1. Good Monday Morning

It’s June 21. The made-up shopping holiday known as Amazon Prime Day begins today and ends tomorrow. We found you a well regarded web app that lets you check a product’s price history on Amazon. You have to click the product’s name in the search result to get to the history.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,073 words — about a 4 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted: “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook, even in the context of satire, because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases, may promote real-world violence.” — a Facebook statement regarding a ruling by its Oversight Board that required the company to reinstate a satirical post.

a) Texas power officials triggered jokes galore last week when residents were asked to set their thermostats to 82 while sleeping. Some residents had that choice made for them because they signed up for a program called “Smart Savers Texas.” That program gave Texans a free sweepstakes entry in exchange for allowing their thermostats to be remotely controlled during high energy demand. From the reactions, many people did not think that would happen. (KHOU)

b) Zillow says that its algorithms’ accuracy have improved. Having improved its Zestimate house price estimate by 6.9%, Zillow plans to increase the number of homes it will offer to purchase by 30%. (WGCL)

c) Nielsen is putting perspective around the size of streaming audiences that is upending conventional wisdom. The company released a new visualization called The Gauge (below). The infographic compares streaming, broadcast, and even DVD viewing against each other rather than comparing individual programs. Netflix and YouTube streaming each make up 6% of viewing and contribute to streaming’s 26% of total viewing.

3. Search Engine News — New Ranking Method Rolling Out

Google’s Page Experience ranking update began rolling out last week. We’ve been telling you about this impending change since last year. Google advises that the new methodology won’t be completed for at least two months.

Factors influencing how a website page ranks include its mobile friendliness and encryption. A group of other page speed and technical metrics that Google calls Core Web Vitals also factor into the algorithm.

The change is significant. Business leaders will want to spend the next several months carefully monitoring the volume of search traffic. Even if your website isn’t directly affected yet, there could very well be changes to your competitors’ websites.

4. In The Spotlight — Covid App Problems Continuing

We’ve all read about the difficulty that contact tracing efforts met from the beginning of the pandemic. Even when states began putting human resources in place, too many people refused to cooperate. Community leaders hoped that digital contact tracing would help.

MIT Technology Review concluded that they really didn’t in large part because of a lack of user trust and the federal government’s failure to create a national app. Experts also cite the sidelining of the CDC, considered one of the best in the world at contact tracing, as a problem.

Digital apps were supposed to be an answer. Americans turned to food delivery, streaming media, and the internet for a year, but widely refused to cooperate with human or digital contact tracers. Two dozen states developed their own exposure notification apps, but the adoption rates in the U.S. mainland ranged from abysmal (only 1% each in Arizona and North Dakota) to low (37% in Connecticut). 

There were reports this weekend of Android phones in Massachusetts automatically receiving an installation of MassNotify, a Covid tracking app. The app still requires a user to opt-in and turn on exposure notices, but some reports suggest that the app is difficult to remove.

User privacy concerns may have been justified. Gizmodo reported last week that police in Western Australia accessed private data from that state’s Covid app at least twice during criminal investigations. Police claim that their use was legal and justified although they concede that people may have been unaware that their information could be checked.

5. Debunked — Hillary Clinton in Cuba

A QAnon site shared fake, graphic details of the alleged execution of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Guantánamo Bay last week. Needless to say, Secretary Clinton is alive and appeared last week with Lin-Manuel Miranda in New York. The graphic details were so disturbing to some that USA Today ran a fact check.

The FBI issued a threat assessment June 4 that warned that some QAnon followers could become violent when the conspiracy theory’s predictions fail to occur.

6. Following Up — Amazon Bigger Than 9 Competitors Combined

We published a deep dive into Amazon Retail just two weeks ago to get you ready for Prime Day. eMarketer released data after our report that shows Amazon’s e-commerce sales in the U.S. exceed the combined sales of the rest of its Top 10 competitors. Included on that list are Walmart, Apple, and Target.

7. Protip — Yes, You Can Fax On A Computer

Some entity still using Windows 3.1 and firmly entrenched in the 1990s is going to insist you fax something to them one day. Maybe it will be a small government agency or someplace similar. Save this How-To Geek roundup of three services that will let you do just that rather than arguing with them.

Screening Room — Internova Travel Group

9. Science Fiction World — Wirelessly Charge Vehicles On the Road

Cornell researchers say they’ve developed an approach to create a charging lane on a roadway that would allow travel to become even more sustainable. They’ve even figured out how to bill you for that energy so I smell a public-private partnership being formed right about now.

10. Coffee Break — Nature’s Great Pics of the Month

I didn’t know that this feature existed before this month, but I’ll be checking it out in the future. Nature’s photo team selects the science pictures of the month, and they’re stunning.

11. Sign of the Times

1. Good Monday Morning

It’s June 14. Happy Father’s Day on Sunday to all the dads, those who have fathered children and those dads who haven’t. We see you.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,545 words — about a 6 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted: “So there is no way to give a third party app your location and not Google? This doesn’t sound like something we would want on the front page of the [New York Times].” — an unnamed Google employee quoted in newly unredacted court documents.

a) Voilà AI Artist is a viral app that creates cartoon avatars from photos. Their popularity exploded last week. Everyone posting photos of themselves looking like a Disney lead character or Renaissance painting has given a Canadian company some online information. Removing the watermark starts the clock on a 3 day trial period that turns into a $2 weekly subscription. Voilà is the top free app in both Google & Apple stores, ahead of such laggards as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

b) TikTok seems to have edited Android user images on their own. Journalist Abby Ohlheiser wrote that some users were seeing subtle differences in their images — almost as if a beauty filter had been applied. After verifying the results herself, Ohlheiser contacted TikTok, which did not answer, but magically, the effect stopped appearing. (MIT Technology Review)

c) Amazon’s newest Echo Show device can identify when a human is in the same room. The device can’t identify the person yet, but as this CNET walk-through shows, you can turn lights on or off, lock a door, or activate any of the routines you’ve configured Alexa to handle when you trigger the device.

3. Search Engine News

As Google continues on its mission to organize the world’s data, some of that data may not be accurately sourced.

Industry news site SEO Roundtable noted that a Google knowledge graph about SEO sources a monthly average price of $2,819 to a self-described small team in Texas. 

They got the numbers from a marketing software company. The creator of the data isn’t even mentioned in the Google search results. And after watching colleagues try to reverse what happened, the agency’s actions were pretty innocent.

Like all of us, they copied and sourced (although didn’t link to) information on an authoritative site. That information could be there for years, just like information in a book is permanent and unchanging. But I promise you that the number quoted is too high for most small businesses and many nonprofit organizations. 

Of course the search experts then went looking for similar examples and found another. This time there was a quote inside a Google knowledge graph that suggested the return on an advertising campaign is 80%, which is a silly number that means nothing without context.

Here is an example that I found after only a few minutes of searching. 

4. In The Spotlight — 3rd annual Police Technology Overview

We’re back with year three of our annual look at police technology. In previous years, we’ve  covered doorbell camera videos shared with police, local use of facial recognition data sourced from non-police sources, persistent vehicle surveillance from the air, broad warrants that seek the names of everyone in a location, and even predictive algorithms that identify citizens as “likely to break the law.”

You can read those previous police technology reports here: 2019 and 2020.

The best example demonstrating how police technology is used today is shown in this criminal complaint (PDF) filed by the FBI against Chicago Police officer Karol Chwiesiuk for his participation in January’s domestic terror attack on the U.S. Capitol. The June 10 document is relatively easy to read as the agent meticulously documents Officer Chwiesiuk’s activity:

1. An email received on January 5 from an organization called “Stop the Steal” with logistics information.
2. Multiple locations mapped out between January 4 and January 8, tracking the defendant from Chicago to Washington and back.
3. Multiple locations mapped out around Washington showing the time and day that the officer was in Washington and when he traveled to the Capitol the night before the rally.
4. Texts beginning January 3 when he contacted a friend and said that he was “traveling to dc … to save the nation.” He also texted during these conversations that he was “busy planning how to fuck up commies.”
5. Multiple texts with pictures showing the defendant participating in the attack. During one exchange, he acknowledged that he was present when guns were drawn in the Capitol.
6. Pictures showing the defendant matched by facial recognition from other sources, including other individuals.

Cracking down on a domestic terrorist assaulting the Capitol feels like an appropriate use of police technology, but this is also the rationale used to create the Patriot Act following the 9/11 terror attacks.

In the last few weeks we’ve learned about three surprising policy technology advances.

USA Today’s publisher is fighting a broad subpoena calling for the device information for every person that read an article on their website about the death of two FBI agents in February. The government won’t disclose why it wants the data that covers everyone who read the article online in a 35 minute period.

We also learned last week of two other developments after the Justice Department announced that it had seized more than 80% of the ransom that Colonial Pipeline paid to hackers last month. That ransom was paid in Bitcoin, which uses publicly available register entries. One big question remaining is how the FBI managed to crack the criminals’ Bitcoin account.

The FBI has also been busy running an encrypted telephone network with Australian law enforcement that was popular among criminals. Their three year operation concluded with 800 arrests announced last week. Law enforcement monitored 27 million messages from 12,000 devices during the operation.

On their surface, these initiatives appear to be a great use of technology in fighting crime, but privacy advocates and legal experts are concerned. New York City police can monitor people from as far as two blocks away using a network of more than 15,000 cameras. Concern quickly boiled over when police worked with doorbell and apartment camera owners to track individuals into nearby homes and apartments during racial equality protests last year.

This type of surveillance is not limited to local agencies. In December, we learned that the Customs and Border Protection agency was purchasing commercial cellphone location data from third parties. This data reportedly includes information on people who are not being investigated for any criminal activity.

The Commerce Department is home to another agency that The Washington Post reports “covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their emails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media for critical comments about the census.”

5. Debunked — Social Media Influencers Offered Bribes

A UK marketing agency with apparent Russian connections has reportedly offered European bloggers and influencers money to falsely report that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is responsible for hundreds of deaths. The Guardian has coverage.

6. Following Up — Amazon Routes

Motherboard has published an in depth look at Flex, Amazon’s driver routing software. Drivers in two states claim that they’re often routed to places where they have to cross busy streets carrying multiple packages.

7. Protip — Your iPhone’s Other Storage Setting

The nice folks at The Next Web are going to show you two ways to reclaim a lot of storage space on your iPhone. One scary method involves resetting your phone. Please don’t do that. 

The other shows you what files you can safely delete.

Screening Room — Danish Road Safety Council

 9. Science Fiction World — Google Maps 50,000 Brain Cells

I know we just beat up Google for synthesizing the wrong information about marketing and advertising costs, but they do have some remarkable initiatives. One of these was assisting a Harvard researcher in mapping 50,000 brain cells. You can read about that at New Scientist.

 10. Coffee Break — Unequal Scenes

Get a venti coffee for this one because you’ll want to spend a lot of time looking at this fascinating drone photography website. In their words: “We’re shocked seeing tin shacks and dilapidated buildings hemmed into neat rows, bounded by the fences, roads, and parks of the wealthiest few.”

The photography at Unequal Scenes is amazing. The message is critical.

11. Sign of The Times

Good Morning

It’s June 7. Incomparable Simone Biles won a record seventh U.S. gymnastics championship last night. She’s also won eight straight all-around competitions. U.S. Olympic trials begin two weeks from Thursday. 

Today’s Spotlight is 1,282 words — about a 4 minute read.

2. News To Know Now

Quoted: “We’ve used this model around terrorism before, but never with ransomware.” —John Carlin, acting deputy attorney general to Reuters describing new initiatives to escalate in-progress ransomware cases.

a)  European regulators are continuing their crackdown on American tech companies.  EC and UK regulators announced an antitrust investigation into Facebook regarding its Marketplace service. Meanwhile Google is reportedly near a settlement of a similar case brought by French regulators regarding the company’s advertising marketplace, according to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Reuters. The Journal is owned by News Corporation, the company that lodged the complaint against Google in France. Tech revenues are an attractive target for governments. G7 leaders meeting in London this weekend announced that they have reached an agreement to create a global corporate minimum tax to address companies providing services in one country and declaring revenues in another.

b) Twitter announced a premium subscription called Twitter Blue late last week. The service will launch as a pilot program in Australia and Canada. The biggest feature is the ability to revise a Tweet within the first 30 seconds after it is sent. Twitter has famously refused to offer an edit function in the past. (Axios)

c) A new Florida law makes it illegal for tech companies to ban the accounts of political candidates. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill to halt what he calls “censorship of conservatives” although conservative and liberal experts expect the law to be challenged in court. Unsurprisingly for Florida, there are exemptions for theme park operators, which include media companies Disney and Comcast. (Ars Technica)

3. Search Engine News

Google says that your web content stands a better chance of catching its ranking software’s attention if you do something that newspapers have known for generations: put some unique content “above the fold.” That’s the area on a broadsheet newspaper visible to passersby when the newspaper is folded at a newsstand or in a vending machine. Web designers apply the term to mean the first screen a visitor sees without any scrolling.

Search Engine Journal transcribed Google’s most recent video chat with users and quoted executive John Mueller saying, “The important part for us is really that there is some amount of unique content in the above the fold area.” Mueller acknowledged that the unique content could be an image. It’s worthwhile to look at your website with fresh eyes (even better: have it professionally tested) to see what impression new visitors receive.

Google also announced a partnership with e-commerce platform Shopify. That’s great news for Shopify merchants because they will receive enhanced listings in Google Shopping. For those of you who compete against merchants who might use Shopify, have a look at your website data to closely monitor your website’s traffic from Google.

4. In The Spotlight — Amazon Retail News: Automated Registers, Pharma, and Lawsuits

Google seemed quite excited to announce that it would open a store in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The area is home to 11,000 Google employees. This is their first non-popup store.

So, about Amazon:

You already know about their ridiculous e-commerce lead. eMarketer summarized it this way: Amazon gets 40 cents of every US dollar spent on retail online, Walmart gets 7 cents, and a handful of other companies get 2-3 cents each.

Amazon is reportedly considering a move into retail pharmacy, according to Business Insider. It’s worth remembering that the company ditched partners JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway last year so that all three could go their own way in health initiatives. Amazon quickly began offering pharmacy services on its website and to leverage its purchase of Pill Pack. One potential jump-start: the company’s 500 Whole Food locations.

I’ve been enjoying Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone’s second book quoting company insiders that was just released in May. Readers get an insider’s look at the Whole Foods acquisition and the rollout of various retail initiatives. 

I also enjoyed Morning Brew writer Halie LeSavage’s tour using the new Amazon One payment system that relies on a customer’s biometrics when a customer leaves an Amazon retail store. The system is now being tested in twenty-one locations–the kind of broad rollout afforded to companies with 12 digit market caps.

Amid the physical retail news, Amazon has new challenges related to its bread and butter e-commerce operations. DC Attorney General Karl Racine brought an antitrust suit against the company in late May. The suit alleges that Amazon exerts monopoly control over third party sellers on the site.

5. Debunked — Bing & DDG Don’t Have Protestor Photos (True!)

Image search at Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo inexplicably returned no results last Friday when users searched for “tank man” on the 32nd anniversary of the iconic photo taken during a protest in China’s Tiananmen Square.

Vice and Gizmodo separately confirmed that results were censored in the U.S., France, and Switzerland.

6. Following Up — Insurance Using AI & Email Spearphishing 

Insurance startup Lemonade bragged on Twitter that its tech-oriented service detects fraud by analyzing non-verbal cues in videos of claims filers just like on TV shows. Not so fast, tweeted apparently everyone who works in that field. Motherboard has more on this cautionary tale.

We’re also going to tell you again about developments in the Solar Winds hack. Reminder: Microsoft, Solar Winds, and two other companies make software that was hacked by a Russian government-backed group. More than two hundred organizations and 10 federal agencies were compromised last year.

Microsoft has detected that 3,000 email accounts at 150 organizations in 24 different countries were targeted late last month using faked email from one U.S. agency. Their targets were humanitarian and human rights organizations this time.

7. Protip — Androids Announce Who’s Calling

This can be quite a boon while you’re driving or otherwise occupied so you don’t reach for the phone to check the caller id when it rings. Lifehacker walks through how to enable caller ID announcements.

Screening Room — Heinz, Waze & Burger King Team Up

9. Science Fiction World — Google Rolls Out Tricorder

That’s the name of a new tool from Google that uses a smartphone to identify skin, hair, and nail conditions to aid a physician’s diagnosis. European regulators have already approved the image recognition program as a medical tool. You can read more at the BBC.

10. Coffee Break — The Today Show Tackles “What Is Internet, Anyway?” Live

Quite possibly the funniest comedy I’ve ever seen lasts 86 seconds and debuted in 1994. That’s when Today show hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric fumble trying to explain the internet to each other and a live national audience. I had already been paid for more than eight years working online by then so I’m feeling very smug right now. Also, very old.

You’re welcome for this trip to Memory Lane.

11. Sign of the Times