Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/12 – Legislation To Break Open App Stores

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

There is officially a bill to crack open the App Store. DoorDash wanted to buy Instacart, but fear of regulators scuppered the deal. WhatsApp will let you migrate your chat history. Lionel Messi’s new club is paying him partially in crypto. And there’s still money in digital piracy. Sponsors: Calm.com/techmeme Metalab.co Links: App Store Competition Targeted by Bipartisan Senate Bill (WSJ) DoorDash Recently Held Talks to Buy Instacart (The Information) TikTok to add more privacy protections for teenaged users, limit push notifications (TechCrunch) WhatsApp will let you transfer your chat history between Android and iOS (Engadget) Researchers Create 'Master Faces' to Bypass Facial Recognition (Motherboard) Messi joins crypto craze as gets part of PSG fee in fan tokens (Reuters) Pirated-Entertainment Sites Are Making Billions From Ads (Bloomberg) 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 Tech meme right home for Thursday, August 12th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. There is officially a bill to crack open the app store. DoorDash wanted to buy Instacart, but fear of regulators scuppered the deal. WhatsApp will let you migrate your chat history. Leonel Messi's

new club is paying him partially in crypto, and there's still money in digital piracy. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Three U.S. senators have unveiled the Bipartisan Open App Markets Act. which would force app stores to allow side-loading and let developers use their own in-app purchasing systems, among other things, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The bipartisan bill by Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, aims to boost competition and consumer protections by placing new restrictions on how the stores operate and what rules they can impose on app developers. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee,

co-sponsored the bill. Apple said in a statement that its app store, quote, is the cornerstone of our work to connect developers and customers in a way that is safe and trustworthy. The result has been an unprecedented engine of economic growth and innovation, end quote. Google declined to comment on the legislation. Google says that its Android system provides choice that others don't. Device makers and carriers can preload competing app stores alongside Google Play, for example. Called the Open App Markets Act, the measure is the latest reflection of lawmakers, concerns about the power of major technology companies across a range of markets, including search, advertising, and social media. The legislation would bar the companies from certain conduct

that would tend to force developers to use their app stores or payment systems. It also would obligate the companies to protect app developers' rights to tell consumers about lower prices and other competitive pricing. It would effectively allow apps to be loaded onto Apple users' devices outside of the company's official app store. At the same time, the bill would create exemptions for actions by the major mobile app stores that are necessary to protect user privacy, security, or safety, or to prevent spam or fraud, end quote. I believe this is a point that I've made before, which is that regulation doesn't necessarily have to be enacted to have an impact, or at least influence on markets and the behaviors of the players in those markets, and this is

an example par excellence. Sources are telling the information that DoorDash recently held talks to by Instacart for between $40 and $50 billion, but the talks fell apart due to potential antitrust scrutiny, quote, the fact that the company's talk that all shows how they're looking for ways to strengthen their businesses, countering growing competition and a slowdown in growth sparked by the end of pandemic lockdowns. Instacart, which has been planning to go public in the next few months, initiated the talks, said one of the people. The company was valued at $39 billion in early March, more than double the price at which it raised money in October of last year. That increase reflected Instacart's pandemic-era growth. But the information recently reported that Instacart saw a

drop-off in sales earlier this year as vaccine rollouts expanded. Still, executives expect revenue to grow at least 10% for the year, up from $1.5 billion in revenue last year. The company continues to be profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis. And separately, Instacart also initiated talks with Uber over the past few months about a sales partnership similar to the the one that Uber recently struck with GoPuff, under which customers of Uber's food delivery service can buy items from GoPuff, said a person familiar with the situation. But Instacart's talks with Uber also fell apart. Uber is itself expanding into the grocery delivery market through the acquisition of a firm called Corner Shop. An Instacart spokeswoman declined to comment on talks with

either company, DoorDash did not have a comment. DoorDash, which has a market capitalization of about $62 billion has seen continued strong growth in its restaurant delivery service, but the company has long sought to diversify into grocery deliveries. In June, for instance, DoorDash announced it would handle on-demand deliveries for the Albertson's grocery chain, which already has a deal with Instacart. The online delivery market is still fairly fragmented, but over the past 12 months, underwent a wave of consolidation spurred on by low margins and the need for scale. Last year, Uber was in talks to purchase Grubhub, before losing out to European

rival Just Eat Takeaway, Uber then paid $2.7 billion for Postmates. That deal got a lengthy look from the U.S. Department of Justice, which approved it after the company agreed to abandon exclusivity provisions with restaurants in markets, including Los Angeles and Miami, end quote. So this story is clearly, also partially about the continued heat in the grocery delivery space. It was just announced this morning that GoPuff has acquired British competitor Dija, which was founded only back in December of 2020, but had already raised $20 million in seed money. The point I'm making here is a tie-up between DoorDash and Instacart.

Five years ago, that deal would have gone through, and no one would have even batted an eyelash. What did I say yesterday about everybody doing stuff like this all of the sudden all at the same time? Just curious for the reasons for this. TikTok this morning, detailed upcoming protections for users, aged 13 to 17, including turning in-app messaging off by default and changes to notifications, quoting TechCrunch. This expands on the changes to privacy settings and defaults for users

under the age of 18 that TikTok introduced in January. At the time, TikTok debuted stricter rules for teens aged 13 to 15 and slightly more permissive settings for users 16 to 17 focused on default account types, commenting and the use of TikTok's interactive features like Stitch and Duet. Now TikTok says new users age 16 to 17 will have their direct message settings be set to no one by default, and existing users would be prompted to review and confirm their settings the next time they use the messaging feature. The company won't prevent teens from using direct messages, however, but they will have to make a more explicit choice to do so. The app will also now display a pop-up message when a teen under the age of 16 publishes their first video

that asked them to choose who can watch their content, either followers, friends only, or only themselves. The everyone option is disabled. Before TikTok had limited who would come across the accounts belonging to teens under the age of 16, which would reduce the visibility of their content to only followers they approved when using the default settings. Now it's more directly pushing teens to make a choice about how public they want their content to be, and they have to decide in order for the video to be published, TikTok notes. TikTok also said it will disable duet and stitch for users under 16, but this is not new. It was part of the privacy changes that rolled out in January. Separately, teens 16 to 17 will now be asked to make a decision about whether or not their videos

can be downloaded by others. While TikTok won't prevent the teens from making their content downloadable, it will pop up a box that asks them to reconfirm their choice while reminding them that this means the videos could be shared to other platforms. Downloads remain disabled for users age 13 to 15, meanwhile. The final change is perhaps the most interesting because it's something neither YouTube nor Instagram introduced. TikTok will limit push notifications. Younger teens, aged 13 to 15, won't receive any push notifications after 9 p.m. while those age 16 to 17 won't receive any notifications after 10 p.m. The notifications resume the following morning at 8 a.m., end quote. So given that this is TikTok, might this one be related to the Chinese tech crackdown on so-called

spiritual opium? WhatsApp. We'll let users move their chat history. including photos and voice notes between iOS and Android devices, starting with the new Galaxy models announced yesterday, quoting in gadget. The Facebook brand has used Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event to introduce the option of importing your WhatsApp chat history between Android and iOS. It'll initially reach Android phones, starting with Samsung phones running Android 10 or newer, including the new foldables, but it'll eventually be available on both operating systems. The transfer includes photos and voice.

voice memos and should reach users in, quote, the coming weeks. The implementation was difficult, according to WhatsApp, as the messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored on device. Migrating them demands additional work from WhatsApp, iOS developers, and phone makers. It took a collaborative effort to enable transfers like these, in other words, end quote. Researchers have created nine computer-generated faces that they say can serve as master keys to impersonate almost half of the faces in three top facial recognition systems. Quoting motherboard. The researchers say their results show these master faces can successfully impersonate over

40% of the population in these systems without any additional information or data of the person they are identifying. The paper cites previous research, which showed a similar method for creating master fingerprints. According to the paper, their findings imply that facial recognition systems are extremely vulnerable. The master key faces tend to be older and didn't have. have glasses or facial hair. The researchers tested their methods against three deep face recognition systems,

D-lib, face net, and sphere face. Lead author Ron Schlemkin told motherboard that they used these systems because they are capable of recognizing, quote, high-level semantic features of the faces that are more sophisticated than just skin color or lighting effects. The researchers used a style gan to generate the faces and then used an evolutionary algorithm and neural network to optimize and predict their success. The evolutionary strategy then creates iterations or generations of candidates of varying success rates. The researchers then use the algorithm to train a neural network to classify the best candidates as the most promising ones. This is what teaches it to predict candidates' success, and in turn direct the algorithm to generate better candidates with a higher probability

of passing. Quote, we are interested in further exploring the possibility of using the master faces generated by our method in order to help protect existing facial recognition systems from such attacks, Schlemkin told Motherboard. The researchers even predict that their masterfaces could be animated using deep fake technology to bypass liveliness detection, which is used to determine whether a biometric sample is real or fake. The paper also notes that white males over the age of 60 in the University of Massachusetts labeled faces in the wild or LFW data set tended to be less varied compared to younger groups, so much of that group could be covered by a single older master face. Additionally, only two of the nine master faces created were female, which the paper notes

matches the, quote, much lower frequency of female faces in the LFW data set at around 22 percent, end quote. Want to see the faces for yourself? Click through to the story in the show notes. Even if you're not a European football fan like me, you might have heard the news that Leonel Messi, considered by many to be the greatest soccer player of all time, has left Barcelona, the club team that he has played for since he was a boy. You might not think there's a tech angle to the story, but not only can I give you that, I can do one better. There's a crypto angle here.

Lionel Messi's new contract with his new club, Paris Saint-Gemont, includes a large number of crypto-PSG fan tokens from socios.com, which lets holders vote on minor decisions. So Messi is partially being paid in crypto tokens created specifically for his new team. quoting Reuters. Confirming an exclusive Reuters report, Paris Saint-Germain said on Thursday the tokens were included in Messy's quote, welcome package, which media reporters have estimated at 25 to 30 million euros or 29 to 35 million dollars. The club did not disclose the proportion of tokens in the package but said the amount was, quote, significant. Fan tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that allows holders to vote on mostly minor decisions related to their clubs. Among clubs to launch tokens this year,

our English Premier League champions Manchester City and Italy's A.C. Milan. Messi's former club Barcelona launched one last year. The tokens are increasingly seen by clubs as a source of new revenue. And Socios.com, which provide the tokens for PSG and other top clubs, says tokens have generated nearly $200 million for its partner clubs in 2021, with PSG already seeing revenue from the Messi deal. Like Bitcoin and other digital currencies, fan tokens can be traded on exchanges. They also share in common with other cryptocurrencies a tendency for why. wild price swings, leading some regulators to issue warnings to investors about digital assets. PSG said there had been high volume of trading in its fan tokens after reports that

Messi was set to join the club, end quote. And finally today, most of my exposure these days to pirate video websites comes because I'm a fan of European soccer. If I hear about a great goal, but I can't wait for or don't have access to or can't find official replays of said goal, I go to red. it. I do a search and I find links to pirate clips of any highlight I want. If you delve deeper into the internet weeds, you can also find pirate streams of entire games, even if you have to wade through a morass of pop-ups and other garbage around the link. Ever wonder if sites like those

make money? Well, they do. A study of 6,000 websites and 900 apps that host pirated movies and TV found they make around $1.3 billion per year from ads, including from ads by names you might recognize, quoting Bloomberg. The piracy operations are also a key source of malware, and some ads placed on the sites contain links that hackers use to steal personal information or conduct ransomware attacks, according to the online safety nonprofit digital citizens alliance, and the anti-piracy firm White Bullet Solutions Limited. While law enforcement officials have sought to stop some of the online criminality. The groups identified at least 84,000 illicit entertainment sites. Major brands accounted for about 4% of the advertising on the pirate websites,

and 24% of the ads on pirate apps with Amazon, Facebook, and Google, the largest companies represented. The biggest chunk of advertising overall was in the form of sponsored content, which often takes the form of clickbait links that look like they will lead to a news story or interesting video. Smaller companies, adult content and fraud and malware, up the rest of the ads. The ads from major brands, though a small portion of the total, are particularly problematic in stopping pirated content sites from proliferating. They make the entire website appear more legitimate and can make users more likely to click on the fraudulent ads they appear besides, according to the study. Any advertising on pirate websites and apps

is almost certainly inadvertent, but there's evidence that companies can put a stop to it if they're vigilant. An initiative called the Trustworthy Accountability Group alerted Amazon to the volume of its ads on pirate sites in early 2021, and the volume of ads from the company on illegal sites plunged throughout the year, the report said. Quote, failure to choose tools that assess piracy risk in real time means advertisers fund criminals and it's a billion dollar problem, said Peter Sisko, CEO and founder of White Bullet in an email, quote, at best, this is negligent. At worst, this is deliberate funding of IP crime, end quote.

Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.