Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 03/28 - Spotify Tests Subscriptions For Two

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

Facebook is charged with violations of the Fair Housing Act, the UK gives Huawei a pass but drags them at the same time, Spotify lets you share your account with your better half, and let’s take two on that Google podcast transcription search experiment. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Tiny.website Link to how to use Google Podcast search Links: Facebook has been charged with housing discrimination by the US government (The Verge) Huawei Security ‘Defects’ Are Found by British Authorities (NYTimes) Spotify is testing Premium Duo, a discounted subscription for two (The Verge) Microsoft sues to take control of domains involved in Iran hacking campaign (TechCrunch) The Business of Your Face (Fortune)   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 Thursday, March 28th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook is charged with violations of the Fair Housing Act. The UK gives Huawei a pass but drags them at the same time. Spotify lets you share your account with your better half. And let's take two on that Google podcast transcription search experiment. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has filed charges against Facebook, saying the company's ad target. tools enabled advertisers to violate the Fair Housing Act. The charges stem from a complaint filed in August and harken back to the ability of advertisers

on Facebook's platform to target ads based on specific options, including ethnicities and religions. One section of the complaint reads that Facebook, quote, has provided a toggle button that enables advertisers to exclude men or women from seeing an ad, a search box to exclude people who do not speak a specific language from seeing an ad and a map tool to exclude people who live in a specified area from seeing an ad by drawing a red line around that area, end quote. Another section of the complaint says, Facebook's quote,

ad delivery system prevents advertisers who want to reach a broad audience of users from doing so. Even if an advertiser tries to target an audience that broadly spans protected class groups, Facebook's ad delivery system will not show the ad to a diverse audience if the system considers users with particular characteristics most likely to engage with the ad, end quote. A Facebook spokesperson told the verge, quote, we're surprised by HUD's decision, as we've been working with them to address their concerns and have taken significant steps to prevent ads discrimination, end quote. Indeed, back in August, Facebook removed 5,000 specific targeting options, including the option to exclude ethnicities or religious affiliations.

And earlier this month, in a settlement with various civil rights organizations, Facebook stopped allowing advertisers to target housing ads to specific ages, genders, or even zip codes. This is an unrelated story, but I'm going to shoehorn it in here. Facebook yesterday also said that it will ban white nationalist and white separatist content on its platforms. Previously, it only banned white supremacy content. And users who post such content going forward will be automatically directed to nonprofit organizations that help people leave hate groups. Quoting from motherboard. Last year, a motherboard investigation found that though Facebook banned white supremacy on its platform, it explicitly allowed white nationalism and white separatism.

Those were all in quotes in the original piece. After backlash from civil rights groups and historians who say there is no difference between the ideologies, Facebook has decided to ban all. three, two members of Facebook's content policy team said, end quote. All right, remember how a lot of countries have been pushing to ban the use of Huawei devices on their wireless systems. The fear advanced most strenely by the U.S. government is that Huawei is too closely tied to the Chinese government and so their devices present security threats. But interestingly, the U.K. government had been bucking that trend, saying that whatever security,

threat Huawei posed could be mitigated. While the official UK review of Huawei's telecom equipment is finally out, and the Brits are still not calling for an outright ban, but they did say, essentially, Huawei basically sucks at security full stop. Forget Chinese government spying. Governments should be wary of Huawei equipment because they're vulnerable to everyday run of the mill spying and hacking, quoting the New York. Times. The British report released on Thursday said that there were, quote, underlying defects

in Huawei's software engineering and security processes that governments or independent hackers could exploit, posing risks to national security. While the report did not call for an outright ban of Huawei equipment, it was endorsed by the country's top cybersecurity agency. From later on in the Times piece, quote, the report on Thursday described a company with poor engineering practices and problems stemming from those engineering flaws more than one operating at the orders of Chinese authorities. In the report, British officials determined that Huawei could not replicate much of the software it built, meaning that the authorities could not be sure what code was being introduced into the country's wireless networks. They added that Huawei had poor oversight of suppliers that provided components for its products.

There remains no end-to-end integrity, the report said, End quote. Spotify is testing what it is calling premium duo, what would essentially be a discounted subscription for two people, for 12 euros, 49 cents a month. Spotify already has family subscriptions, and like family subscriptions, the two people signing up for premium duo

will have to live at the same address. Since a single Spotify subscription costs $9.99 a month, this is a pretty good deal, right? Super great. You and your Bay can save some money by sharing an account. But wait, won't Bay's music listening screw with the algorithms that suggest music for you? Look, my wife loves country music, and there's no way I want that coming into my suggested plays. Well, Spotify says this is no problem, quoting from their duo web page, quote, because you are now on separate accounts, music recommendations are tailored to your individual tastes, end quote.

All right. Separate accounts, one bill. But actually, you could do sharing if you wanted, quoting the verge. Once you're both signed up, you'll get access to Duo Mix, a new auto-generated playlist similar to Spotify's existing Discover Weekly or Daily Mix playlist. You'll get one playlist between you, and this is automatically created and shared when you set up the account. As you both listen to music, the plan updates with music it thinks you'll both enjoy. There are also chill and upbeat options for the playlist on the mobile app to switch between songs of different tempos. If you'd rather listen to playlist you've created yourself, then the plan also includes a shared playlist feature.

This allows you to share all your playlists with your duo partner with one click, end quote. You can upgrade to Duo with your existing premium account on Spotify right now and keep all of your saved music playlist and recommend But you can only do so right now if you are in Colombia, Chile, Denmark, Ireland, and Poland. No word on when Spotify expects to roll this out more broadly. All right. So, yeah, remember that secret string of words I wanted to put into yesterday's show so we could test Google's podcast transcription search thingy? Well, right, I put those words in the show notes as well yesterday, which, of course, defeated the purpose of the test, Google can already search show notes.

Duh, Brian. I have no other excuse for the screw up other than I thought. It would be fun to try. And then in the midst of getting the show out, I didn't think everything through. So let's try this again with a new series of words. I will not put them in the show notes this time, though I will still put the link to yesterday's story

that tells you how to use Google's podcast search. It's not public, by the way. You kind of have to hack your way into it. But, and this reminds me of Pee Wee's Playhouse a bit, today's secret word is, no, seriously, the string of words to search for is as follows. Frost, value, pretense, optics, elevator, Iowa, river, puppet. Again, that is. Frost, value, pretense, optics, elevator, Iowa river puppet. So again, give it a few hours or a few days, try a search, and then let me know what you're able to find.

And again, I'll share if this experiment has been successful or not. Microsoft was granted a U.S. court order to take control of 99 websites that the company says are linked to the Iranian Hacking Group Phosphorus, quoting TechCrunch. The granted order allows Microsoft to take control of the domains from the registrars and hosts the domains on Microsoft's own servers, including Outlook slash verify.net and Yahoo slash verify.net and redirect malicious traffic safely into a Microsoft controlled sinkhole. The hacker group Phosphorus or APT35 is believed to be linked to former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence officer Monica Witt, who defected to Tehran in 2013 and is now wanted by the FBI for alleged espionage.

The hackers have targeted academics and journalists with spearfishing, campaigns designed to look like Yahoo and Google login pages, but can defeat two-factor authentication, end quote. Finally, today, this is a story that has bubbled up in a bunch of different places lately, but this piece from Fortune, I think, does a good job of summing up the whole thing. As image recognition technology has gotten good, it got so by training on our photos. And we might have never known anything about them training on. our photos. Yes, your Creative Commons licensed Flickr photos were used, but then facial recognition came along. Companies needed tons of faces. Let me quote from the piece. In order to build

facial recognition technology capable of spotting individuals in the wild, companies needed more images. Lots more. Hundreds are not enough. Thousands are not enough. You need millions of images. If you don't train the database with people with glasses or people of color, you won't get accurate results, says Peter Trep, CEO of Face First, a California-based facial recognition. company that helps retailers screen for criminals entering their stores, end quote. Well, super lucky for them. Social media came along and photo sharing and storing apps. Quoting again from the piece,

We have consumers who tag the same person in thousands of different scenarios. Standing in the shadows with hats on, you name it, says Doug Alley, the CEO of EverAI, a San Francisco facial recognition startup that launched in 2012 as Everroll, an app to help consumers manage their bulging photo collection. collections, end quote. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of things here and all the various other pieces have gone into all the various problems here. They boil down to something like this. A lot of people never consented to their faces being used in this way, naturally, but even if you did consent, it's sort of like giving your DNA to those DNA companies. You never know how that could

come back to bite you in the keister later. And a lot of the ways facial recognition software is being deployed now might not be good for you personally, especially if it's your face or your kid's face or something like that in the corpus. They know you are you now. Quoting again from Forbes, for years, the most avid paying customers for facial recognition has been law enforcement agencies. More recently, though, a growing number of organizations, including Walmart, are using the software to identify and learn more about the people who enter their physical premises, end quote. So again, you may be never consented to allowing your kisser to be used for training facial recognition software, but also now that it has happened, they have you, not just you in a general sense, but you specifically. Your face is in that corpus of faces. Walmart or the TSA at the airport or whatever, they can know that that is you walking through the door.

When did you agree to that? You never did. But really, I chose this story because I wanted to make this specific point. Quoting again from the piece, the companies, including industry leaders like Face Plus Plus and Kairos, are competing in a market for facial recognition software that is growing by 20% each year and is expected to be worth $20 billion a year by 2022, according to market research future. Their business model involves licensing software to a growing body of customers from law enforcement to retailers to high schools, which use it to run facial recognition programs of their own, end quote.

All right. Again, again, we all know this. Big data. It's big money. It's been called the new oil. It is perhaps the most valuable commodity of the 21st century. But it's generated by us, and we're not getting rich off of it. Other people are, but we're not, even though we're the ones that generated it.

We're not even being nominally compensated. I mean, sure, you can make arguments that, yeah, you use an app or a service, and they give you convenience, and that's the trade-off. Give me all the music I want to listen to or let me stay in touch with my friends, and the trade-off is you get to exploit and monetize the data about what I do or listen to or say or where I am, all that stuff. It's the trade-off of convenience for whatever. But that's everything now. How can you live your modern life now and not generate some data for someone else to get rich? off of. That's what's bothering me. Is there some scenario where those of us creating the most valuable commodity in the 21st century can at least get a taste? Can we at least wet our beak?

If someone thinks there's oil in your backyard, they don't just get to take it. They have to pay you for the right to take it. This is another case of, I feel like, things like this just keep happening because there are no rules in place. There are no regulations. or even, you know, tradition or case law or even cultural expectations. So companies just get to rush in and do a thing for as long as they can because they can, right? I guess my point here is, how long does everyone else get to get rich out of what I do? I can't help it. I'm alive in the modern world.

I'm going to generate data. Other people have the ability to collect and exploit that data and put aside whether that's ethical and the fact that I can't stop them bother. me, why can't I profit as well from the thing that I can't not do? This is a super tortured metaphor, maybe. But what if tomorrow they discovered some mystery compound in human breath that was more valuable than gold? Quick, everybody, harness everyone's breath, every exhale from every human on the planet. Here, Brian, put on this mask over your mouth so we can harness this new ephemeral gold. Before that could even come close to happening, you'd better believe I'd at least say, sure, how much are you going to pay me for it? That's all for today. Again, nothing pithy to end with here.

So let's just do my favorite hybrid sign-off mashup of Bill and Ted and Jerry Springer. Be excellent to yourself and each other. Talk to you tomorrow.