Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/03 – Meta And Zillow Shut It Down

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Facebook shuts down its decade-old face scanning and photo tagging feature. Zillow shuts down its house flipping business entirely. Netflix’s foray into games officially launches widely. And Microsoft says hey Zuckerberg, if you think the Metaverse is going to be about work meetings with cartoonish avatars and virtual whiteboards? Hold our beer! Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride TinyCapital.com Links: Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans to Shut Down Facial Recognition System (NYTimes) Zillow to shutter home buying business and lay off 2,000 employees as its big real estate bet falters (GeekWire) CISA creates catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities, orders agencies to patch (The Record) Netflix games are coming to all members on Android, starting this week (TechCrunch) Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings (The Verge) Loop app from Microsoft keeps projects in sync across Microsoft 365 (VentureBeat) 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, November 3rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Facebook shuts down its decade-old face scanning and photo-tagging feature. Zillow shuts down its house-flipping business entirely. Netflix's Foray into games officially launches widely, and Microsoft says, hey Zuckerberg. If you think the Metaverse is going to be all about work meetings with cartoonish avatars and virtual whiteboards, hold our beer. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Meta plans to shut down Facebook's decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting all of the face-scan data of more than one billion people it has collected over the years, following legal and regulatory concerns about

this practice. Quoting the New York Times. Jerome Passenti, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Meta, Facebook's newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of, quote, many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, end quote. He added that the company still saw the software as a powerful tool, but, quote, every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance, end quote. The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could

save time. The facial recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users tag them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facebook only used its facial recognition capabilities on its own site and did not sell its software to third parties. Even so, the feature became a privacy and regulatory headache for the company. Privacy advocates repeatedly raised questions about how much facial data Facebook had amassed and what the company could do with such information. Images of faces that are

found on social networks can be used by startups and other entities to train facial recognition software. When the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a record $5 billion to settle privacy complaints in 2019, the facial recognition software was among the concerns. Last year, the company also agreed to pay $650 million to settle a class action lawsuit in Illinois that accused Facebook of violating a state law that requires residents' consent to use their biometric information, including their face geometry. The change affects more than a third of Facebook's daily users who had facial recognition turned on for their accounts, according to the company. That meant they received alerts when new photos or videos of them were uploaded to the social network. The feature had also been used

to flag accounts that might be impersonating someone else and was incorporated into software that described photos to blind users. Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called Deepface. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, said Jason Gross, a meta spokesperson, end quote. Side note, but I guess we're really doing this. It really is meta from now on.

I suppose we have no choice. Well, that was fast. Zillow says it is shutting down its home buying business entirely, laying off around 2,000 employees and taking a write-down of more than $500 million. $1,000, quoting Geekwire. The decision is a remarkable reversal from the company's home sales operation that represented a fundamental shift away from Zillow's core business when it began rolling out in 2018. Zillow was pinning its future on Zillow offers beyond its core business as a home price

estimate platform and lead generator for agents. It originally projected annual revenue of $20 billion by 2024 off 5,000 home sales per month from the home flipping program, which was billed as a way. way for consumers to avoid the hassle, time commitment, and uncertainty of a traditional sale. We've determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated, and continuing to scale Zillow offers would result in too much earnings and balance sheet volatility, Zillow, C.O. C.E.O. C.E.R.T.O., C.E.R.T.T.T.E.T.E. at Zillow, end quote. On a call with analyst, Barton apologized to the laid-off employees. I'm sorry for how

difficult and disruptive this will be, said Barton, who co-founded Zillow 16 years ago and is the largest individual shareholder. Barton provided more explanation in a shareholder's letter. He cited price forecasting volatility caused in part by the pandemic, which initially froze the housing market followed by rising home prices and a supply demand imbalance. That resulted in Zillow offers unit economics fluctuating in both directions by margins wider than Zillow predicted. Zillow, as a result, was unable to accurately forecast the price of homes three to six months in the future and was forced to think about making Zillow offers an even larger business. Barton said, quote, the business would only become consistently profitable at scale.

We have determined this large scale would require too much equity capital, create too much volatility in our earnings and balance sheet and ultimately result in far lower return on equity than we imagined, end quote. In an interview with CNBC, Barton said that the move was about, quote, not being naive and thinking that this kind of price movement could never happen again in the future, end quote. As Lori Voss tweeted, quote, so did Zillow fail to become a buyer and seller of homes directly because it undermined their credibility as a search engine if they were also a broker, or just because they were bad at it? End quote. Obasandro tweeted, they basically went head to head with Open Door without any secret sauce,

then lost big. Open Door sub-tweets Zillow's earnings to let everyone know their business model is sound, and it's Zillow that failed to execute, end quote. And John Ford tweeted, quote, This Zillow story is crazy and underscores the importance of understanding what big data and AI can and can't deliver. There will be many more emperors wearing disappointingly flimsy outfits before all is done, end quote. Netflix has rolled out its exclusive mobile games globally to the Play Store and plans to feature them in its Android apps starting this week, quoting TechCrunch. In July, the streaming service first confirmed its plans to enter the mobile gaming market

calling games another new content category for the company to offer its subscribers alongside movies and TV. Since then, Netflix has made available to members a growing number of free games with no ads or in-app payments, including a mix of both casual games and those centered around its popular original TV series, Stranger Things. And just last month, TechCrunch broke the news of Netflix's gaming expansion with the launch of three new casual games, Frosty Pop's Shooting Hoops, and Teeter Up, and Rogue Games card blast, two Netflix subscribers in Spain and Italy in addition to Poland. Now this full lineup, including the two Stranger Things games and three casual games, will become available to all members globally on Android. To access the titles, users will

tap on the new games tab in the Netflix app for Android where the games are listed. After selecting a title, users are directed to the Google Play Store to install the games as you would any other app. However, to sign in and play the game, a Netflix membership is required. After being downloaded, the games will be available to play at any time by tapping them within the Netflix app or on the home screen of their Android device. During tests, the games were only available to Android smartphone users. With the global launch, they'll now become available to members with Android tablets to Netflix says. Here, the games will also be featured in a new games row, pinned to position six, and they'll be found in the category's drop-down menu in the Netflix app. The company

tells TechCrunch the new games will become visible in the Google Play Store starting today, but the rollout to the Netflix Android app will begin on Wednesday. It may be several days until that rollout completes, and all Netflix members in global markets are able to access the games, end quote. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency today announced a catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities, including from companies like Apple and Google, and ordered federal agencies for the first time to apply patches within specific timeframes, quoting the record. The catalog currently lists 306 vulnerabilities with some as old as 2010 that are still being exploited in the wild. This includes vulnerabilities for products from

Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Atlassian, IBM, and many other companies large and small alike. For the vulnerabilities disclosed this year, CISA has ordered U.S. Federal Civilian agencies to apply patches by November 17, 2021. For older vulnerabilities, agencies have to patch systems by May 3, 2022. In a press release, CISA also said they plan to add new entries to their database as new vulnerabilities come under active exploitation. An RSS feed was provided for this purpose to allow IT and security teams to keep an eye on new entries to the database, end quote. Microsoft kicked off its annual Ignite conference yesterday, and I bet you can guess what

recently popular buzzword popped up quite a bit. Here's a hint from one of the big headlines from yesterday. Microsoft said it will bring its mixed reality platform mesh, with 3D avatars and virtual reality support to Microsoft Teams in the first half of 2022. Or as somebody snarked on Twitter, hey, don't worry, when you join the Metaverse, PowerPoint and Excel will be there too, quoting the Verge. Microsoft is entering the race to build a Metaverse inside Teams. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences,

directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It's part of a big effort to combine the company's mixed reality and HoloLens, work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars. With today's announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the Metaverse, particularly for the future of work. Microsoft Teams will get new 3D avatars in a push toward a Metaverse environment, and you won't need to put a VR headset on to use them. These avatars can literally represent you in both 2D and 3D meetings so you can choose to have an animated version of yourself if you're not feeling like turning your webcam on.

Microsoft will use AI to listen to your voice and then animate your avatar. If you switch to a more immersive 3D meeting, then these animations will also include raising your avatar's hands when you hit the raise hand option or animate emoji around your avatar. The immersive spaces are really where Microsoft sees this mesh integration as being the most useful, particularly in its efforts to build a metaverse for businesses. Microsoft envisions virtual spaces inside teams where people can network and socialize with games or even use Microsoft apps to collaborate on projects. These virtual environments will obviously work best with a VR or AR headset,

but they'll be open to anyone across multiple devices thanks to the animated avatar work. I think the thing that really separates how Microsoft is approaching Metaverse and our own experiences is starting with the human experience. So the feeling of presence talking to somebody, making eye contact and reactions, are going to be important, explained a Microsoft spokesperson. Microsoft is even building in translation and transcription support, so you might be able to meet in a virtual team space with a co-worker from across the world with fewer language barriers. The promise is that Microsoft teams will be able to start to use these virtual spaces and avatars in the first half of 2022, end quote.

Quoting Dar Obisangio on Twitter one more time today, I love that big tech companies are now competing for who can make meetings look more like the world's most boring Fortnite session, end quote. Amin Gun Serere tweeted, quote, Look, the Metaverse, as envisioned by Big Tech, is just going to be ads, ads, and ads combined with office work. It's full-on cringe because this is all they know. The actual Metaverse will be built on blockchains, end quote. Though a more optimistic take came from Fast Company who said that if Meta wants to build a Metaverse, Microsoft wants its mesh platform to be the glue that holds a multiverse of many worlds together.

And also to be slightly unfair to Microsoft. Remember, boring, unsexy office work is their bread and butter. So, you know, finally though, real quickly and somewhat unrelatedly, the other big headline from Ignite yesterday came when Microsoft announced Loop, an app that combines a, quote, flexible canvas with collaborative components that sync across Microsoft 365 services, quoting Venture Beat. Built on Microsoft's fluid framework, loop is, quote, the next big break. through in Microsoft 365, according to Microsoft 365 corporate VP, Jared Spataro.

We're completely reimagining office to go beyond the traditional confines of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation spilling over to entirely new mediums, just like teams transformed collaboration and productivity. Spataro said in a blog post, loop consists of three core elements, loop components, previously fluid components, loop pages and loop workspaces. Loop components are units of productivity that allow users to complete, work and collaborate in the flow of work, either on a loop page or in a chat, email, document, or online meeting. Components can be as simple as lists, tables, and notes, or as sophisticated as a customer sales opportunity from Dynamics 365, according to Microsoft, and they always

stay in sync across Microsoft 365 apps. Under the hood, loop components are a JavaScript library and a set of services that the library interacts with in order to synchronize objects. For example, in a web app, a table in a document would be represented as a JavaScript object. The web app calls a service to synchronize status changes, and that flows to all the other participants. As for Loop Pages, their, quote, flexible canvases, once again, where users can organize their components and pull in elements like links, files, or data. Loop Workspaces are shared platforms that allow users to see and group everything important to their project, ostensibly making it easier for users to catch up on what everyone's working on, as well as react to ideas and track progress towards

shared goals. Loop components are continually being added, Microsoft says, including a voting table and status ticker. The voting table is designed to help teams brainstorm choose and decide to drive decision-making, while the status ticker gathers information to maintain an up-to-date view of a project across a team. In platforms like teams, loop components, which can be copied and pasted throughout different teams' chats, can allow chat users to send a message with a table, action items, or lists that can be co-authored and edited by everyone in line, for example, or add notes to calendar invites collaborating on the agenda with invitees ahead of the meeting, end quote. So I guess this can be thought of as an answer to Google's workspace spaces,

though lots of people thought this was an unashamed, unabashed, unabashed rip-off of notion, and TechCrunch snarked that this was a reincarnation of Google Wave. Hey everybody, Twitter space tonight, but at a slightly earlier time, we're going to do it at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, which is, what is that, 5 p.m. Pacific time tonight. So check Twitter for that. Also, quick product review from Yours Truly. I did finally get my new Apple Watch on Monday. And quick review, this is the first device upgrade I've done in recent years that actually feels like a whole new device. Now, this is probably because I was going to be a new device. Now this is probably because I was coming from a series three watch. The screen, I know it's not that much bigger, but it sure feels much bigger. Like I'm wearing a widescreen on my wrist, even though it's not any heavier. The battery life is so much better.

I slept with it on last night in order to try out the sleep tracking features for the first time and only had to charge it for about 15 minutes while I was showering this morning to have full battery life to start the day with again. That's impressive considering this is. now and always on screen. So you know, would recommend, especially if you've got a much older watch like I had. Talk to you tomorrow.