Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/27 – Amazon Joins The Self-Driving Race

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

Amazon joins the self-driving race, and actually, why haven’t they before? Google’s plans to get back to the office. HBO Max debuts, but with one major handicap. Facebook faces a novel whistleblower complaint and looking back on 2 years of GDPR. Sponsors: Go.rims.org/ridehome Tovala.com/ride DoubleUp.agency Links: Amazon in Advanced Talks to Buy Self-Driving-Car Tech Company Zoox (WSJ) Google to begin reopening offices July 6, will let workers expense $1,000 for equipment while telecommuting (CNET) Advertisers Seek to Revise Deal Terms With Streamer Quibi (WSJ) HBO Max debuts without the two most popular streaming platforms, Roku or Amazon (USAToday) ByteDance Hit $3 Billion in Net Profit Last Year (Bloomberg) Whistleblowers say Facebook has not warned investors about illegal activity, in new SEC complaint (Washington Post) Twitter labels Trump’s tweets with a fact check for the first time (Washington Post) Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive (WSJ) EU privacy enforcer hits make-or-break moment (Politico) Tech Giants’ Top EU Privacy Watchdog Attacked Over Slow Pace (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 TechMeme ride home for Wednesday, May 27th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon joins the self-driving race, and actually, why haven't they done so before? Google's plans to get back to the office, HBO Max debuts, but with one major handicap, Facebook faces a novel whistleblower complaint and looking back on two years of GDPR. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Amazon is in advance talks to buy self-driving car startup Zooks. That's Z-O-O-O-X.

The deal would reportedly value Zooks at less than the $3.2 billion valuation that the startup achieved in 2018. Now, before you say, Amazon getting into the self-driving vehicle race, that's not so. Think about it. It's actually kind of obvious. If self-driving vehicles could work, then obviously there's a solution to, Amazon's whole delivering packages problem. Quoting from the journal, an agreement may be weeks away, one of the people cautioned and the discussions could still fall apart. Zooks, founded in 2014, has been working to develop the hardware and software needed to create electric-powered

robot taxis that would be summoned by smartphone apps starting this year. A successful deal could give new life to a once-high-profile startup that has seen its fortunes dim as it struggled to raise money. Amazon, a few years ago, created a team devoted to driverless vehicle technology, motivated in part by a push to transport more of its goods itself. It has made several investments in the area, including last year when it participated in Autonomous Technology firm Aurora Innovation's $530 million funding round, end quote. We now know more about Google's plans to get back to work, at least in some capacity. CEO Sundar Pichai has told employees that Google plans to reopen offices targeting a July 6-D date.

But starting out, they're going to be targeting only around 10% capacity per building, increasing to only around 30% capacity by September. So Googlers will still be working remotely for the most part for the foreseeable future, quoting CNET. For people who want to continue working from home, Pachai said the company will allow employees to expense up to $1,000 for equipment and furniture, such as state. standing desks and ergonomic chairs. Google is amid big office expansions, including major additions

to its already sprawling headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company is also investing in a large campus in San Jose, California, and renovating a building in New York City. Pichai told Wired last week that remote working won't affect those projects. Quote, in all scenarios, I expect us to need physical spaces to get people together, absolutely. We have a lot of growth planned ahead, he said. So even if there's is some course correction. I don't think our existing footprint is going to be the issue, end quote. Banner Newsday for the Wall Street Journal. I'm going to be quoting from them half a dozen times in today's episode, and we'll be hearing from them at the end of the show.

But right now, they're giving us an update on Quibi, as sources have been telling the journal that some big-name advertisers, including Pepsi and Walmart, are seeking to, shall we say, renegotiate with Quibi. Further suggesting that Quibi's audience is not what Katzenberg and Coe had been hoping for, quoting the journal. Quibi, which was founded by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, struck ad deals valued at $150 million in the run-up to its April 6th launch, selling 10 blue-chip marketers on the prospect of a mobile-first ad platform featuring short-form movies and television shows. As of last week, Quibi had been installed by users about 4.2 million times, and the company had signed up around 1.5 million users to a free 90-day trial,

some of the people said. Quibi was initially targeting about 7 million paying subscribers in its first year and planning to have 16 million customers in three years. During an all-hands meeting last week, Quibi executive said the COVID-19 crisis wasn't the only factor that has hampered the launch, a person familiar with the meeting said. An over-reliance on scripted programming, a pool of inactive users and lower than hoped enthusiasm from some viewers all have affected the launch, the executives said at the meeting. Mr. Katzenberg was asked in the question and answer session how Quibi is, quote, changing the narrative around its launch. The person familiar with the meeting said, Mr. Katzenberg told staffers that product changes and quality content would help the company

distinguish itself. The company continues to launch new shows. Earlier this week, Quibi introduced a series about Kirby Jenner, a performance artist who pretends to be related to the Kardashian-Gener family of entrepreneurs and reality stars, end quote. Indeed, quality content to the rescue. And continuing on the streaming front, HBO Max debuts today, and when we've talked about HBO Max in the past, we've noted that HBO Max is the most expensive entrant in the streaming war. and that they were relatively late to the game, as it were. Customers have been cozing up to Disney Plus for half a year now. But what we haven't discussed is that HBO Max is also launching with something less than a full court press.

If you want to dial up HBO Max today to catch up on Friends, Big Bang Theory, or Game of Thrones, you won't be able to do so on Roku or Amazon devices. Between them, Roku and Amazon are the largest. streaming platforms with a combined 33% market share. So not being able to be seen by fully one-third of existing committed streamers is probably far from ideal. But then again, HBO Max has seemingly always been more interested in converting existing cable TV subscribers.

See, if you're an existing HBO Now subscriber, congratulations. You're now automatically an HBO Max subscriber. And quoting USA Today, beyond streaming many HBO. cable and satellite subscribers also get Max for free as customers of AT&T TV, DirecTV, AT&T Uverse, Cox Contour, Optimum, Spectrum, SunLink, and Verizon Fios TV are grandfathered in as well. But not all cable operators will offer Max for free, and there's one huge omission, the nation's largest cable operator Comcast. But the ones who do will offer streaming access to Max, not a separate Macs.

cable channel. Phil Swan, the author of the TV Answerman blog, says many of his readers are puzzled by the launch. They don't have a clue, he says. They don't understand why HBO Max isn't on Roku or Amazon. It's just a sea of confusion to them, end quote. For example, HBO Max is available for purchase directly from within the streaming services, Hulu, and YouTube TV. But if you watch those services on an Amazon or Roku player, or Roku branded TCL smart TVs, Your monthly $15 won't be worth much. Max won't be playable. And if you have subscribed to HBO now via Roku or Amazon,

your app won't update to Max because HBO and the companies couldn't come to terms, end quote. Bloomberg is reporting that ByteDance, the parent company of mega social media hit TikTok, generated more than $17 billion in revenue and more than $3 billion in net profit in the year 2019. Those are impressive numbers. all on their own, but they're even more so when you consider that that is more than double the $7.4 billion in revenue that ByteDance generated in the year 2018, quoting Bloomberg.

BiteDance has emerged as one of the tech industry's most surprising success stories, an innovative Chinese company that is challenging the global dominance of U.S. Internet giants. It draws some one and a half billion monthly active users to a family of apps that includes the TikTok short video platform, its Chinese twin Doyin, and the news service Tao Chow. This month, the company poached Walt Disney streaming czar Kevin Mayer to become chief executive officer of TikTok. The company owes much of its success to TikTok, now the online repository of choice for lip-sinking and dance videos by American teens. The ambitious company is also pushing aggressively into a plethora of new arenas from gaming and search to music.

ByteDance could fetch a valuation of between $150 billion and $180 billion in an initial public offering, a premium relative to sales of as much as 20% to social media giant Tencent, thanks to a larger global footprint and burgeoning games business, estimated Ki-Yan, Singapore-based analyst with DZT research. Quote, none of the Chinese tech companies has achieved this level of success in the global market before Bight Dance, he said, adding neither social media company harbors much debt. The fact that Bight Dance is making a profit, if true, and sitting on a $6 billion cash pile means that it is not in a rush at all to come to market to raise capital, and therefore

less likely to offer the shares at a more reasonable price for IPO investors, end quote. Here's a brand new worry for Facebook. A group of insiders has filed a confidential whistleblower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission claiming that Facebook has not warned investors of illegal activity that it is aware of on its platform. Note the distinction I'm making here. The whistleblowers claim that Facebook is aware of illegal activity on its platform but is not policing it. Why file such a thing with the SEC? See, because Facebook would have a duty to warn investors of any potential liability or criminal issues that it is aware of. This is needle-threading because of the way that the laws are

currently written, quoting the Washington Post. The complaint which was obtained by the Washington Post includes dozens of pages of screenshots of opioids and other drugs for sale on Facebook and its photo sharing site Instagram, with some having seemingly obvious tags, such as hashtag buy drugs online. It also notes that Facebook has a pattern of taking down content when it is pointed out by media or activists, only to have it reappear later. The filing is part of a campaign by the National Whistleblowers Center to hold Facebook accountable for unchecked criminal activity on its properties. By petitioning the SEC, the consortium is attempting to get around a bedrock law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that exempts internet companies from liability for

the user-generated content on their platform. Instead, the complaint focuses on federal securities law, arguing that Facebook's failure to tell shareholders about the extent of illegal activity on its platform is a violation of its fiduciary duty. If Facebook alienates advertisers and has to shoulder the true cost of scrubbing criminals from its social networks, it could affect investors in the company, the complaint argues, end quote. I'm going to group a bunch of political stories altogether into one segment here. In a first for the company, Twitter has added a get the facts label to two tweets from President Trump that made false claims about voting by mail. Here are the tweets in question, quoting the president. There is no way, zero, that mail and ballots will be anything less than

substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged, and even illegally printed out, and fraudulently signed. The guys are not. The guys will be robbed. The guy, of California is sending ballots to millions of people. Anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how and for whom to vote. This will be a rigged election, no way, end quote. Now, that tweet comes, despite the fact that there remains zero evidence of widespread voting fraud conducted in the U.S. generally or via mail-in ballots specifically. Like, there has simply never been any evidence of such. And by the way,

the president himself votes by mail-in ballot. Anywho, quoting the Washington Post, the tweets, said Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rossboro, quote, contained potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots, end quote. The label directs users to articles by CNN, the Washington Post, and the Hill, along with selections from the articles and a page summarizing the findings of fact-checkers. Twitter's action quickly drew backlash from Trump and his supporters. Twitter, quote, is now interfering in the 2020 presidential election, the president tweeted, quote, they are saying my statement on mail-in ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud is incorrect based on fact-checking by fake news CNN and

the Amazon Washington Post, end quote. Again, though, if there were any sources that could demonstrate voting fraud due to mail and ballots, despite the fact that they have been used regularly by tens of millions of people in each and every election for decades, perhaps Twitter's cards could point to those as other fact-checking sources. This morning, the president tweeted the following, quote, Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservatives' voices. We will strongly regulate or close them down before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do and failed in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that, end quote.

Which along those lines of alleged political bias in social media, the Wall Street Journal has a piece up saying that according to documents it saw, Facebook ordered research into Facebook's potentially politically polarizing people in terms of public opinion. But when the report came back in a damning way, suggesting that Facebook was indeed making people more politicized, more polarized, Facebook elected to shelve the research, quoting from the journal. Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had, in public and private expressed concern about, quote, sensationalism and polarization, end quote.

But in the end, Facebook's interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products. Facebook policy chief, Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil, were, quote, paternalistic, said people familiar with his comments. Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have

disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias, end quote. Finally, today, with the two-year anniversary of GDPR coming and going last week, Politico over the weekend took a look at how that's all been going over there. Europe and finds that the Irish Data Protection Commission, which is basically the teeth of the whole GDPR regime, is under increasing pressure to show results amid growing doubts about the agency's enforcement abilities. And by show results, that of course likely means throwing the book at major tech companies. The piece describes some executive reshuffling, the details of which are not important,

but, quote, the internal changes were not well communicated outside the DPC. Again, I'm referring to the Irish Data Protection Commission, leaving some across the block in doubt over who was in charge of high-profile cases, according to officials at other EU agencies. People who had filed complaints with the regulator went months without a response, raising questions about how officials were enforcing the rules. Other European watchdogs began to voice concerns in public that the region's flagship privacy standards were not being enforced. Nothing has really changed, said Fred Logue, a privacy lawyer in Dublin, who has filed multiple cases on behalf of clients with Ireland's privacy watchdog, adding that months would go by without

hearing from officials. When you deal with them, you don't get the sense that they're there to vindicate data protection rights, end quote. The agency's restructuring was the latest headache for the regulator two years after Europe's landmark privacy overhaul known as the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR came into force in late May 2018. Over that time, Helen Dixon, the agency's head and her staff of more than 140 regulators have yet to complete any of their investigations into big tech. Europe's new laws allow officials to impose fines of up to 4% of a company's global revenue, or potentially billions of euros, for failures to protect people's personal information. They've become the de facto global standard from Colombia to Japan, and achievement Brussels is eager to promote.

Yet discussions with both advocates and critics of Dublin's oversight reveal a picture of an agency struggling to come to terms with a powerful new regulatory weapon, with little experience or training about how to wield it. Last year, the agency received more than 7,000 data protection complaints a record high. It's currently working through a backlog of cases, as EU agencies are still trying to figure out how best to enforce the rules, end quote. Indeed, over the weekend, Privacy Advocate Max Schwerms criticized the Irish Data Protection Authority in an open letter, specifically calling out the slow pace of its probes into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Quote, with about 10,000 complaints in two years and no fines at all against private actors, it is obvious that Ireland does not

effectively implement EU law, Schwerms Group said in the letter. Schwerms also accused the regulator of, quote, secret cooperation, end quote, with Facebook during 10 meetings before the GDPR took effect, putting the Irish authority in a situation where it is now, quote, structurally biased because it is essentially reviewing its own legal advice to Facebook on how to bypass rules on getting user consent, end quote. Long episode today, the news just kept on coming. And actually, I'm going to go ahead and hit publish now before something else happens talk to you tomorrow