Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/24 - Tim Cook Attacks the "Data Industrial Complex"

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

Tim Cook attacks the “data industrial complex,” why political texts are flooding your phone, the US, China and the AI cold war, and how Facebook Messenger got its new look. Links: Apple’s Tim Cook Makes Blistering Attack On the “Data Industrial Complex” (TechCrunch) Why political text messages are flooding your phone (Axios) The AI Cold War That Could Doom Us All (Wired) Messenger redesigns to clean up Facebook’s mess (TechCrunch) How Facebook’s Messenger Got Its New Look in a New Jersey Basement (Wired) 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 Wednesday, October 24th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Tim Cook attacks the data industrial complex.

Why political texts are flooding your phone? The U.S., China, and the AI Cold War, and how Facebook Messenger got its new look. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a Barn Burner keynote speech at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels. His speech was a chilling warning about the dangers of what he called the data industrial complex, hearkening back to President Eisenhower's 1962 message to Americans about the growing power of the so-called military industrial complex during the Cold War.

Let me start by quoting a section of Cook's speech. Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is then run through algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences, into hardened convictions. If green is your favorite color, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles

or watching a lot of videos about the insidious threat from people who like orange. In the news, almost every day, we bear witness to the harmful, even deadly effects of these narrowed world views. We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance, end quote. He also warned about the danger

of training artificial intelligence based on identifiable data about users. again quoting, For artificial intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including privacy. If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound. We can achieve both great artificial intelligence and great privacy standards.

It is not only a possibility, it is a responsibility, end quote. Cook went on to praise GDPR, the recently implemented data protection law in Europe. He also named checked Singapore, Japan, Brazil, and New Zealand, all of which have dealt in some way or in another with data privacy in their laws. He then said, quote, it's time for the rest of the world, including my home country, to follow your lead, end quote. Cook then laid out four essential principles for new data privacy laws that he wants to see implemented in the U.S. These principles are, number

one, the right to have personal data minimized. This is the idea that personal data should be de-identified or simply not collected in the first place, minimizing both the amount of personal data that exists and the damage it can do. Number two, the right to knowledge. Cook insisted that users have a right to know what data is being collected about them and also what it will be used for. He said, anything less is a sham. Three, the right to access.

Much like the recent GDPR imposed features that allow you to get a download of all the data a company has about you, Cook says companies need to recognize that, quote, data belongs to users. Based on that idea, users should be able to correct inaccuracies in the that data or delete it altogether. And finally, number four, the right to security. Cook said security is foundational to trust and all other privacy rights, end quote. After laying out these principles, Cook took a few digs at Apple's competitors that sometimes endorsed data privacy reform publicly, but privately lobby against it. He wrapped up with a call to optimism, immediately

followed by a pragmatic insistence that people matter and their trust matters. Here's the quote. technology's potential is and always must be rooted in the faith people have in it, in the optimism and the creativity that it stirs in the hearts of individuals, in its promise and capacity to make the world a better place. It's time to face facts. We will never achieve technology's true potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it, end quote. Also today, I thought that this would be an implicit bookend to that last segment,

Google announced a more direct interface to manage the data Google has about you. Quoting from their blog posts, today we're making it easier for you to make decisions about your data directly within the Google products you use every day, starting with search. Without ever leaving search, you can now review and delete your recent search activity, get quick access to the most relevant privacy controls in your Google account, and learn more about how search works with your data, end quote. The big change here is moving these data.

data management tools from the hard-to-find areas of the Google account interface directly into the Google product you're currently using. This should help users use data management features without having to poke around trying to find them. In addition to making these settings more prominent, new explainer videos will clarify what kinds of data are being collected and what you can do about that. Google says the changes will roll out first in Google Search on desktop and mobile web versions today, then in the Google app for iOS and Android in the coming weeks. In 2019, the changes will come to Google Maps and, quote, many other Google products. If your cell phone has been blowing up with text messages from political campaigns, you're not

alone. Axios reports that U.S. campaigns have turned to so-called peer-to-peer or p-to-pe texting ahead of November's election as a way to increase engagement in politics. Why? Well, unlike robocalls and mass texting, it's perfectly legal for a real person at a political campaign to text you or to manually dial your phone number, even if you're on the do not call list. Axios reports that campaigns often glean phone numbers from voter records or buy them in bulk from firms that collect voter data. Since the messages are actually sent by real humans, typically campaign volunteers, they can start a dialogue spanning many messages. That's a level of engagement you just can't get with an email or a TV ad. Or the engagement the campaign gets is a

pissed off cell phone user with the equivalent of spam pinging their phone all day. Plenty of voters aren't happy with this campaign practice. In one Florida community, political text messages arrived in the middle of the night waking voters up to tell them that a mayoral candidate in the city at plantation had the endorsement of local police. The recipients of those messages filed complaints with the FCC and the Florida Elections Commission. according to the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. And in Texas, Colin County resident Samir Saeed filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all Texans

against Beto O'Rourke's campaign. Said claimed the O'Rourke campaign set him nine text messages without his permission and he couldn't get a human to respond when he called the originating phone numbers back, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram. An organization called P2P Alliance has filed a petition with the FCC

asking it to rule on the issue, clarifying whether or not these human-initiated text messages break rules or just the spirit of the rules. The FCC has not yet weighed in, although the Axios story suggests that campaigns believe they are probably in the clear for now. Axios recommends that if you get a text message you don't want, you can reply with the word stop. For many automated systems, this is an explicit opt-out trigger. For humans receiving a one-word text message like stop, it's also a pretty clear indicator of what you probably want. Also today, a really interesting long read from Wired about the possibility of a new Cold War, this time between the U.S. and China, and this time with the battlefield being artificial intelligence.

The story begins with an event that was only a blip in the U.S. in terms of news, the moment in 2016 when Alphabet's AI platform defeated a world champion go player in South Korea. While 280 million people in China watched the match live, people in the U.S. mostly said, what's this Go thing? Go is an ancient Asian game and here was a computer system built in California taking the win. Quoting the wired piece in Beijing, the machine's victory cracked the air like a warning shot. That impression was only reinforced when over the next few months the Obama administration published a series of reports grappling with the benefits and risks of AI. The papers made a series of recommendations for government action, both to stave off potential job losses from automation and to invest in the the development of machine learning. A group of senior policy wonks inside China's science and

technology bureaucracy who had already been working on their own plan for AI believed they were seeing signs of a focused emerging U.S. strategy, and they needed to act fast, end quote. When a second major win by AlphaGo happened in May 2017, this time against Chinese go master K. Jai, China responded by releasing the next generation artificial intelligence development plan, which laid out a strategy for China to dominate global AI by 2030. Suddenly, AI was one of the key initiatives for both government and industry in China. Alibaba, the online shopping site, began developing a city brain for a special economic zone near Beijing. The brain would ingest data from sensors and cameras in order to optimize things like traffic lights,

and it would be built into the new city from the start. In October of 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech in which he named AI, big data, and the internet as key technological spheres for China to focus on. Quoting Kai Fu Lee's new book, AI Superpowers, quote, if AlphaGo was China's Sputnik moment, the government's AI plan was like President John F. Kennedy's landmark speech calling for America to land a man on the moon, end quote. The article goes deep on what an AI race means for both sides and emphasizes a chilling point. It's essentially a zero-sum game, as in games.

of chess or go, only one player can win, so there are few motives to collaborate. From the U.S. side of the story, there is a growing fear that whoever cracks AI first will have an insurmountable advantage. There is belief that true breakthroughs in AI will be exponential, not incremental, and thus whoever gets there first will use whatever AI breakthroughs that come to solidify that country's technological dominance, possibly also using those breakthroughs to frustrate the other side's ability to ever catch up. This terrifies policymakers and technologists and even militaries on both sides of the Pacific. With China investing heavily and firing on all cylinders in the AI race, it sees an increasing internal collaboration

between its government and business sectors. But in the U.S., government and business are increasingly at odds over issues like user privacy and surveillance, which seem like non-issues on the Chinese side of the fence. Indeed, Chinese AI is explicitly designed to surveil citizens. That's what you intend when you build AI into the heart of your new cities with their digital eyes watching and optimizing everything. Here's another quote from the wired piece. Quote, China's police cloud system is built to monitor seven categories of people, including those who undermine stability. The country also aspires to build a system that will give every citizen and every company a social credit score.

Imagine your FICO score adjusted to reflect your shopping habits, your driving record, and the appropriateness of your politics, end quote. Check out this piece for a sane and legitimately scary look at how the U.S. and China see AI differently and how that may lead to serious clashes. You might have noticed that your Facebook Messenger has gotten a new look. A redesign of the product is rolling out now. and usually app makeovers aren't that interesting to me, but this one was for a couple of reasons. First, it feels like a strategic shift for Facebook, at least for this one product,

because the bottom line is Messenger had just gotten way too bloated. And for once, I guess, Facebook is showing that it can be self-aware. As Owen Williams noted in his newsletter, quote, Until now, Messenger felt like a messy land of growth hacks designed to get you using it more. but it seems Facebook might be beginning to understand that simplicity is important. Before it was an array of buttons, tabs, weird patterns designed to get you to add a bot or story, and much more, end quote. Facebook even acknowledges that it had a problem with restraint. Quote, you build a feature and then you build another feature and they are piling up, said Facebook's head of messenger Stan Shednovsky.

Quote, we either continue to pile on or we build a foundation. that will allow us to build simplicity and powerful features on top of something new that goes back to its roots, end quote. So Facebook has gone back to the drawing board, and the redesign there is more white space, fewer tabs to navigate through, and though a lot of things like video calls and stories and all sorts of stuff have sort of been swept into corners, they're not gone entirely, just filed away sensibly.

But the other thing that I found fascinating about this redesign story was this detail, Quote, the key shaper of the new messenger's look is Christian Delonzo, a 23-year-old who was still an undergraduate at Rowan University in New Jersey when he crafted the bubbly vibe of what was known internally as M4, announced today after a long gestation. He blueprinted the screen experience of a billion-plus people while living in the basement of his parents' South Jersey home. Delonzo had twice spent summers interning at Facebook, embedded with the Messenger design team. He had been so impressive that the company agreed to hire him after his 2015 summer stint, even as he returned to New Jersey to finish his degree. The ideas he came up with in his basement a year later helped Messenger evolve its own distinct brand, end quote. Apparently Delonzo was inspired by Steve Jobs' years ago description of the look of Aqua,

the Mac OS10 interface from the early 2000s, which jobs described as lickable. When Delonzo shared his new ideas with the messenger team over video conference from his New Jersey basement, they seized on his designs as a new way forward for the app. In May of last year, Delonzo finally graduated and moved to California to help Shepard the redesign through Facebook's various design processes until as of today it is now ready for the masses.

So a new simplified direction for Messenger and perhaps a new design star by way of a New Jersey basement. By the way, I forgot to thank Chris Higgins for helping me write the show yesterday, so thank you for that, Chris. And he helped me write the show again today. So, again, thank you, Chris. And in fact, Chris is going to write, record, and host tomorrow's show as I'm booked up with book-related promotions. So thank you in advance, Chris, and have fun. Chris will talk to you guys tomorrow, and I'll talk to you again on Friday.