Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/11 – A Meaningful Anti-Tracking Law

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

Could Massachusetts pass the first meaningful anti-tracking law in the country? With social media in transition, what’s the lane for someone like Tumblr? Instagram is going after Twitter, but is someone coming for Instagram at the exact same time? And the sad state of affairs for video game history. Sponsors: https://www.birddogs.com/RIDE SwissAmerica.com/ride Links: Selling Your Cellphone Location Data Might Soon Be Banned in U.S. for First Time (WSJ) Tumblr says it’s going to ‘fix’ its ‘core experience’ to appeal to new users (The Verge) HCA Healthcare patient data stolen and for sale by hackers (CNBC) A New VC-Beloved Startup Rips a Page From Meta’s Playbook (The Information) THE GAME AVAILABILITY STUDY, EXPLAINED (Video Game History Foundation) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, July 11th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Could Massachusetts pass the first meaningful anti-tracking law in the country? With social media in transition, what's the lane for someone like Tumblr right now? Instagram is going after Twitter, but is someone coming for Instagram at the exact same time and the sad state of affairs for video game history? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. This is something that has needed more attention, in my opinion. Forget about social networks selling your data to third parties, consider the fact that your sell carrier, that you pay $90 a month or more or two, might be selling your real-time location information to third parties as well,

where you are literally right now. Well, Massachusetts lawmakers are weighing a near-total ban on buying and selling consumers' mobile device location data, which would be the first such ban in the U.S., quoting the journal. The legislature held a hearing last month on a bill called the Location Shield Act, a sweeping proposal that would sharply curtail the practice of collecting and selling location data drawn from mobile phones in Massachusetts. The proposal would also institute a warrant requirement for law enforcement access to location data, banning data brokers from providing location information about state residents without a court authorization in most circumstances. Location data is typically collected through mobile apps and other digital

services and doesn't include information such as a name or a phone number. But often, a device's movement patterns are enough to derive a possible identity of its owner. For example, where a phone spends its evening and overnight hours is usually the owner's home address and can be cross-checked against other databases for additional insight. The Massachusetts proposal is part of a flurry of state-level activity to better protect the digital privacy of residents in the absence of a comprehensive national law. Ten states have enacted privacy laws in recent years under both Republican and Democratic-controlled legislatures. Several bipartisan proposals are under consideration in Congress but have failed to gain traction. No state has gone so far as to completely

ban the sale of location data on residents. The most common approach in other states is to require digital services and data brokers to obtain clear consent from consumers to collect data and put some restrictions on transfer and sale. In the public hearing, the Massachusetts law drew opposition from a trade association representing the technology industry, which said it would put the state out of step with others. The proposal would still allow digital services to collect consumer location information to deliver services to users in the States, such as weather information or ride share services, but it would put in place a near total ban on sale or transfer of that data to other entities. The Supreme Court has said that a warrant is required for law enforcement to access

location data from cell phone carriers in most circumstances. However, the growing availability of data for purchase has upended traditional understandings of law enforcement restrictions on access. In a report made public last month, an intelligence community panel acknowledged that the proliferation of commercially available information had begun to eclipse more invasive surveillance techniques, end quote. We've spoken at length this month about how the social media landscape seems to be in flux, Twitter, Reddit, the rest, well, wither Tumblr, what is the lane for a Tumblr in this current environment? Tumblr has detailed the future of its platform in a blog post, including efforts to, quote, fix the core experience and make the site less intimidating to better compete with

larger rivals. Quoting the Verge. Tumblr's staff blog has posted a long update on the future of the platform alluding to coming changes that include redesigning its reply and reblogue features. The goal, according to Tumblr staff, is to make Tumblr less intimidating, implicitly at a time when it could attract users disillusioned with platforms like Reddit and Twitter. In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience, says the post. To guarantee Tumblr's

continued success, we've got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators nurturing their growth and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform, end quote. The strategic changes are grouped into several categories, including expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr, and create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr. Some of the suggestions are broad and may simply indicate Tumblr plans to experiment with possible improvements. The Create Pattern section includes action items like conduct an audit of our messaging strategy and test what the right daily published

notification limit is. But the changes suggest Tumblr is interested in positioning itself as a stronger competitor to mainstream social networks, particularly for creators who want to share material on the platform. The goals include helping creators attract more engagement and making sure people see engaging posts every time they open Tumblr. One goal is to improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. Tumblr's feeds include a home dashboard of people you follow, plus an explore tab with suggested posts from across the site. There's also a video service called Tumblr Live, which I have never seen anybody use,

but which is apparently supremely weird. The most obvious change for existing users may be a series of planned updates to the reply and re-blog system. The current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users, the staff blog says. Tumblr plans to let users reply to a particular addition to a reblogged post, very loosely equivalent to a quote tweet, instead of grouping all replies under the original. It also wants to explore the feasibility of removing duplicate re-blogs with any user's following feed in case you don't want to watch popular posts ping-ponging around your

social circle. Interestingly, the update doesn't mention Tumblr's plans to integrate with decentralized social networking protocol activity pub, end quote. I get pings all the time from listeners asking me why I don't cover this data breach or that one. And again, I'm going to tell you, the reason is there are data breach headlines every day. I know if a specific data breach happens to you, it seems like the most important one to talk about, but I have to have some sort of bar to clear, lest this entire show just be data breaches all the time. This one clears a couple of important bars for me. Millions of users potentially affected, and it's in health care. CNBC is reporting that the personal data of potentially tens of millions of HCA healthcare patients

was stolen from an external storage location and is for sale on a data breach forum. HCA, one of the largest companies in the U.S. first acknowledged the breach earlier today. In a release, it warned patients that critical personal information had been compromised, including their full name city and when and where they last saw a provider. The provider claimed no clinical information had been disclosed. But databreeches.net reported Monday that the unnamed hacking group provided them a sample set of data about a patient's low-risk lung cancer assessment, which would apparently undercut HCA's assessment that no material or protected health information was breached. The hack affects

patients in nearly two dozen states, including patients at dozens of facilities in Florida and Texas. The data sale was flagged on Twitter by Brett Callow and analysts at New Zealand-based Emisoft. This may be one of the biggest health care-related breaches of the year and one of the biggest of all time. That said, despite affecting millions of people, it may not be as harmful as other breaches as based on HCA's statement, it doesn't seem to have impacted diagnoses or other medical information, Calo told CNBC. The hacker has, however, claimed to have emails with health diagnoses that correspond to a client ID, Calo noted. Patient data breaches are not uncommon, but they can vary in scope and effect. HCA's breach did not apparently include critical medical

records, and the company said the breach data originated at an, quote, external storage location exclusively used to automate the formatting of email messages, end quote. or on social networks for a second. Do we have room for another one? Maybe one that is going after Instagram itself? Well, quoting the information, it's a return to a simpler version of a popular social network, an app without fancy bells and whistles, a new iteration of a famously walled garden, one less commercialized, uncluded so far by advertising, and with more palatable ownership. No, I'm not talking about Instagram's threads this week as meta-platforms introduced the world to its new Twitter knockoff, I was testing out a beta version of Retro, an upstart Instagram competitor

built by four former meta employees. It operates with an ethos similar to that of threads, positing that maybe new social apps don't need to innovate. Perhaps they just need to recreate something we once loved. It's not called retro by accident. For meta, copycatting has worked. It's what the company did with Instagram stories, pulling the idea from Snapchat and with Reels, a direct rip-off of TikTok. But the borrowing can go both ways, with insurgent startups realizing that consumers aren't entirely happy with what Instagram has become, instead yearning for the simpler friend-focused feed it once was. Retro was founded by Nathan Sharp, a former director of product at Meta, who led the product team that launched Instagram Stories, and Ryan Olson, a former

director of engineering at Instagram. The app is designed as a photo journal, prompting users to retroactively post photos from the past week, cataloged by day. Profiles are viewable only by a user's friends and posts can only be seen after a user posts one of their own photos, though once a week users can unlock content for 24 hours even if they don't have anything of their own to share. It's designed as an Instagram for close contacts, not brands or professional creators. On other social platforms, quote, there's an extreme focus on people that you probably don't know, whether it's entertainers, creators, information experts, that sort of thing, Sharp told me this week. We think that there's probably a more open vacuum for a simple friends-only product

then there's really been in the last decade, end quote. Retro, which is preparing to launch on the app store next week, is particularly popular with at least one niche group so far, venture capitalists. The list of suggested accounts I saw on the app was peppered with big-name investors who have signed up, including Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, conviction founder, Sarah Gao, and Y Combinator President Gary Tan. The app's parent company, Lone Palm Labs, raised an undisclosed seed round from Thrive, Figma CEO, and co-founder Dylan field, scribble ventures, and several other funds and angel investors. Of course, the ash sheep of Silicon Valley history is filled with apps adopted early by venture capitalists that hit a brick wall

of indifference with consumers. Can Retro's vintage Instagram fare any better? The timing of its rollout, coming just one week after threads, is either auspicious or terrible, depending on how you look at it. But the takeaway is the same. Retro hopes to do to meta what meta just did to Twitter. Enough people are fed up with Twitter that they are now giving threads a shot, said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence, it really only needs to convert one and four Instagram users to threads to make it as big as Twitter will be this year, end quote. Sharp and Olson would likely be satisfied with even a smidgen of that percentage. Last summer, the pair who met on a Facebook shuttle in 2016, started brainstorming

ideas for a new social app and felt there was an opportunity around a friend's only product, Sharp said. In May 2022, they decided to leave meta and began to brainstorm a consumer social app. They landed on the idea for Retro that September. They've since hired two other team members, Peter Cottle and Sean Leach, both meta-alums as well. The first iteration of the app launched for a select group in January, and it's been in a closed beta since. The issue they have with Instagram is, quote, not so much a problem with technology or a format because the technology was perfectly fine, Sharpe said. What we saw is that some of the apps that evolved into a place where people kind of felt crowded out. It wasn't really just for friends and family anymore.

Retro wants to turn back the clock to a more digital digital. intimate era when users' feeds were filled with pictures of people they actually knew. Retro combines the old Instagram's aesthetic with a post-to-see-your-friend strategy that newer social platforms like Be Real piloted. Users can like each other's posts, but the number of likes isn't visible to the public. There's no camera attached to the app. All posts come from your camera roll, similar to the photo dump trend on Instagram, basically just posting a carousel of photos from a stretch of time. It also doesn't have any photo editing capabilities. The founders readily admit they aren't reinventing the wheel here. The format is not.

going to knock you over the head as something that's completely new, Sharp said. As with threads, the hope is not for a paradigm change, but a vibe shift. You should, over the course of a couple weeks, start to feel that it's different, he said. Their monetization strategy is similarly stripped down. Eventually, once the user base is established, they'll roll out a subscription model for premium features. Currently, users can only see Friends' photos four weeks back, but a paid add-on could unlock posts backdated beyond that. Sharp and Olson believe power users will one day be willing to pay for extra perks and compare Retro's subscription strategy to those of Discord and Snap. Barring any delayed approvals from Apple to enter the App Store, Retro should go live next week.

In the meantime, prospective users can sign up for the waitlist and reserve a username. And Berg hopes there's room for new social platforms like Retro to sustain growth, but she acknowledged the environment is extremely tough. People might say that they don't want another app from meta or that they don't trust meta or don't want to use their services. But the reality is that the company is very much intertwined with our daily lives already, she said. It's very difficult for newcomers to be able to build and grow against these jargonauts like meta and bite dance, end quote. Threads may well work because, Endberg noted, meta has, quote, the scale and resources and the execution strategy to make it work. But for a small, albeit well-connected upstart like retro with four employees, the results are less certain.

Nonetheless, the team believes they'll be able to cut through the noise, end quote. Finally today, a bit of the old history hat. According to a depressing study from the video game history Foundation. Only about 13% of video games released in the U.S. before the year 2010 are still in print right now. And it gets worse the further back in time you go. Less than 3% of titles released before 1985 are still in print in 2023, quoting gamehistory.org. Most classic games are no longer in print might sound like an obvious statement for us to write a 40-page study about, and it is. The retro gaming community knows from experience that most games are no longer available. Anyone who's tried to research old video games has probably run into a situation where they can't get a copy of the game they're studying.

That's the reality of the video game market. However, this isn't widely known outside the gaming community, and it's not easy to prove. From the outside, it certainly doesn't look like there's a problem. You can fire up your switch and get Super Mario Brothers and Pac-Man. You can buy a new copy of Final Fantasy 7 for just about every platform. There's certainly a market for classic game re-releases, and as far as the game industry is concerned, business is booming. Since 2012, libraries, museums, and archives in the United States have been petitioning the Copyright Office for new exemptions that would make it easier for them to preserve games and make those games

available to researchers. Each time, game industry lobbyists have opposed these new exemptions. They've argued that there's already an active growing market for classic games, something that libraries would interfere with if they got their way. The results of our studies show why this is important because consistently across every time period and platform we studied, availability was low. Our abandoned ecosystem, the Commodore 64, clocked in at an abysmal 4.5% while our active ecosystem, the PlayStation 2, only managed to make it to 12%. No five-year period examined by this study rose above 20% availability. For comparison, this is slightly above the availability of pre-World War II audio recordings at 10% or less, and slightly below the survival

rate of American silent films at 14%. We're talking about games from the 80s and 90s and 2000s, and their in just as bad shape as music and movies from back when Calvin Coolidge was president. Some of the most popular classic games are part of that 13% that remains in print. So if those are the games that people want to play, what's the problem here? The problem is that video game history is more than just the best sellers. If we want to understand and appreciate the history of video games, we need more than a curated list of the games that publishers decide have commercial value, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.