Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, May 25, 2018 - Musk Rages and Alexa Listens In

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

European Union privacy restrictions kick in, Tesla settles a suit, Alexa is listening, Essential becomes a misnomer, and San Francisco brakes scooters. Tweets: @bxchen, @ktbenner, @geoffreyfowler, @zeynep, @cathyyoung63, @mccanner Links:Publications block EU readers (New York Times)Google late to update advertisers and ad-tech networks on GDPR changes (Digiday)Tesla settles on auto-pilot (Reuters)Alexa forwards private conversation by couple (KIRO)Amazon’s statement on Alexa recording and forwarding (Recode)Piles of bike-sharing cycles (Atlantic)Long Reads:Instagram has transformed high-school basketball players into starsAn oral history of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit that’s now 20 years oldHow Facebook monitors for abuse and misuseIn depth on Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne BoleynCredits: Special Guest-Host: Glenn Fleishman Produced by @glennf, @brianmcc, and the @techmeme editors Music by @jpschwinghamer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home for Friday, May 25th, 2018. Today, European Union privacy restrictions kick in. Tesla settles a suit while Musk rages.

Alexa is forwarding your private conversations. Andy Rubin's Essential is no longer essential, and San Francisco puts a break on scooters. I'm Glenn Fleischman in for Brian McCullough, who's on vacation. And here's what happened in Tech News today. Happy GDPR day, everyone. 25th is the day that the general data protection regulation, or GDPR, goes into effect in the European Union. If you wondered why you've received dozens, perhaps thousands of emails explaining new or clarified privacy policies, or are being asked to opt into mailing lists that you thought

you'd already opted into before, and probably some you hadn't, it's the GDPR. The GDPR is a comprehensive set of rules about data protection and privacy that, among other things, require affirmative and specific consent by an individual to have their data collected, processed, and stored. The scope is very broad. The European Commission says personal data is any information relating to an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional, or public life. It can be anything from a name, a home address, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer's internet protocol

address. It also requires organizations to provide all information they possess on an individual on request and with some provisos to delete all that information when asked to. While it only covers residents of the EU and the European Economic Area, the EU considers any digital interaction with one of those residents by a party anywhere in the world to fall under the GDPR's purview. Fines for violating the rules are significant. Up to 4% of worldwide revenue or 20 million euros, whichever is for the most severe offenses, and the EU plans to attempt to enforce them through reciprocal agreements with other countries if the violator operates outside of EU boundaries. Despite a two-year period between the rules being set and going into effect,

many large companies seemed almost entirely unprepared, while small ones woke up to the sudden reality that they could be out of compliance. The most surprising was Instapaper, a read-it-later service created by Marco Arment, a former employer of mine, who sold it to Betawks, who in turn sold it to Pinterest. InstaPaper announced earlier this week that it would be disabling the site for EU customers until it had completed GDPR compliance. They're relying on IP addresses, the unique network numbers used to move data around the internet, which is considered highly unreliable for adequately identifying EU users.

Some sources say you need to ask someone if they're in the EU in order to block them, and asking that question without the right constraints could be a violation of the GDPR. TechCrunch expresses mystification as to why Instapaper, existing privacy policy isn't enough, and Instapaper hasn't provided more detail or a timetable. Instapaper isn't alone. The BBC reports that the Chicago Tribune in LA Times, as well as dozens of other papers in the Tronk and Lee Enterprises media groups, were marked as unavailable to EU visitors. The New York Times quotes a statement from Andrea Jelanik, chairwoman of the European Data Protection Board,

which coordinates enforcement of the GDPR. It didn't just fall from heaven. everyone has had plenty of time to prepare. Despite the years of advance notice, ad tech networks and publishers are also in a scramble, as Google-informed companies working with its double-click ad division only this week about critical remaining issues in tracking EU residents and feeding personalized ads. Digidae's Jessica Davis reports that ad exchanges are seeing a drop in volume of 25 to 40% for European ads. The online ad world is complicated, but advertisers place ads through ad tech networks with demographic and other parameters,

and the networks use a variety of user tracking and information licensed from other parties to have those ads appear on publisher's sites only to users deemed qualified. Davis notes, the day before the deadline, buyers were also warned to not buy any inventory via Google on third-party exchanges, especially those using tracking and ad verification pixels, as Google couldn't verify whether those partners were compliant or not, according to sources. Anyone in the covered area can file a complaint about GDPR abuses and one group lodged theirs immediately.

As Fortune Magazine reports, the nonprofit group, None of Your Business, which had previously fought back reductions in EU privacy protections, filed four complaints today against Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook claiming forced consent, as the group's Max Schrams explains. He says the GDPR doesn't require consent for the necessary function of a service, which would conceivably include nearly everything Facebook does to connect you with friends and show you news and the like. What it does require consent for, he says, is everything that's not strictly necessary, such as ads or selling your data. The group objects to bundling consent to continue to use the core service with these external purposes. Potential maximum penalties for the four companies could be nearly $8 billion euros based on their revenue.

Brian X. Chen, the New York Times lead consumer tech reporter, recently wrote about GDPR updates and tweets. this morning about the complaint. I pointed out in my column that companies were using GDPR to force people into consent, there's already a complaint on day one of GDPR. Even though these rules apply only to EU residents, the European Union is out proselytizing and advising other countries and blocks on adopting them, the New York Times reports. Brazil, Japan, and South Korea are first out of the gate. The GDPR puts limits on the kind of data that can exit the EU to other countries unless those countries are in harmony with the EU's rules. Brazil is particularly eager to be an equal partner.

Giovanni Boutarelli, the European Data Protection Supervisor, told the New York Times, many countries are interested in signing a trade agreement with the European Union, and then privacy becomes an important precondition. Reuters reports today that Tesla settled a class action suit on Thursday that alleged its Model S and Model X cars had an autopilot system that was essentially unusable and demonstrably dangerous. Those affected had paid $5,000 in 2016 and 2017 for an autopilot upgrade and will receive $20 to $280 in compensation due to delays and features becoming active.

Elon Musk has spent the week on Twitter yelling at journalists about bias and motivation, musing about setting up a Yelp-style reporter and publication rating site called Pravda and generally taking time away from paying attention to his car business. Musk tweeted, problem is, journales are under constant pressure to get max clicks and earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation as Tesla doesn't advertise, but fossil fuel companies and gas-slash-deas-deas car companies are among world's biggest advertisers. This tweet came oddly after an auto industry analyst said negative media attention had peaked and that Tesla's execution would lead to an improved stock price. While down about 30% from its all-time high year ago, the stock is still about 14 times above its initial offering price, and well in line with this price in the last few years. Earlier in the week, the nonprofit investigative journalism group,

the Center for Investigative Reporting, which has no advertising and has no pressure for clicks, followed up on an earlier story that angered Musk in April about alleged underreporting of work-related injuries at the main Tesla plant, noting that Tesla had updated its 2017 list to include more injuries. Perhaps Musk won't be as mad about yesterday's settlement as the company said it wanted to do right by its customers.

In the thing we all fear about the future department, Amazon's Alexa recorded the conversation of a couple in Oregon and sent it to an employee of one of their companies. And, yes, Amazon confirms this really happened. Everything about this story is implausible from the initial account to Amazon's explanation, but it just demonstrates that with enough technology, a sequence of improbable and unwanted actions can cascade one into the other. The story begins in Portland, Oregon, where the TV station Cairo, reported on Danielle, last name withheld in the report,

who said her house is riddled with Amazon echoes in every room, controlling their heat, lights, and security system. Two weeks ago, she told Cairo, one of her husband's employees called and told them to unplug their devices because they were being hacked. Danielle relates that the employee said that he had received a recording of her and her husband talking. She didn't believe this at first until he played them back to her.

They unplugged their hardware and called Amazon, who, she said, confirm this sequence of event. So far, that's a first-person account of what could have been a technological misunderstanding. A friend of mine's husband wound up being visited by the police a few years ago, asking about pressure cookers and bombs. Apparently based on internet searches, she, her husband and son had separately done about news on the Boston bombers, backpacks, and pressure cookers, things that could only seemingly have been known by someone monitoring their internet connection. It turned out that her husband's former employer had reviewed the search history on a work computer he'd returned after leaving the firm. and alerted the police. It all ended happily, but bizarrely enough. The same sort of Rube-Goldberg

interaction seems to have happened in this case, according to Amazon, which confirmed Danielle's story. Amazon released a statement to Recode and others, which I'll read in full. Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like Alexa. Then the subsequent conversation was heard as a send message request, at which point Alexa said out loud, to whom? At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer's contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, contact name, right? Alexa then interpreted background conversation as right. As unlikely as a string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.

Aha. This also reminds me of a plot point in Matt Ruff's novel, The Public Works Trilogy, in which an artificial intelligence purposely mishears a conversation at Disneyland, long story. and uses it as an excuse to initiate a selective mass murder. Watch out home listening device owners. Longtime Mac writer and echo owner, Dan Morin, writing at the Six Colors site, has more insight based on his experience. He believes that the confirmation query was made by an echo or dash in another room than the couple was in, and that the speaker volume on that other device could have been turned down so it was even less audible.

He has two echoes in his house, and he writes frequently the wrong echo response. I've had the one in the office respond when I'm standing in the kitchen. I've had timers meant for one get triggered on the other. Sometimes one device seems to be stuck and not listening, and the other picks up the slack a little too enthusiastically. As more in notes, given the number of requests and number of devices out there, even a one in a million incident is going to happen, you know, one in a million times.

It was a one and a million chance, Doc. A one in a million chance. Reactions were not good for Amazon. Katie Benner of the New York Times tweeted, So, I just threw my smart speakers into the garbage. Wall Street Journal technology columnist Jeffrey Fowler noted, The lesson from the Alexa bombshell today, Alexa is always listening. So are Siri and Google Assistant.

Wake Word is a misnomer. We're learning these services are far from foolproof about listening only at the right moment. Zaynip Defetchi, a professor and a frequently published expert on protests and government intrusion in the digital age, tweeted, I still find it hard to believe we put more listening devices into our homes willingly. The phone is bad enough, somewhat hard to avoid. How do we willingly dot our homes with more of them? Writer Kathy Young suggested, Someone do a modern day remake of Sorry Wrong Number,

where you can get an email with audio of someone plotting a murder that you eventually realize is your own. But Aaron McCann, an editor at the New York Times, noted on Twitter, what's weirder to me than the story is that Reuters is referring to Alexa as her rather than it. Essential finds itself less than essential? The latest phone from Android creator

Andy Rubin is powering down. Bloomberg reports that after a hundred million investment and the release of a first model that sold somewhere over 150,000 phones, the second model was cancelled and the company is shopping itself around. It has a patent portfolio and some other

products in the pipeline. The Essential phone attempted to stand out through design. In Wired Magazine's which gave it an excellent rating, 8 out of 10 on its scale. It noted, this sharp edge, slippery slab of titanium and ceramic conveys power, all tool, and no toy. It has no camera bumps, no branding. The phone had a nearly edge-to-edge screen as well, but software bugs, touchscreen interaction problems, and poor camera results plagued the model based on customer and publication reviews. The phone debuted at nearly $700, and Bloomberg said it sold

only 20,000 phones at that price. After a $200 price drop, it sold at least another $130,000. The writing has been on the wall for a while, however, as dozens of employees left and top executives departed, including the hardware engineering chief. Rubin is a serial phone innovator. He found a danger which created the much-loved hip-top, later sold to T-Mobile and re-labeled the sidekick. Then he started up Android to create a new kind of smartphone operating system, and it was acquired by Google in 2005, where he headed up the team until 2013. His latest company, Essential, was his attempt to hit a trifecta, but that race now appears to be over.

Finally, San Francisco, a city littered with billionaires, teetering new towers, and thousands upon thousands of unhoused people focuses on what's important. Scooters! That's right, the scourge of scooters is being addressed with a ban and licensing. Following the lead of dockless bike sharing, in which bikes can be unlocked by a smart app, Some of the same bike companies and some new electric scooter entrance like bird, Lymebike, and jump bikes decided scooters were the next untapped market and, in the absence of rules, started flooding the streets of cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and Santa Monica.

The total count is unknown, but it's in the thousands. San Francisco passed a permitting law on April 24th, which goes into effect on June 4th, but it just started accepting permit applications yesterday. The program limits the total number of scooters in the city to 1,250 during a six-month pilot program, after which it may be increased. After June 4th, unpermitted scooters get impounded by the city. The electric scooters typically cost a dollar to unlock and 15 cents a minute to use. As regular host Brian cited a few days ago, a story at the Atlantic by Taylor Lawrence explains how armies of people compete each night for the currently high fees paid to recharge scooters. The cautionary tale for electric scooters and shared bikes is in China, where dockless bikes run into the millions, and you can find extensive photo essays of vast numbers of abandoned and unused shared bikes.

A link to a collection of those photos at the Atlantic is in the show notes. It's a long weekend, and you might be looking for some long reads. Here are a few. All the links are in the show notes. At the Atlantic, Taylor Lawrence, once again, writes about how Instagram has transformed high school basketball players into stars. She writes, kids who don't know how to use social media are definitely at a disadvantage. The ringers, Victor Luckerson, has assembled an oral history of the antitrust suit that changed the face of the technology industry. Twenty years ago, the Department of Justice in 20 states' attorneys general accused Microsoft of being a trust,

ordered to break up by a judge that was overturned on appeal, and then Microsoft negotiated a settlement, but its grip on the industry was broken, maybe by the trial and maybe just because its moment had passed. Fortune's Michael Levram tells a detailed story about how Facebook monitors and manages abuse and misuse of its platform and how it determines whether a line has been crossed. And this isn't a tech story, but it's a great long read, and it's at Long Reads. Anne Terrio goes into great depth about Anne Boleyn, second wife of England's Henry VIII as part of her for series Queens of Infamy. And that's the news. I've been your host, Glenn Fleischman, in for Brian McCullough. Brian said I should tell you that you can find my work at glog.g.g.g-l-en-n-n-f, like frank.com. I recently wrote a book about printing and type history in London called London Kearning, which you can find there.

Follow me on Twitter at Glenn F, G-L-E-N-N-F. Thanks to the editors at TechMeme who tweet out every headline they post every hour of the day at TechMeme. It's a great way to keep current. We'll be off for the three-day Memorial Weekend in America, and I'll be back. on Tuesday, May 29th. Have a great and safe weekend.