1. Good Monday Morning

It’s March 21st. The Senate Judiciary Committee begins its hearings at 11 a.m. today on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first female African American justice on the Supreme Court.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,358 words — about a 5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted: “Children deserve to be protected before they have the ability to consent that their data be shared and sold to third parties.”— Maryland state senator Susan Lee to Government Technology on her sponsorship of new student privacy legislation. We unpack the issue in Maryland and elsewhere in Spotlight Explainer below.

a) Instacart launched Shoppable Recipes with partners TikTok, Tasty, and Hearst Magazines. As content creators share their short video recipes on TikTok or a magazine site, the audience watching the video can easily add the ingredients to an Instacart cart. In addition to TikTok, sites featuring Shoppable Recipes include Good Housekeeping and Country Living.

b) A bipartisan group of House Judiciary committee members have requested that the Justice Department investigate Amazon and its executives for obstruction of Congress. The lawmakers say that the company has refused to answer its questions and has not produced information that committee members say would implicate Amazon in anticompetitive behavior.

c) Columbia University may have gamed the famous U.S. News college rankings according to a tenured math professor at the school. Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell surfaced Prof. Michael Thaddeus’ allegations to his newsletter audience last week. If his explanation is accurate, Columbia has done things like use the cost of patient care in its hospital as part of its teaching expenditure. The school also reported that more than 96% of its faculty were full-time and that 100% of the faculty had attained the highest possible degree in their field, data that Columbia reports lower in other surveys.

3. Search Engine News — Google Related Search & New Hotel Searching

Google introduced a new related search feature for advertisers last week. The feature allows websites that monetize using Google’s AdSense program to display a “related searches” widget directly on their site. If a visitor clicks a related search, they remain on the site, but on an embedded Google search results page.

Why is that important? We’ve been telling you since Spotlight started years ago that Google’s mission is to control the entire information research ecosystem. By subsidizing publishers, Google takes the reins from a visitor who may be dissatisfied with the search result and try a competing search engine. 

Google gives the publisher some money for their trouble, but it’s not a lot. The big thing that Google gets is the ability to learn what site it sent a search visitor to and how that person refined their request to get the information that they wanted.

Hotels will see a similar tool that they use get expanded availability soon. Free hotel booking links will now appear directly on Google Maps and Google Search. That inserts Google as a middleman between the hotel and traveler. Restaurants already suffer similar encroachment from Google, Facebook, and delivery apps that provide links to their ordering process instead of the restaurant’s website.

4. Spotlight Explainer — Student Privacy

As education tech and online tracking grow, students of all ages are being observed in ways that were never possible before. Privacy advocates express extreme concern about schools using location monitoring, facial recognition, and device tracking to stay abreast of student behavior. 

The Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act is the law that protects student privacy according to the Education Department. That law took effect in 1974 and was last amended twenty years ago in 2002. Critics understandably say that it is incomplete given technology advances since then.

Device Tracking & Student Privacy
School personnel use software that monitors a student’s behavior online–even if they’re at home–while using a school-issued device. Schools argue that they own the device, and that teachers can only view information during school hours. That’s not always the case. An important distinction remains that teachers cannot access the data, including location coordinates, but that the data is saved and can be viewed by school administrators.

No Student Privacy With Facial Recognition at Lunch
The promise of accurate and contactless school lunch payments led some UK schools to begin using facial recognition last fall. They were quickly warned by a national privacy agency to “consider less intrusive ways” of collecting payments.

A school district in New York had already begun using a similar program before the state government banned facial recognition in its schools. Meanwhile, Colorado legislators last week advanced a bill that would ban all facial recognition in public and charter schools until 2025.

Universities & Facial Recognition
One of the most prominent recent abuses of student privacy became public knowledge last month when interim George Washington University president Mark Wrighton apologized for GW tracking student, faculty, and staff locations during the fall semester. The program had begun before Wrighton arrived and his email to the community was explicit about what was tracked.

When To Sue An Unknown Student
A Chapman University professor has sued a student known so far only as John Doe because that student uploaded copies of questions from his midterm and final exams in a business law course. The company would not identify the person who uploaded the information without a legal proceeding so the professor sued. 

Online cheating is a serious issue. The Markup published an outstanding story last month about a company called Honorlock that uses websites seeded with specific exam questions and tracking software to identify students who look for them.  Honorlock’s critics call the ruse entrapment and are encouraging educators to find different ways to assess student knowledge.

5. Did That Really Happen? — UCLA Posted A Professor’s Job Last Week With No Compensation

UCLA published a job listing last week with a strange provision:

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.

The people who use the internet had some thoughts about that until the job listing vanished. Not before it was captured here, of course, but pretty fast.

Now UCLA is apologizing for “unfortunate wording” for a position that it said required an affiliation with the school, but would be paid for by a grant. But yes, the university did advertise for an unpaid chemistry professor gig. Wait until Columbia hears about this.

6. Following Up — Yale List of Who Left & Who Stayed In Russia

In much the same way that Johns Hopkins leaped to the forefront of COVID-19 data publishing in January of 2020, Yale has developed a list of hundreds of organizations and whether they still do business in Russia. 

Hundreds have left that country after it attacked Ukraine, but 37 remain including Credit Suisse, Koch Industries, Renault, and Subway.

7. Protip — Leaving Photos Behind When You Die

No one wants to plan for this, but if you read Spotlight, we know that you’re most likely a planner. Wired has a nice, short piece on how to best organize the digital photo portion of your legacy. (P.S. Don’t forget to set up access to your digital accounts for email, social media, and banking too. It’s important.)

8. Screening Room — Tattoos & Duolingo

9. Science Fiction World — AI Speech

Now that the Duolingo spot loosened you up, you must watch this video from AI voice company Sonantic.  You won’t regret giving it two minutes.

 10. Coffee Break — Test Your Reaction Time

JustPark lets you take the wheel in this quick “emergency stop game” to grade your reflexes. I tell you this as a thirty-one year old man who may be a bit older than that.

 11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

It’s March 14th. Happy π day. Chances are good that you’re enjoying this morning more than the football memorabilia collector who paid $518,000 on Saturday for the football used for Tom Brady’s last career touchdown pass only to learn Sunday night that Brady had un-retired.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:“The spread of biometric surveillance tools like palm scans and facial recognition now threatens to [transform] these spaces into hot spots for ICE raids, false arrests, police harassment, and stolen identities.“— An open letter signed by Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave’s Tom Morello to the parent company of Colorado’s Red Rocks. The iconic venue scrapped plans to use Amazon’s palm scanning technology.

a) Autonomous vehicles no longer need human controls such as a steering wheel, according to new regulations from the U.S. government. The request was made by GM subsidiary Cruise which argued that its Origin podlike vehicle going into production next year does not have human-centric operating features.

b) Google announced plans to purchase cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion. The acquisition of the Reston, Virginia, based company is Google’s second largest purchase ever and is expected to become part of the Google Cloud division. Google parent Alphabet began the year with more than $139 billion in cash on hand.

3. Search Engine News — Google & The Importance of Internal Links

No, more than that. Seriously. Build a strategy. Google search exec John Muller confirmed last week that internal linking is “super critical” for search purposes. And he says that your normal navigation linking is fine and all, but doesn’t replace an internal linking strategy.

Part of Mueller’s comments during SEO office hours last week:

“You should really have normal HTML links between the different parts of your website. 

And ideally, you should not just have a basic set of links, but rather you should look at it in a strategic way and think about what do you care about the most and how can you highlight that with your internal linking.”

4. Spotlight Explainer — 2022 Social Media Trends

TikTok.  

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

The short form social media channel is the world’s buzziest platform when you account for the fact that journalists hang out on Twitter.  eMarketer summarized their 2022 social media video report this way, “The percentage of young US digital video viewers who watch video on Instagram and TikTok is within shouting distance of YouTube.”  

In a broad sense, YouTube still owns the viewership crown for audiences over the age of 25 with 68% market share, but Instagram and TikTok are now watched by two-thirds of audiences between the ages of 18 and 24.

There is a huge generation gap
Only 6% of Boomers and 18% of Gen X are watching TikTok. More than 60% of Gen Z is on TikTok. 

But that gap cuts both ways because half of kids 12 and under are on YouTube.

Video rules
It’s not just TikTok. Instagram’s Reels was a hit and moved to Facebook even though Facebook truncates many of the videos there. Statista data for the 2022 social media landscape shows that YouTube remains a close second behind Facebook with 2.5 billion active users, but Instagram is 4th and TikTok is 6th with 1 billion monthly active users. That’s more than twice the monthly user base of Pinterest, Twitter, or Reddit.  Business platform LinkedIn doesn’t even make the top 15.

From pariah to prestigious guest
The Trump administration detested TikTok’s presence. The former president signed a now-revoked Executive Order banning it from operating in the U.S. After the company’s assurances that U.S. data is only housed in the U.S., backed up in Singapore, and not shared with China, the company has been allowed to continue operating in America.

The importance of TikTok’s audience reach was highlighted last week when Biden administration officials shared an online video briefing with several dozen popular TikTok creators. This followed similar outreach last year around the administration’s vaccination drives.

Specialists are necessary
Social video is different from other social media. There’s a very different style and flow to those videos. The platforms are not interchangeable. A client last year didn’t budget for different versions of a video and found themselves having to use hastily re-edited video to advertise on TikTok and other video channels.

The TikTok audience is also not a casual one. U.S. Android users are on TikTok nearly 20 hours every month. That’s up from 13 hours per month just the year before. A brand trying to engage that audience should have experts who do the same.

Special resource: here’s a nifty Hootsuite report with optimal video specs updated for 2022 social media for each platform.

5. Did That Really Happen? — Little Girl With Lollipop and Gun

You may have seen an image of a young girl sitting in the window of a dilapidated building. Her clothes are neat. She has a lollipop in her mouth and a gun cradled in her arms. Her hair is tied back with ribbons and her jeans run into boots that nearly extend to her knee.

She looks like a model.

And she is. The photographer is her father, a hobbyist who staged this and other photos to draw attention to the then-impending war in Ukraine. You can read his statement here.

GMU Professor Shaun Dakin and I tried hard to find the origin of this image as it went viral. One tip-off: despite its virality with hundreds of shares on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, not one well known news organization ran the image. 

Here’s the lesson: ignore the photographer and his family. As the image swept throughout the world and trended on many sites, prayers were offered and people were searching for places where a 9-year-old girl might reasonably be expected to defend a place with a gun more than half her own height. 

None of those people meant any harm, but all were guilty of spreading wartime propaganda.

 6. Following Up — The EU & UK Investigating Google and Facebook’s Jedi Blue

We’ve told you before about Jedi Blue, the Google and Facebook agreement to work together on advertising platforms in exchange for preferential rates. A consortium of U.S. states are suing Google over the agreement and now the EU and United Kingdom have announced parallel antitrust investigations into both companies.

7. Protip — Blurring Images Might Not Work Well

Some privacy advocates wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to un-redact an image. And now Unredacter software is available for anyone to download free. Read this to learn how to best remove information from files that you share.

8. Screening Room — Cheetos Hands Free

9. Science Fiction World — Tricorders for Cars

Who doesn’t dig watching Dr. McCoy wave a salt and pepper shaker over someone while gravely announcing a medical condition? Now Volvo is doing that for cars at U.S. dealerships. The camera-based AI system checks the underbody, tires, and creates 360-degree scans looking for body damage or rust.

10. Coffee Break — Rating Fictional Professors

Now that anyone can see how previous classes have rated instructors from the unofficial but popular Rate My Professor, perhaps we should check in on the creative writing of people who have rated their favorites from movie and TV history. 

Here is Dr. Indiana Jones at Princeton, Professor Xavier, Professor Minerva McGonagall of Hogwarts, and Professor Charles Kingsfield of Harvard Law (Mr. Hart, Mister Hart…)

11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

It’s March 7th, almost exactly two years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In America, we’re now about 2 months away from reaching the horrific milestone of one million deaths. In Mississippi, 1 out of every 245 residents has died. In Vermont, the number is about 1 out of every 1,000 people. Every state falls in between those two extremes.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,415 words — about a 5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:“I am an artist who was raised by an accountant and a businessman … My goal in all of this is to see what’s possible.“— Science fiction author Brandon Sanderson to The New York Times after he raised $1 million on Kickstarter in 35 minutes. By last night with more than 3 weeks to go, the author had raised $25 million from fans for four new books.

a) Samsung is throttling more than 10,000 apps on phones that it has produced since the S10, according to The Verge. The tech site points out that popular performance benchmarking apps are not throttled. The company says it slowed down the apps to manage the amount of heat the phones generate, and that it would ship software to allow consumers to disable the function. That stunning revelation led Ars Technica to ask why they would create software to turn off something needed for the phone to operate.

b) Wordle cheating is a big thing around 7 to 8 a.m., and especially in New Hampshire. That’s the word from word search site WordFinderX. They called out all of northern New England and Washington, D.C. as “the biggest cheaters.” The word most often searched outside New England was “tacit.”

c) U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is issuing a Request for Information about Health Information Misinformation during the pandemic. The deadline to submit comments is May 2. No entities, including technology companies, are required to respond at this stage.

3. Search Engine News — Google Releases Search Trend Insights

The Think With Google team released a set of 16 new search trends in four distinct categories: Sticky Trends, Seasonal Things, Reopening Continued, and Rising Expectations.

Rising Expectations are trends with big growth. They include late night searching, 24/7 customer service, next day flower delivery, and dog friendly restaurants (a thing I didn’t know until now that I wanted).

Sticky Trends were influenced early by the pandemic and remain a high volume search category. This is the group where you’ll find makeup games (literally games about cosmetics), best movies to stream, nursery plants near me, and hair trends for females.

Reopening Continued reflects changing attitudes around socializing as the Omicron wave diminishes. They consist of spring break, cinemas near me, seating charts, and unique things to do in a city.

Seasonal Trends reflect February as only these can: Valentine’s Day nails, figure skating, Winter Olympics, and winter vacation in different locations.

4. Spotlight Explainer — Tech Blocks Russia

Russia’s attack on Ukraine is the first time that many people have seen a war and all of the attendant suffering in streaming media and 24/7. That’s despite years of American combat in Afghanistan, the Yemeni Civil War aided by Saudi Arabia, and conflict in Ethiopia with Eritrea. All three trouble spots experienced more than 10,000 casualties in the last year.

This war has captured American attention for reasons of race, status, and position that are far too complex for a newsletter to tackle. But because of the heightened interest, tech companies are responding in unprecedented ways to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine instead of, say, to Russia’s military incursions in the Syrian Civil War during which Russia has attacked civilian targets for years.

Social media cuts new content and monetization

Every major social media platform has stopped making new content available from Russia including Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. This follows reports in the world’s media that Russian propaganda was flooding social media.

Facebook, YouTube and others have also cut the ability for Russian companies, including government controlled media, to earn advertising revenue on content. A consensus of too little too late has sprung up around those initiatives.

No major fintech companies are offering payment processing

Mastercard and Visa have suspended operations in Russia and Belarus. They were followed by PayPal, and on Sunday, American Express.

Meanwhile, an inspiring Ukrainian moment came when the country’s Digital Transformation office issued a plea on Twitter for cryptocurrency donations and received more than $50 million in days. Reports this weekend came out that half of the funds have been spent on bulletproof vests, night-vision devices, food packages, and bandages.

That Airbnb meme is accurate, but tread cautiously

Western social media lit up on Friday when memes began circulating that people could buy an Airbnb stay in Ukraine and the money would be transferred to the individuals who were renting out the property. That’s true, and Airbnb quickly waived fees for Ukraine bookings. The big caveat is that you can give money directly to the Ukrainian government or to relief organizations. It’s a sweet story about direct giving, but seems pretty inefficient.

Entertainment and news options are disappearing in Russia

News organizations have stopped reporting from Russia after the Russian government said that journalists printing what it calls “fake news” could face imprisonment for up to 15 years. Among the organizations halting news from and in Russia are CNN, CBS, ABC, the BBC, and probably many more by the time you read this.

Faced with a requirement to carry state-sponsored programming, Netflix has also ceased operating in Russia. They’ve been joined by Apple and Microsoft, who are no longer selling devices or apps in Russia. Meanwhile, Russian teams have been banned from participating in international soccer competitions related to the World Cup. Of all the actions, that one generated immediate and urgent appeals from the Russian government.

5. Did That Really Happen? — Can You Spot Fake News Stories?

With news about the Russian invasion occupying so much attention, there are a constant flurry of news hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation being published. We have previously told you about First Draft’s excellent interactive training that lets you check your news verifying skills.

There are all sorts of resources and quizzes you can use for free. This is worth your time to visit. They also publish a nice, free newsletter and have a free app.

6. Following Up — Nukemap is Popular Again

For a world that didn’t often have nuclear meltdowns or bombings top of mind, the richly detailed Nukemap is a return to decades of Cold War horror. Creator Alex Wellerstein launched the site 10 years ago, and it’s enjoyed surging popularity since the Russian invasion. 

You can target anywhere in the world and control for different factors. It’s macabre, but also fascinating.

7. Protip — Chromebook Expiration Dates

That’s right, Chromebooks, the tablet/laptop hybrid, have an expiration date. Once they reach that date, they won’t update their software. The current time frame is 8 1/2 years, but was previously 5. That’s the period from its release date, not when you activated it. This great WSJ explainer has details, including how to find out your device’s date.

8. Screening Room — Apple Card & Chocolate

9. Science Fiction World — Google Can Read Your Body Language Without Cameras

This very cool story is an example of how a device can use radar instead of cameras to determine where you are and what you’re doing. Imagine getting a snack or going to the bathroom while watching a movie — and your TV pauses until it senses your return. There are many more applications from driving to sleeping and everything in between.

10. Coffee Break — Heardle

You know about Wordle, and you may have even heard about Quordle, a game that tests you with four words at once. There’s also Worldle for geography, and brand new: Heardle for music.

11. Sign of the Times