The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.
Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated — meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people — but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.
Remember, during the early days of the pandemic, when the Washington Postpublished an article chastising Apple and Google for not providing health organizations full access to users’ physical locations? In the time since it was published, the two companies released their jointly-developed exposure notification framework which, depending on where you live, has either been somewhat beneficial or mostly inconsequential. Perhaps unsurprisingly, regions with more consistent messaging and better privacy regulations seemed to find it more useful than places where there were multiple competing crappy apps.
The reason I bring that up is because it turns out a new app that invades your privacy in the way the Post seemed to want was unnecessary when a bunch of other apps on your phone do that job just fine. And, for the record, that is terrible.
In a context vacuum, it would be better if health agencies were able to collect physical locations in a regulated and safe way for all kinds of diseases. But there have been at least stories about wild overreach during this pandemic alone: this one, in which the CDC wanted location data for all sorts of uses beyond contact tracing, and Singapore’s acknowledgement that data from its TraceTogether app — not based on the Apple–Google framework — was made available to police. These episodes do not engender confidence.
Also — and I could write these words for any of the number of posts I have published about the data broker economy — it is super weird how this data can be purchased by just about anyone. Any number of apps on our phones report our location to hundreds of these companies we have never heard of, and then a government agency or a media organization or some dude can just buy it in ostensibly anonymized form. This is the totally legal but horrific present.
Reports like these underscore how frustrating it was to see the misplaced privacy panic over stuff like the Apple–Google framework or digital vaccine passports. Those systems were generally designed to require minimal information, report as little externally as possible, and use good encryption for communications. Meanwhile, the CDC can just click “add to cart” on the location of millions of phones.
Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.
The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.
Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.
Zac Moffatt, Targeted Victory’s CEO, disputed this reporting on Twitter, but many of his complaints are effectively invalid. He complains that only part of the company’s statement was included by the Post, but the full statement fits into a tweet and is pretty vacuous. The Post says the company refused to answer specific questions, which Moffatt has not disputed.
Moffatt also says the Post called two letters to the editor a “scorched earth campaign”, but the oldest copy of the story I could find, captured just twenty minutes after publishing and well before Moffatt tweeted, does not contain that phrasing, and neither does the current copy. I am not sure where that is from.
But one thing Moffatt does nail the Post on, a little bit, is its own reporting on TikTok moral panics. For example, the “slap a teacher challenge” was roundly debunked when it began making headlines in early October 2021 and was traced back to rumours appearing on Facebook a month earlier, but that did not stop the Post from reporting on it. It appears Targeted Victory used the Post’s reporting, among that from other publications, to further concerns about this entirely fictional story. That is embarrassing for the Post, which cited teachers and school administrators for its story.
The Post should do better. But it is agencies like Targeted Victory that the Post and other media outlets should be steeling themselves against, as well as in-house corporate public relations teams. When reporters receive a tip about a company’s behaviour — positive or negative — the source of that information can matter as much as the story itself. It is why I still want more information about the Campaign for Accountability’s funders: it has been successful in getting media outlets to cover its research critical of tech companies, but its history with Oracle has muddied the waters of its ostensibly pure concern. Oracle also tipped off Quartz reporters to that big Google location data scandal a few years ago. These sources are not neutral. While the stories may be valid, readers should not be misled about their origin.
Why are you still claiming this @digicert? This is extremely misleading, anyone feel like reporting this to the relevant advertising standards authority in their jurisdiction? https://www.digicert.com/faq/when-to-use-ev-ssl.htm
The linked page touted some supposed benefits of Extended Verification SSL certificates. Those are the certificates that promise to tie a company’s identity to their website, which was ostensibly confirmed by the company’s name appearing in a web browser’s address bar alongside the HTTPS icon.
I have a vehement dislike for misleading advertising. We see it every day; weight loss pills, make money fast schemes and if you travel in the same circles I do, claims that extended validation (EV) certificates actually do something useful:
[…]
Someone had reached out to me privately and shared the offending page as they’d taken issue with the false claims DigiCert was making. My views on certificate authority shenanigans spinning yarns on EV are well known after having done many talks on the topic and written many blog posts, most recently in August 2019 after both Chrome and Firefox announced they were killing it. When I say “kill”, that never meant that EV would no longer technically work, but it killed the single thing spruikers of it relied upon – being visually present beside the address bar. That was 2 and a half years ago, so why is DigiCert still pimping the message about the green bar with the company name? Beats me (although I could gue$$), but clearly DigiCert had a change of heart after that tweet because a day later, the offending image was gone. You can still see the original version in the Feb 9 snapshot on archive.org.
Website identity is a hard thing to prove, even to those who are somewhat technically literate. Bad security advice is commonplace, but it is outrageous to see companies like DigiCert using such frail justifications for marketing fodder.
Meta Platforms Inc. has tumbled out of the world’s 10 largest companies by market value, hammered by its worst monthly stock decline ever.
Once the world’s sixth largest company with a valuation in excess of $1 trillion, the Facebook parent closed on Thursday with a value of $565 billion, placing it in 11th place behind Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Huge changes in market value like Meta is currently experiencing can partly be attributed to the massive market capitalization reflected in today’s top ten. The Economic Research Council published a chart in 2019 showing the ten most valuable publicly traded companies for twenty years prior and, as recently as 2014, only one was worth more than a trillion dollars. That is not the world we live in any more. Even normal day-to-day fluctuations reflect billions of dollars that ostensibly reflect investors’ confidence.
But there is also an undeniable loss of confidence in Meta’s ability to maintain the success of its core product — targeted advertising — in the face of increasing regulatory scrutiny, and changes made by operating system vendors. Meta’s virtual reality efforts, with which it is hoping to become an operating system owner itself, are still far away, and I do not think the company has yet demonstrated a compelling case for its existence.
For now, it has ads to sell across its platforms, and that is getting harder as public pressure mounts against its business practices. Unfortunately, as Meta’s empire is increasingly scrutinized, small businesses that depend on it are feeling the squeeze.
Martha Krueger, who runs a gift-basket business called Giften Market, used to spend her entire advertising budget on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram. She picked up a new customer for every $14 she spent.
When Apple Inc. introduced a privacy feature for mobile devices last year that restricts user tracking, she said, her costs to acquire such customers rose 10-fold. In October, she shifted her whole ad budget to search ads on Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
I empathize with the owners and marketers who work with businesses like these, which have depended on precisely targeting advertising to lower their marketing costs and get more customers. However, I think we have lost sight of how Meta was able to be so successful in the first place: it tracked users’ behaviour without their explicit consent or knowledge. What I find so frustrating about this is how Meta defends its practices by invoking the trust these businesses have placed in it:
Meta said in a written statement that it has more than 10 million advertisers. “Apple’s harmful policy is making it harder and more expensive for businesses of all sizes to reach their customers,” it said. “We believe Facebook and Instagram remain the best platforms for businesses to grow and connect with people, and we’ll always keep working to improve performance and measurement.”
Meta constructed a fundamentally unethical business model that allowed it to offer cheap ads, and it is laundering that scummy behaviour through the much better reputation of coffee shops, and florists, and travel agents, and other small business owners. Entrepreneurs should not be blamed for taking advantage of the marketing opportunities available to
them.
This is a complex problem with a simple root: in a more just world, where the privacy of individuals is truly respected, Meta would never have offered these kinds of ads in the first place. But the company recognized that it was on legally firm ground to follow users’ activity across the web and through third-party apps, and it built its entire business around milking that strategy for everything it could give. It gave small business owners the ability to buy better advertising at lower rates, but has cost all of us our privacy online with little in the way of notice, consent, or control.
So that is how we got into this mess, and lawmakers in many regions around the world are trying various ways of getting us out of it. But Apple, having a business model more conducive to privacy and being an operating system vendor, realized it could also do something about tracking without due consent. It asks a simple question when apps want to track a user: do you want to permit this? Most people answer in the negative.
This naturally leads to the question of what business it is of Apple’s to have a say in other companies’ practices. It has a long history of doing so and a familiar future ahead. That is a discussion way too long for a single post, especially one I am publishing on a Friday evening. But there is one argument I think can be addressed in short order: all Apple did to push Meta’s buttons is that it now requires explicit consent for tracking. If Meta’s business model cannot handle a simple question of permissions, that is a pretty crappy business model. It should have been better prepared for a day when lawmakers started asking questions. But it was not. Meta’s best move has been to use the plight of small businesses, lured by its short-term promises, to excuse its unethical practices. Shame.
After millions of Euros in fines for its delinquency, Apple has announced its rules for developers of dating apps who wish to use external payment mechanisms in the Netherlands. While ostensibly straightforward, they are not easy to comply with, but likely form a template for other circumstances where apps will be permitted to use non-IAP mechanisms.
Developers are required to apply for the entitlement allowing them to use a non-Apple payment flow. This includes fields for the payment processor’s information. Apple says developers must “demonstrate that your PSP meets the criteria of having a secure payment processing system and an established track record of protecting user privacy”. Apple lists several other privacy and security requirements for payment processors. Then, in the separate app binary developers must produce solely for the Dutch App Store, they must also include a message which “must exactly match” the following (shown in English and Dutch on Apple’s website; I am only quoting the English here):
Title: This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system
Body: All purchases in the <App Name> app will be managed by the developer “<Developer Name>.” Your stored App Store payment method and related features, such as subscription management and refund requests, will not be available. Only purchases through the App Store are secured by Apple.
Learn More
Action 1: Continue
Action 2: Cancel
Just look at the striking twist in language here. The title and final sentence the body text literally say that the app’s payment mechanism is different from Apple’s, and that Apple’s is “private and secure”. But it implies the payment standard used by the developer is less private and has inferior security to Apple’s own — even though Apple requires all developers to use a private and secure payment processor. Apple is selling asbestos-free cereal, while requiring all other cereals to be asbestos-free but not allowing them to label themselves as such.
I wonder how Dutch regulators will feel about that.
Apple also says that it is entitled to a commission of 27% on all sales, which is about what I expected. The App Store commission is not solely a payment processing fee and never has been. It is a profit margin for Apple, plain and simple. I am not for a moment arguing that this is a good thing or that it is acceptable, but I do not think developers should hope for a dramatically different commission unless lawmakers intervene.
Update: If I am reading this right, Apple’s 27% commission does not appear to differ for third-party subscriptions after the first year, while subscriptions sold through the App Store drop to a 15% commission.
This statement from Information Technology and Innovation Foundation VP Daniel Castro is a ride:
Online advertising pays for the vast majority of free online services. Banning targeted ads would make online advertising much less effective, so advertisers will pay less for them and those who display ads — including app developers, media companies, and content creators — will earn significantly less revenue. Faced with a budget shortfall, many online services will have few options other than to either reduce the quality of their services or charge their users fees.
It will not surprise you to know that this group is funded by basically every major technology company, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
But let us engage with this argument on its merits, and not which ostensibly independent voices are making it. One reason highly-targeted ads cost more than less targeted ones is because there are more companies involved in their delivery and each one gets its cut. Another reason is, allegedly, because Google overcharged advertisers, paid publishers a lower rate, and kept the difference.
And while some wealthier households might be willing to pay for ad-free Internet services, millions of American families would be hurt by this policy as they find themselves cut off from key parts of the digital economy. Indeed, this policy would be equivalent to telling the millions of American households who watch ad-supported broadcast television that, to protect them from advertising, they will have to sign up for premium cable and streaming subscriptions instead.
This is some race-to-the-bottom nonsense that conflates less-targeted advertising with a ban on ads altogether — a confused argument this industry loves to make because its actual practices are indefensible. Non-creepy advertising is completely fine. Just do that.
It is worth Americans’ time to question the efficacy of the bill’s text and look for unintended consequences. But this trade group assumes everyone is a sucker and will fall for its misleading arguments.
Software engineers are hopeless optimists when they design and code only for success. There’s much more to handling errors than displaying a couple of phrases of in-house jargon and fobbing the user off with a magic number. It’s high time that designing error-handling to help the user became a central tenet of macOS.
My only quibble with Oakley’s conclusion here is that it should not be limited to MacOS; I expect better diagnostics across all of Apple’s operating systems. Otherwise, this is spot on.
It is bananas that the best error messages users will encounter are those with an inscrutable code — “the best” because it is at least something which can begin a web search for answers. But a Mac is not a microwave; it has a very large display and can display more information than an error code of a few characters. Worse still are errors which have no information — Oakley’s example is a MacOS installer with the error “This copy of the Install macOS Big Sur.app application is damaged, and can’t be used to install macOS.” has only an “OK” button, as though that is an acceptable response1 — or silent failure where no message is displayed to the user at all.
There is no way this is the best that can be done, nor is it what we should expect out of our ostensibly modern families of operating systems.
Since this is a MacOS installer, a better error message would have an option to fix the application, or at least re-download it in full. ↥︎
In his Sunday “Media Equation” column in the New York Times, Ben Smith said he obtained an internal document created for new TikTok employees:
The document, headed “TikTok Algo 101,” was produced by TikTok’s engineering team in Beijing. A company spokeswoman, Hilary McQuaide, confirmed its authenticity, and said it was written to explain to nontechnical employees how the algorithm works. The document offers a new level of detail about the dominant video app, providing a revealing glimpse both of the app’s mathematical core and insight into the company’s understanding of human nature — our tendencies toward boredom, our sensitivity to cultural cues — that help explain why it’s so hard to put down. The document also lifts the curtain on the company’s seamless connection to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, at a time when the U.S. Department of Commerce is preparing a report on whether TikTok poses a security risk to the United States.
What is interesting to me is the lengths the Times went to so that it could obscure this relatively mild piece of internal documentation. Unlike many other artifacts obtained by the Times, a copy was not linked within the article, and even embedded diagrams were reproduced instead of the originals being shown.
Whether those were precautions borne of a secrecy promise, or perhaps because the original documents had legibility problems, I feel like Smith buried the lede. After wading through an overwrought exploration of the file’s contents, Smith reports on the many lingering connections the ostensibly independent TikTok has with its predecessor app Douyin:
TikTok’s development process, the document says, is closely intertwined with the process of Douyin’s. The document at one point refers TikTok employees to the “Launch Process for Douyin Recommendation Strategy,” and links to an internal company document that it says is the “same document for TikTok and Douyin.”
It turns out the Douyin version of that shared internal document has been circulating publicly for months.
Protocol’s Zeyi Yang, writing in the Source Code newsletter:
In fact, another closely related app uses the same secret sauce. In January, a document titled “Guide to a Certain Video APP’s Recommendation (Algorithm)” was released on several Chinese platforms. While it intentionally obscured which app it’s referencing, there are plenty of hints that it’s about Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version.
For one, the Chinese document describes how it makes recommendations in the exact same formula and language (yes, word for word) as the document leaked to the Times. They also used the same challenge to the algorithm as a case study.
And in a Q&A entry about competitors, the document mentioned three other major Chinese apps — Toutiao, Kuaishou and Weibo — that rely on recommendation algorithms, but not Douyin, the app that does it the best.
The link above is now dead, but you can find plenty of copies on Chinese social networks — one that was uploaded to CSDN, for instance. It is in Chinese, but it appears to be exactly the same file.
With 340 million people using Facebook’s various social media platforms, India is the company’s largest market. And Facebook’s problems on the subcontinent present an amplified version of the issues it has faced throughout the world, made worse by a lack of resources and a lack of expertise in India’s 22 officially recognized languages.
[…]
Of India’s 22 officially recognized languages, Facebook said it has trained its A.I. systems on five. (It said it had human reviewers for some others.) But in Hindi and Bengali, it still did not have enough data to adequately police the content, and much of the content targeting Muslims “is never flagged or actioned,” the Facebook report said.
Facebook likely spends more on integrity efforts than any of its peers, though it is also the largest of the social networks. Sissons told me that ideally, the company’s community standards and AI content moderation capabilities would be translated into every country where Facebook is operating. But even the United Nations supports only six official languages; Facebook has native speakers moderating posts in more than 70.
Maybe I am oversimplifying this, but perhaps some things are obviously simple: it is probably not possible to fairly and accurately moderate discussions between billions of people speaking hundreds of languages.
If Facebook were a utility, this would not be a problem — but it is not, nor should it be. Facebook is a business. Its features amplify our worst instincts which, in turn, boosts engagement with the company’s platforms and helps attract advertisers. Facebook’s representatives like to say that this is not true because advertisers and shareholders could not possibly be attracted to a company with a poor record, but in the years since Facebook was tied to genocide the company’s value has doubled.
Facebook is too large. It has too much control over platforms relied upon by too many people in too many languages and regions. That is in part because its platforms are very good at facilitating communication, but it is also because the company has acquired potential rivals and encouraged use by violating the net neutrality principles the company ostensibly supports. There are apps competing for different parts of Facebook’s business in different parts of the world, but Facebook’s products remain the glue holding together disparate factions. I do not think crowning Facebook by treating it like a utility, as some have suggested, is a wise decision, as the objectives of a private company are inherently different to those of a public entity. It makes more sense to break this giant into smaller pieces, both by mandating interoperability and exploring options to separate its self-competing products.
Maybe individual companies should not be this big.
As part of its second annual Technology Report, Bain & Company published a study yesterday that reframes large acquisitions by tech companies — anything over $300 million — as inconsequential or even beneficial for competition. In an environment of increasing wariness of massive conglomerates, this raised my eyebrows, especially since it was being promoted by the CEO of a tech company lobbying organization.
It is not my place to assess the economics or business acumen of this study. I went to art school, which is sort of an anti-education in those kinds of fields. Usually, I would stay out of this sort of commentary since my reaction probably means that I am missing something non-obvious. But there are several things in this study that, so far as I can tell, do not require an economics degree to see that the conclusions drawn do not match the evidence presented.
The first case study is Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017. Bain produced three graphics. One shows that Whole Foods’ “pricing premium” over standard grocery store chains fell in the two years after Amazon bought the company. That is great, except Bain draws the conclusion that this “[made] healthy, fresh food more affordable for consumers”. That is an absurd summary. Last I checked, regular grocery stores had fresh, healthy food too, and at lower prices than the 13% premium Whole Foods charges, according to Bain’s own chart.
The second and third charts show that there was a modest increase in online grocery purchases between 2015 and 2019, followed by an explosion of the same in 2020. A similar trajectory is shown for delivery, in a graphic comparing 2016 to 2020 and carrying the headline “acquisition intensified pressure to adopt delivery”.
I am wondering if you, reader, can think of anything else beginning in 2020 that may have encouraged many more people to shop for groceries online and have them delivered. Anything at all?
Bain:
Amazon’s 2013 expansion into grocery delivery with Amazon Fresh added pressure on US grocery retailers to begin offering online ordering and delivery services, and that pressure only intensified after Amazon acquired Whole Foods. Now, every major US grocery retailer offers online ordering and delivery services, either managed in-house or via partnerships. This was true even before the Covid-19 pandemic.
I buy the basic thrust of this argument. Amazon is a classic conglomerate, but many of its innovations have been in logistics. It is unsurprising that the biggest online retailer in the U.S. would be able to extend those logistics capabilities to a grocery store, and it is arguably beneficial for consumers, particularly persons with disabilities.
But there are reasons beyond stagnation why supermarkets in the U.S. have been reluctant to embrace delivery. Deliery is dependent on delivery drivers and, without the artificially low pay structure of gig workers, it is prohibitively expensive because of its inherent inefficiencies. But because the gig economy is now a reality, grocery delivery has become a practical option, initiated — if anything — by Instacart, which launched in 2013, months before Amazon’s effort.
The benefits Bain describes can also be attributed to scale. Amazon also offers perks like free shipping in its online store, which small businesses struggle to compete against. Lower prices and free shipping are the kinds of consumer benefit derived from massive scale, but they must be weighed against the benefits of retailer choice and local businesses.
I am getting into the weeds here and away from the point I think we ought to focus on: Bain asserts that Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods was a key reason we now have widespread grocery delivery. It seems far more likely to me that grocery delivery was yet another industry where startups could underpay gig workers to do tasks that were previously economically unviable, and Amazon was well-positioned to hop on that ride. Instacart was in an even better place when Amazon bought Whole Foods, since grocery stores saw it as a lesser evil.
Another case study in the Bain report looks at the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook. The authors point to the effect this acquisition ostensibly had on SMS prices in the U.S., producing a chart that showed — in two-year increments — the average cost of an SMS.
I have reproduced that sole data series here and I would like you to point to the spot on this line of average SMS prices where WhatsApp was acquired:
Illustration based on Bain & Company chart.
Is it not obvious?
Here is the full chart they presented:
Source: Bain & Company “Regulate with Care: The Case for Big Tech M&A” report.
This chart shows that the biggest drop in SMS costs came before app-based messaging went mainstream, even before iMessage launched in 2011. The price of voice calls also catered around the same time. 2010 was about when carriers realized that charging people for texts was unnecessary since data was the new gravy train.
The story presented in Bain’s series of charts is really the story of switching from a protocol to several platforms. SMS, for all its faults, is a platform-agnostic messaging protocol that requires nothing extra. Now, we have a bunch of messaging applications that compete, but also silo our communications. My conversations span seven different messaging apps, and it is a good thing I am not an Android user or I would be struggling. Is it inherently good that we have many different messaging clients now? I appreciate the many features these platforms provide, but it seems to have come at the expense of interconnectedness. Imagine if we had many different telephone protocols that were platform-specific and incompatible with each other.
One more example from this Bain report is Google’s acquisition of YouTube. Here’s how the authors explain that:
In video streaming, YouTube helped fuel the proliferation of “over the top” (OTT) video providers such as Hulu, Sling, and Disney+. Now, YouTube competes for advertising dollars both with other OTT providers and traditional television companies.
The reason people were not consuming streaming video as much in 2006 — or 2001, when Blockbuster and Enron launched their own streaming service — is not because Google did not own YouTube at that time. Widespread broadband connections are a far more likely reason people are consuming more streaming video now.
More to the point, there simply is not another YouTube. I ran a poll last week — which, with only 43 respondents, is not some kind of robust study — in which I asked Twitter followers how many pre-roll ads YouTube could run before it sees a decline in viewership. 65% thought three pre-rolls was the cap, but I think it could be pushed way higher. If there were suddenly five or six pre-roll ads before the first video you watched that day, and then three or four on subsequent videos, do you really think people would stop watching? Where would they go?
The most robust user-generated video competitor, according to Bain’s charts, is Twitch. The Amazon-owned site is not really a YouTube competitor aside from in specific verticals and, as Ryan said in response to my poll, it is also running several ads before streams. These platforms are both terrible for users, and they know they can be increasingly horrible because they have no replacement.
I can continue to nitpick, but near the end, the study veers from mixing up cause and effect to being almost deceptive (“hyperscalers” is what Bain calls Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft):
The common narrative is hyperscalers are acquiring disruptive competitors. But their M&A activity is only a small piece of the overall landscape, representing just 5% of total tech start-up exits last year (see Figure 5).
Switching from the value of acquisitions — which is mostly what the preceding paragraphs are all about — to their quantity masks their impact. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp or Apple’s purchase of Beats is not equal to a small tech company merging with another small tech company. That is an obviously unfair comparison.
The impression I get from this study is that an acquisition by a big company of something else can be a wider indication of the value of that market, hopefully creating competition in that space. But that is not what much of this data shows. There are so many examples here of “hyperscalers” hopping onto an existing market trend that it is hard to see that case being made. The closest the authors get is with Instacart’s boom following Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods — but “Instacart” appears nowhere in this study.
It is a frustrating article where I am sure I am missing a great deal. I wish I could read the authors’ references or see their analysis in more detail. But all we get is this lightweight summary that does not prove its case.
Today, I rushed to finish Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment. Partly, that is because it is a riveting series of vignettes ostensibly about the distorting effects of Amazon in America; partly, that is because the library needs this copy back to lend to someone else.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Do your best to set aside any thoughts you may have about antitrust and the kinds of big theoretical questions that a massive company like Amazon engenders. Try to read these stories as presented: many, many people who have found their lives turned upside down by the extraordinary influence of Amazon working in concert with lawmakers at all levels, for the economic advancement of the few. It is devastating.
I bet it is available at your local bookstore or library. But, if you cannot find it there and you enjoy living a life rich in irony, it is also available on Amazon.
Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference, announced his resignation Tuesday, after The Pillar found evidence the priest engaged in serial sexual misconduct, while he held a critical oversight role in the Catholic Church’s response to the recent spate of sexual abuse and misconduct scandals.
[…]
According to commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar, a mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.
I do not wish to devalue any reader’s faith; if you are Catholic, please know that I am not criticizing you specifically or your beliefs.
The Catholic Church has a history of opposing LGBTQ rights and treating queer people with a unique level of hatred — this report says that the use of Grindr and similar apps “present[s] challenges to the Church’s child protection efforts”, invoking the dehumanizing myth tying gay men to pedophilic behaviour, an association frequently made by the Catholic Church.1 I find it difficult to link to this story because of statements like these, and it offends me how this priest was outed.
But I also think it is important to give you, reader, the full context of what is disclosed, and what is not. For example, I understand that Catholic priests have an obligation to be celibate and, theoretically, the Pillar would investigate any clergy it believed was stepping out of line. But this specifically involves one priest and Grindr, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For a start, how did the Pillar know? Did it get tipped off about Burrill’s activities so it would know where to look, or did it receive data dumps related to the phones of significant American clergy? And what about other dating apps, like Tinder or Bumble? Surely, there must be priests in America using one of those apps to engage in opposite-sex relationships; why not an exposé on one of them? This report does not give any indication about how it began investigating. I find that odd, to say the least.
The reason I am linking to this is because of that data sharing angle. As reported by Shoshana Wodinsky at Gizmodo, Grindr has repeatedly insisted on the anonymity of its data collection and ad tech ties:
When asked about the Burrill case, a Grindr spokesperson told Gizmodo that it “[does] not believe Grindr is the source of the data behind the blog’s unethical, homophobic witch hunt.”
[…]
Obviously, only Grindr knows if Grindr is telling the truth. But these sorts of adtech middlemen the platform’s relying on have a years-long track record of lying through their teeth if it means it can squeeze platforms and publishers for a few more cents per user. Grindr, meanwhile, has a years-long track record of blithely accepting these lies, even when they mean multiple lawsuits from regulators and slews of irate users.
Wodinsky points to a piece at the Catholic News Agency — which both Pillar writers used to work for — claiming that an anonymous party had “access to technology capable of identifying clergy […] found to be using [dating apps] to violate their clerical vows”. It will come as no surprise to you that I find it revolting that someone can expose this behaviour through advertising data. It is a wailing klaxon for regulation and reform.
But, also, is it ethical for a news organization to acquire data like this for the purpose of publicly outing someone or sharing their private activities? In a 2018 story, the New York Times showed how it was possible to identify people using similar data. But the newsworthiness of that story was not in individuals’ habits and activities, it was about how easy it is to misuse advertising and tracking data. And where is the line on this? Are journalists and publications going to begin mining the surveillance of ad tech companies in search of news stories? I would be equally disturbed if this were instead a report that exposed the infidelity of a “family values”-type lawmaker. I think the Pillar exposed a worrisome capability with this report, and also initiated a rapid ethical slide.
The authors clarify that they are ostensibly concerned about the relative ease with which minors are able to use dating and hookup apps. That is a fair criticism. But this digression cannot be separated from this harmful belief, nor from the Church’s history of sexual abuse of minors. That abuse was not caustic because the clergy involved were engaged in same-sex relations, it was because they were powerful adults molesting children. ↥︎
Here’s a fun piece from Andy Salerno about how more complex emoji are constructed and why they are sometimes very large for what is ostensibly a single character.
A week after The Verge published the García Martínez letter, a group of Muslim employees at Apple penned a note calling for the company to release a statement in support of Palestine. When Tim Cook didn’t respond, the letter was leaked to The Verge.
It is interesting to me that these letters, and another about Apple’s back-to-office plan, were leaked specifically to the Verge. They were not sent to a labour reporter at the more aggressive Vice, or to a business publication like Bloomberg. Curious.
The two letters, and their leaks, are signs of a slow cultural shift at Apple. Employees, once tight-lipped about internal problems, are now joining a wave of public dissent that’s roiling Silicon Valley. Employees say this is partly because Apple’s typical avenues for reporting don’t work for big cultural issues. They also note the company rolled out Slack in 2019, allowing workers to find and organize with one another.
The Google and Amazon examples Schiffer cites were both truly organized in public and on social media. But all three Apple letters — so far — are ostensibly for internal audiences only, though that façade is crumbling.
I have to wonder if this recent spate of letters has actually made a difference. The one asking for a reconsideration of hiring policies cost Antonio García Martínez a job, but it is unclear whether there have been any changes to recruiting or interviewing. Apple and its leadership did not post any statements in defense of Palestine, either.
While it is too soon to know whether there will be any changes to Apple’s plan to bring employees back to the office for 60% or more of a workweek, I do not imagine this will make a dent. I know that some people will find this a bummer — the past year has proved that many people can do many jobs without being anywhere near an office. But many people were hired at Apple with the understanding that they would be working at the company’s buildings. This is not a case of Apple reducing the amount of time working from home; it is an increase from being required to be in the office full-time. This pandemic has been difficult and traumatic, but it is not a permanent state. I do not think it is realistic to expect everything to go back to the way it was before this pandemic, but it is equally unlikely that our generally rich and privileged lives will be unrecognizable because of it.
I hope this does not come across as indifferent. Many people have lost family and friends to this pandemic, and countless more have been impacted in ways little and large — including me.
Steven Aquino says that Apple has long been accommodating for people with disabilities. I have also heard several stories of Apple being surprisingly flexible for people who cannot work in Cupertino. That is clearly not the case for all people who wish to work remotely, but there are satellite Apple offices in dozens of cities that you would not immediately think of. Employees are, however, working in offices.
Apple’s arrangement is limiting, as are most jobs. There are plenty of companies that I would love to work for that would require me to relocate, and that is frustrating but fine. There are also many remote positions I could consider at other companies if I were looking for another job and wanted to work from home. If these requirements mean that Apple begins to bleed too much talent to more remote-friendly companies, it will no doubt adjust its policies. For now, so long as it is safe, this is entirely what I expected — and, I think, what most people should have anticipated.
For most new Apple hardware, I look forward to written reviews, but for these new M1 iMacs, I was especially excited for videos. These anodized aluminum colours are going to look different depending on lighting and motion, so they will look best in person, and video gets closest to that experience.
Apple shipped one of each colour iMac to Justine Ezarik, and I think she shows off the depth of colour coordination really well. Marques Brownlee received a blue review unit, and pointed out that the white bezel keeps it looking friendly and is less distracting in actual use.
I really liked Tyler Stalman’s review as well, where he takes the iMac through some of his typical photo and video editing processes. Like all M1 Macs, it seems almost impossibly capable for being an ostensibly entry level Mac.
It is still hard to believe that you can buy Macs today that range from $699 to over $2,600 — if you max out an iMac — and they all feature the exact same processor with maybe one GPU core missing. And, oh, you can buy an iPad with the same SoC too. This radically simplifies the computer buying experience to one based almost entirely on form factor. There is virtually no performance compromise you need to make in choosing between a desktop and a laptop — not like the Intel era.
So, now that the consumer side of the Mac product line has been transitioned to Apple’s own processors, it will soon be time to see what is in store for its more professionally-oriented computers. Exciting times.
Although App Tracking Transparency only shipped this week as part of iOS 14.5, Apple announced it last year, and it got Facebook all riled up. The company has aggressively campaigned against the feature, arguing that it will harm small businesses because, as Facebook’s Dan Levy wrote, precisely targeted ads bring businesses’ costs down:
This affects not just app developers, but also small businesses that rely on personalized ads to grow. Here’s why. Small businesses have small budgets. For these small budgets to work, they have to be targeted at the customers that matter to small businesses. It doesn’t do a local wedding planner any good to reach people who aren’t planning a wedding. Likewise, it doesn’t do a small ecommerce outfit selling customized dog leashes any good to reach cat owners. Put simply, by dramatically limiting the effectiveness of personalized advertising, Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies.
This line of reasoning was thoroughly debunked by Facebook’s ex-employees and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Andrés Arrieta who pointed out that behaviourally-targeted ads are often more expensive than more weakly-targeted versions because of the many intermediaries taking their cut. These types of ads produce mixed results for advertisers, have little benefit for publishers, are not very well targeted, and require us to sacrifice our privacy with few ways of opting out.
Then, in a Clubhouse chat with Josh Constine last month, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook “may even be in a stronger position” after the introduction of App Tracking Transparency because of Facebook’s uniquely large amount of user data. But that was contradicted somewhat in today’s quarterly earnings report in a comment from CFO David Wehner (emphasis mine):
We expect second quarter 2021 year-over-year total revenue growth to remain stable or modestly accelerate relative to the growth rate in the first quarter of 2021 as we lap slower growth related to the pandemic during the second quarter of 2020. In the third and fourth quarters of 2021, we expect year-over-year total revenue growth rates to significantly decelerate sequentially as we lap periods of increasingly strong growth. We continue to expect increased ad targeting headwinds in 2021 from regulatory and platform changes, notably the recently-launched iOS 14.5 update, which we expect to begin having an impact in the second quarter. This is factored into our outlook.
On the call, Wehner said that the impact would be “manageable” due to the company’s increased investments in e-commerce. How much Facebook’s own revenue will be impacted will, as the company says, be seen later this year. This quarter, however, there are no such worries for Facebook.
The company said it earned $9.5 billion, or $3.30 per share, in the January-March period. That’s up 94% from $4.9 billion, or $1.71 per share, a year earlier.
Revenue grew 48% to $26.17 billion from $17.44 billion.
But for the small businesses Facebook ostensibly cares about, things got more expensive:
The average price of ads on Facebook grew 30% from a year earlier, while the number of ads increased by 12%.
Its pricing power for ads is increasing dramatically as Apple makes cheap ads less efficient
The business is becoming more efficient as it grows (43% operating margin!) […]
As is often the case for stories about privacy changes — whether regulatory or at a platform level — much of the coverage about App Tracking Transparency has been centred around its potential effects on the giants of the industry: Amazon, Facebook, and Google. But this may actually have a greater impact on smaller ad tech companies and data brokers. That is fine; I have repeatedlyhighlighted the surreptitious danger of these companies that are not household names. But Facebook and Google can adapt and avoid major hits to their businesses because they are massive — and they may, as Zuckerberg said, do even better. They are certainly charging more for ads.
That is not to say that we should give up and accept that these businesses destroy our privacy to enrich themselves and their shareholders. If we threw in the towel every time we realized that lawmaking was difficult or that laws would be broken sometimes, we wouldn’t have any laws.
You may have noticed my pivot from Apple’s platform rules to a more regulated approach. That is because I maintain that a legal solution is the only correct one. While I am glad this new control exists in iOS, privacy is not something people should buy. And, pursuant to Facebook’s earnings and forecast, there should not be a benefit from the increased scarcity of data due to better privacy controls.
The breakthrough M1 chip takes the industry-leading performance of iPad Pro to an entirely new level. The 8-core CPU design features the world’s fastest CPU cores in low-power silicon — delivering up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than A12Z Bionic. The 8-core GPU is in a class of its own, delivering up to 40 percent faster GPU performance. This combination of CPU and graphics performance on iPad Pro widens its lead as the fastest device of its kind. Powerful custom technologies, including a next-generation 16-core Apple Neural Engine, an advanced image signal processor (ISP), a unified, high-bandwidth memory architecture with up to 16GB of memory, 2x faster storage, and up to 2TB capacity, make iPad Pro more capable than ever. The industry-leading power efficiency of M1 enables all of that amazing performance along with all-day battery life in the thin and light design of iPad Pro.1 Because M1 shares the same fundamental architecture of A-series chips, iPadOS is already optimized to take full advantage of the powerful technologies in M1 to easily handle everything from simple navigation to the most demanding workflows.
An iPad uses what is ostensibly the same processor as half of Apple’s Mac lineup. Impressive. This is the first time Apple has openly acknowledged the iPad’s memory instead of treating it as secret sauce and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is offered in similar configurations as its Mac cousins. Unlike a Mac, you cannot customize the RAM independent of its storage; if you do not want a terabyte of disk space, you will get 8 GB of RAM.
There is a lot to love about these new iPad models, and I am excited to see the display in the 12.9-inch model, even though it increases the price considerably. But this is the part of covering new iPad hardware where I am legally obligated to express that my frustrations remain in its software. I am excited for what WWDC may bring on that front because, much as I want one of these new iPad Pro models, nearly all of the things I wish to change about my base-model years-old iPad are in its operating system.
Let’s start with what we can see, shall we? Not since the iMac G3 of the late 1990s has Apple used such vibrant colours on any Mac, and they look beautiful. The product photography makes the green one look like the original “Bondi Blue” iMac. If I were buying one of these iMacs, that’s the one I’d have. I wish the MacBook Air came in these same colour choices.
The new model has a slimmed-down bezel in white, which is an odd choice. I am curious about what that will look like in person, though I have not been a fan of any of the devices I have used with white bezels. There isn’t a logo anywhere on the front, but it still has a chin because that’s where the computer is.
That chin features a pastel version of the iMac’s colour that is matched in the stand; around the sides and back, it is a richer and more vibrant hue. Don’t worry — there is still a silver model available if you are boring.
I am so happy to see colourful computers again — can you tell?
It is around the back of this iMac where things take a bit of a dive. For a start, it has just two USB 4/Thunderbolt ports; on the higher-end models, there are an extra two USB 3 ports. But that and a headphone jack is all the I/O that you get. That means no USB-A ports, of course, but also not SD card reader, which I use every few days on my own iMac. At least all currently-sold iPhones ship with Lightning cables that have a USB-C connector.
This iMac also has a curious new port around back for power and connectivity. It supports WiFi, of course, but if you want to use a wired connection, the higher-end models include a power brick with a gigabit ethernet port. That means the power supply is no longer built in, which creates some floor clutter, and — most curiously — this connects to the iMac via a single braided cable that attaches magnetically. So all current Apple notebooks have cables that are firmly seated and can cause the computer to go flying if they are tripped over, but one desktop model has a magnetic cable.
Apple is pitching this 24-inch iMac as a replacement for the 21.5-inch model; it has discontinued all but the lowest-end 21.5-inch Intel models, but it has retained the 27-inch models for now. This sets up the possibility for a greater differentiation between Apple’s more consumer-oriented products — the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, and this iMac — and its higher-end products. This iMac uses ostensibly the same chip as its other own-silicon Mac models — and the new iPad Pro — and is limited to the same storage and memory options. The M1 products that have been released so far have proved to be extraordinarily powerful, but there are plenty of use cases that would benefit from more RAM and more power. That is what we can expect from the big iMac, and the 15-inch and higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro models.
As I see it, there are three distinct structural shifts happening that both explain and give merit to a shift in emphasis toward businesses using their direct channels instead of relying on media coverage. Collectively, they have some profound implications for companies, communicators, and journalists.
[…]
Put simply, Americans on the whole trust business as an institution more than the press as an institution. That’s not conjecture. It’s backed by data.
[…]
There are far more stories businesses want to tell than there are reporters to tell them. How do we know that? Let’s look at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In 2000, there were about two people working in public relations for every one working reporter in America. By 2019, that spread more than doubled to over five, driven by both an increase in PR jobs and a decrease in reporter jobs. By 2029, BLS projects the spread will keep expanding to over six.
I found this post illuminating and alarming. A collective trust in business marketing — or “storytelling”, as Prosser puts it — over good journalism means that more credence is given to media that has an inherent conflict of interest over that which, ostensibly, does not.
A common retort to this is that media outlets have, for years, degraded their own trust. CNN spends hours a day broadcasting talking head shouting matches; entire books have been dedicated to the inadequacies of the New York Times; Fox News is Fox News. This is not a U.S.-exclusive phenomenon: trust in the media, scientists, and academics has fallen in Canada, too.
But this trust gap is almost inherently unfair. When companies screw up, they barely flinch. Consider that, as of last year, 71% of Americans surveyed have a favourable opinion of Facebook. This is after years of behaviour that should have destroyed its reputation.
Media, on the other hand, operates within far tighter margins of trust. Brooke Gladstone, writing for the New York Times in 2015:
Americans say they want accuracy and impartiality, but the polls suggest that, actually, most of us are seeking affirmation. Americans want the news to be patriotic, which explains the big drop in 2004 when stories abounded about Abu Ghraib, the 9/11 commission’s slam on the government’s handling of terrorism, and the Senate Intelligence Committee finding that the White House “overstated” the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Plus, it was an election year. Trust in news media always dips in election years.
We tend to trust media that reflects our own views, and inherently distrust outlets that do not. Companies are perceived to be more neutral; the view that they are only interested in the bottom line is both cynical and perceived as more trustworthy than journalism. I think this is false, but it is what surveys suggest. Prosser makes several suggestions in this article about how media can improve reader trust — many of which have been made before — but I do not think they will be effective. For example, here’s one idea:
While the means of news distribution have changed starkly over the previous decade, news presentation online remains largely the same: text with occasional links and photos, sometimes video, presented in a format that basically tracks the print experience. There’s a meaningful opportunity here to look at means of presenting stories that reinforce trust: presenting primary source documents in line instead of just writing in reference to them, detailing how a piece was sourced in ways people understand […]
“Present primary sources” sounds like a slam-dunk, right? If a publication has documentation of something and shows it, the story should speak for itself. But this has mixed results. In 2004, records supposedly denigrating George W. Bush’s military service were shown to be created in Microsoft Word because those documents were available. On the other hand, even after a full summary was released by the White House of a call between then-U.S. president Donald Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, less than half of Republicans believed news reports about the substance of the call. I am sure you can find plenty of similar examples from different political parties and orientations; these are my own biases.
“Hey everyone!! This is Yola from Oak4,” an account tied to an employee named Yola said last week. “I just joined a program where I am able to answer any questions, comments or concerns you may have about Amazon. I can’t wait to share what my experience working here has been like for me.”
The account, like several others reviewed by Insider, was started in March 2021. Rather than posting, the accounts focus on responding to people tweeting about the company.
Not coincidentally, warehouse workers in Alabama finished voting yesterday on whether they should unionize; the result is expected in the coming days. But it is unclear which, if any, of these accounts are part of an Amazon astroturfing campaign, and which are fraudulent.
Many of the accounts involved used the handle @AmazonFC followed by a first name.
Amazon has previously used this handle for its so-called Amazon Ambassadors – real employees who are paid by the firm to promote and defend it on Twitter.
[…]
Several of the high-profile accounts have been suspended by Twitter. It told the BBC that Amazon Ambassadors are subject to Twitter’s rules on spam and platform manipulation.
Accounts which impersonate or falsely claim to be affiliated with a company, can be temporarily suspended or removed.
Just take a look at the ears and the way the hair falls if you need any evidence that the photo of “Darla” is computer generated.
But photos aside, is Darla possibly real in other ways? Frankly, it’s really hard to tell. Some of the tweets almost seem purposely obtuse in the way that a troll might tweet.
“Amazon is NOT union busting, I can not stress that enough! Amazon is just trying to prevent employees from fraternizing or organizing outside of company-approved channels,” Darla tweeted over the weekend.
If that seems a little too perfect, that’s probably because it is. Aric Toler of Bellingcat spotted that the account was associated with a Gmail address instead of an Amazon one. That was the case for many of these new accounts, as Emanuel Maiberg of Vice says:
@AmazonFCDarla and @AmazonFCLulu are just two of the accounts Twitter suspended yesterday. Another used a photo of a guy from Dude Perfect, the YouTube trickshot guys; it was quickly suspended. Other ambassador accounts that appear to be endorsed and operated by Amazon, are still online, and posting only slightly less deranged content about how much they love working at Amazon. The accounts belonging to Amazon were registered with @amazon.com emails. The accounts we noticed had seemingly AI-generated faces were registered with other emails, or required an email before continuing the account verification process. @AmazonFCDarla and other seemingly fake Amazon ambassador accounts had open direct messages. The official Amazon ambassador accounts did not.
It’s kind of funny that Amazon thought these “ambassador” accounts — there are still some real ones — were a great PR move in the first place. It uses a predictable format and doesn’t control the Twitter namespace, so it is trivial for others to create parody accounts that highlight many of the reasons workers are unionizing. But I am not surprised many people fell for these tweets. Amazon’s PR strategy has been so hostile lately that a member of its security team filed a report speculating that the @AmazonNews account may have been accessed by an unauthorized user.
Regardless, the collapse of context on Twitter makes it easy to create the impression of legitimacy with little work. It sort of feels like screaming into the void to encourage extra vigilance on Twitter, but I think we can all remind ourselves and each other to be more careful about reacting strongly to tweets from new and unfamiliar sources.
