1. Good Monday Morning

It’s February 7th, which means that National Pizza Day is on Wednesday. The Today Show helpfully published a list of national chain discounts, including delivery app Slice, which represents local shops.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,521 words — about a 5 1/2 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:“We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.“— A GoFundMe announcement last Friday that the company would refund individual donors instead of disbursing funds to COVID-19 protesters in Ottawa. The Ottawa government declared a state of emergency late last night.

a)  The Crisis Text Line, a suicide prevention hotline, has stopped sharing “anonymized data” with a for-profit partner after data ethicists were horrified to learn that they had been doing so. Politico points out that they’re not alone–even the Trevor Project allows targeted advertising. The company halted the agreement after that story made national headlines and drew questions from Congress, philanthropists, and its own volunteers.

b) NewsCorp announced last Friday that its networks had been breached and journalists targeted. The company owns The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Smart Money magazine and has linked the attack to China.

c) Tech earnings season wrapped up last week with Facebook posting the largest one day stock loss in history and Amazon posting the largest one day gain. Highlights:

• Alphabet — Google’s parent posted a 32% YOY increase in quarterly revenue and finished 2021 with $76 billion in net profit. 
  
• Snap — The Snapchat parent company posted its first ever quarterly profit after quarterly sales grew to $1.3 billion.
  
• Pinterest —A 20% YOY increase in quarterly revenue offset news that its monthly active U.S. user count declined.
  
• Facebook — Two storylines that drove Facebook stock down more than 21% last week need context. The company lost users for the first time, but it decreased from 1.93 billion daily users to 1.92 billion. The other is the $10 billion that it invested in its Reality Labs division, which includes its metaverse strategy. Even with that investment, Facebook posted a quarterly profit of $10.3 billion vs. an expected $10.9 billion. Most Facebook metrics are up even as Apple’s privacy initiatives hurt the company’s core advertising business.
  
• Amazon — The Everything Company nearly doubled profit and was rewarded with a $190 billion market cap bump in only one day. Amazon also disclosed that it now owns 18% of EV maker Rivian, 5% of self-driving tech company Aurora, and 95 planes in its fleet. On top of all that news, Amazon is also reportedly exploring a deal to acquire Peloton and announced a Prime dues increase of $20 per year. It’s the second Prime increase after a four year interval. 
  
  Despite the flood of great Amazon news, the company had a setback after a Washington Attorney General order permanently shut the retailer’s “Sold by Amazon” program. As part of that agreement, Amazon will pay a fine of $2.25 million.
  
  Meanwhile, founder Jeff Bezos will pay the city of Rotterdam to temporarily dismantle a 95-year-old bridge so that his new 417 foot yacht can pass through when it launches from a shipyard there this summer. 

3. Search Engine News — Google Often Changing Titles Websites Submit 

We’ve told you before how Google has been changing the titles of webpages that it shows in its search results. The search giant says that its machine language systems will change the title of a webpage in its displays if the software calculates that it’s appropriate and closer to the user’s intent.

Search marketers were not happy about this, but the company has held fast to its decision.

Now a study conducted by search software firm Zyppy has found that Google changed those titles more than 61% of the time. Zyppy CEO Cyrus Shepherd, a well respected digital marketer, reported:

• When titles were only 5 characters or less, they were rewritten by software 96% of the time.
• Titles up 20 characters still had a better than 50% chance of being rewritten.
• But titles exceeding 60 characters were also getting rewritten too often.
• In fact, anything over 70 characters was almost always (99.9%) rewritten.

Google has also demonstrated a clear favorite in the way marketers separate phrases in titles. For years, that was a brand preference issue, but Zyppy’s data from thousands of sites shows that Google removes dashes 20% of the time and pipes (the | character) more than 40% of the time.

Part of your website’s strategy in 2022: analyze how often this is happening to your site and whether Google’s changes are helping. If they are, perhaps more than the title should change.

4. Spotlight Explainer — Algorithm Bias & Housing Discrimination

The Situation

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra has put mortgage lenders on notice that the agency considers algorithmic lending a path to digital redlining and robo discrimination. Chopra recently testified to Congress that the agency believes that “matching consumer records solely by name” is an unreasonable standard because of algorithm bias.

He’s reacting to reports and studies from The Markup last summer that showed nonwhite homebuyers were more likely to be rejected for mortgages that white borrowers received. When nonwhites were approved for those mortgages, they also paid higher rates.

Explaining Redlining

Generally used today to describe a discriminatory practice of denying or marking up services in a specific area, the term redlining comes from color-coded maps that the U.S. government used in the 1930s. Neighborhoods with the highest risks for mortgage lenders were outlined in red and invariably contained most of a city’s African American homeowners. Redlining created an inequitable race wealth gap in the U.S. economy that McKinsey estimates at more than $1 trillion.

Breakdowns by Racial Group

The Associated Press worked with The Markup and analyzed 17 factors across more than 2 million mortgage applications. Nationally, the rates at which nonwhites were rejected when whites were approved ranged 40% more often for Latinos to 80% for Black applicants. The AP cautioned that final decisions are made by humans, but “largely driven” by software recommendations.

What’s Next for Algorithm Bias

The Department of Justice and Comptroller of the Currency have joined the CPFB in a new effort to identify and stop algorithm bias that is often codifying systemic bias created by generations of legal discrimination against women and nonwhites.

Democrats in Congress have also announced that they will introduce an updated version of the Algorithmic Accountability Act that was first proposed in 2019. That legislation would require transparent audits of AI used in finance, health care, housing, and education.

5. Did That Really Happen? — Johns Hopkins Lockdown Paper Not Peer-Reviewed

Last week conservative media outlets began touting a paper by Johns Hopkins professors that reportedly found that “lockdowns” did not mitigate the COVID-19 death toll to date.

Snopes dug in and found that the document was a working paper by three economists, not epidemiologists or medical scientists. This working paper has not been peer-reviewed and cannot be labeled a JHU study. Finally, instead of the traditional definition, these economists defined a lockdown as “the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI).” That means that requiring masks counts for these professors as a “lockdown.”

6. Following Up — No Movement on IRS Facial Recognition, Apple Improves Face ID

After a flurry of complaints about the IRS’ plans to require facial recognition via a third party for taxpayers who want to receive personal data online, the Treasury Department said that it would re-evaluate the idea. And as the second week of tax season closed, there was no movement on that issue, but Apple announced last Thursday that its Face ID now works when the person is wearing a face mask.

7. Protip — Import a PDF into Excel

Importing a PDF with words, numbers, or both into Excel is easier than you might think. And since tax season has begun in earnest, here is a walkthrough for you.

8. Screening Room — Matthew McConaughey’s Space

9. Science Fiction World — Google’s DeepMind Says Its System Can Code Competitively

I still think that it’s cool when my robo vacuum plugs itself back in to recharge, but DeepMind, a Google AI lab in London, says that its new AlphaCode software can write programs at a competitive level. The company says that the software ranked in the top 54% against human competitors in problems on the Codeforces platform.

10. Coffee Break — McMansion Hell

Kate Wagner’s blog is the place to go for some of the funniest annotated pictures of the dreaded McMansions. Bring a large coffee. She writes well and often.

11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

Exhale. It’s January 31st. Tomorrow is February, when the Lunar New Year and Black History Month celebrations begin. 

Today’s Spotlight is 1,326 words — about a 5 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted:“[Last year] more than 95,000 people told the FTC that they’d been scammed with a con that started on social media.”— A Federal Trade Commission report detailing $770 million in losses, or an average of just over $8,000 per person. Perhaps surprisingly: people 18 to 39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money than older adults.

a) Apple and Microsoft reported strong earnings last week. Microsoft reported quarterly profit rose 21 percent to $18.8 billion. The company has $125 billion in cash reserves and intends to buy video game company Activision Blizzard with $70 billion of that. Apple also broke records. The company announced quarterly profits of $34.6 billion. Apple has $203 billion in cash. That cash hoard is bigger than the entire valuation of companies like Shell and McDonalds.

b) Snap Inc. is taking on drug-related content with new initiatives.The company said that 88% of drug related content is detected by AI and machine learning. They have also grown their law enforcement operations team and continue to work on blocking drug dealing information and attempts on the platform.

c) More than 50 nursing students each week are learning in George Mason University’s new Virtual Reality simulator lab. Students begin in a simulated hospital lobby and interact with peers and patients followed by individual debriefing. Up the road in Baltimore, researchers are using an autonomous robot to operate on pigs. The team reported that the robot made no errors while providing consistent suturing.

3. Search Engine News — Google’s Latest Idea to Classify People is Topics + Be Careful Changing URLs 

After resistance from browser makers and privacy experts, Google has abandoned its post-cookie world plans for a new notion: assigning dynamic topics to individuals.

As outlined now, Google will assign three different topic groups for each person every three weeks. There will also be some false data included to make uncovering identities more difficult. Google believes more privacy is assured by making 300 larger topics instead of 30,000 smaller ones under their previous proposal. 

The plans won’t make anyone anonymous on the web. Right now, they’re still in proposal stage, and only applicable to Google’s Chrome browser, which has about 65% market share globally and 50% in the U.S.

On the search side, Google released a short video reminding people that software can make changing a website’s URL structure seem like a small task, but this is considered a site move — even if the only change is to remove a trailing slash from the URL. Google also advises that the updates won’t be completed on its end for several months and that any redirects should be left in place for at least one year. 

Stash this video away for when an exec or board member has an idea to change things up.

4. Spotlight Explainer — IRS Facial Recognition

The IRS says that people using its website will have to scan their faces to access individual tax information like transcripts and other personal data. Logging in with facial recognition is NOT required to file a return or retrieve forms. Here is what the new login process looks like.

You’ve probably already guessed that it’s much easier to find people who disapprove than to find people who approve.

Why do I have to do this?

Anyone accessing data about their taxes (refund status, tax transcripts, etc.) will have to do this although the Treasury department is signaling that they are reconsidering. 

Who is ID.me?

The privately held suburban Virginia company started out by providing identity services in the military and state government sectors. Last year, the IRS announced this change around Thanksgiving and just as the Omicron variant was being identified. That may be why you don’t remember.

Why facial recognition?

Remember that one-to-one facial recognition is a smart way to verify someone’s identity and usually more secure than relying on passwords, even passwords backed up by two factor authentication. The privacy problem begins when images are used in a one-to-many environment such as identifying protesters or for law enforcement purposes. 

Isn’t it a bad idea to start with taxes?

Many federal agencies already use a system called Login.gov that reportedly has 30 million users. There are also multiple state governments using identity verification for benefits such as COVID relief payments or unemployment.

How does it work?

After some pretty usual steps like entering an email address and telephone number (both of which are verified), users are prompted to upload images of their driver’s license or passport. That data is then aggregated with your phone, email, and a credit verification that the company says does not affect your credit score. If the automated systems don’t detect a match, you can enter a video call with an ID.me employee who will try to ascertain your identity.

Who is against this?

Pretty much every privacy expert you’ve ever heard of and many members of Congress. Their biggest complaints center around outsourcing all of the data services to a private company and lack of transparency around that data. There are also significant concerns regarding people who don’t have easy access to smartphone technology.

 5. Did That Really Happen? — FL Governor Lies About COVID Treatments

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is being dishonest when he says that the Food & Drug Administration has limited the use of monoclonal antibody treatments previously used as COVID-19 therapeutics. DeSantis inaccurately wrote on Twitter that the FDA had canceled the medication’s emergency use authorization with no physical evidence. In truth, the manufacturer of the medicine and the FDA agreed that it is “highly unlikely” to be useful against the Omicron variant. Read: Reuters fact-check

6. Following Up — NSO Pegasus Spyware

We’ve been telling you about the Pegasus software used to crack phones that has been found installed on mobile devices used by heads of state, activists, reporters, and business leaders. The New York Times continues to publish excellent coverage, including this description of when the FBI installed the software on burner phones with dummy accounts:

What they could see, minutes later, was every piece of data stored on the phone as it unspooled onto the large monitors of the Pegasus computers: every email, every photo, every text thread, every personal contact. They could also see the phone’s location and even take control of its camera and microphone. 

7. Protip — How to Cover Your Tracks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great browser tool called Cover Your Tracks that tests your browser to see how much data you share with websites. I got high marks for my Brave browser and VPN, lower marks for allowing ad tracking, but uh, that’s kinda my job, so there’s that.

8. Screening Room — Dove on Hair Discrimination

9. Science Fiction World — The Virtual Human

Software company Unity, the outfit behind the technology used by many video game companies, bought Ziva Dynamics. They in turn showed off this amazing video of a virtual human — literally a simulation not based on any specific person.

 10. Coffee Break — Incredibox

Music for all is available at Incredibox with one simple requirement: you have to create the mix of samples used. But it’s free to try and really addicting.

 11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

It’s January 24th. Thursday is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. You can watch the commemoration event livestreamed beginning at 6 p.m. ET Wednesday. 

Today’s Spotlight is 1,790 words — about a 6 1/2 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted: “The attacks by certain folks on journalists doing their job frighten me.”— Missouri Rep. Peter Merideth to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after Gov. Mike Parson told reporters that he expected the imminent prosecution of a reporter who filed a story about the state’s education department inadvertently publishing personal data about teachers.

a) The CEOs of Google and Facebook allegedly signed an agreement to collude in Google’s advertising market, according to a lawsuit led by Texas and other states against Google. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s suit also says that top executives at both companies were aware of and participated in negotiating the agreement.

b) Amazon Style is a new retail concept the company is testing this year in LA. The clothing and shoe store will use high end technology, including smartphones and Amazon’s touchless entry system to provide secure fitting rooms where clothes will be delivered.

c) Google’s earliest adopters will soon have to start paying for free services they’ve received for 10-15 years. When Google rolled out its first attempt at a Microsoft Office competitor, the company made the service available free to anyone who owned a domain. That free offer ran until 2012, and Google never charged those companies for the service. 

That changes in May when the company says that it will begin charging those free users or suspend their free accounts. It’s a reasonable position since the organizations (and I personally represent nearly a dozen) have received quite a financial break. The most inexpensive of the accounts would run nearly $1,000 for each email address since the offer was first made in 2006. Silver Beacon and our clients alone have more than one hundred accounts that have been free for years so we’re certainly not complaining.

Important distinction: free accounts provided by Google for Nonprofits will remain free. We’ll be happy to help you apply for Google for Nonprofits to receive free email and office suite software, Google Earth & Maps, free Google advertising (yes, really), and more. Just reply to this email. We will help any nonprofit understand and apply for the program.

3. Search Engine News — The Cost of Bad Information 

A new analysis at Search Engine Journal reasonably concludes that consistent name, address, and phone information (NAP) for a business is considered by Google as a ranking factor. That’s especially true for organizations that rely on Google Map searches. You might think that’s a no-brainer, but I once went with a team to a Detroit-area conference room where a management group at a then-Big three automaker told us that our data about their locations was better than their own internal data.

Editor Miranda Miller methodically details Google’s comments about this basic information, including previous analyses by hers and other organizations, and real world data. The critical element is the detailed information from Google about this data along with links to review the source material.

Contrast that with a study that a colleague forwarded to me last week that cited a problematic concept called “authority.” This is the notion that websites can influence their rankings by being cited by other authoritative websites. It’s an interesting concept that Google has disclaimed for years in writing, in speeches, and in training documents. In Google’s words, so-called domain authority is not used to influence search engine rankings.

I forwarded my colleague a half dozen links citing Google executives over a span of years. The early comments simply refute the idea, then grow more strident, until this most recent spate of attention when a top Google search evangelist tweeted out that he had given up on trying to convince people.

Like ancient people attempting to explain physical science with a pantheon of deities, the marketplace will attempt to explain a black box like search engines with concepts that seem to fit. The consultants that last for years in this field do something different. They listen to all the theories and then follow the best practices detailed by Google and Bing.

So why does Google make a big deal out of recommending name, address, and phone information? Easy: their plan has long been to organize the world’s information. If they can get business owners to keep information updated, they get to be the authority themselves.

4. Spotlight Explainer — Facebook’s Top Content

NewsWhip published a report last week about the top Facebook content in Q4 that is worth everyone’s attention because of the outsized influence that social media, especially Facebook, has on the world.

We spend a lot of time online and much of it on Facebook

There are 2.9 billion monthly active Facebook accounts. In all, Meta owns four platforms that each have more than 1.3 billion active accounts. Alphabet’s YouTube is in the same park and so are Tencent’s WeChat in Asia and Bytedance’s TikTok. Nothing else is close.

About 57% of the world’s population uses social media. The average is 2.5 hours each day.

The breadth and depth of social media platforms is unlike anything the world has ever known.

Information — right or wrong — flows faster than you can imagine

A financial executive lost control at a smoothie shop in Connecticut mid-Saturday afternoon. He cursed the staff, screamed racial epithets, threw a smoothie at one worker, and tried to get behind the counter. The workers called police and posted video to social media channels. The videos quickly moved from TikTok to YouTube to Facebook and then filtered down to Twitter and Reddit. The man was arrested, fired from his Merrill Lynch position, and lawyered up — all within 24 hours. His name trended throughout social media. 

Within 24 hours, the activities were done. He had been arrested, released, and fired, but the outrage was continuing to build. Even smaller social media platforms like Reddit received tens of thousands of engagements on the subject. Breaking stories continue to show about him in traditional media like Newsweek and NBC News, but for those spending that time online, this story ended early Sunday.

Facebook’s top U.S. content during Q4 was predominately conservative media

You might think of your Facebook feed as a slugfest between Fox (in 4th place among publishers) and CNN (6th), but it’s more fringe conservative media that dominates Facebook engagement. Conservative Daily Wire led all publishers, finishing 12% above aggregated NBC. Other surprising entrants in the top 15 included conservative outlets Breitbart, Rumble, and The Blaze. All had much more engagement than traditional media platforms like ABC and The Washington Post.

Politics, Betty White, and legal cases were the big stories

Three of the quarter’s top four most engaged stories were about Betty White’s death. Others touched on tragedies like the tornadoes in Kentucky or legal cases including the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and the case of three Georgia men found guilty of murdering Ahmad Aubrey.

Politics and legal stories like that made up nearly half of all Facebook’s top stories during the quarter. The newest COVID-19 variant, responsible for the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans reported Friday, made up only 8% of the top content.

Don’t forget memes and videos

The Facebook page with the most engagement during Q4 was not a news site, but a meme page called Women Working. In only three months, the page generated 155 million engagements, nearly double the page in second place, the Manchester United soccer team. 

5. Did That Really Happen? — Norton Antivirus & Sneaky Software

With social media priming the digital information world, it’s easy for stories to be unintentionally mispresented in real time. That’s apparently what happened when writer Cory Doctrow took to Twitter and accused Norton 360 of installing cryptocurrency mining software on computers and even taking a commission for that.

The truth was more nuanced as The Verge later reported. An inactive mining app was installed by the software, but nothing happened until the computer’s owner accepted an upsell with the software. The idea was horrible, but quickly morphed online into something worse — and untrue.

6. Following Up — REvil Hackers Taken Down By Russia (?)

We’ve written a lot about REvil, a computer crime gang based in Russia that disrupted global meat company JBS and two months later, attacked an IT services company. The gang disappeared shortly after that, then reappeared with bigger threats. Now we’ve learned that Russian authorities have arrested 14 people and seized millions from those attacks. 

We would caution that anyone take anything the Russian government says about cybercrime with a big grain of salt, but at the very least, the syndicate is not operating as publicly and flamboyantly as it was.

7. Protip — Apple Closes Discount Loophole

Thrift shoppers who didn’t mind trying to finagle a discount with an inaccurate statement have long claimed Apple computer and software discounts offered to students, teachers, and others in the education community without the company really verifying their claims.

That ended last week according to reporting from How To Geek & PC Magazine. The company now uses a third party verification service and has limited the amount of discounted equipment a person can buy.

8. Screening Room — Remembering Prom

9. Science Fiction World — Self-Driving Tractors

New John Deere tractors use six pairs of cameras and AI navigation to plow or perform other farming duties by themselves. Non-automated tractors can cost up to $800,000, and it’s not clear yet how much these will cost after their reveal at this month’s CES show. It’s still a pretty cool development if a little early.

In addition to doing the normal tractor activities, the new models will analyze soil conditions and farmers can change instructions using a smartphone app.

10. Coffee Break — All Things Wordle

In November — just a few weeks ago — software engineer Josh Wardle’s game averaged 90 daily users. That number increased to two million last week, which is fast even for the internet. There is a new Google Easter egg about Wordle — search for the game’s name, and Google’s logo turns into a graphic of its ubiquitous green and yellow blocks.

Let me start your addiction or feed your cravings with some links:

The Wordle game’s official site

Wordle Explained: Everything You Need To Know — at CNET

How Wordle Became the Internet’s Omicron Pastime — at BuzzFeed

Why You Can’t Resist Wordle — at The New Yorker

11. Sign of The Times