Artificial Intelligence Concerns Tech Execs
News

Good Monday morning. It’s February 25th. Meteorological spring begins Friday.

Thank you, George Mason University’s Marketing 491 class and Professor Shaun Dakin, for allowing me to talk with them Thursday at the Fairfax campus. I always learn a lot from these sessions, and last week was no exception. Here’s an overview of what we discussed.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 5 minutes to read.

News to Know Now

 

  • The Open AI initiative announced it would not release its recent text generator project because “it looked pretty darn real.”  We unpack the important story below.

 

  • Facebook is in new hot water over apps that report user health information to the company. It’s a day that’s name ends with the letter “y” – you expected good Facebook news?

 

  • Those Amazon Scout delivery robots being tested near Seattle have some cousins in college. George Mason University now has a fleet of 25 delivery robots bringing food including pizza, doughnuts, and coffee to people on campus. DoorDash has also tested the Starship Tech robots. The rollout video from the Mason launch is below.

 

 

Artificial Intelligence News

 

An algorithm’s writing reached a level that caused scientists to block its release. The text generator was reviewed by journalists including reporters from Axios and Wired. Fake political stories quoting real people and even fake Amazon reviews were well within the program’s grasp.

An excerpt from a story Axios had the AI write,

“China uses new and innovative methods to enable its advanced military technology to proliferate around the world, particularly to countries with which we have strategic partnerships,” the Pentagon said in its five-page strategy outline last week.The new U.S. strategy will be a major component of the White House’s first National Security Strategy, coming in two parts in September.”    (Axios, Wired)

Visual disinformation, often called “deep fakes”, are also making news after software engineer Philip Wang created a website called This Person Does Not Exist. The site creates an entirely new image of a person from an algorithm every time a browser refreshes the screen. The very real image is of a person that never existed. Wang said that he created the site to show people how A.I. has advanced and its possibilities in today’s world. (Inverse)

CAPTCHAs are the small programs websites use to separate human visitors from automated traffic. You’ve seen them before–click this box to prove you’re a human or maybe select the parts of a picture showing a street sign. But machine learning and artificial intelligence is solving each new type of puzzle faster than before. “Machine learning is now about as good as humans at basic text, image, and voice recognition tasks,” said scientist Jason Polakis. (The Verge)

 

Tech Privacy News

 

“What’s the big deal if consumer tech has privacy problems?” a GMU student asked me. “They’ll just use the info to market more appropriate things to me.”

And he’s right.

But as Professor Dakin and I explained, there are many abuses from redlining based on race or gender to employment and other discrimination. NATO researchers have another take.

They used publicly available data against the participants in a military exercise in an Allied country. Their goals were to get service personnel to leave position, not fulfill their duty, or other actions. They took three to four weeks of prep time, used only information that the public could retrieve, and quickly identified the individual soldiers involved. Then they lured soldiers into fake social media groups and conversations, gained the exact locations of battalions as well as dates and troop movement information.

One conclusion: “The privacy features and settings…cannot be trusted not to leak information.”  Our takeaway: people adept at pretexting and Internet research are not limited to NATO. Your organization can be targeted. Read the Stratcom report.

This wasn’t Facebook’s fault but the British government would like you to know that the company “intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws” in their country. We’ve been telling you for months about the legal clashes between EU countries and Facebook, especially the United Kingdom and Germany. The report from Parliament is harsh and could have ramifications beyond that country’s nearly 40 million users. The U.S. government is also reportedly in talks with Facebook regarding a multi-billion dollar fine for the company’s data privacy practices.

Data privacy’s big news this week centered around an explosive WSJ expose that cites medical and other private data being sent to Facebook from mobile apps. The Journal has been following this story for months. This latest expose is going to spell trouble for the social media company for decades. WSJ and privacy researchers found:

  • Instant Heart Rate sends a user’s heart rate information to Facebook
  • Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker sends dates of a woman’s period or if she’s trying to get pregnant
  • Realtor.com sends locations and prices of homes users review
  • Better Me Weight Loss Workouts sends height and weight information.
  • Lose It also sent height and weight information along with exercise information, including sexual  activity that the user entered.
  • Glucose Buddy sent blood pressure information and meal detail from food tracking.
  • Trulia sends zip code and some neighborhood information about homes users check.
Here is the most important part about these apps: they were downloaded from Google’s Play Store and Apple’s iOS App Store. They were not Facebook apps, but Facebook had reached seemingly legal data agreements with them to purchase information. And in some cases, the user didn’t have a Facebook account.When apps specify that they are going to share user information only with its trusted partners, those partners are often trusted as the result of writing a check.

The original WSJ article is here but requires a subscription. A free CNBC article is here.

Also in the Spotlight

Worth your time this week:
  • Advertisers are leaving YouTube again over “soft core” child exploitation and porn videos and comments left on them. The company has been deleting users (including commenters) and videos. AT&T and Walt Disney are among the companies that are boycotting the company.
  • Pinterest has filed for an IPO according to multiple reports, but as a direct listing. That means much less fanfare. Slow, steady Pinterest is winning praise for solid growth and banning anti-vaccination and other health-related disinformation.
  • 40% of LinkedIn users check the site daily according to Search Engine Journal. The site now has 610 million members.

 

News

Good Monday morning. It’s February 11th. Valentine’s Day is Thursday, and the federal government faces its next shutdown crisis on Friday. These both occur right before the 3 day President’s Day holiday next Monday. We won’t be publishing next week unless something extraordinary happens.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read.

News to Know Now

 

  • Germany told Facebook its data collection practices, specifically sharing data between the platforms it owns: Whats App, Instagram, and Facebook, violate the EU’s GDPR privacy regulations. Facebook is appealing.
  • Three new numbers worth knowing:
  1. Google’s Gsuite (gmail, calendars, etc.) has 5 million paying customers.
  2. Twitter has 126 million ‘daily active users’–far less than competitors and even Snapchat
  3. Duck Duck Go served 1 billion searches in January. That’s 1% of the U.S. search market, and as we always say, “One billion of anything is worth knowing about.”

Spotlighting Google

 

Google’s parent Alphabet reported better than expected revenues that still didn’t please Wall Street. Like Amazon, analysts cited higher spending concerns as a reason to drub the stock.  Also like Amazon, the company’s future growth is in cloud computing services. Industry leading Amazon Web Services (AWS) created $7.4 billion in cloud revenue last quarter.  Watch the tension between Google and Amazon in 2019–especially as Amazon’s ad revenue keeps growing.

Google continues cozying up to small businesses, the last bastion of mostly untapped digital marketing dollars Their latest effort to control local advertising included letters sent to small businesses that said Google would begin automating their advertising unless the business opted out. The solicitation did not fare well at the small and medium sized businesses we spoke with or in the digital agency world, and yes, that’s us. Let us know if you got one of those emails and want to understand your options.

Keeping nonprofits happy remains a Google business practice. Most nonprofits can receive free advertising, GSuite services, and other freebies on Google after a qualification process (we can help). Prominent nonprofits like the Wikimedia Foundation that offer complementary programs receive millions in cash and licenses.

Privacy experts continue to cite Google’s far ranging reach as problematic. The company now has global search market share of 90%, which means that Alphabet knows the things that consumers want to know more about and often things that are not even disclosed between couples. As Bing and other services have experienced decreasing market share, privacy-centric Duck Duck Go is enjoying its highest volume ever. The industry is also buzzing about Google Assistant launching facial recognition in 2019.

 

Also in the Spotlight

 

  • Spotify will suspend or cancel accounts if free users block ads with an ad blocker.  Spotify also rolled out an option to block artists after furor over recent R. Kelly sexual abuse revelations
  • Apple fixed the FaceTime bug called FacePalm. That’s a good reason to update now.
  • Facebook is closing the LOL Memes section we told you about and announced new options that allow Page owners to join groups as the page. Facebook is also rolling out a petition program.

Great Data

Google Earth has released Timelapse, a free program that allows users to see a changing aerial view of an address over 32 years. It’s addictive and comes with some already preconfigured views in Las Vegas, Alberta, and others. (Our hint: pause the video and drag the slider as slow or fast as you like

 

Online Data Trove of Passwords Grows to Over 2 Billion
Articles

Spotlight

News You Need to Know Now

 

Good Monday morning. It’s February 4th. Google parent company Alphabet announces earnings when the markets close this afternoon.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read.

Breaking Sunday night: Family Tree DNA is vehemently denying media reports that it has given the FBI access to its database of more than one million genetic profiles. Family Tree says that the FBI has the same permissions that any consumer has and that law enforcement has used the free-to-all service fewer than ten times.

 

Highlights

 

  • Amazon and Facebook posted record financials last week. Analysts liked Facebook’s story and rewarded the company’s stock. Amazon warned that it would invest more in 2019, and its stock took a hit despite record holiday earnings. Remember that the execs involved most often are compensated based on stock performance, not earnings.

 

  • The FCC was in court before a three judge panel Friday to present oral arguments regarding its rollback of net neutrality consumer protections. Among the FCC’s arguments was the contention that broadband is not a telecommunications service. The FCC also faced questions about Verizon throttling service used by the Santa Clara Fire Department as they fought deadly wildfires last year.

 

  • Hackers uploaded password and email combinations in more files last week, bringing the total to 2.2 billion password records that researchers say have now been downloaded more than 1,000 times. Please stop right now if you’re using your old passwords “now that time has passed”.

Wild Online Data Days Continue

 

Apple users, pay attention to the Group FaceTime bug called Face Palm. The company confirmed that users could add a third person to a FaceTime call, creating a Group, and eavesdrop on the person who was being added even if that person didn’t answer. Apple disabled group video chatting last week and is due to push out an update to users this week.

Apple was also on the dishing out side of things after it learned that Google and Facebook had both violated their App Store agreements and promoted programs that captured lots of data. Facebook’s case was egregious because Apple had already made Facebook remove a similar program. Instead, Facebook launched an online data program targeting people between the ages of 13 (with parental consent) and 35. They paid each person $20 per month to load a program on their phone that allowed Facebook to see virtually everything that was done on the phone. Plenty of survey companies do exactly this, but Facebook bypassed Apple’s App Store, and Apple responded by revoking Facebook’s developer access permission for nearly three days.

When Apple discovered that Google was doing something similar, they also revoked Google’s access even though this was their first offense.

The control that Apple places on its App store far outweighs anything that Google does for Android apps. And Apple is ruthless about protecting this advantage. We learned during Apple’s financial reports that its revenue sharing from Netflix alone is $130 million per year. For accounts smaller than Netflix, Apple’s revenue sharing costs publishers 15-20 percent of total revenue. And you thought that only their phones were expensive.

Children and teens are also spending millions on Facebook apps and games that parents are often unaware of, according to reporting by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The organization reported that Facebook’s chargeback rate for contested credit card charges made by children is more than 9 percent–18 times the regular rate.

Even municipalities are getting involved. New York City will begin receiving data from Uber and Lyft as part of its agreements allowing them to operate. Among the data being received is date, time, locations, and the route driven. The city says that its goal is traffic planning and new programs, but skeptics have already pointed out that the database when combined with cameras and taxicab data provide the city with a database of non-private vehicle travel.

Some Help Is Coming

Google’s Chrome browser will warn users when it is visiting a spoofed website. It’s still in an early beta, but I’ve tested it, and it’s got promise.

What’s App–one of Facebook’s most popular programs–will start limiting the number of times that a message can be forwarded in an effort to cut down on disinformation.

New York’s Attorney General reached a settlement last week that it says is “…the first finding by a law enforcement agency that selling fake social media engagement and using stolen identities to include in online activity is illegal.” Gizmodo has an excellent summary of what it means and how it came to be.

EU regulators also continue pursuing tech data issues. Polish and UK authorities last week began taking action to limit an online advertiser’s ability to identify and target a consumer who has been the victim of sexual abuse, substance abuse, or medical conditions. This has fallen into the “we know how to do it technically, but it’s not permitted and it’s evil” bucket. Regulators would like to put that into the “make it impossible to do” bucket.

Reporter Kashmir Hill–one of our favorites and one whose work we’ve referred to you before–is publishing a fantastic series called “Life Without the Tech Giants”.  She is a data privacy expert who is enlisting great tech resources to help her block companies like Google and Amazon from her life. And as she writes, it’s not always working. Start with her intro to the series here.

 

Spotlighted

Worth your time this week:

  • Google is finally removing Google+ data from the publicly-accessible Internet. Your stuff–if there was any there-will be deleted April 2.
  • Snopes is ending its fact-checking partnership with Facebook.
  • Steve Buscemi’s face on Jennifer Lawrence’s body? It’s not a Snickers commercial. It’s a well done 75 second Deep Fake video that reporter Mikael Thalen posted to Twitter.