Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/19 - The Fallout From Facebook Coin

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Wednesday, June 19th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. More revelations about the horrible job that is being a Facebook moderator. Best Buy now doubles as a genius bar, sort of. YouTube has some new AR tricks and is mulling some changes for kids. And the reaction to Facebook's crypto play has me fascinated.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The big story that everyone has been talking about today is from The Verge. Casey Newton did another investigative report about a Facebook content moderation facility, this time in Tampa, Florida. This time he spoke to 12 former Facebook content moderators, three of them on the record, breaking their confidentiality agreements. And I'm not going to quote from it extensively because I want you to read it for yourself, and also you know the drill.

Starting point is 00:01:27 It is super depressing. appalling working conditions. Many of the workers are coming away with PTSD because of all of the insane stuff that they have to wade through every day. I think of what Casey said when he came on this show to talk about his piece last time, that these people should be treated and paid like the frontline social workers and societal EMTs that they are. The piece is super critical of cognizant again, the company that Facebook outsources the moderation to, but As Casey sums up, quote, If you believe moderation is a high-skilled high-stakes job that presents unique psychological risks to your workforce,

Starting point is 00:02:08 you might hire all of those workers as full-time employees. But if you believe that it is a low-skilled job that will someday be done primarily by algorithms, you probably would not. Instead, you would do what Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter have done, and hire companies like Accenture, GenPact, and Cognizant to do the work for you. Leave to them the messy work of finding and training human beings and of laying them all off when the contract ends. Ask the vendors to hit some just out of reach metric and let them figure out how to get there. At Google, contractors like these already represent a majority of its workforce.

Starting point is 00:02:45 The system allows tech giants to save billions of dollars a year while reporting record profits each quarter. Some vendors may turn out to mistreat their workers, threatening the reputation of the tech giant that hired them, but countless more stories will remain hidden behind non-disclosure agreements. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people around the world go to work each day at an office where taking care of the individual person is always someone else's job, where at the highest levels, human content moderators are viewed as a speed bump on the way to an AI-powered future, end quote. Apple says that its devices can now be repaired at over 1,000 Best Buy locations across the U.S. So essentially, Apple has quadrupled the amount of eye triage centers.

Starting point is 00:03:35 You can take your Apple stuff to when it breaks beyond the 270 or so Apple stores in the U.S., quoting TechCrunch. It's a deal that makes sense for both parties. For Apple, it means covering customers in locations like Yuma, Sue City, and Bismarck. This brings its total third-party authorized service locations up to 1,800 in the U.S. For Best Buy, the deal means a partnership and blessing from another key electronics giant with Apple joining the likes of Samsung, which currently has authorized galaxy repairs from the Big Box store, end quote. The high-end Kindle device, the Kindle Oasis, got an update today, adding color temperature

Starting point is 00:04:22 adjustment for night reading. In a first for Amazon's e-reader, you can adjust the color tone of the display from the traditional white all the way to a pretty legal pad-looking. yellow. You can also schedule the device to shift to a warmer tone to coincide with sunrise and sunset. There were no other updates to the device beyond Amazon vaguely saying it also has the next generation of E-ink technology for fast page turns, quoting the verge. Otherwise, the third generation Oasis is virtually the same as the older model, which is largely a good thing, given that the second-gen Oasis was a great device. That means it has the same 7-inch, 300 pPI, e-ink display, one-handed

Starting point is 00:05:04 design, waterproofing, and Bluetooth support for audible audiobooks. Unfortunately, that also means that, like the rest of Amazon's Kindle hardware, you're still stuck with micro-usb for charging and not USBC in what's becoming an increasingly difficult to defend choice from Amazon. The new Kindle Oasis will start at $249.99 for the 8-gigabyte model and, $279.99 for the 32-gigabyte version, the same as the previous price, although add-ons like removing ads or cellular data will cost extra. It's set to go on sale July 24th, with pre-orders available starting today at Amazon's website, end quote. Two YouTube stories now. YouTube has unveiled AR Beauty Try-On, which lets viewers virtually try-on makeup while watching beauty tutorials. The feature

Starting point is 00:05:59 is currently testing, in fact, it's still only in alpha, and is expected to come out sometime later this summer, quoting TechCrunch, when available the YouTube makeup review or tutorial video plays at the top of the screen with a stream from your own front-facing camera below. Here, a YouTube viewer could access a palette of colors like new lipstick shades, for example, and tap to apply them to their own face while the video plays above. YouTube says it already tested AR Beauty Tryon with several beauty brands and found that 30% of viewers chose to activate the experience when it was available in the YouTube iOS app. While that's not a majority by any means, those who did try the feature were fairly engaged, spending more than 80 seconds trying on the virtual lipstick shades. Mac Cosmetics is the first brand to launch an AR Beauty Tryon campaign, which includes the ability for the brand to see real-time results from the try-on activity, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:55 And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that YouTube is considering far-reaching changes to protect kids on its platform, including moving all children's content to the YouTube Kids app, quoting the journal. That would be a seismic and risky switch as children's videos are among the most popular on the platform and carry millions of dollars in advertising. Some YouTube employees are pushing for another major modification. They are encouraging the company to switch off for children's programming, a feature that automatically plays a new video after one has been completed, according to the people briefed. While that default setting known as YouTube's recommendation system has helped boost audience hours to new heights, it has also opened the company up to criticism that kids and parents

Starting point is 00:07:37 can select innocuous videos only to be automatically transitioned into inappropriate fare, end quote. Yeah, I don't know if I've ever told this story on this show before, but after we got a Google Nest hub or whatever they call it now, the one with the screen on it. My kids fell in love with YouTube. They started watching Thomas the Train videos one day. And 20 minutes later, I came back and I'm not making this up. There was some video playing with Thomas the Train going through a McDonald's drive-thru window. And then in the background, the McDonald's itself was on fire and all the trains were screaming and running around. And I was like, what in the loving heck is going on here? Yes, like many people have said on Twitter, I've learned that you cannot leave kids alone on YouTube unsupervised for even five minutes thanks to autoplay.

Starting point is 00:08:30 Penny still tells me all the time, Papa, you think there's bad things on YouTube, but there's not. And I always think, Penny, you've got the wrong Papa because unfortunately it's my job to read about all of the bad things that are on YouTube every single day. Well, it's worth taking a look at the reactions to Facebook's cryptocurrency announcement yesterday because it's actually been more substantive and has come quicker than I ever would have imagined. For example, Congress is already calling for Facebook to halt development of Libra until Congress can look into it. With the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of users, House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters said in a statement, Given the company's trouble past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any

Starting point is 00:09:27 movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action, end quote. Waters' comments came shortly after the top Republican on the committee. Representative Patrick McKenry wrote to Waters requesting a hearing on Facebook's new initiative. We know there are many open questions as to the scumption. scope and scale of the project and how it will conform to our global financial regulatory framework, McHenry wrote. It is incumbent upon us as policymakers to understand Project Libra. We need to go beyond the rumors and speculations and provide a forum to assess this project and its potential

Starting point is 00:10:03 unprecedented impact on the global financial system, end quote. And that came after the French finance minister called on the group of seven central bank governors to review Facebook's Libra, citing concerns that it may become a sovereign currency. So, yeah, Facebook's reputation has preceded it. And what is interesting, I think, is that having a quote-unquote population of 20 billion people or so and creating essentially your own currency might get the attention of, you know, nation states. Why might governments be wary of Facebook encroaching on their territory? Well, here's a quick, for instance, that I saw.

Starting point is 00:10:42 prominent bitcoiner Andreas Antonopoulos tweeted, and he's quoting someone else here, Libra doesn't compete with central banks, they're using a basket of currencies, to which Antonopoulos says, quote, think about what happens in, say, India, when they decide to apply monetary policy, to devalue their currency, and people have access to hard currency Libra alternative, it undermines the power of monetary policy, end quote, to which Joe Wisenthal tweeted, this is an interesting question. Devaluing currency aside, what if buying a basket of stable DM currencies is as easy as buying a long-distance phone card? How do authorities handle that? Or do they care? If Lieber becomes an easy vehicle for people in chaotic economies

Starting point is 00:11:30 to buy a stable asset, maybe it turns out to be a gold killer, end quote. And Mike Dutus in the block wondered, where are the banks? The Libre Association includes the likes of Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, but not a single bank. Quote, the facts remain. Governments and central banks are deeply intertwined with the largest banks in nearly every country in the world from a regulatory and dependency perspective, end quote. So might the banks and governments together see an emergent threat to their entrenched sovereign power here, which would create an interesting conundrum to be sure.

Starting point is 00:12:06 If there's a showdown coming between Facebook and the big banks, what side would you even root for? And two other things that caught my eye. In Stephen Levy's summation of the Libra project in Wired, I noticed this graph, quote, Facebook knows that critics and regulators might freak out, that it's adding a wallet that will give it bundles of new personal data, so it's taken pains to assure people that this information won't be blended with other stuff it knows about you, or that your Libra purchases will be used to target ads. Calibra will be a separate subsidiary of Facebook and keeps the information separate. unless you give permission to allow data like your Facebook friends to be blended into Calibra for convenience and added features.

Starting point is 00:12:48 If you use the version of Calibra integrated with WhatsApp or Messenger, Facebook will be able to see which people or businesses you've transacted with, though it says other details won't be visible. Also, the draft terms of service give Facebook the right to use aggregated Calibra data, quote, to facilitate and improve the Calibra product experience and market Calibra products and services. end quote. Then there is the ongoing question of, to what degree Libra is either the ultimate fulfillment of the crypto dream or some sort of betrayal of it, quoting from the verge. While many of the technical aspects are similar to Bitcoin, Libra breaks from the model in important

Starting point is 00:13:30 ways. The currency runs on a permissioned blockchain, which means that only companies in the Libra Association can mine it. As the developers describe it, it's a necessary concession to stability, allowing Libra to avoid the power use and transaction lag problems that have plagued Bitcoin. But it also makes the Libra Association a de facto central bank, actively managing the currency for stability, backed by a reserve of bonds and liquid currency. As a blockchain business, it makes perfect sense. You need a blockchain that can clear transactions quickly and won't plummet in price after you buy it, but as a question of trust, it's a bizarre choice. If you don't trust the Federal Reserve, why would you trust Visa and MasterCard?

Starting point is 00:14:13 Libra doesn't plan to stay permissioned forever. A separate document lays out the association's plans to open to more members, ultimately moving to a permissionless model after five years when the scalability problems have presumably been solved. This plan is entirely possible, but there's reason to be skeptical. No blockchain has ever moved from permissioned to permission less, and there will be significant political hurdles to clear, not the least of which are the companies in the association, which may want to hold on to their privileged position in the network. At best,

Starting point is 00:14:43 the five-year timeline seems like kicking the can down the road, hoping that the technical problems seem less insurmountable in the future. At worst, it seems like a faint. Knowing that a centrally managed blockchain wouldn't be trusted, the Libre team promised it was only temporary, planning to come up with a fix later, end quote. As I said at the outset, I'm finding the reaction to Facebook deciding to do a crypto coin as fascinating as Facebook deciding to do a crypto coin. Like, might this end up being the biggest test yet of the move fast and break things ethos in the sense that this is the biggest thing that Facebook has ever tried to disrupt? Will people let them do it? Suddenly, I'm not so sure.

Starting point is 00:15:31 That is all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. My Twitter is at Brian MCC. The podcast subreddit is our slash right home. The bottom link in the show notes lets you subscribe to the ad-free feed right inside your podcast app. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/19 - The Fallout From Facebook Coin

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