Good Monday morning. It’s November 4th. Tomorrow is Election Day in the U.S. Please vote. Turnout in some cities can be as low as 6% for local elections and doesn’t get much more than the mid-teens no matter how the data is analyzed.

There will be no Spotlight next week as we take off for Veteran’s Day. Thank you to everyone who served and everyone who supported them.  Their service helped guarantee your right to vote so go do it.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 5 minutes to read. Want to chat about something you see here? Here’s our contact form.

1. News To Know Now

1. Twitter banned political and social advocacy ads effective November 22. The final policy is due November 15. Social advocacy ads include any addressing of abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade. That’s addressing them on either side, and the chances are excellent that something you adamantly support or oppose is included.

2.  Amazon began offering free grocery delivery within two hours for Prime members. The company missed earnings this quarter after spending more on logistics than Wall Street anticipated. Despite that, Amazon Prime annual subscription revenue exceeds ten billion dollars, and as always, don’t mind missing quarterly targets. Groceries and one day delivery of goods is only the beginning. Expect that Amazon will look to play a role in home delivery of all types.

3. Lebanon’s prime minister resigned this week after widespread protests. One of his government’s most unpopular proposals was the equivalent a 20 cent tax consumers would pay each day on messaging app WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. The free app offers free telephone-like connectivity and observers report that the government tax on a free commercial service enraged people in a tea-in-the-harbor manner.

2.  School Monitoring and Kids

Schools track kids from the time they enroll and into college. Many schools use systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars annually and claim to help prevent bullying, self-harm, suicides, and more. Opponents claim that the systems often violate privacy laws, are used for marketing purposes, and have methodologies that create false positives. 

Children, even as old as seventeen, who need to use a bathroom in some schools during class are required to enter a request into an online app at their desk, reports the Washington Post. That seems benign until you learn that the system tracks the time they are gone and alerts a school administrator to check on students exceeding a time limit. 

Many apps go beyond tracking students’ test scores and schoolwork. Class Dojo, aimed at K-8 classrooms, allows teachers to reward or dock students with points based on obedience, preparation, or behavioral issues. That seems like an automated version of checklists teachers have long used, but some parents worry that aggregating this level of micro-issues about their children truly represents the dreaded “permanent record”. 

The level of monitoring increases when students are assigned school email accounts or devices. Companies with names like Bark, Gaggle, School Sentinel, and Securly set up software monitoring tools that analyze website usage, email text, chats and messaging, and anything else associated with a school device or account.

The monitoring seems benign on the surface and every company tells of stopping at least hundreds of suicide attempts, bullying incidents, and other problems. Bark, which began offering schools free services after the Parkland school shooting in 2018, claims to have stopped sixteen other school shootings and “twenty thousand serious incidents.”

False positives related to keywords being triggered for school assignments are only one example of problems related to this level of monitoring.  Buzzfeed published a trove of documents related to Gaggle, including hundreds of pages of their training documents. Many of the documents flagged by Gaggle appear creative or expository. Items flagged for demonstrating a risk of suicide or self-harm often had titles like “poem portfolio,” “Possible Poems ???” “Narrative Essay,” and “Narrative/Common App College Entry Essay.”

Some parents are also concerned about the Gaggle safety dashboard that ranks students with the most infractions related to email, web surfing, or other flagged issues. You’re not alone if you think that this sounds like the social credit system being built by the Chinese government. The system neatly graphs, charts, and lists the aggregate scores of students within a school or district.

High schoolers remain tracked by all of these systems, but then also contend with college admissions tracking.  You’re also correct if you guessed that SAT owner, College Board, is a big player in this predictive analytics field. Combining test scores, student interests (the infamous “send my info to my school choices”), and the school’s tracking of individual high school students creates a system similar to athletics recruiting.

College admission officers access student prospect lists that rank high schoolers on a one hundred point scale based in part on all of those things plus household income, ethnic background, and other information available from data brokers like the College Board. The Washington Post found dozens of colleges using these systems, but only three of the schools disclose the full extent of their tracking.

Their right to privacy as well as special privacy regulations covering children’s use of the Internet will undoubtedly form part of any new federal privacy legislation.

An exhaustive analysis of school monitoring systems isn’t possible in a newsletter, but we know that many parents will want additional information. That’s why we’re happy to send anyone who asks a list of more than one dozen sources used for this article as well as links to the hundreds of pages that BuzzFeed published. Simply reply to the email and tell us your email address.  You don’t even have to be a subscriber.

3.  Google Search Updates

Sue and I were recently talking about Twitter. “Anything interesting going on there?” I asked her.

“I’m watching [this person] and [others] rip Google on Twitter,” she replied with maybe a trace of enjoyment in her words.

That makes sense because Google and marketers have a predator and prey relationship that often bubbles over into ripping Google as it were.  To quote Rand Fishkin of SparkToro, “…a large majority of professional marketers disbelieve most of Google’s public statements.”  He bases that on a survey of nearly 1,600 of them, including me.

At issue is Google’s obvious quandary: they can’t disclose exactly how their search engine works because then it would be manipulated, which is their term.  That’s why I believe that Google deliberately obfuscates guidance, but I also remain focused on what behaviors they reward.

Page speed is one of those behaviors. Last week, Googlers Martin Splitt and John Mueller told a YouTube audience that page speed is theoretically calculated and then compared to the site’s actual speed based on user visits. But Martin made some waves when he said that speed was sorted into either “really good” or “really bad” or unsorted. 

I don’t believe that the smart Googlers were allowed to contemplate a data grouping called really good.  But when we work on your site, we’re going to tell you that the page speed must be great. And when you ask for the number, we’re going to grumble something about Google.

4. Debugged: Marijuana in 19th Century Drugstore

The image online featuring some old-timey looking folks in front of a dusty building labeled “Drug Store” with a marijuana leaf logo was made by a graphic artist in 2009.

Snopes has the details and a copy of the picture.

5. Also in the Spotlight

Google missed its earnings forecast. So did Amazon. Facebook blew past theirs because for all of the user complaints you see on Facebook about Facebook, the site added more users. Meanwhile, Google and Amazon continue to struggle by on their cash hoards of tens of billions of dollars.

More than half of 11-year-old children own a smartphone, says nonprofit we love Common Sense Media. There’s no word on whether they’re accessing their school email on those phones to trigger school monitoring, but I’ll go out on a limb and say you betcha.

6. Great Data: The Internet’s Birth Certificate

There’s plenty of great data still to be digitized. But before that was possible, the nice folks at UCLA and Stanford logged on paper when they first made a connection “host to host” and birthed the Internet.

Gizmodo has baby Internet’s birth certificate from October 29, 1969 (hmmm, a Scorpio).

7. Protip: The Enchanting .New Domain

I start every Google document I create by visiting the URL sheet.new or doc.new. They’re part of Google’s effort to save time and the are now other destinations including Stripe, Spotify and eBay. 

See where they’re going and if your org can get one.

8. Bizarre Bazaar (strange stuff for sale online)

Your uranium ore order may include any of or any number of “radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium and potassium and any of their decay products such as radium and radon.”

On the plus side, your uranium ore sample is only $39.95 at Amazon.

Click to see. The product Q&A is hilarious.

9. ICYMI – Top links from the past 30 days

Open Puppies – only gifs and gifs of puppies

The Beautiful Hidden Logic of Cities – fantastic map visuals

The Dark Web Offering Disinformation as a Service – on ZDNet

10. Coffee Break:  The Last McDonalds in Iceland

McDonalds closed its last restaurant in Iceland on October 31, 2009. Hjörtur Smárason bought a burger and fries and didn’t eat them. Instead he kept them in a bag for three years. Then he put them on display at Snotra House and attached a webcam to live stream them.

The packaging looks old, but there’s no decomposition or mold. 

Good Monday morning. It’s October 28th. Google reports earnings later today. Facebook and Apple report on Thursday. Expect lots of tech news this week.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read. Want to chat about something you see here? You’re looking for the contact form then.

2. News To Know Now

1. Facebook has begun testing a news tab in its app. The news was announced by Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor and current Facebook exec. Former Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Kornblut is also part of the group. Facebook acknowledged that it will pay some publishers to participate.

2.  UnitedHealth Group has been ordered by New York state regulators to prove that an algorithm they produce is free from racial bias, reports the Wall Street Journal.  A study published in the journal Science claims that white patients were projected to need more care over sicker, non-white patients. At issue is the manner in which the racial bias came from the data since race was excluded from the algorithm.

3. Some of YouTube’s most popular hosts launched a joint effort to raise money to plant trees. The coordinated effort took over YouTube’s trending chart by late Friday. The Team Trees website showed on Sunday that funds had been raised to plant five million of the twenty million trees the organization has set as its goal.

3.  FTC Warning on Stalkerware

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is warning American consumers about “stalkerware”, its term for mobile spyware that monitors another person. Once installed by someone with physical access to your phone, those apps could be run without the person knowing anything was wrong.  The apps then share detailed information about activities like call history, text messages, photos, GPS locations, and browser history.

The FTC alleges that Retina-X developed MobileSpy, which was marketed to monitor employees and children. Another two apps, PhoneSheriff and TeenShield, were marketed to monitor mobile devices used by children. Retina-X sold more than 15,000 subscriptions to all three stalking apps before the company stopped selling them in 2018. All of the apps required that the installer weaken the phone’s security.

The company did not safeguard the data, and it was hacked twice, according to the agency, which cited child and employee privacy laws as well as potential use by domestic abusers.  

Stalkerware is part of a pattern of benign devices and software proving troublesome:

Apple’s iTunes, replaced for Apple computers but still used by millions of Windows users, had a bug that allowed hackers to install ransomware on computers in a new and hard-to-detect way, reports Threatpost. 

New Android malware called Joker infects phones with software that orders premium subscriptions, according to Bleeping Computer. The malware was hidden on 24 Google Play Store apps that were downloaded a half million times. Another type of malware called Cutlet Maker targets ATMs and causes them to “jackpot”–spitting out the machine’s cash.

Even The Vatican’s brand new “smart rosary” (and fitness tracker) had an undetected vulnerability that would allow a hacker to quickly access a user’s Google or Facebook account. Called a brute-force flaw, the vulnerability was detected by a diligent researcher who apparently contacted The Vatican a lot to find the developers.

What we think: You can’t guard against stalkerware being installed on your phone by someone with access to your phone unless you use strong passwords and protections on your phone. Practice safe computing with timely backups, updating all software, and using password managers.

4.  Google Search Updates

You may have heard that Google is using artificial intelligence to sort search results.  They aren’t, but there have been many fantastic headlines saying otherwise. Here is what is happening:

First, it’s not artificial intelligence like you’ll see in a movie. This is a software program that in some instances replaces reliance on a massive database of keyword matching and starts to interpret context. We all sometimes misuse a word or find ourselves picking the best way to express an idea. The new Google software does a better job interpreting natural language. 

The software is called BERT and will be invoked in approximately 10% of search queries. It will change a lot for those of us in the field. But like all of the thousands of changes that Google makes to its algorithms, this should improve the results over time and be transparent to most users.

5. Debugged: $39.95 to Hold Your Baby

Making the rounds again is a story about a hospital charging $39.95 for skin-to-skin contact with a newborn following a C-section delivery. It’s true, but the charge was for an additional nurse because the operating room nurse is otherwise occupied.

Truth or Fiction has details and context.

6. Also in the Spotlight

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon have launched a joint initiative to update U.S. text messaging systems from SMS to a new, feature-rich RCS that looks more like Facebook Messenger or chat apps. [The Verge]

97% of tweets from U.S. adults that mentioned national politics came from just 10% of users according to  a new study. Sorry, not sorry.  [Pew Research]

7. Great Data: Beautiful Hidden Logic of Cities

Erin Davis has color-coded map data from major cities and found… well, some interesting patterns underlying how each city was laid out.

See her work here.

8. Protip: Free Digital Wellbeing Apps

We share a lot about the digital wellbeing initiative because of its importance in helping us find balance between life and screens. This week Google launched six new free apps as part of the effort, including new ways to queue your phone’s notifications and counters showing you how often you check your phone.

Android Police run down the apps and has download links.

9. Bizarre Bazaar (strange stuff for sale online)

You can’t catch him, he’s the Gingerdead Man. Ready to combine Halloween and the cookie-heavy winter holidays? How about some gingerbread skeleton cookie cutters?

Genuine Fred has them in stock along with Snack-o-Lanterns.

10. Coffee Break:  Pupper Edition

B’gosh, you’re going to lose time on this website that features gifs of the most adorable puppers, doggos, and good bois and girls. There are no votes, comments, or any other distractions.  

You can, however, download your favorites.

Good Monday morning. It’s October 21st. The Washington Nationals face the Houston Astros to start baseball’s World Series on Tuesday night. 

2. News To Know Now

1. Facebook will change the way it counts the number of times someone has seen an organization’s posts. The company says that the change will be less extreme than the change in Q1 and appears to adjust the number of impressions downward. There has been scant information about this news that broke Friday, and we expect more this week. [AdWeek]

2. Facebook has also opened its search channel to advertisers after months of testing. When you search for a page or person on Facebook, you will now see advertising mixed in with the results.

3. A bill that would create personal penalties for corporate executives leading organizations with data privacy problems was introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) last week. Wyden is the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee that will first consider the legislation. [Ars Technica, Congress.gov Legislation Tracking]

3.  Medical Technology on Consumer Devices

Medical technology advances are enabling prolonged lifespans in many developed countries, and consumer devices are now being pressed into service to help medical practitioners help you prevent and fight diseases. 

Mobile phones and wearable devices such as fitness trackers are the tools fueling change. A top-end smartphone tends to lag the power of computer desktops by as little as five years. Mobile usage rates continue skyrocketing across all groups and have caused substantial decreases in other device sales. That means that your smartphone is as powerful as computers from only a few years ago and much more likely to be nearby.

Consider these medical technology advances that seemed aspirational ten years ago:

• Google’s Android Live Transcribe app creates talk-to-text “instant captioning” in seventy different languages, a boon to hearing impaired people.
  
• CPAP machines used by millions to treat sleep apnea now often use a home’s computer network or a device’s bluetooth connection to automatically upload sleep data directly to physicians.
  
• Taking a selfie video with your phone can diagnose high blood pressure based on how software interprets the smartphone’s light interacting with your skin. There are still major kinks to work out, but with 1.1 billion hypertension sufferers worldwide, there is plenty of upside.
  
• Beauty company L’Oreal created a nine millimeter wide sensor that measures UV exposure. The device can store three months of data.
  
• Don’t forget that video conferencing was essentially unavailable in the mobile marketplace until 2012. A recent data analysis of insurance claims shows that consumers are availing themselves of video visits to doctors and clinicians.

Plenty of issues still need to be decided, especially data privacy and securing medical devices that consumers may wear. We told you previously about security researchers who had to prove to Medtronics that they could hack an insulin pump and withhold or overdose insulin into a vulnerable patient.

4.  Google Search Updates

Advertisers can now create a lead form that appears directly in Google’s search results. The information is then sent to the company. It’s part of the ongoing process we’ve been following and sharing with you that allows Google to be a sole distribution point for as many search queries as possible. They describe the process as frictionless, which is a phrase that certain members of the fox family often use when asked to guard a chicken coop.

A substantial part of that initiative is the often-overlooked Google Books project, which just celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. What started out as Page and Brin’s “audacious goal of organizing the world’s information” now includes a digitization project of more than forty million books. Google rolled out a new interface last week and greatly improved the search screens. Google already keeps the results one click away from every search result.

Google continues to be interested in crowd-sourced data and will now allow Apple users to report traffic congestion, crashes, speed traps, and similar information using Google Maps. This information can appear when people search for how to find a business. In online search forums where marketers sometimes speculate about nefarious things, the notion of negative information on maps is a big deal. Let your imagination run wild with tales of chronic traffic slowdowns and undesirable yet fictitious businesses nearby.

Google is also cautioning organizations not to use a separate domain to present your website to mobile users. That’s because they are not always sure what device a search is using and might display mobile-optimized pages to desktop computer users. Our takeaway is that mobile device vs. desktop device optimization is best left to people who study such things.  Need more details? Point the responsible person in your org to this YouTube Q&A with Google analyst John Mueller.

5. Debugged: Flu Vaccine does not cause polio

Things are bad enough when untrained lay people incorrectly insist that flu vaccines cause influenza. They can’t and don’t. Now a stupid meme is making the rounds on Instagram claiming that “over 1,100 people died from reactions to the flu shot” last year. And that it causes polio in children. 

The flu vaccine does not give children polio. Severe allergies do occur at the rate of 1.3 allergic reactions per one million doses. Those reactions caused one person to be hospitalized in the last three years. No one died from the flu shot.

Get more facts here if you need them.

6. Also in the Spotlight

Lyft is offering free or discounted rides to job seekers and to new hires still waiting for their first paycheck. The USO, United Way, and Goodwill are partners. [Lyft]

Pinterest is allowing users to “fine tune” their pin feeds and get recommendations about their secret boards. Head over to this explanation on their site to learn more. [Pinterest]

7. Great Data: An Interactive that Teaches 

MIT has created the Court Algorithm Game (yay, algo games!) that allows users to set standards for whether a judge should jail a defendant. There’s no code involved, promises MIT, which uses an iterative process to take visitors through some of the complexity that a human or software program faces when making this recommendation.

I learned a lot from this tool. That’s why it’s great data.

8. Protip: Your Data After Your Death

You know when you need a digital executor, and yes, I do. But most people don’t. They just need to someone to help memorialize their Facebook timeline and to get their data out of Google.

The funny and smart people at The Next Web take you through how to do the latter in their feature from this weekend, “RIP: How to stop Google from stealing all your data after you die.”

9. Bizarre Bazaar (strange stuff for sale online)

If you write a compelling 50 word answer about why art matters,  British artist Banksy may deign to sell you a clutch for £750 ($968 USD) or a mug for much less. Some items like the clutch are limited editions. Some like the mug are priced around $13-15 to keep the man outfitted in spray paint.

Visit Gross Domestic Product, the homewares brand of Banksy.

10. Coffee Break: Traffic planning simulator

Remember that MIT interactive tool showing you how hard it is to be a judge from three items ago? It’s also really hard to design optimum traffic flow. That’s why Google Maps wants to report about it. 

Go ahead and take a spin on this simulator that lets you change road types, truck behavior, noise levels, and all sorts of variables.

There’s a politeness indicator for drivers changing lanes that I cranked down to zero to mimic the DC Beltway.

Start your engines!