Good Monday morning. It’s August 10th. Breaking last night from the Wall Street Journal is news that Twitter is reportedly interesting in acquiring TikTok. Expect to hear lots more until this deal is done. Size-wise it’s as if Colgate-Palmolive or Goldman Sachs were being acquired, but the complicated political environment magnifies the transaction even more for this three year old service. Here’s Reuters’ coverage.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,525 words, a bit over a 5 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. Walmart has delayed its Amazon Prime competitor again. Walmart+ was supposed to finally launch last month with a $98 annual price tag. Amazon is now valued at three times more than Walmart, and the gap is growing. (Recode-Vox)

b. More retail news ahead of Friday’s retail sales report: Rite Aid deployed facial recognition in two hundred stores located in low income neighborhoods of major cities. A match would alert the store’s loss prevention employees via a smartphone alert. This is a riveting story that Reuters broke about the unregulated use of facial recognition.

c. Ancestry is facing a class action lawsuit over a claim that the company violated California law regarding subscriptions. At least one legal analyst suggests that the company may have mostly complied but not included “the level of clarity required by law.” Remember that if you’re making a social media disclosure, an affiliate program disclosure, or describing your terms and conditions that many laws include requirements regarding font size and placement. (Ad Law Access)

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Covid Tracking Project — useful for its annotations
Johns Hopkins — the gold standard
School Reopening Plan Tracker from Johns Hopkins
College Crisis Initiative (Open or Hybrid) from Davidson College
NEW: Cases by Metro Area – Factbase
NEW: Johns Hopkins Data Animated – JHU

Tech News
Facebook & Twitter remove Trump posts over misinformation – NBC News
Facebook extends work from home policy until July 2021 – Techcrunch
How to Understand COVID-19 Numbers – ProPublica
PayPal will enable contactless payments at 8,000+ CVS Stores – Retail Brew
Virginia Launches COVIDwise App Using Google-Apple System – Slate

3. Search Engine Optimization News

Google purchased nearly seven percent of home alarm company ADT last week. That ordinarily would be for another discussion, but it’s important to note that Google and not parent Alphabet is the investor. The two are on the record talking about smart home appliances and monitoring, but there is also now a remote Google workforce in place. Apple, Amazon, and (once) Microsoft might have stores, but Google will have the ability to load the data from smart home technology to its shopping and search results. 

Google is also cleaning up its advertising categories.  A video ad showing police officers beating, pushing, and tasing protesters over the president speaking about law and order was rejected for violating the company’s prohibitions against graphic violence in ads. Google also banned all ads for stalkerware and remote surveillance equipment and software. Finally, Google banned ads from companies posing as news organizations and any ads mentioning illegally obtained documents such as from Wikileaks.

We’ve been telling you that Google is constantly changing the business profiles it shows in search engine results. One new trend spotted by Search Engine Land is that Google will now specify when a company’s business hours were updated. This allows anyone visiting your business to know whether the information has been updated during the pandemic. 

Finally, Microsoft Bing, rather than Google, has launched a new WordPress plugin that allows webmasters to automate submissions to the search engine. Remember that Bing gets about one billion-with-a-b visitors to its search engine every month.

4. Also in the Spotlight — GPT-3 is Ready to Learn

We last wrote about OPENAI in June. That’s the research lab founded by Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman. They put together an investment group and one billion dollars to advance artificial intelligence. Microsoft kicked in another one billion dollar investment last year.

After first saying in 2018 that they could not in good conscience release their latest machine learning software called GPT-3 that modeled text, the organization started looking for corporate buyers in June. And since what was once theoretical would now be commercial, the industry media got all breathless and fawning.

Neither Altman nor Musk are wallflowers, and Altman tweeted this two weeks ago:

You probably have the right image in mind if you see him collecting grubby dollar bills while standing outside a tent set apart from a local carny decades ago, but there is something inside the tent.

“Did a Person Write this Headline, or a Machine?” poses a recent Wired article that went on to say that the software is “provoking chills across Silicon Valley” before relating the story of one tester writing a sample app to track a to-do list. The tester than uploaded the app to GPT-3 and the system, which has received coding tutorials, returned code for the app. 

But there are plenty of ghosts in this machine, not the least of which are the prejudices of the humans who build it. When prompted with words like “Holocaust” or “woman”, the system has opined with anti-Semitic and misogynistic language. Sometimes the words it creates seem profound, but other times, they are nonsensical. We’ll link below to a free app that lets you generate tweets written by GPT-3 so you experience this dichotomy. 

How do we know this is original? I’ve run a number of samples through Google and Bing, and none were exact matches. In other words, GPT-3 was providing new language, not parroting something that it had scanned.

Computer scientist Kevin Lacker gave GPT-3 a Turing test that is designed to establish if software output can be indistinguishable from a human’s output. Early in the testing process, Lacker writes, “Traditionally, artificial intelligence struggles at “common sense.” But GPT-3 can answer a lot of common sense questions … Ten years ago, if I had this conversation, I would have assumed the entity on the other end was a human.”

The iterative process is important as humans improve the software, but even GPT-3’s earlier version has shown the ability to create new images. The version using graphics instead of words is called iGPT and can create the rest of a graphic image if given the first half of an image. That’s not a big deal for any artist, but it is a very big deal for software.

Smartlinks
Did a Person Write This Headline, or a Machine? — Wired
Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test — Lacker.io
Generate your own GPT-3 tweets — refresh the screen for each new one
GPT-3 Creative Fiction — Gwern
OpenAI’s fiction-spewing AI is learning to generate images — MIT Tech Review

5. Following Up: Twitter Bans

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Twitter seemed to take its first steps towards confronting disinformation on its platform. Remember that misinformation is often a mistake while disinformation is deliberate.

David Duke, who once won 43% of the vote in an election for Louisiana governor, is a white supremacist and former KKK leader. Twitter confirmed that they have joined YouTube in banning him for continued violations of the service’s hate speech rules.

Read more at The Washington Post.

6. Debugging: Yes there is a Google+ Class Action

The emails have been flying about a Google Plus data leak that exposed the information of 500,000 users. This one is real. 

You’ll only get $5-$12, but why not take it?

7. ProTip: The NSA Teaches You to Secure Your Phone

I love this outreach by the spy agency. In just a couple of pages of a free PDF you’ll learn what steps to take to limit your phone’s location data exposure.

There’s more at the PDF link, but remember that Location Services do not equal GPS.

8. Great Data: Online Gaming

This is a series of infographics that can each be shown as one-offs (timelines, revenue, company charts, etc.) but make a great story with very few words.

There are $150 billion in revenues now.

9. Screening Room: DSW Back to School

I’ve been a fan of DSW’s authenticity in recent spots, and their back to school ad featuring a mom and kid shopping while wearing masks is a great example of them leaning in to being real. 

It’s not on YouTube yet, but you can watch it here.

10. Coffee Break: Window Swap

I love this newish site that lets people submit a webcam view from their window. You can’t choose any particular vista, but as you refresh your screen, a new destination pops up. It was breezy in Lucerne, there was a cat sunning itself in Italy, and it was raining in Poland when I last visited.

Open up the windows here.

Good Monday morning. It’s August 3rd. Thursday marks the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear weapon bombing of Hiroshima. I recommend the Hiroshima for Global Peace website as you consider that event.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,438 words, about a 5 minute read.

Didja see what happened last week after we wrote about online political bias?

Mere hours after we sent your copy of Spotlight, the internet exploded with reactions to the misleading “frontline doctors” video that the president and his oldest son recommended. For this week’s trick, well, stay tuned.

1. News to Know Now

a. Facebook Messenger has introduced a new app lock feature for iOS users. When activated, the setting requires you to unlock the app with your fingerprint or face ID. Android devices are next. 

b. Amazon spent just under $7 billion on U.S. advertising in 2019. That’s about 9% more than previous leader Comcast. Those two companies and AT&T are the only three U.S. companies to spend $5 billion or more. (Statista)

c. Ten members of Congress have signed a letter sent to the FTC requesting an investigation of data brokers who may have engaged in “unfair and deceptive” business practices. The letter includes examples of people having their mobile location data captured when they attended Black Lives Matter protests and of religious profiles being created from similar data when people attended houses of worship as early as 2017. (See a PDF of the signed letter)

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Johns Hopkins — the gold standard
Event Risk Assessment from Georgia Tech
School Reopening Plan Tracker from Johns Hopkins
College Crisis Initiative (Open or Hybrid) from Davidson College
NEW: Covid Tracking Project — useful for its annotations

Tech News
Facebook suspends anti-mask group for spreading misinformation – The Verge
Google Promises Privacy With Virus App, Can Still Collect Location – NY Times
Uber offers COVID-19 contact tracing help amid chaotic U.S. response – Reuters
UK Government admits breaking law with NHS test and trace – The Guardian

An important article that deserves your attention:
How to Understand COVID-19 Numbers – ProPublica

3. Search Engine Optimization News

A new study of Google search results suggests that Google’s strategy of displaying non-text items in search results can siphon off nearly half the clicks when showing users images, maps, or recipes. Even in specific subject areas like news, up to 30% of the clicks won’t be made. This is the effect that we describe when we write about Google’s “zero-click” search results page.

One other extreme example: displaying a knowledge panel of boxed data often found on the right side of a Google results page reduces the click rate of that page 42%.

Website owners complain that the data is often siphoned from their properties and shown in piecemeal fashion while mixed with data from other organizations.

Google often works with data providers to gather this information and has recently announced a new deal with Uber. That deal calls for Uber to pay Google for Maps usage over the next four years. Uber also bought Routematch this month and now owns a platform that has 500 transit agency partners.

Another data deal example on Google Maps: Android users in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now see traffic light detail on their maps according to Droid LIfe.

Google continues adding structured data functions so that it can show even more information in search results without generating a click. Google is now recommending that businesses offering remote or telecommuting jobs use special codes in their website so that a flag can be shown in search results.

This is all new and continues to worry organizations we speak with that rely on publishing replicable data to attract potential customers.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Just What is TikTok?

We last took you on a deep dive through TikTok in mid-December and suggested then that you think of the app as a YouTube and Snapchat hybrid. Users post videos ranging from 6 to 60 seconds although 15 seconds is the norm. Those videos are then shared with others who can react with likes or comments or even a short video of their own.

There is little time for elaborate setup or exposition in this app that grew to prominence because of its quirky dance and lip syncing memes. The culture is similar to internet meme culture but with a dialect and style of its own. Despite the brief content, users spend about 45 minutes on the site each day, making it one of the most sticky of the social media sites.

Like Facebook and Snapchat before it, TikTok dominates usage among teens and people in their early twenties with about half of its users between the ages of 18 and 24. The site is a global phenomenon with huge user bases in the U.S., India, Brazil, and China. The number of U.S. users nearly doubled between January and April, when it reached 52 million. 

So what happened?

U.S. politicians and corporate interests have long been suspicious of TikTok’s parent company in China. Race-baiting actions by the Trump administration over the COVID-19 pandemic have also vilified the company. For months, a stream of NGOs, corporate offices, and government agencies have prohibited the app on their devices. Wells Fargo, the U.S. military, TSA, and the Biden campaign have all banned the app from phones that they own. Amazon made news in July when it sent its employees an email banning the app and then almost immediately rescinded that directive.

Detractors claim that the video sharing app is a way for China to spy on other countries although waiting for the daily news of which company has had its data breached seems to undercut that argument. The app’s supporters say that an anti-establishment bias makes it an enemy of powerful governments. A rallying cry over the last few days has asked why the U.S. government would ban an entertainment app before it bans extremist hate groups like the KKK.

What’s next: Microsoft might still purchase the entire U.S. operation and run it  operate it domestically alongside versions for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The app has been downloaded more than two billion times worldwide. No news regarding a sale or government action had been reported by late Sunday night.

Here is a cute interactive test about TikTok from the good folks at Emerging Tech Brew. 

Smartlinks

Everything to Know About Social Media Usage in July — TNW
Facebook Readies TikTok Competitor — Dow Jones MarketWatch
How the U.S. Government Could Ban TikTok — CNBC
See the list of Where TikTok is Already Banned — Business Insider
TikTok — Statistics & Facts — Statista
U.S. Consumers Flocking to TikTok -eMarketer (way back in April!)

5. Following Up: That Facebook Ad Boycott

Much has been made of the Stop Hate for Profit Facebook ad boycott we’ve told you about in the past. 

We’ve learned that not all of the one thousand participating organizations stopped advertising on all their brands. We applaud the awareness generated by the program, but also acknowledge that the financial impact was minimal.

Here’s a CNBC report suggesting that Facebook’s YOY July revenue will stay consistent.

5. Following Up: That Facebook Ad Boycott

Much has been made of the Stop Hate for Profit Facebook ad boycott we’ve told you about in the past. 

We’ve learned that not all of the one thousand participating organizations stopped advertising on all their brands. We applaud the awareness generated by the program, but also acknowledge that the financial impact was minimal.

Here’s a CNBC report suggesting that Facebook’s YOY July revenue will stay consistent.

7. ProTip: Dinosaurs in Your House

We could tell you about the Google Easter Egg honoring the Cha Cha Slide, but dinosaurs are way more fun. We’ve seen this type of augmented reality before with animals and rocket launches.

Follow along as Lifehacker shows you how to create dinosaurs in a mobile view of your house.

8. Great Data: Atlas of Surveillance

The privacy stalwarts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have published an interactive map that shows more than 5,300 programs of citizen surveillance operated by law enforcement agencies in the U.S.

Check it out for yourself. It’s why TikTok didn’t seem so scary to us.

Screening Room: Open Like Never Before

10. Coffee Break: Time Warp Trailer

While sipping your hot beverage of choice, enjoy this fan-made trailer for the 1986 Batman movie re-imagined if it was released in 1945. This is so much fun that it deserves your attention a year after it was released. It’s still relatively unknown with under 50,000 views.

Good Monday morning. It’s July 27th. The leaders of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple make a rare public appearance before a House Judiciary subcommittee about antitrust matters beginning Wednesday at noon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the world’s wealthiest person and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the fourth. Joining them are Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,569 words, about a 6 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. Facebook has agreed to pay each Illinois user between $200 and $400 to settle claims that it violated the state’s facial recognition law. The $650 million plan still needs Judge James Donato’s approval.  Donato previously rejected Facebook’s $550 million offer, saying, “That’s a lot. But the question is, is it really a lot?  That is a significant reduction from the $1,000 that the Illinois legislature set as the baseline.” (Recode)

b. Title insurance giant First American Financial is also in legal hot water according to new reporting by Krebs on Security. New York officials have charged the company for exposing millions of mortgage data records covering a sixteen year period. A hearing is set for October 26.

c. The U.S. Army has been accused of offering fake contests on video game streaming platform Twitch and has agreed to stop recruiting efforts there. It’s not the Army’s first foray into video gaming. They publish their own series of games called America’s Army. And don’t sleep on Twitch as a platform that attracts nearly 40 million monthly active users. (The Guardian)

d.  William Safire prepared a contingency speech for then-President Nixon if the first moonwalk had ended in tragedy. MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality has made a film of an AI-powered Nixon giving that speech. This growing availability of deepfake technology terrifies futurists. Here is the project’s trailer.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Johns Hopkins — the gold standard
Florida data — Unofficial, but great data and presentation
Event Risk Assessment from Georgia Tech
School Reopening Plan Tracker from Johns Hopkins
NEW: College Crisis Initiative (Open or Hybrid) from Davidson College

Tech News

5 charts illustrating economic trends during the pandemic — CNBC
COVID-19 data collection offers benefits, poses hazards — Johns Hopkins
Expanded payment capability for more online SNAP purchases — Governing
No end to COVID-19 webcam shortage — BBC 
Pandemic purchases lead to record reports of unreceived goods — FTC

Some videoconferencing fun: Bored with video call bingo?  There is a new Chrome extension that turns your Google Meet video conference into a game of 1970s-era Space Invaders using the faces of your unsuspecting co-workers. Here’s the trailer for their extension and here’s the link to their extension. 

3. Search Engine Optimization News

Google Shopping continues improving its feature set and integrating it within search results.

The company’s latest moves are seen as a challenge for Amazon’s third-party sellers that are coping with new rules. After first announcing free product listings, Google has now enabled commission-free Buy on Google checkout via PayPal or Shopify, according to Search Engine Land. That means that visitors will be able to buy products directly from Google Shopping search results, which are just a click away from the main search results. 

Google Shopping is also making Amazon-like use of product feeds. In a follow-up SEL article, T-shirts were shown in Google’s main search results with data pulled from the product feed to show the type of material that was used. If you’re already using Google Shopping, you should be reading Ginny Marvin’s coverage. You should talk with us if you’re interested in starting to sell products on Google. Just press your reply key and let us know your thoughts.

Google is also helping future mortgage buyers by showing a mortgage explainer article and mortgage tools from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on related searches. The tools include mortgage calculators and rate tracking. 9 to 5 Google has details.

Google Guaranteed status that includes a green check mark in Google My Business listings, is available to more businesses. Local search expert Greg Sterling reports that businesses advertising locally can apply for the mark and “guaranteed” language for $50/month.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Political Bias Online

A majority of Americans think social media companies have too much influence in politics according to a new Pew study. Researchers say that Democratic and Republican supporters feel the same way, but the feeling is much more prevalent among Republican voters. 

In the spotlight: few acknowledge that political bias online works on them. And the time to have this discussion is now when tech company leaders are scheduled to appear before a House Judiciary subcommittee.

The companies are expected to testify that they’ve tried to protect users from inaccurate claims made by politicians and their supporters. Twitter and Facebook have labeled inaccurate statements the president has made, but there is no way to effectively police the content posted by one third of the humans on the planet without also putting everyone’s content through onerous filters, false positives, and long wait times for approval.

No single platform is to blame. Instagram has emerged as a news platform that equals Twitter’s popularity among news seekers, according to a twelve country study released earlier this month. And researchers at Northeastern University report that after accounting for ” the prevalence of hate speech and misinformation, they found no differences between comment moderation on right- and left-leaning videos” after studying more than 84,000 comments on YouTube. 

Months ago, the president’s reelection campaign preemptively purchased the advertising masthead area on YouTube for the days leading up to Election Day. The campaign has also purchased hundreds of Facebook ads that accuse Twitter of silencing the president.

As George Mason marketing professor Shaun Dakin showed me when I sent him an archive of the Facebook ad library database, the Trump campaign also used aggressive tactics in promoting the same ads via accounts owned by the president, the vice president, and then-campaign manager. Dakin challenged me to figure out what they were doing, and it took a yeoman’s effort by The New York Times several days later to figure it out.

We have no answers for you regarding political bias online and recommend you watch Eli Pariser’s short TED talk about filter bubbles. The premise is still sound even though the details have changed slightly. We also recommend reading the twelve page Northeastern study, “Bias Misperceived”, and checking out the rest of our Smartlinks.

Smartlinks
Beware online filter bubbles by Eli Pariser — TED
Bias Misperceived (PDF) — Northeastern University

Americans: Social Media Companies Have Too Much Power — Pew Research
Instagram on Pace to Overtake Twitter as News Source — eMarketer
Researchers Have Already Tested YouTube for Bias — Ars Technica
Roger Stone Removed from Instagram, Linked to Fake Accounts — CNN
Trump Ads Take Over YouTube’s Homepage on Election Day — Bloomberg
Trump: $325K on Facebook Ads featuring Parscale’s Page — NY Times

5. Following Up: Amazon Robots & Twitter Hackers

Those Twitter hackers who gained access to the personal accounts of famous people two weeks ago apparently also read some of their private messages. Twitter reported that the crooks accessed the direct messages of 36 well-known account holders and downloaded the archived data of eight other users who don’t have “verified accounts.”

We also told you almost one year ago about Amazon Scout, the company’s delivery robots that were first tested in suburban areas of Los Angeles and Seattle. Amazon announced last week that the test is broadening to suburban communities near Atlanta and Nashville.

6. Debugging: That Eagle Carrying the Shark

The video making the rounds last month of a big bird carrying a shark over a beach was the perfect metaphor for 2020.  Except it wasn’t a shark.  Or an eagle.

TrackingSharks.com has the scoop because of course they do.

7. ProTip: How to Tell You’ve Been Hacked

We mean really hacked, not the “someone on Facebook copied my profile picture and is using my name” stuff, but had an account taken over by someone.

Wired has a nice common sense explainer with tips.

8. Great Data: Google Search Trends by State…for a Decade… and Animated

Search engine logs are the most boring reading imaginable. Top Search on Google? Facebook.  Don’t snicker. Google came in at #5 overall on its own search engine. It’s the same in every search of every database regardless of size.

But the folks at V1 Analytics did something smart by grabbing the top trending search on Google in every state for every day of the last decade.

Groupthink creeps in sometimes when all fifty states have the same top trending search. That happened on February 4, 2011 for Adele the week before her second romp through the Grammy Awards when she won all four major trophies. And it happened again for two weeks when Game of Thrones’ first season ended.

See all the trends for all the states here.

Screening Room: A Burger King Christmas

10. Coffee Break: The Loneliest Wave

The Phillie Phanatic was at the ballpark this weekend to cheer on the ball club but it was awfully hard starting The Wave, as seen in this bite-sized video. 

It’s the highest form of flattery to have you read Spotlight. Thank you for starting your week here and please tell a friend that they can also get a free copy each week. This is the link that they need.