too similarly to mainstream reporting, and their models do not permit that.
It is one of the problems with being a shallow contrarian. Because these writers must position themselves as alternatives to mainstream news coverage — “focus[ing] on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative”, “for people who dare to think for themselves”. How original. They suggest they cannot cover the same news — or, at least, not from a similar perspective — as in the mainstream. This is not actually true, of course: each of them frequently publishes hot takes about high-profile stories along their particular ideological bent, which often coincide with standard centre-right to right-wing thought. They are not unbiased. Yet this widely covered story has either escaped their attention, or they have mostly decided it is not worth mentioning.
I am not saying this is a conspiracy among these writers, or that they are lackeys for Musk or Trump. What I am saying is that their supposed principles are apparently only worth expressing when they are able to paint them as speaking truth to power, and their concept of power is warped beyond recognition. It goes like this: some misinformation researchers partially funded by government are “power”, but using the richest man in the world as a source is not. It also goes like this: when that same man works for the government in a quasi-official capacity and also owns a major social media platform, it is not worth considering those implications because Rolling Stone already has an article.
They can prove me wrong by dedicating just as much effort to exposing the blurrier-than-ever lines between a social media platform and the U.S. government. Instead, it is busy reposting glowing profiles of now-DOGE staff. They are not interested in standing for specific principles when knee-jerk contrarianism is so much more thrilling.
There are going to be a lot of x.com links in this post, as it is rather unavoidable. ↥︎
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)
This is the tenth year Snell has run this; the first was for 2015. Over that time — and you can see this reflected in graphs in the 2024 edition — the reputation of Macs and Apple’s services has soared, Home products and software quality continue to be pretty meh, and developer relations and reception of the company’s societal impact has cratered. The vibe in the room is not great.
I continue to be impressed by how much work Snell puts into this every year. There are some changes to the survey and its reporting this time. Notably, the full commentary from all panellists who wanted to be quoted has been published separately. Maybe you think this is a lot of words, but consider how much sixty-ish commentators would write if you gave them an empty text box to rant in, and I think you will agree we all showed admirable restraint.
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Yesterday, I published a little thing about how Quartz slipped and fell into a toxic stew of A.I. slop. If you have not yet read it, I must say I quite like it. What began as a little link I was going to throw to Riley MacLeod’s article became an exploration of an A.I.-generated article with at least two completely fictional sources, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, that article is still up — unchanged — and it still claims “new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March”.
Trump launched a trade war against Canada earlier Saturday by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on virtually all goods from this country — an unprecedented strike against a long-standing ally that has the potential to throw the economy into a tailspin.
[…]
These potentially devastating tariffs are slated to take effect on Tuesday and remain in place until Trump is satisfied Canada is doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.
I think you have to see “fentanyl” in this context as the equivalent of “weapons of mass destruction” in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. It’s not the real reason; Canada isn’t even a major source of fentanyl. It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons — George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.
The president posted today that “Canada should become our Cherished 51st State”, effectively saying the tariffs are part of a hostile takeover strategy. And, sure, maybe he does not mean it; maybe if he gets a series of special edition Trump-branded Timbits, he will call the whole thing off. But we are now on the receiving end of economic warfare from the world’s most powerful nation, and an explicit threat of far worse.
The stance of the Trump administration only exacerbates the growing recognition that allowing US companies to dominate the internet economy across much of the world was a terrible mistake. The harms that have come of that model — for workers, users, and the wider society — have already shone a spotlight on the problems of importing poorly regulated internet platforms based on American norms and practices. But now more than ever it’s clear that cannot continue, and traditional allies of the United States need to come together not just to take on its tech industry, but to protect themselves from a declining superpower that’s decided it can do whatever it wants — even to those it recently called friends.
I maintain my disagreement with the U.S. requirement that TikTok divest or be banned, and will continue to do so until there is compelling evidence to reconsider. There is currently nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies and executives are aligning themselves with this adversarial administration, some more than others. I am not saying we ought to require Canadian versions of Meta’s apps or X. But can users trust their recommendations systems?
It is folly for me, an idiot, to offer geopolitical analysis, so I will anyway. There are a handful of world powers worth worrying about: Russia, and its territorial expansion; China, and its manufacturing dominance combined with human rights abuses. The U.S. has long been on that list for anyone living in Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, formerly, and then the Middle East, and Africa now, too. But those of us in developed nations or who have been allies have had it easy; we have only needed to worry about its potential for demonstrating its power. Now, it has. Yet we are all reading about it using devices running U.S. software. I do not like thinking in these terms — the internet was supposed to be a grand unifier — but here we are.
Quartz’s A.I. Slop
The downfall of Quartz is really something to behold. It was launched in 2012 as a digital-only offshoot of the Atlantic specifically intended for business and economic news. It compared itself to esteemed publications like the Economist and Financial Times, and had a clever-for-early-2010s URL.1 It had an iPad-first layout. Six years later, it and “its own bot studio” were sold to Uzabase for a decent sum. But the good times did not last, and Quartz was eventually sold to G/O Media.
As of publishing, the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” has written 22 articles today, running the gamut from earnings reports to Reddit communities banning Twitter posts to the Sackler settlement to, delightfully, a couple articles about how much AI sucks. Quartz has been running AI-generated articles for months, but prior to yesterday, they appear to have been limited to summaries of earnings reports rather than news articles. Boilerplate at the bottom of these articles notes that “This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting. While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.”
MacLeod published this story last week, and I thought it would be a good time to check in on how it is going. So I opened the latest article from the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom”, “Expected new tariffs will mean rising costs for everyday items”. It was published earlier today, and says at the top it “incorporates reporting from Yahoo, NBC Chicago and The Wall Street Journal on MSN.com”. The “Yahoo” story is actually a syndicated video from NBC’s Today Show, so that is not a great start as far as crediting sources goes.
Let us tediously dissect this article, beginning with the first paragraph:
As new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March, consumers in the U.S. can expect price increases on a variety of everyday items. These tariffs, imposed in a series of trade policy shifts, are anticipated to affect numerous sectors of the economy. The direct cost of these tariffs is likely to be passed on to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods ranging from electronics to household items.
The very first sentence of this article appears to be wrong. The tariffs in question are supposed to be announced today, as stated in that Today Show clip, and none of the cited articles say anything about March. While a Reuters “exclusive” yesterday specified a March 1 enforcement date, the White House denied that report, with the president saying oil and gas tariffs would begin “around the 18 of February”.
To be fair to the robot writing the Quartz article, the president does not know what he is talking about. You could also see how a similar mistake could be made by a human being who read the Reuters story or has sources saying something similar. But the Quartz article does not cite Reuters — it, in fact, contains no links aside from those in the disclaimer quoted above — nor does it claim to have any basis for saying March.
The next paragraph is where things take a sloppier turn; see if you can spot it:
Data from recent analyses indicate that electronics, such as smartphones and laptops, will be among the most impacted by the new tariffs. Importers of these goods face increased costs, which they are poised to transfer to consumers. A report by the U.K.-based research firm Tech Analytics suggests that consumers might see price hikes of up to 15% on popular smartphone models and up to 10% on laptops. These increases are expected to influence consumer purchasing decisions, possibly leading to a decrease in sales volume.
If you are wondering why an article about U.S. tariffs published by a U.S. website is citing a U.K. source, you got the same weird vibe as I did. So I looked it up. And, as best I can tell, there is no U.K. research organization called “Tech Analytics” — none at all. There used to be and, because it was only dissolved in October, it is possible Tech Analytics could be a report from around then based on the president’s campaign statements. But I cannot find any record of Tech Analytics publishing anything whatsoever, or being cited in any news stories. This report does not exist.
I also could not find any source for the figures in this paragraph. Last month, the U.S. Consumer Technology Association published a report (PDF) exploring the effects of these tariffs on U.S. consumer goods. Analysis by Trade Partnership Worldwide indicated the proposed tariffs would raise the price of smartphones by 26–37%, and laptops by 46–68%. These figures assumed a rate of 70–100% on goods from China because that is what the president said he would do. He more recently said 10% tariffs should be expected, and that could mean smartphone prices really do increase by the amount in the Quartz article. However, there is again no (real) source or citation for those numbers.
As far as I can tell, Quartz, a business and financial news website, published a made-up source and some numbers in an article about a high-profile story. If a real person reviewed this story before publication, their work is not evident. Why should a reader trust anything from Quartz ever again?
Let us continue a couple of paragraphs later:
The automotive sector is also preparing for the impact of increased tariffs. Car manufacturers and parts suppliers are bracing for higher production costs as tariffs on imported steel and aluminum take hold. According to a February report from the Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S., vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500. This increase stems from the higher costs of materials that are critical to vehicle manufacturing and assembly.
Does the phrase “according to a February report” sound weird to you on the first of February? It does to me, too. Would it surprise you if I told you the “Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S.” does not exist? There was a U.S. trade group by the name of “Automobile Manufacturers Association” until 1999, according to Stan Luger in “Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry”.2 There are also several current industry groups, none of which are named anything similar. This organization and its report do not exist. If they do, please tell me, but I found nothing relevant.
What about the figure itself, though — “vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500”? Again, I cannot find any supporting evidence. None of the sources cited in this article contain this number. A November Bloomberg story cites a Wolfe Research note in reporting new cars will be about $3,000 more expensive, not $1,500, at the same proposed rate as the White House is expected to announce today.
Again, I have to ask why anyone should trust Quartz with their financial news. I know A.I. makes mistakes and, as MacLeod quotes them saying, Quartz does too: “[w]hile we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard”.
This is the first article I checked, and I gave up after the fourth paragraph and two entirely fictional sources of information. Maybe the rest of the Quartz Intelligence Newsroom’s output is spotless and I got unlucky.
But — what a downfall for Quartz. Once positioning itself as the Economist for the 2010s, it is now publishing stuff that is made up by a machine and, apparently, is passed unchecked to the web for other A.I. scrapers to aggregate. G/O Media says it publishes “editorial content and conduct[s its] day-to-day business activities with the UTMOST INTEGRITY”. I disagree. I think we will struggle to understand for a long time how far and how fast standards have fallen. This is trash.
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The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.
A whirlwind of emotions here in just nine selected images. Tremendous documentary work.
“For the longest time I’ve been satisfied and chill,” he [Tom Anderson] later wrote on IG. “Just at peace with how I am and how the world is.”
In comments like these, I see the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom. Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: more profits, more influence, more data. I think of the image of Musk, Zuckerberg and others at Trump’s recent inauguration. I think, too, of the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen’s claim that mega-successful entrepreneurs are also entitled to public adulation. Nothing is ever quite enough for these people; the trend line must always go up. That Myspace Tom defied that mandate and fucked off to Hawaii feels unusually decent, if not straight-up heroic.
It was a mistake for us to indulge the business leaders craving celebrity despite also having lots of money and lots of power. Perhaps you do not believe they ought to be considered enemies — though there is a strong case to be made for that — but they are assuredly not our friends. Their ruthless behaviour is not aspirational.
Google Maps users in the United States can expect to see the body of water known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America, aligning with the terms of President Trump’s controversial executive order. Google also said Denali, a mountain in southern Alaska and North America’s tallest peak, is going to be called Mount McKinley on its maps for those same users, reflecting the presidential mandate.
It does not matter how idiotic this renaming is, it makes sense for Google — and Apple — to follow official local naming conventions. Disputed territories are common and there are exceptions to this rule, as I wrote in a terrible 2019 article that still has some good points, and I do not think U.S. tech companies should be arbiters of these political disputes. It is the renaming itself which ought to be ridiculed.
However, it is pretty rich to think of Google as particularly concerned about the accuracy of names on its maps. It routinelyinventsnames of neighbourhoods.
See Also: The U.S. National Park Service had a good article about Denali and why it was renamed. It was online as of yesterday, but has just been removed.
The “study” that spearheaded this cascade of concern in 2005, and is still quoted in the press today, claimed that using email lowered IQ more than cannabis. But Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, smelled a rat when he couldn’t find the original paper. It turns out there never was one – it was just a press release. That finding was the result of one day’s consultancy that a psychologist did for Hewlett Packard. He would later state that the exaggerated presentation of this work became the bane of his life.
Alongside a survey on email usage, the psychologist conducted a one-day lab experiment in which eight subjects were shown to have reduced problem-solving abilities when email alerts appeared on their screens and their phones were ringing. He later wrote: “This is a temporary distraction effect – not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel.”
A little detail I appreciate in online news is noticing where the links are pointed. Most often, publishers love to cite their own past work to establish their credibility, keep people within the same website, and for search optimization reasons. But what happens when they want to point out a previous error? One option is to also keep that link in-house — a bold move but one that, I think, also reinforces readers’ trust. A sassier option is to link to a competitor, as the Guardian did here linking to the BBC. But the Guardian also uncritically covered this 2005 survey, albeit referring to it not as a “study” but as a series of “clinical trials”. It carries no correction notice or update.
Fleming’s article is quite good, however. It is a necessary correction to several widespread myths about the effects of technology on our brains. I am reminded of Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think”, which I intend to revisit. That is not to say new technologies do not have any negative effects, but let us not repeat the same old moral panics.
The complaint [by Uber] was issued shortly before council voted 11–3 to approve a suite of changes to the livery and transport bylaw on Tuesday. Among the changes is a requirement for Uber and other ride-booking companies to provide the city with exact geolocation data for each trip down to five decimal places, including trips that start or end outside of Calgary’s boundaries.
[…]
Cory Porter, deputy chief of vehicle for hire with public vehicle standards, noted that Calgary’s taxi and rides-booking regulations already require the longitude and latitude of a driver’s licensed vehicle. He said the city has been collecting vehicle-for-hire data since 2015 and that taxi companies already provide geolocation data accuracy within six to eight decimal points, whereas TNCs [Transportation Network Companies like Uber] provide accuracy within three to five decimal points.
Porter says this data is used to allow drivers to more accurately find a ride hailer in crowded environments and, naturally, it can also be shared with law enforcement.
I had no idea taxicabs record precise location data every two minutes and automatically submit it to the city daily — and have apparently done so since 2014 (PDF). This is information about the car and its driver — not the location of individual passengers. Uber told the Herald these changes will make passengers identifiable to a greater extent than the three decimal places they currently report to, as it increases the precision from about one hundred metres to just one metre. I do not see that in the proposed amendments (PDF), which seem to make the reporting from ride sharing drivers match that of taxi drivers.
I feel like I should be opposed to this on the basis that it records trips with surprising granularity, and that it brings this data uncomfortably close to law enforcement access. The city, for its part, appears to have been a decent steward of the taxi data it has already collected. Also, Uber itself collects location data of riders and drivers for safety and marketing reasons, and shares it with advertisers. The city’s collection may be uncomfortable, but at least it is bound by stricter privacy laws than Uber.
Another thing I learned from digging around for the bylaw amendments is that the city of Calgary has just 1,882 taxi plates (PDF) for a population of over 1.3 million people. There are also over sixteen thousand ride sharing drivers.
Today, noyb has filed GDPR complaints against TikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN, Temu, WeChat and Xiaomi for unlawful data transfers to China. While four of them openly admit to sending Europeans’ personal data to China, the other two say that they transfer data to undisclosed “third countries”. As none of the companies responded adequately to the complainants’ access requests, we have to assume that this includes China. But EU law is clear: data transfers outside the EU are only allowed if the destination country doesn’t undermine the protection of data. Given that China is an authoritarian surveillance state, companies can’t realistically shield EU users’ data from access by the Chinese government. After issues around US government access, the rise of Chinese apps opens a new front for EU data protection law.
This is exactly why data privacy laws are so important. If everyone has a minimum expectation of privacy, it is possible to point to specific violations and correct for them in a fair and standard way. It also makes it easier to respond to new potential threats.
On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence Features
With this week’s public release of Apple’s operating system updates comes Apple Intelligence now on by default. More users will be discovering its “beta” features and Apple will, in theory, be collecting even more feedback about their quality. There are certainly issues with the output of Notification Summaries, Siri, and more.1 The flaws in results from Apple Intelligence’s many features are correctly scrutinized. Because of that, I think some people have overlooked the questionable user interface choices.
Not one of the features so far available through Apple Intelligence is particularly newsworthy from a user’s perspective. There are plenty of image generators, automatic summaries, and contextual response suggestions in other software. Apple is not breaking new ground in features, nor is it strategically. It is rarely first to do anything. What it excels at is implementation. Apple often makes some feature or product, however time-worn by others, feel so well-considered it has reached its inevitable form. That is why it is so baffling to me to use features in the Apple Intelligence suite and feel like they are half-baked.
Consider, for example, Writing Tools. This is a set of features available on text in almost any application to proofread it, summarize it, and rewrite it in different styles. You may have seen it advertised. While its name implies the source text is editable, these tools will work on pretty much any non-U.I. text — it works on webpages and in PDF files, but I was not able to make it work with text detected in PNG screenshots.
What this looks like on my Mac, sometimes, is as a blue button beside text I have highlighted. This is not consistent — this button appears in MarsEdit but not Pages; TextEdit but not BBEdit. These tools are also available from a contextual menu, which is the correct place in MacOS for taking actions upon a selection.
In any case, Writing Tools materializes in a popover. Despite my enabling of Reduce Transparency across the system, it launches with a subtle Apple Intelligence gradient background that makes it look translucent before it fades out. This popover works a little bit like a contextual menu and a little like a panel while doing the job of neither very successfully. Any action taken from this popover will spawn another popover. For example, selecting “Proofread” will close the Writing Tools popover and open a new, slightly wider one. After some calculation, the proofread selection will appear alongside buttons for “Replace”, “Copy”, and providing feedback. (I anticipate the latter is a function of the “beta” caveat and will eventually be removed.)
There are several problems with this, beginning with the choice to present this as a series of popovers. It is not entirely inappropriate; Apple says “[i]f you need content only temporarily, displaying it in a popover can help streamline your interface”. However, because popovers are intended for only brief interactions, they are designed to be easily dismissed, something Apple also acknowledges in its documentation. Popovers disappear if you click outside their bounds, if you switch to another window, or if you try to take an action after scrolling the highlighted text out of view. Apple has also made the choice to not cache the results of one of these tools on a passage of selected text. What can easily happen, therefore, is a user will select some text, run Proofread on it, and then — quite understandably — try to make edits to the text or perhaps switch to a different application, only to find that the writing tool has disappeared, and that opening it again will necessitate processing the text again. A user must select the resulting text in the popover or use the “Replace” or “Copy” buttons.
Unlike some other popovers in MacOS — like when you edit an event in Calendar — Writing Tools cannot exist as a floating, disconnected panel. It remains stubbornly attached to the selected text.
As noted, the Writing Tools popover is not the same width as the other popovers it will spawn. By sheer luck, I had one of my test windows positioned in such a way that the Writing Tools popover had enough space to display on the lefthand side of the window, but the popovers it launched appeared on the right because they are a bit wider. This made for a confusing and discordant experience.
Choice of component aside, the way the results of Writing Tools are displayed is so obviously lacklustre I am surprised it shipped in its current state. Two of the features I assumed I would find useful — as I am one person shy of an editor — are “Proofread” and “Rewrite”. But they both have a critical flaw: neither shows the differences between the original text and the changed version. For very short passages, this is not much of a problem, but a tool like “Proofread” implies use on more substantial chunks, or even a whole document. A user must carefully review the rewritten text to discover what changes were made, or place their faith in Apple and click the “Replace” button hoping all is well.
Apple could correct for all of these issues. It could display Writing Tools in a panel instead of a popover or, at least, make it possible to disconnect the popover from the selected and transform it into a panel. It should also make every popover the same width or require enough clearance for the widest popover spawned by Writing Tools so that they always open on the same side. It could bring to MacOS the same way of displaying differences in rewritten text as already exists on iOS but, for some reason, is not part of the Mac version. It could cache results so, if the text is unchanged, invoking the same tool again does not need to redo a successful action.
Writing Tools on MacOS is the most obviously flawed of the Apple Intelligence features suffering from weak implementation or questionable U.I. choices, but there are other examples, too. Some quick hits:
I could not figure out how to get Image Playground to generate an illustration of my dog, something I know is possible. On my iPhone, the toolbar in Image Playground shows a box to “describe an image”, a “People” button, and a plus button. The “People” button is limited to human beings detected in your photo library, even though Photos groups “People & Pets” together. Describing an image using my dog’s name also does not work. The way to do it is to tap the plus button — which contains a “Style” selector and buttons to choose or take a photo — then select “Choose Photo” to pick something from your library as a reference.
This is somewhat more obvious in the Mac version because the toolbar is wide enough to fit the “Style” selector and, therefore, the plus button is labelled with a photo icon.
Also in Image Playground, I find the try-and-see approach as much fun as it is with Siri. I typed my dog’s breed into the image prompt, and it said it does not support the language. I then picked one photo of my dog from my photo library and it said it was “unable to use that description”. I wish the photo picker would not have shown me an option it was unable to use.
Automatic replies in Messages are unhelpful and, on MacOS, cannot be turned off without turning off Apple Intelligence altogether.
The settings for Apple Intelligence features are, by and large, not shown in the Apple Intelligence panel in Settings. That panel only contains a toggle for Apple Intelligence as a whole, a section for managing extensions — like ChatGPT — and Siri controls. Settings for individual features are instead placed in different parts of Settings or in individual apps.
I think this is the correct choice overall, but it is peculiar to have everything Apple Intelligence branded across the system with its logo and gradient — and to advertise Apple Intelligence as its own software — only to have to find the menu in Notification settings for toggling summarization in different apps.
You will note that not a single one of these criticisms is related to the output of Apple Intelligence or a complaint about its limitations. These are all user interaction problems I have experienced. Perhaps this is the best Apple is able to do right now; perhaps it considered and rejected putting Writing Tools in a panel on MacOS for a good reason.
It is unfortunate these features feel almost undesigned — like engineers were responsible for building them, and then someone with human interface knowledge was brought in to add some design. There are plenty of things that are more visually appealing and consistent with platform expectations, like Priority Inbox in Mail. Many of the features seem more polished for iOS compared to MacOS.
Writing Tools, in particular, can and should be better. I write a little on my iPhone, but I write a lot on my Mac — not just posts here, but also emails, messages, and social media posts. A more advanced spelling and grammar checker that has at least some contextual awareness sounds very appealing to me. This is a letdown, and because of so many basic reasons. I do not need Apple Intelligence to be the apex of current technology. What I do expect, at the very least, is that it is user-friendly and feels at home on Apple’s own platforms. It needs work.
In the public version of iOS 18.3, summaries are unavailable for apps from the News and Entertainment categories. ↥︎
Brazil’s AI bill is one window into a global effort to define the role that artificial intelligence will play in democratic societies. Large Silicon Valley companies involved in AI software — including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon Web Services, and OpenAI — have mounted pushback to proposals for comprehensive AI regulation in the EU, Canada, and California.
Hany Farid, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent regulation advocate who often testifies at government hearings on the tech sector, told Rest of World that lobbying by big U.S. companies over AI in Western nations has been intense. “They are trying to kill every [piece of] legislation or write it in their favor,” he said. “It’s fierce.”
Meanwhile, outside the West, where AI regulations are often more nascent, these same companies have received a red-carpet welcome from many politicians eager for investment. As Aakrit Vaish, an adviser to the Indian government’s AI initiative, told Rest of World: “Regulation is actually not even a conversation.”
It sure seems as though competition is so intense among the biggest players that concerns about risk have been suspended. It is an unfortunate reality that business friendliness is code for a lax regulatory environment since we all have to endure the products of these corporations. It is not as though Europe and Canada have not produced successful A.I. companies, either.
In a WhatsApp group named Build Canada, some of the country’s most prominent technology leaders, including Shopify executives Tobi Lütke, Daniel Debow and Kaz Nejatian, as well as investor John Ruffolo, are developing a vision for where they think the country should go next.
[…]
While the members of the Build Canada WhatsApp group are saying little, elsewhere Canada’s tech sector and the Conservative party have gone public with their commitment to each other, frequently singing each others’ praises on social media.
I am fascinated to think about who would have leaked the existence of this WhatsApp group, which goes unmentioned in the article after the quotes above. There is no indication of how large it is, nor are any discussions disclosed. Whichever participants leaked it are seemingly okay with public knowledge of its existence but nothing more than that. Maybe it is an uninteresting chat among the investor class.
Another thing: the populist rhetoric of the Conservative Party is clearly fake. As in the U.S., the moneyed interests are simply aligning themselves with who will benefit them as the tide is turning. They had to have known the parties more amenable to regulation would propose legislation in response to corporate interests. The Conservatives are only too happy to give large corporations an easier time.
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At first glance, ravenprp is a very impressive user, writing 2,891 posts in a mere seven-month span (from September 2006 to April 2007) for average of more than thirteen posts per day. […]
Impressively, these posts span from three years before the account was created to a year after the account was last logged into. And, as the icing on the cake, ravenprp is prescient enough that he can joke about being a language model developed by OpenAI, seven years before OpenAI was even founded; evidently he should have joined PsychicsForums instead.
Not just a story about an increasingly poisoned web, but also one about identity. For future reference, I will note X, with its integrated LLM, claims ownership of users’ accounts and has not been shy to stealusernames for its own purposes.
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:
This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.
This was published in December but I only read it today. Here is the thing: I am going to read a lot of stuff this year, but I already know this is going to be one of my favourite essays. Well told and beautifully designed. Make the time for this thoughtful work.
A group of Italian physicists has dared to tinker with the traditional recipe for cacio e pepe, the challenging Roman dish consisting of pasta, pecorino cheese and black pepper. In a new study, the scientists claim to have “scientifically optimized” the recipe by adding an ingredient: cornstarch.
For some reason I cannot explain, the related paper was already in my history. It is an interesting read — no joke.
I am fascinated by the number of ways this simple recipe has been explored, from using two pans to incorporating cold water. I am not opposed to any of them on principle — I am not Italian, and anything that gets me closer to a perfectly smooth pasta-and-cheese snack is welcome — but there is something that feels a little perverse about an additional starch. Even though these science-backed techniques are tremendous, there is something very special about getting this emulsion just right without any real tricks.
In a January email to staff, Musk pointed to the company’s growing influence and power, but said the finances remain problematic.
“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,” he said in the email, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
“Barely breaking even” would have been an improvement for most of Twitter’s life. Given this fascist’s predilection for dishonesty, I would be surprised if this is an accurate reflection of the current state of X.
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If one reads closely, there is nothing in the ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie that Arendt describes that is not shared by this new tech-oligarchy. What could explain better the apparent contradiction in the oscillation between their state-phobic libertarianism and sudden interest grasp for the reigns of state power; “What Imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politic.” Power without public accountability or a common good. And what about the strange transformation of many of these figures from Utopian “progressives” into dystopian reactionaries? Arendt account[s] for this as well. […]
File this under the essays that will be seen as either barely relevant or prescient for the next four-or-so years, all of which I hope are the former but will likely — and regrettably — fall into the latter camp.
It’s official: The FBI’s warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.
Critics’ primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans’ communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.
Some good news, American friends.
In 2023, then-FBI director Christopher Wray said a warrant “would amount to a de facto ban, because query applications either would not meet the legal standard to win court approval; or” because of the time required to meet legal obligations. To be sure, I bet there are lots of crimes the FBI could catch if it did more illegal stuff.
Lily Hay Newman, Wired, interviewed Easterly near the end of her time running CISA:
The timing couldn’t be worse for the nation to lose its top cybersecurity cop. A Beijing-linked group called Salt Typhoon spent months last year rampaging through American telecoms and siphoning call logs, recordings, text messages, and even potentially location data. Many experts have called it the biggest hack in US telecom history. Easterly and her agency unknowingly detected Salt Typhoon activity in federal networks early last year — warning signs that ultimately sped up the unraveling of the espionage campaign.
The work of banishing Chinese spies from victim networks isn’t over, but the walls are already closing in on CISA. Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, told a senate committee last week that CISA needs to be “smaller” and “more nimble.” And a day after the inauguration, all members of the Cyber Safety Review Board — who were appointed by Easterly and were actively investigating the Salt Typhoon breaches — were let go.
In a letter dated Jan. 20, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Benjamine C. Huffman said the move was meant to avoid a “misuse of resources,” and terminated all current memberships on advisory committees immediately.
The CSRB was established under President Joe Biden’s Executive Order (EO) 14028 on “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity” to study major cyber incidents and recommend improvements. Its members served in a volunteer capacity and did not have regulatory or enforcement authority.
Charitably, the best you can say about Tim Cook’s appearance at the inauguration this week is to presume he is there reluctantly. A million-dollar contribution bought him the same proximity to this nakedly transactional administration as executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Uber. It is not his presence that would be conspicuous to this administration, but his absence.
If you believe all that, this is a photo of someone whose face appears between those of J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. I hope Cook will keep a framed copy on his desk as a reminder every time those two do something cruel, inhumane, or bleak.
When installing macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3, or iPadOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be turned on automatically on compatible devices, Apple says in the developer release notes for the updates.
The documentation is for 15.3, so I suspect the version number is a typo. iOS 18.3 will also receive this “feature” — while there is a toggle to turn it back off, just having Apple Intelligence installed uses a lot of space. […]
This is a good point. According to my Mac, Apple Intelligence is consuming 5.75 GB of disk space. MacOS, as a whole and including Apple Intelligence, consumes 22 GB. The exact amount probably varies from device to device but, still, that is a considerable amount of new space required — a thirty-odd percent growth in operating system size in a nominally minor version update.
Apple still insists this is a beta, but it no longer has the excuse that users are opting in knowing the risks and flaws. These are just unfinished new features. It turns out problems and a lack of quality control magically become excusable if you just slap a beta badge on it. This is a trick Google has known about for decades.
You are probably aware already of the flurry of executive orders signed on the first day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, a phrase that will hopefully not become as infamous as it already feels. His attack on transgender people is particularly appalling despite its predictability. To my likely overwhelmed U.S. readers, I ask only that you take care of yourselves and each other as best you are able.
For whatever reason,1 among the highest of priorities for this new administration is the status of TikTok. Specifically, delaying enforcement of last year’s law requiring U.S. businesses to not facilitate TikTok’s availability lest they be subject to massive penalties. But laws are only as real as those with power demand them to be and, in this case, one man believes he can override both its enforcement and its stated goals.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at halting the ban against TikTok for 75 days so he can “pursue a resolution” outside of a complete prohibition, a legally dubious maneuver that could test his power to stave off a measure he once championed.
The order directs the Justice Department to not take any action to enforce the law nor to “impose any penalties” against companies that carry TikTok for 75 days, a slightly shorter window than Trump had previously suggested. The goal, the order says, is to “determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.”
I wish to issue a small correction. I wrote Sunday that the “leadership of Akamai and Oracle are quite possibly betting their companies on” deferred enforcement, and I am not sure why I hedged. Those leaders are most certainly not betting their companies. Four years down the line, do you really believe the Justice Department will go after Akamai and Oracle for breaking this law? It would be fully capable of doing so, but I guarantee it will not.
Alas, Apple and Google are still not taking that bet. They have enough high-profile legal drama for now.
He floated the possibility of a joint venture running the company, saying he was seeking a 50-50 partnership between “the United States” and its Chinese owner ByteDance. But he did not give any further details on how that might work.
I am no legal scholar, but the law specifically says the ownership stake from adversary nations must be less than twenty percent. Not only does the president believe he is capable of nullifying this law’s penalties, he also thinks he can change its requirements on a whim. That is quite the precedent.
The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control.
A good reminder, indeed. We can debate how much any of us control our spaces so long as any part of it is provided by someone else, but just having your own domain name is a fantastic starting point. Services like Micro.one and omg.lol make that first step super easy. Return proprietary social media to its rightful place as a nice addition to your online presence, not the centre of it. It is not much, and it is not something everyone can do, but it is a start.
Last week I awoke to Google deciding I hadn’t had enough AI shoved down my throat. With no warning they decided to take the previously $20/user/month Gemini add-on and make it “free” and on by default. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also decided to remove my ability as an admin to turn it off. Despite me hitting all the Off buttons I could find: […]
Users were still seeing giant Gemini chat windows, advertisements and harassment to try out Gemini.
I am not sure I agree with Duggan’s conclusion — that the “A.I. bubble is bursting” — but I share his derision for how aggressively these features are being promoted. Ever since software updates became distributed regularly as part of the SaaS business model, it has become the vendors’ priority to show how clever they are through callouts, balloons, dialogs, toasts, and other in-product advertising. I understand why vendors want users to know about new features. But these promotions are way too much and way too often. Respecting users has long been deprioritized in favour of whatever new thing leads to promotions and bonuses.
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In November 2024, Pixelmator announced that the company would join Apple. Although the post said there would be “no material changes” to the company’s apps, fans were worried. The assumption was that Photomator and Pixelmator (the latter being a rare sort-of-Photoshop for iPhone) were on borrowed time.
But is it always bad news for fans of an app when Apple buys it? Let’s explore some key examples from the past 30 years and see how they inform what Apple might do with Pixelmator’s apps.
One thing I noticed in Grannell’s analysis is that more recent acquisitions — with the exception of Dark Sky — are adopted somewhat whole, whereas the older examples are more like foundations. That could be a coincidence based on the specific examples Grannell chose — it bought Texture in 2018 and built Apple News Plus on top of it, for instance.
This reminded me of a different and unrelated part of Apple’s acquisition strategy, which is when it retains a standalone company. You might think of Beats or Claris, but there are a few others: BIS, Shazam, and — until recently — Beddit. Apple feels like such a monolithic brand to me, and it surprises me whenever I remember that it also has these somewhat independent subsidiaries.
Trump seems to want TikTok available for his inauguration on Monday, because “Americans deserve” to see the event. But TikTok is officially banned starting today until it sells to a non-Chinese company, and there’s no deal in sight. Flouting that ban could get Apple and Google’s app stores, as well as service providers Akamai and Oracle, dinged for potentially $850 billion in penalties. Despite all this, Trump has reportedly assured companies they won’t face these fines if they let TikTok keep operating. Now, the question is simple: will Trump-friendly companies risk breaking the law to make the president happy?
Trump is, as of writing, thirteen hours from having actual power, and already corporations and their leaders are proving their fealty. This whole spectacle is embarrassing to watch as a foreigner. Whether he is a true authoritarian or more of a La Croix-esque suggestion of an authoritarian is a matter debatable by political science types and historians. But he has still managed to get tech companies to fall in line behind his administration’s agenda. The leadership of Akamai and Oracle are quite possibly betting their companies on it. And that is before he has any power.
Here’s a notification for you, Apple: There is no husband.
Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.
An Apple spokesperson told Stern the company’s A.I. services “were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases”, but here we are.
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The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company,holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.
The opinion (PDF) is predicated solely on data collection concerns. The justices did not even consider questions about TikTok’s recommendations system, finding that national security alone is worth a change in TikTok’s ownership.
This was a per curiam opinion, but both Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch elaborated separately. Sotomayor (I trimmed references in these excerpts but otherwise left them whole):
[…] The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. […] And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.” […] That, too, calls for First Amendment scrutiny.
Gorsuch:
First, the Court rightly refrains from endorsing the government’s asserted interest in preventing “the covert manipulation of content” as a justification for the law before us. […] One man’s “covert content manipulation” is another’s “editorial discretion.” Journalists, publishers, and speakers of all kinds routinely make less-than-transparent judgments about what stories to tell and how to tell them. Without question, the First Amendment has much to say about the right to make those choices. […]
These are two ideologically divergent justices similarly compelled by arguments for TikTok to moderate and recommend as it sees fit. Perhaps the court would have ultimately come down differently on these questions if the justices had spent more time considering them, but all this produced is understandable concern over user data. Requiring TikTok to be sold off or banning it is not very useful for correcting that misbehaviour, but that was not the question before the court.
The timing of their departure that day last July proved lucky. Just seconds later, a meteorite would plummet onto the front walkway of [Joe] Velaidum’s home in Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, shattering on impact with a reverberating smack.
[…]
Luckier still, his home security camera caught both video and audio of the meteorite’s crash landing.
I am not sure what I expected a chunk of rock falling onto stone from space would sound like, but now I know.
Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed.
But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.
The whole piece is good, but this part in particular is going to stick with me.
This week, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it is legal to require that TikTok be forced to divest from its parent company by January 19 or be banned. You may know this as the “TikTok ban” because that is how it has been reported basically everywhere. Seriously — I was going to list some examples, but if you visit your favourite news publication, you will almost certainly see it called the “TikTok ban”.
Pedants would be right to point out this is not technically a ban. All TikTok needs to do is become incorporated with entirely different ownership, with the word “all” doing most of the work in that phrase. Consider a hypothetical demand by a populous country that Meta divest Instagram to continue its operations locally. Not only is that not easy, I strongly suspect the U.S. government would intervene in that circumstance. No country wants another to take away their soft power.
Coverage of Supreme Court hearings is always a little funny to read because the justices are, ostensibly, impartial adjudicators of the law who are just asking questions of both sides, and are not supposed to tip their hand. That means reporters end up speculating about the vibes. Amy Howe, syndicated at SCOTUSblog,1 reports the justices were “skeptical” and “divided over the constitutionality” of the law. CNN’s reporters, meanwhile, wrote that they “appeared likely to uphold a controversial ban on TikTok”. While some justices were not persuaded by the potential for manipulation, they did seem to agree on the question of user data. I also think privacy is important, and perhaps for some intersecting reasons, but targeting a single app is the dumbest way to resolve that particular complaint.
Mathew Ingram wrote a great piece calling this week’s proceedings a slide into “even stupider” territory, which could refer to just about anything. How about NBC News’ reporting that the Biden Administration is looking into “ways to keep TikTok available in the United States if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect Sunday proceeds”? Yes, apparently the government which signed this into law with bipartisan urgency is now undermining its own position.
Alas, Ingram’s article has nothing do to with that, but it is worth your time. I want to highlight one paragraph, though, which I believe is not as clear as it could be:
We’ve had decades of fear-mongering about both American and foreign companies manipulating people’s minds, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but there’s no evidence that any of it has actually changed people’s minds. All of the Russian manipulation of Facebook and other platforms that allegedly influenced the 2016 election amounted to not much of anything, according to social scientists. I would argue that Fox News is a far bigger problem than Russia ever was. And even if the Chinese government forces TikTok to block mentions of Tiananmen Square (as it has forced Google to), it’s a massive leap to assume that this would somehow affect the minds of gullible young TikTok users in any significant way. In my opinion, people should be a lot more concerned about how Apple — despite all of its bragging about protecting the privacy of its users — gave the Chinese government effective control over all of its data.
I get the feeling the discussions about manipulating users’ opinions will be never-ending, as have those about, say, the influence of violence in video games. Two recent articles I found persuasive are one by Henry Farrell, and another by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, in the Atlantic, calling the internet a “justification machine”.
But to Ingram’s argument about Apple, it should be noted that it gave over control of data about users in China, not “all of its data”. This is probably still a bad outcome for most of those users, yes, but the way Ingram wrote this makes it sound as though the Chinese government has control over my Apple-stored data. As far as I am aware, that is not true.
The publisher of SCOTUSblog is facing charges today of tax evasion through fraudulent employment schemes. ↥︎
Apple released iOS 18.3 beta 3 to developers this afternoon. The update includes a handful of changes to the notification summaries feature of Apple Intelligence.
Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.
This is the first time I can remember where Apple uses an app’s App Store category to change its system behaviour. The closest equivalent I can think of is background downloads in Newsstand publications.
A new data set obtained from a US data broker reveals for the first time about 40,000 apps from which users‘ data is being traded. The data set was obtained by a journalist from netzpolitik.org as a free preview sample for a paid subscription. It is dated to a single day in the summer of 2024.
Among other things, the data set contains 47 million “Mobile Advertising IDs”, to which 380 million location data from 137 countries are assigned. In addition, the data set contains information on devices, operating systems and telecommunication providers.
This is, somehow, different from the Gravy Analytics breach. The authors note this data set includes fairly precise location information about specific users, and they got all this in a free sample of one day of Real Time Bidding data. This is all legal — at least in the U.S.; German authorities are investigating and have threatened sanctions — able to be collected by anyone willing to either pay or become a participant in RTB themselves.
When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more significant: the growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk’s involvement began with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks reveal his growing role in this broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia, and the right’s frustration with platforms that remain resilient against such control.
I first noticed this campaign about three years ago when clips of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on Fox News began circulating among the more reactionary corners of the web. While he has disparaged the site regularly since his long-ago departure, Sanger stepped up his attacks a few years ago after professional contrarians like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald gave him an uncritical platform to do so.
As White writes, there is plenty to criticize about Wikipedia. But Sanger, Musk, and others are jamming this into the same narrative they apply to everything because they are all intellectually lazy. The bananas thing is that it is Wikipedia — the site where you can check just about every edit for yourself. But because few people are actually going to do that and it is possible to produce seemingly damning screenshots, you can see how this nonsense can take shape.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive who has tried to keep a distance from politics, is warming to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Zuckerberg is among several Big Tech executives who are expected to be front and center at Mr. Trump’s inauguration next week. He will be one of four hosts of a black-tie reception on Jan. 20, joining the longtime Republican donors Miriam Adelson and Todd Ricketts in hosting a party “celebrating the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance,” according to a copy of the invitation seen by The New York Times. The event was first reported by Puck.
In what way has Zuckerberg “tried to keep a distance from politics”? Some years ago, he was actively interested in issues of immigration, social justice, and inequality. His views were published in newspapers and magazines. He co-founded an organization advocating for better paths to citizenship.
I know all of these things because I read a different article by Schleifer and Isaac — one which carries a headline that is rapidly becoming infamous: “Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics”. It is even linked in a subsequent paragraph:
But he has undergone something of a political reinvention over the last year. He traveled to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last week. And has announced a series of changes at Meta since the election in November that have delighted advisers to Mr. Trump.
Journalists do not write the headlines; I hope the editor responsible for this one is soaked with regret. Zuckerberg is not “done with politics”. He is very much playing politics. He supported some more liberal causes when it was both politically acceptable and financially beneficial, something he has continued to do today, albeit by having no discernible principles. Do not mistake this for savviness or diplomacy, either. It is political correctness for the billionaire class.
Look, I get it. We’ve all grown cynical about promises to “fix” social media. But this could be different. It’s not about creating a utopian new platform; it’s about building the infrastructure to ensure that no matter what platform you choose to use, it can’t be captured by billionaire interests.
Well said. I think it is important to be skeptical of efforts like Bluesky and Free Our Feeds — and I am. But we should avoid being so cynical when there are, at long last, exciting social media developments which do not benefit billionaires. Hope is not naïveté. Let us keep making things better, if not perfect.
The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky were to end up in the hands of billionaires.
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
Signatories to this campaign include a mix of technologists, writers, business people, government officials, and celebrities. They have launched a $4 million GoFundMe campaign; among the top donors are Mutale Nkonde and Randy Ubillos.
People at Bluesky, like Paul Frazee, also seem enthusiastic:
📢 This is the big goal of Bluesky! 📢
Social networks should not be owned by own company! They should be a shared commons! Nobody should have sole power over them.
Bluesky itself is reportedly raising money right now, only a few months after a $15 million Series A. So much money so fast makes me worried about the company’s business long-term. But, while I admire the spirit of a crowd-funded alternative, I also question whether every contributor is fully aware of the risks. For its part, the organization says it will return pledges if it does not make its fundraising targets.
Mastodon’s [Eugen] Rochko told the Tech Brief on Monday that he was not consulted by the Free Our Feeds group and was not thrilled by its announcement.
“Personally, I think it’s a wasted opportunity to organize this huge effort with a $30 million fundraising goal just to rebuild … what already exists and flourishes today on ActivityPub,” the protocol that underlies Mastodon, Rochko said. He argued that Bluesky’s protocol, called AT Protocol, is designed in a way that gives Bluesky too much control over the system as a whole, meaning that “it will always be an uphill battle” to make it truly open.
Mind you, Mastodon instances are not invincible, either.
There is unlikely to be a singularly effective business model for these more distributed ideas about social networks. Some will likely become paid services; Bluesky is working on a subscription offering. Smaller Mastodon instances might survive on donations. Maybe there are simple ads on some others. The good news is that both AT Protocol and ActivityPub, as protocols, offer some degree of portability and self-sufficiency.
Beijing officials strongly prefer that TikTok remains under the ownership of parent ByteDance Ltd., the people say, and the company is contesting the impending ban with an appeal to the US Supreme Court. But the justices signaled during arguments on Jan. 10 that they are likely to uphold the law. Senior Chinese officials had already begun to debate contingency plans for TikTok as part of an expansive discussion on how to work with Donald Trump’s administration, one of which involves [Elon] Musk, said the people, asking not to be identified revealing confidential discussions.
There are some strange things about this report, like how it carries no byline, which means its credibility rests entirely on how much you trust anonymous sources giving Bloomberg information about government activities in China. Also, Todd Spangler, of Variety, has a quote from TikTok saying it is “pure fiction”.
Then there is this paragraph, later in the article, which does not make very much sense to me:
A majority of the Supreme Court justices suggested the security concerns take priority over free speech, although they have yet to issue a formal decision. President-elect Trump, who takes office Jan. 20, has sought to delay the TikTok ban — which takes effect Jan. 19 — so he can work on the negotiations. He has said he wants to “save” the app and there’s been speculation he could take last-minute action to sidestep the ban.
The obvious question — of how someone who does not yet have power is able to take “last-minute action” to avoid a ban — goes unanswered in this article. Maybe I am missing something. Or, maybe Trump’s golden toilet seat was borne of the fires of Mount Doom.
This whole idea — if it even exists — is dumb as rocks. If you believe social media platforms should not overtly support a particular candidate or ideology, too bad — that is precisely how Musk used X during the last U.S. presidential election. If you are of the opinion that TikTok could be too compromised by government influence, Musk is working directly with the incoming administration. If you think Chinese government influence is a specifically corrupting force for TikTok, they have leverage over Musk thanks to Tesla’s manufacturing plant and sales in China. Think Musk is going to stand up to quasi-authoritarian bullies at home and abroad? Doubtful. This solves basically none of the concerns raised by detractors.
This report sounds, at best, like wishcasting by people who stand to benefit from Musk paying too much for TikTok’s U.S. operations. Little wonder why nobody wanted to put their name on it.
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The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is widely considered to be a dry and unemotional document. Published by the Department of Transportation, it outlines the basic specifications of all the street signs you could expect to see out on roads and highways across the United States. Most are familiar, but if you dive deeper into its pages, you can find some unsettling relics from darker times.
I wanted to see if there was anything similar in the Canadian equivalent of this manual, but it would cost me over $1,000 to find out. Disappointing.
Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned.
[…]
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows these posts [announcing the themes] were both still live as of September 2024, the last time the announcement posts were archived. The chat themes that they were announcing were deleted this week, according to internal information obtained by 404 Media. We also confirmed that the themes are no longer active on Messenger. A “Pride” rainbow theme is still active.
That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.
If anybody is still committed to the idea that Meta changed its policies for principled speech reasons, this ought to shatter that belief. It created explicit carve-outs to permit discriminatory speech based on gender and sexual orientation, and Meta — as a company — is reinforcing that by reducing its public support for people who are transgender and non-binary, and making employees’ lives worse.
“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said during a nearly 3-hour-long conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan, published on Friday.
“It’s like you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy,” Zuckerberg said during the episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing,” he added, before discussing his passions for mixed martial arts and hunting invasive pigs in Hawaii.
This isn’t simply toxic masculinity. It’s also the toxicity of pursuing the latest variant of masculinity. To feel whole. To feel worthy. To feel powerful. To have a purpose. This doesn’t have to be toxic. But the problem with masculinity is that it’s socially constructed. […]
If there was any doubt about what he means by “masculine energy”, Zuckerberg goes on to say “I think having a culture [in martial arts] that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits”, elaborating:
Rogan: I can see your point, though, about corporate culture. When do you think that happened? Was that a slow shift? Because I think it used to be very masculine. I think it was kind of hyper-aggressive at one point.
Zuckerberg: No, look — I think part of… the intent on all these things I think is good, right? Like, I do think that, if you’re a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it’s too masculine. It’s like there isn’t enough of the energy that you may naturally have, and it probably feels like there are all of these things that are set up that are biased against you. And that’s not good either, because you want women to be able to succeed and, like, have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what background or gender.
But I think these things can always go a little far, and I think it’s one thing to say “we want to be … welcoming and make a good environment for everyone”, and I think think it’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I kind of think we swung culturally to that part [of the spectrum] where it’s like “masculinity is toxic, we have to get rid of it completely”. It’s like “no, both of these things are good”.
Ridiculous backlash like this happens every single time some group without much power gets a little bit more. Men remain overrepresented in the U.S. workforce generally, and earn far more. Women are discriminated against when doing paid work from hiring onward. Sexual harassment remains a problem. The literature on this in both popular culture and academic circles is vast. A good introduction to the “masculine energy” at tech companies, in particular, is Emily Chang’s “Brotopia”. The idea that corporate culture has swung too far feminine and is placating women too much is laughable, let alone one which is sufficiently welcoming to people who are transgender, non-binary, or genderfluid.
There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every other field: squared. The pill shape distinguished itself. Removing that characteristic introduced a level of ambiguity that is unnecessary. The same can be said for so much in modern visual design (or lack thereof).
When Mac OS X Lion was released, John Siracusa wrote imagined “three dials labeled ‘color,’ ‘contrast,’ and ‘contour,'” saying “Apple has been turning them down slowly for years. Lion accelerates that process”. At the time, we had no idea how much closer to zero Apple would take those dials. Now, we know — and for the same apparent reason. Siracusa, again:
Apple says that its goal with the Lion user interface was to highlight content by de-emphasizing the surrounding user interface elements.
We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on user’s content.
The thing about this explanation that frustrates most is that while we are sometimes merely viewing something, we are very often doing something with it. The reason there is a visual interface with controls and structure is because the computer is a tool.
You know how many stoves have implemented some form of touch-based controls which sometimes dim or recede? They always look more clever than they are to actually use. A physical knob is more utilitarian, and much better for its purpose. MacOS — and its users — would benefit from similar clarity and obvious controls, even if it comes at the cost of adding more shapes and colours.
Elizabeth Lopatto, for the Verge, listened to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast so none of us need to. Lopatto does a good job in this article of walking through some of the claims made by Zuckerberg and the conspicuous things he omits. It is a good piece.
However, there is one paragraph for which I call for a correction. Zuckerberg spent considerable time complaining about Apple in ways well beyond the scope of his corporate interests. He whined about blue iMessage bubbles! But he does have more legitimate and relevant disputes, too.
Lopatto:
At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.
The 2018 Safari changes might have been what started Zuckerberg’s grudge, but they were not the trigger for Meta’s newspaper complaints or the multibillion-dollar cost to ad-supported social media companies. That was, of course, App Tracking Transparency, announced in 2020 and launched the following year.
Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, according to people briefed on the matter.
Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US president-elect Donald Trump, is probing how he and his rightwing allies can destabilise the UK Labour government beyond the aggressive posts he has issued on his social media platform X, the people said.
Private Eye editor Ian Hislop appeared on Andrew Marr’s LBC show to discuss Musk’s absurd claims:
I mean, it is almost impossible to avoid him, and he has enormous power, because of a) his money, and b) his reach to people who have been persuaded over the last five years or so that the mainstream media hasn’t covered any stories.
Hislop says the award-winning story Musk is using to cause this frenzy was broken on the front page of the Times and has been covered for a decade or more. As Hank Green said, everything is a conspiracy theory when you do not trust anything and, as Mike Masnick said, when you do not bother to educate yourself.
I shudder to think what nonsense is coming for the Canadian election likely happening this year. It is going to be a nightmare.
Hackers claim to have compromised Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel which has sold masses of smartphone location data to the U.S. government. The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples’ precise movements, and they are threatening to publish the data publicly.
Included in the hacked Gravy data are tens of millions of mobile phone coordinates of devices inside the US, Russia, and Europe. Some of those files also reference an app next to each piece of location data. 404 Media extracted the app names and built a list of mentioned apps.
The list includes dating sites Tinder and Grindr; massive games such as Candy Crush, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells; transit app Moovit; My Period Calendar & Tracker, a period tracking app with more than 10 million downloads; popular fitness app MyFitnessPal; social network Tumblr; Yahoo’s email client; Microsoft’s 365 office app; and flight tracker Flightradar24. The list also mentions multiple religious-focused apps such as Muslim prayer and Christian Bible apps; various pregnancy trackers; and many VPN apps, which some users may download, ironically, in an attempt to protect their privacy.
This location data, some of it more granular than others, appears to be derived from real-time bidding on advertising, much like the Patternz case last year. In linking to — surprise — Cox’s reporting on Patternz, I also pointed to a slowly developing lawsuit against Google. In a filing (PDF) from the plaintiffs, so far untested in court, there are some passages that can help contextualize the scale and scope of real-time bidding data (emphasis mine):
As to the Court’s second concern about the representative nature of the RTB data produced for the plaintiffs (the “Plaintiff data”), following the Court’s Order, Google produced six ten-minute intervals of class-wide RTB bid data spread over a three-year period (2021-2023) (the “Class data”). Further Pritzker Decl., ¶ 17. Prof. Shafiq analyzed this production, encompassing over 120 terabytes of data and almost [redacted] billion RTB bid requests. His analysis directly answers the Court’s inquiry, affirming that the RTB data are uniformly personal information for the plaintiffs and the Class, and
that the Plaintiff data is in fact representative of the Class as a whole.
[…]
[…] For the six ten-minute periods of Class data Google produced, Prof. Shafiq finds that there were at least [redacted] different companies receiving the bid data located in at least [redacted] countries, and that the companies included some of the largest technology companies in the world. […]
This is Google, not Gravy Analytics, but still — this entire industry is morally bankrupt. It should not be a radical position that using an app on your phone or browsing the web should not opt you into such egregious violations of basic elements of your privacy.
Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.
There are examples in this article and, separately, in Casey Newton’s reporting about dehumanizing speech toward people who are transgender, non-binary, or genderfluid. I cannot imagine working on these products and being proud to see such abusive language is allowed.
What ‘Free Speech’ Is
Four years ago this week, social media companies decided they would stop platforming then-outgoing president Donald Trump after he celebrated seditionists who had broken into the U.S. Capitol Building in a failed attempt to invalidate the election and allow Trump to stay in power. After two campaigns and a presidency in which he tested the limits of what those platforms would allow, enthusiasm for a violent attack on government was apparently one step too far. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg explained:
Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies. We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech. But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.
Zuckerberg, it would seem, now has regrets — not about doing too little over those and the subsequent years, but about doing too much. For Zuckerberg, the intervening four years have been stifled by “censorship” on Meta’s platforms; so, this week, he announced a series of sweeping changes to their governance. He posted a summary on Threads but the five-minute video is far more loaded, and it is what I will be referring to. If you do not want to watch it — and I do not blame you — the transcript at Tech Policy Press is useful. The key changes:
Fact-checking is to be replaced with a Community Notes feature, similar to the one on X.
Change the Hateful Conduct policies to be more permissive about language used in discussions about immigration and gender.
Make automated violation detection tools more permissive and focus them on “high-severity” problems, relying on user reports for material the company thinks is of a lower concern.
Roll back restrictions on the visibility and recommendation of posts related to politics.
Relocate the people responsible for moderating Meta’s products from California to another location — Zuckerberg does not specify — and move the U.S.-focused team to Texas.
Work with the incoming administration on concerns about governments outside the U.S. pressuring them to “censor more”.
Regardless of whether you feel each of these are good or bad ideas, I do not think you should take Zuckerberg’s word for why the company is making these changes. Meta’s decision to stop working directly with fact-checkers, for example, is just as likely a reaction to the demands of FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, who has a bananas view (PDF) of how the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution works. According to Carr, social media companies should be forbidden from contributing their own speech to users’ posts based on the rankings of organizations like NewsGuard. According both Carr and Zuckerberg, fact-checkers demand “censorship” in some way. This is nonsense: they were not responsible for the visibility of posts. I do not think much of this entire concept, but surely they only create more speech by adding context in a similar way as Meta hopes will still happen with Community Notes. Since Carr will likely be Trump’s nominee to run the FCC, it is important for Zuckerberg to get his company in line.
Meta’s overhaul of its Hateful Conduct policies also shows the disparity between what Zuckerberg says and the company’s actions. Removing rules that are “out of touch with mainstream discourse” sounds fair. What it means in practice, though, is to allow people to make COVID-19 more racist, demean women, and — of course — discriminate against LGBTQ people in more vicious ways. I understand the argument for why these things should be allowed by law, but there is no obligation for Meta to carry this speech. If Meta’s goal is to encourage a “friendly and positive” environment, why increase its platforms’ permissiveness to assholes? Perhaps the answer is in the visibility of these posts — maybe Meta is confident it can demote harmful posts while still technically allowing them. I am not.
We can go through each of these policy changes, dissect them, and consider the actual reasons for each, but I truly believe that is a waste of time compared to looking at the sum of what they accomplish. Conservatives, particularly in the U.S., have complained for years about bias against their views by technology companies, an updated version of similar claims about mass media. Despite no evidence for this systemic bias, the myth stubbornly persists. Political strategists even have a cute name for it: “working the refs”. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Creators Syndicate, August 1992:
But in a moment of candor, [Republican Party Chair Rich] Bond provided insight into the Republicans’ media-bashing: “There is some strategy to it,” he told the Washington Post. “I’m the coach of kids’ basketball and Little League teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.”
Zuckerberg and Meta have been worked — heavily so. The playbook of changes outlined by Meta this week are a logical response in an attempt to court scorned users, and not just the policy changes here. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, UFC president and thrice-endorser of Trump, would be joining its board. Last week, it promoted Joel Kaplan, a former Republican political operative, to run its global policy team. Last year, Meta hired Dustin Carmack who, according to his LinkedIn, directs the company’s policy and outreach for nineteen U.S. states, and previously worked for the Heritage Foundation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Ron DeSantis. These are among the people forming the kinds of policies Meta is now prescribing.
This is not a problem solved through logic. If it were, studies showing a lack of political bias in technology company policy would change more minds. My bet is that these changes will not have what I assume is the desired effect of improving the company’s standing with far-right conservatives or the incoming administration. If Meta becomes more permissive for bigots, it will encourage more of that behaviour. If Meta does not sufficiently suggest those kinds of posts because it wants “friendly and positive” platforms, the bigots will cry “shadowban”. Meta’s products will corrode. That does not mean they will no longer be influential or widely used, however; as with its forthcoming A.I. profiles, Meta is surely banking that its dominant position and a kneecapped TikTok will continue driving users and advertisers to its products, however frustratedly.
Zuckerberg appears to think little of those who reject the new policies:
[…] Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better.
I am allergic to the phrase “virtue signalling” but I am willing to try getting through this anyway. This has beenwidelyinterpreted as because of their virtue signalling, but I think it is just as accurate if you think of it as because of our virtue signalling. Zuckerberg has complained about media and government “pressure” to more carefully moderate Meta’s platforms. But he cannot ignore how this week’s announcement also seems tied to implicit pressure. Trump is not yet the president, true, but Zuckerberg met with him shortly after the election and, apparently, the day before these changes were announced. This is just as much “virtue signalling” — particularly moving some operations to Texas for reasons even Zuckerberg says are about optics.
Perhaps you think I am overreading this, but Zuckerberg explicitly said in his video introducing the changes that “recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech”. If he means elections other than those which occurred in the U.S. in November, I am not sure which. These are changes made from a uniquely U.S. perspective. To wit, the final commitment in the list above as explained by Zuckerberg (via the Tech Policy Presstranscript):
Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
For their part, the E.U. rejected Zuckerberg’s characterization of its policies, and Brazilian officials are not thrilled, either.
These changes — and particularly this last one — are illustrative of the devil’s bargain of large U.S.-based social media companies: they export their policies and values worldwide following whatever whims and trends are politically convenient at the time. Right now, it is important for Meta to avoid getting on the incoming Trump administration’s shit list, so they, like everyone, are grovelling. If the rest of the world is subjected to U.S.-style discussions, so be it. But so have we been for a long time. What is extraordinary about Meta’s changes is how many people will be impacted: billions, plural. Something like one-quarter the world’s population.
The U.S. is no stranger to throwing around its political and corporate power in a way few other nations can. Meta’s changes are another entry into that canon. There are people in some countries who will benefit from having more U.S.-centric policies, but most everyone elsewhere will find them discordant with more local expectations. These new policies are not satisfying for people everywhere around the world, but the old ones were not, either.
It is unfair to expect any platform operator to get things right for every audience, especially not at Meta’s scale. The options created by less centralized protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol are much more welcome. We should be able to have more control over our experience than we are trusted with.
Zuckerberg begins his video introduction by referencing a 2019 speech he gave at Georgetown University. In it, he speaks of the internet creating “significantly broader power to call out things we feel are unjust”. “[G]iving people a voice and broader inclusion go hand in hand,” he said, “and the trend has been towards greater voice over time”. Zuckerberg naturally centred his company’s products. But you know what is even more powerful than one company at massive scale? It is when no company needs to act as the world’s communications hub. The internet is the infrastructure for that, and we would be better off if we rejected attempts to build moats.
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional.
“A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.”
I object to the “beta” excuse. Would Apple not be “continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback” if it was not a “beta” product? Of course it would make changes.
We shouldn’t be. Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong. That’s a failure, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as being the nature of OS features in the 2020s.
The Apple Intelligence vs BBC story is a microcosm of the developer story for the feature. We’re soon expected to vend up all the actions and intents in our apps to Siri, with no knowledge of the context (or accuracy) in which it will be presented to the user. Apple gets to launder the features and content of your apps and wrap it up in their UI as ‘Siri’ — that’s the developer proposition Apple has presented us. They get to market it as Apple Intelligence, you get the blame if it goes awry.
I agree with Jason. I’ll maybe go further—If Apple Intelligence summarizes your notifications then Apple *should* badge it with *their* Apple logo. Not some weird cog or brain or some other such icon. Put your name on it! […]
I agree. Apple should not be putting its name or logo on something it does not stand behind, and it should stand behind everything it ships. It supposedly cannot “ship junk”, but it is obviously not yet proud of the way these notifications were summarized — it is making changes, after all. But will it be courageous enough to attach its valuable brand to the output of its own large language model? I would bet against it, but it should.
Jon Milton, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:
He also announced that Parliament — which has been consumed for months in Conservative-led procedural squabbling — would be prorogued until March 24. Prorogation is a type of temporary suspension of parliamentary activities. It is distinct from dissolution, which would trigger an election.
Prorogation is more like hitting the reset button on all legislation. All bills that haven’t yet been passed are now dead and would have to start from scratch. Importantly this includes both the spring budget and the fall economic statement, along with all other outstanding house business.
Among the bills killed is a package of privacy legislation contemplated since 2022. The Conservatives have voted unanimously against these laws so, if they win the next federal election — and they are heavily favoured to do so — expect to see this whole process beginning from scratch.
The Online News Act aims to level the playing field by extracting compensation from search engine and social media companies with a total annual global revenue of $1 billion or more and 20 million or more Canadian average monthly unique visitors or average monthly active users. Google, along with Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta, are the only tech firms that currently meet these criteria.
Google secured a five-year exemption from the act by agreeing to pay $100 million a year to media organizations. Meta has avoided having to make any payments by blocking access to Canadian news on its platforms.
The way Google is “exempt” is a little odd. Instead of negotiating with individual publishers, Google is submitting a lump sum to be divided by the Canadian Journalism Collective, the government entity responsible for administering the Online News Act.
This is a significant discount from the $172 million Google was expected to pay annually. You can tell it had the upper hand in these negotiations, at least compared with Meta. Canadian publications do not want to lose whatever is left of Google’s precious referrals before that dries up and is replaced with A.I. zero-click summaries.
The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex from its new laptops, desktops, and monitors and replacing them with three main product lines: Dell (yes, just Dell), Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max.
If you think that sounds a bit Apple-y and bland, you’re right. But Dell is taking it further by also adding a bit of auto industry parlance with three sub-tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium.
Di Benedetto knocks Dell for “stripping itself of some of its identity” but I disagree: this is exactly what I expect to see from Dell’s naming conventions. I attempted to configure a model of its new Dell Pro Premium laptop. Upon selecting a brighter and nicer display, I received an error message reading “Composite Rule Error: Invalid selection in Processor Branding”. Upon closing the error and returning to the configurator, I was told:
The Chassis Option requires the matching Memory size. The 16gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 236V/226V and Ultra 7 266V. The 32gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 238V and Ultra 7 268V.
This is almost nostalgic for me. Before I owned a Mac, I recall trying to shop Dell’s website and encountering gibberish like this all the time. That is the Dell charm I so vividly remember, no matter what combination of “premium”, “pro”, “max”, and “plus” they use.
When I try to cross my street at a marked crosswalk, the Waymo robotaxis often wouldn’t yield to me. I would step out into the white-striped pavement, look at the Waymo, wait to see whether it’s going to stop — and the car would zip right past.
It cut me off again and again on the path I use to get to work and take my kids to the park. It happened even when I was stuck in a small median halfway across the road. So I began using my phone to film myself crossing. I documented more than a dozen Waymo cars failing to yield in the span of a week. (You can watch some of my recordings below.)
The crosswalk in the video looks terrifying. On a road with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour (56 kilometres per hour), it seems many human drivers happily barrelled through that crosswalk, too. But, as Fowler writes, a key argument for automated cars is supposed to be safety. That cannot be only for people in big metal boxes easy for a Waymo to spot. It must also — especially — be true for pedestrians.
Beta
The ads for Apple Intelligence have mostly been noted for what they show, but there is also something missing: in the fine print and in its operating systems, Apple still calls it a “beta” release, but not in its ads. Given the exuberance with which Apple is marketing these features, that label seems less like a way to inform users the software is unpolished, and more like an excuse for why it does not work as well as one might expect of a headlining feature from the world’s most valuable company.
“Beta” is a funny word when it comes to Apple’s software. It often makes available preview builds of upcoming O.S. releases to users and developers for feedback, testing software compatibility, and to build with new APIs. This is voluntary and done with the understanding that the software is unfinished, and bugs — even serious ones — can be expected.
Apple has also, rarely, applied the “beta” label to features in regular releases which are distributed to all users, not just those who signed up. This type of “beta” seems less honest. Instead of communicating this feature is a work in progress, it seems to say we are releasing this before it is done. Maybe that is a subtle distinction, but it is there. One type of beta is testing; the other type asks users to disregard their expectations of polish, quality, and functionality so that a feature can be pushed out earlier than it should.
We have seen this on rare occasions: once with Portrait mode; more notably, with Siri. Mat Honan, writing for Gizmodo in December 2011:
Check out any of Apple’s ads for the iPhone 4S. They’re promoting Siri so hard you’d be forgiven for thinking Siri is the new CEO of Apple. And it’s not just that first wave of TV ads, a recent email Apple sent out urges you to “Give the phone that everyone’s talking about. And talking to.” It promises “Siri: The intelligent assistant you can ask to make calls, send texts, set reminders, and more.”
What those Apple ads fail to report — at all — is that Siri is very much a half-baked product. Siri is officially in beta. Go to Siri’s homepage on Apple.com, and you’ll even notice a little beta tag by the name.
This is familiar.
The ads for Siri gave the impression of great capability. It seemed like you could ask it how to tie a bowtie, what events were occurring in a town or city, and more. The response was not shown for these queries, but the implication was that Siri could respond. What became obvious to anyone who actually used Siri is that it would show web search results instead. But, hey, it was a “beta” — for two years.
The ads for Apple Intelligence do one better and show features still unreleased. The fine print does mention “some features and languages will be coming over the next year”, without acknowledging the very feature in this ad is one of them. And, when it does actually come out, it is still officially in “beta”, so I guess you should not expect it to work properly.
This all seems like a convoluted way to evade full responsibility of the Apple Intelligence experience which, so far, has been middling for me. Genmoji is kind of fun, but Notification Summaries are routinelywrong. Priority messages in Mail is helpful when it correctly surfaces an important email, and annoying when it highlights spam. My favourite feature — in theory — is the Reduce Interruptions Focus mode, which is supposed to only show notifications when they are urgent or important. It is the kind of thing I have been begging for to deal with the overburdened notifications system. But, while it works pretty well sometimes, it is not dependable enough to rely on. It will sometimes prioritize scam messages written with a sense of urgency, but fail to notify me when my wife messages me a question. It still necessitates I occasionally review the notifications suppressed by this Focus mode. It is helpful, but not consistently enough to be confidence-inspiring.
Will users frustrated by the questionable reliability of Apple Intelligence routinely return to try again? If my own experience with Siri is any guidance — and I am not sure it is, but it is all I have — I doubt it. If these features did not work on the first dozen attempts, why would they work any time after? This strategy, I think, teaches people to set their expectations low.
This beta-tinged rollout is not entirely without its merits. Apple is passively soliciting feedback within many of its Apple Intelligence features, at a scale far greater than it could by restricting testing to only its own staff and contractors. But it also means the public becomes unwitting testers. As with Siri before, Apple heavily markets this set of features as the defining characteristic of this generation of iPhones, yet we are all supposed to approach this as though we are helping Apple make sure its products are ready? Sorry, it does not work like that. Either something is shipping or it is not, and if it does not work properly, users will quickly learn not to trust it.
Suddenly, the future is now. Shortly after the calendar clicked over to 2000, Apple unveiled Mac OS X’s brand-new interface—named Aqua—giving the world its first glimpse of how we’ll all interact with our Macs for years to come. […]
[…]
Perhaps the most radical addition to the Mac OS interface in Mac OS X is the Dock, a strip that lives at the bottom of your screen and displays the contents of open windows (you can even opt to have it appear only when you move the cursor to the bottom of the screen, like the Windows task bar).
The version he [Steve Jobs] showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.
I was not using a Mac until after Mac OS X 10.2 was released, so I am by no means a good barometer for the Mac-iness of early releases. One thing I remember clearly, though, is being smitten with it from my earliest use; I was among many who downloaded Aqua Dock to get a taste of the experience on my Windows computer.
I still cannot believe it took until perhaps five years ago for me to become a Dock-on-the-side person, however.
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
We can keep an open mind and accept the editor rejected this cartoon for any number of reasons, while also considering the most obvious reason: the editor acknowledges the owner of the Post is aligninghimselfwith the incoming administration. Perhaps a more generous reading is that Jeff Bezos is directing the Post to be less adversarial than it was from 2016–2020. Either way, the effect is the same.
In the United States, donations to the extravagant presidential inauguration ceremony by U.S. citizens and corporations are unlimited. As a result, it is the perfect vehicle with which to get comfortable with the incoming administration. It is not a bribe, though. Money or goods given to holders of public office with the implication of favours is almost never bribery. If you call it a bribe, everyone involved seems to get mad. So do not call it a bribe.
Amazon, run by billionaire Jeff Bezos, intends to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund and will stream the ceremony on Prime, amounting to another $1 million in-kind donation, according to a source familiar with the donations. The Wall Street Journal first reported Amazon’s plans.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also plans to send $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to make a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inaugural fund, according to an OpenAI spokesperson. Fox News Digital first reported Altman’s intended donation.
That makes three-for-three on billionaires who see nothing but good news in getting cozy with Trump administration figures.
US business leaders are spending big on Donald Trump’s second inaugural fund, which is predicted to exceed even the record-setting $107m raised in 2017.
[…]
“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Thursday.
I had blessedly forgotten what this seventy-eight year old sounds like.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell Axios.
[…]
Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said. The company is not expected to give.
The sources’ names? Cim Took and Ptim Kooc.
Call this what you want: bipartisanship, diplomacy, pragmatic, outright support, or “the spirit of unity”. But one thing you cannot call it is principled. We have become accustomed to business leaders sacrificing some of their personal principles to support their company in some way — for some reason, it is just business is a universal excuse for terrible behaviour — but all of these figures have already seen what the incoming administration does with power and they want to support it. For anyone who claims to support laws or customs, this is not principled behaviour.
After the Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump International Hotel in Vegas on Wednesday, Elon Musk remotely unlocked the Cybertruck for law enforcement and provided video from charging stations that the truck had visited to track the vehicle’s location, according to information released by law enforcement.
While Clark County Police gave explicit credit to Musk, it is unclear what role he played. Even so, this demonstrates the power Tesla has over vehicles in owners’ hands. It can remotely interact with them and, because Telsa also provides the charging infrastructure, it can track vehicle use to a greater extent than its competitors.
Software is eating the world continues to sound as much like a threat as it does inspiration.
That law, passed as Act 440, was introduced by “sex addiction” counselor and state representative Laurie Schegel and quickly copied across the country. The exact phrasing varies, but in most states, the details of the law are the same: Any “commercial entity” that publishes “material harmful to minors” online can be held liable—meaning, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and/or private lawsuits—if it doesn’t “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”
These and other worries about minors’ access to technology increasingly convinces me a device-level age verification standard is around the corner. A requirement for Apple and Google to age-restrict their app stores was proposed by U.S. legislators in November, but this would not affect users’ access to the web. I bet something changes on this front — and soon.
Apple agreed to pay $95 million in cash to settle a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated Siri assistant violated users’ privacy.
A preliminary settlement was filed on Tuesday night in the Oakland, California federal court, and requires approval by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White.
Alex Hern, who wrote the 2019 Guardian story forming the basis of many complaints in the lawsuit, today on Bluesky:
There’s two claims in one case and one of them Apple is bang to rights on (“Siri records accidental interactions”) and the other is worth far far more than $95m to disprove (“those recordings are shared with advertisers”)
The original complaint (PDF), filed just a couple of weeks after Hern’s story broke, does not once mention advertising. A revised complaint (PDF), filed a few months later, mentions it once and only in passing (emphasis mine):
Apple’s actions were at all relevant times knowing, willful, and intentional as evidenced by Apple’s admission that a significant portion of the recordings it shares with its contractors are made without use of a hot word and its use of the information to, among other things, improve the functionality of Siri for Apple’s own financial benefit, to target personalized advertising to users, and to generate significant profits. Apple’s actions were done in reckless disregard for Plaintiffs’ and Class Members’ privacy rights.
This is the sole mention in the entire complaint, and there is no citation or evidence for it. However, a further revision (PDF), filed in 2021, contains plenty of anecdotes:
Several times, obscure topics of Plaintiff Lopez’s and Plaintiff A.L.’s private conversations were used by Apple and its partners to target advertisements to them. For example, during different private conversations, Plaintiff Lopez and Plaintiff A.L. mentioned brand names
including “Olive Garden,” “Easton bats,” “Pit Viper sunglasses,” and “Air Jordans.” These advertisements were targeted to Plaintiffs Lopez and A.L. Subsequent to these private conversations, Plaintiff Lopez and Plaintiff A.L., these products began to populate Apple search results and Plaintiffs also received targeted advertisements for these products in Apple’s Safari
browser and in third party applications. Plaintiffs Lopez and A.L. had not previously searched for
these items prior to the targeted advertisements. Because the intercepted conversations took place in private to the exclusion of others, only through Apple’s surreptitious recording could these specific advertisements be pinpointed to Plaintiffs Lopez and A.L.
I am filing this in the needs supporting evidence column alongside other claims of microphones being used to target advertising. I sympathize with the plaintiffs in this case, but nothing about their anecdotes — more detail on pages 8 and 10 of the complaint — is compelling, as alternative explanations are possible.
For example, one plaintiff discussed a particular type of surgery with his doctor, and then saw ads on his iPhone related to the condition it treats. While it seems possible Siri was erroneously activated, Apple received a copy of the recording, and then it automatically transcribed and sold its contents to data brokers, this is massively speculative compared to what we know ad tech companies do. Perhaps the doctor’s office was part of a geofenced ad campaign. Or, perhaps the doctor was searching related keywords and then, because the plaintiff’s phone was in the proximity of the doctor’s devices, some cross-device targeting became confused. Neither of these explanations involve microphones, let alone Siri.
Yet, because Apple settled this lawsuit, it looks like it is not interested in fighting these claims. It creates another piece of pseudo-evidence for people who believe microphone-equipped devices are transforming idle conversations into perfectly targeted ads.
None of these stories have so far been proven, and there is not a shred of direct evidence it is occurring — but I can understand why people are paranoid. While businesses have exploited private data to sell ads for decades, we have dramatically increased the amount of devices we have and the time we spend with them with few meaningful steps taken toward user privacy. We are feeding every part of this nauseating industry more data with, in many countries, about the same regulatory oversight.
I could be entirely wrong. Apple could have settled this case because it is, indeed, doing more-or-less what the plaintiffs say. To that possibility, I say: show me real evidence. I have no problem admitting I got something wrong.
Update: Apple has issued a statement in which it says it has “never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose”.
Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users.
[…]
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform … that’s where we see all of this going,” he [Meta’s Connor Hayes] added.
Imagine opening any of Meta’s products after this has taken over. Imagine how little you will see from the friends and family members you actually care about. Imagine how much slop you will be greeted with — a feed alternating between slop, suggested posts, and ads, with just enough of what you actually opened the app to see. Now consider how this will affect people who are more committed to Meta’s products, whether for economic reasons or social cohesion.
A big problem for Meta is that it is institutionally very dumb. I do not want to oversell this too much, but I truly believe this is the case. There are lots of smart people working there and its leadership clearly understands something about how people use social media.
But there is a vast sense of dumb in its attempts to deliver the next generation of its products. Its social media products are dependent on “engagement”, which is sometimes a product of users’ actual interest and, at other times, an artifact of Meta’s success or failure in controlling what they see. Maybe its “metaverse” will be interesting one day, but it seems deeply embarrassing so far.
Patrick Beuth et al., in a German-language report in Der Spiegel, as translated by Apple’s built-in translator:
Because many of the vehicle data could be linked to the names and contact details of the drivers, owners or fleet managers. Precise location data could be viewed on 460,000 vehicles, which allowed conclusions to be drawn about the lives of the people behind the steering wheels – just like the two politicians.
[…]
It is a more than embarrassing breakdown for the already struggling group. It’s a shame. Especially in the software, where VW lags behind the competition anyway. Of all things, the security of private data, which the Germans like to cite as a location advantage over the much more lax USA.
Linus Neumann, of the Chaos Computer Club, also German-language, also translated by Safari:
The information collected by VW subsidiary Cariad contains precise information on the location and time of the ignition. The movement data is linked to other personal data. In this way, they also allow conclusions to be drawn about suppliers, service providers, employees or camouflage organizations of the security authorities.
The hacker group, the Chaos Computer Club, informed Cariad about the vulnerability, which quickly patched the issue. Cariad told Spiegel that the vulnerability was a “misconfiguration” and that the company doesn’t merge data that would allow someone to create a profile about a person. According to the company, the researchers had to combine different data sets by “bypassing several security mechanisms.” It also said it’s unaware of anyone accessing the data other than CCC.
Cariad has a lot of gall to issue a statement redirecting blame to someone defeating “security mechanisms” instead of the possibility all this stored data could be re-identified in the first place.
I love that Apple is trying to do privacy-related services, but this [“Enhanced Visual Search” setting] just appeared at the bottom of my Settings screen over the holiday break when I wasn’t paying attention. It sends data about my private photos to Apple.
The first mention of this preference I can find is a Reddit thread from August.
Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. […]
The company goes into more technical detail in a Machine Learning blog post. What I am confused about is what this feature actually does. It sounds like it compares landmarks identified locally against a database too vast to store locally, thus enabling more accurate lookups. It also sounds like matching is done with entirely visual data, and it does not rely on photo metadata. But because Apple did not announce this feature and poorly documents it, we simply do not know. One document says trust us to analyze your photos remotely; another says here are all the technical reasons you can trust us. Nowhere does Apple plainly say what is going on.
Of course, this user never requested that my on-device experiences be “enriched” by phoning home to Cupertino. This choice was made by Apple, silently, without my consent.
From my own perspective, computing privacy is simple: if something happens entirely on my computer, then it’s private, whereas if my computer sends data to the manufacturer of the computer, then it’s not private, or at least not entirely private. Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device.
I see this feature implemented with responsibility and privacy in nearly every way, but, because it is poorly explained and enabled by default, it is difficult to trust. Photo libraries are inherently sensitive. It is completely fair for users to be suspicious of this feature.
