Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/07 - Why Robocalls Have Taken Over Your Phone

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

Silicon Valley’s special election day vote, why robocalls have taken over your phone, Jeff Bezos’ clever HQ2 bonus, making 911 calls better and why Jake Tapper is a digital media pioneer. Links: San Francisco has passed a first-of-its-kind tax on big businesses — like Square and Stripe — to help the homeless (Recode) Scoop: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown (Axios) Why robocalls have taken over your phone (The Verge) Amazon gained a huge perk from its HQ2 contest that's worth far more than any tax break (Business Insider) Chinese ‘gait recognition’ tech IDs people by how they walk (The Associated Press) RapidSOS, an emergency response data provider, raises $30M as it grows from 10K users to 250M (TechCrunch) Newsonomics: “Digital defeats print” is the headline as Gannett steps away from printed election results (NiemanLab) 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 ride home for Wednesday, November 7th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Silicon Valley's special election day vote.

Why robocalls have taken over your phone? Jeff Bezos' clever HQ2 bonus. Making 911 calls better and why Jake Tapper is a digital media pioneer. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. While the whole world was focused on the U.S. midterm elections, there was one measure on the ballot that was specific to Silicon Valley itself yesterday. San Francisco voters passed Proposition C, a measure that will raise that city's gross receipts tax by around 0.5% on all companies located inside the city that have annual gross receipts of more than $50 million.

This would specifically target large tech companies like Square, Lyft, and Salesforce, which are San Francisco, based, of course. It's estimated that this new levy will bring in about $250 to $350 million a year, and all of that money is earmarked to be spent on services for San Francisco's homeless population. That $250 to $350 million number would roughly double what the city of San Francisco currently spends on homeless services. This proposition was loudly championed by Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Beniof, who along with Salesforce itself spent $7 million campaigning to get the proposition passed. Last night, Benioff tweeted triumphantly, quote, Prop C's victory means the homeless will have a home and the help they truly need.

Let the city come together in love for those who need it most. There is no finish line when it comes to helping the homeless. Thank you, amazing supporters of Prop C, end quote. But the proposition proved controversial with some local San Francisco tech companies, including square, lift, and stripe, who opposed the measure, and over the last month, Benihoff feuded publicly with, among others, Jack Dorsey, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and Zinga founder Mark Pinkus. Opponents of the proposition questioned if merely spending more money on the homelessness problem

would actually be effective. Quote, if homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved, Collison wrote in a blog post last month. And quoting Recode, Beniof himself initially voiced concerns about the measure in private conversations as Recode previously reported. But he said that after weighing the city's economic analysis,

which found that the money would significantly reduce the homeless population, and talking to local housing activists, he decided to support it. Square and Stripe in particular have been text most vocal opponents of the measure. Dorsey tweeted that Square would likely be taxed at a disproportionately higher rate of total revenue than software companies like Salesforce.

That would be due in part to a complex city tax structure that categorizes Square as a financial services company rather than an information services firm, among other reasons, end quote. But as Leslie Miley, a former director of engineering at Slack, who voted yes on Prop C, by the way, is quoted as saying in that same recode piece, quote, Tech has been the greatest generator of wealth in our generation, and when you look at that, you have to say, what is your responsibility? How progressive can you be when you walk by people living on the streets and not bat an eyelash? All I know is doing nothing is no longer an option, end quote. Axios is reporting that AT&T intends to notify more than 20 customers that their wireless services will be terminated because of alleged streaming or down.

downloading of pirated copyrighted material over the AT&T network. Eyebrows are being raised over this news because, well, AT&T is now in the content business itself after its $85 billion takeover in June of Time Warner. In a statement to Axios, AT&T claims that it has received notices from copyright owners about the users and their piracy activities. It is unclear, though, at this time, whether or not it was Warner Media, who was the copyright holder in question, who notified AT&T about the piracy. As Axios notes, quote, very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before they are cut off from AT&T's service. copyright infringers are often illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two, from their favorite band, end quote. Still on Twitter, film girl herself Christina Warren was blunt,

quote, as predicted, it took less than six months for AT&T to go full evil after buying Time Warner. Speaking of cell service, have you noticed a huge uptick in robocalls to your cell number lately, I know I have. The Verge took a look at why robocalls are suddenly such a big problem again. Quote, researchers say the volume of calls has grown particularly severe in recent years. One private call-blocking app provider

clocks them at around 147 million per day in the United States, and the Federal Trade Commission and FCC have seen a significant increase in consumer complaints in the past few years. Ian Barlow, the FTCs do not call program coordinator told the verge the agency is fielding an average of about 500,000 complaints a month, end quote. The culprit behind the undead-like rise and resurgence of robocalls is basically

the classic spam problem. As with all spam, there is essentially no barrier to entry with robocalls. Anyone can download software that makes it easy to make these calls. And it costs basically nothing to just run a script that calls random numbers at infinitum. You only have to pay a fraction of a penny per minute, and there's no charge for calls that aren't answered. Ajit Pai, the chairman of the SEC, has said that fighting robocalls is a high priority of his chairmanship of the FCC,

but he also has come out as skeptical of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which allows UNI to sue robocallers for financial damages. He believes that that act is possibly being overused and is perhaps too litigious a solution. But Pye still seems open to creating some sort of framework to crack down on robocallers. Instead of sweeping into a regulatory dragnet the hundreds of millions of American consumers who place calls or send text messages from smartphones, the FCC should be targeting bad actors who bombard Americans with unlawful robocalls, Pye said recently. I know, I know, please forgive me, but one more story about that Amazon HQ2 thing,

well, at least one more now until the day comes when they actually formally announce the decision, and then I'll have to talk about it again. But Business Insider has a piece up that suggests that whatever the outcome of HQ2, there is one huge perk that Amazon has gotten from this whole process that could potentially be worth more than any tax break. it can squeeze out of a city. Since the lure of Amazon coming to town encouraged 238 cities to submit proposals to Amazon,

Jeff Bezos now has likely gotten a ton of valuable data on land use and land development across the entire country. Quote, Amazon has a godlike view of what's happening in digital commerce, and now cities have helped give it an inside look at what's happening in terms of land use and development across the U.S., said, B.C. Mitchell, a director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. Quote, Amazon will put that data to prodigious use in the coming years to expand its empire, end quote. As Business Insider notes in the piece, quote, Amazon could use this data to aid in future expansion as it selects sites for new stores, warehouses, data centers, fulfillment centers, and other brick and mortar needs.

Forget about facial recognition monitoring crowds. Authorities in China have begun deploying gate recognition AI software in Beijing and Shanghai that can identify people via their body shapes and their gate, how they walk. The software was developed by a company called Wattrix, which says its system can identify people from up to 50 meters away, even if their back is turned or their face is covered, simply by looking at how they walk. Quote, you don't need people's cooperation for us to be able to recognize their identity,

Waitrix CEO Huang Yong Zhen told the Associated Press. Gate analysis can't be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because we're analyzing all the features of an entire body, end quote. Apparently, even though the software is not quite as good as facial recognition software yet, Waitrix claims it is 94% accurate, and it doesn't even require special cameras to work. Uploading footage from regular old existing security cameras will do just fine. Waitrix last month announced it had raised $100 million yuan or around $14 million in funding to build out its system, quoting from the AP.

Chinese police are using facial recognition to identify people in crowds and Nab Jaywalkers and are developing an integrated national system of surveillance camera data. Security officials in China's far western province of Xinjiang, a region whose Muslim population is already subject to intense surveillance and control, have expressed interest in the software, end quote. Apparently, this gate recognition stuff is nothing new. Scientists in Japan, the UK, and even the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency have been working on this technology for a decade now.

But until now, no one has commercialized the technology. So aside from the quite obvious nightmare Big Brother surveillance scenarios that commercializing this stuff brings to mind almost instantly, let's suffice with imagining this only mildly less troubling scenario. You think it's annoying now to get a ticket for going through a yellow light because a camera snapped a picture of your license plate as you went by. imagine 10 years from now getting a ticket in the mail for jaywalking or even littering because a camera recognized you from the funny way you swing your hips when you walk.

I'm pairing this segment with that last one because it's sort of a glasses half-full counterpoint. Did you know that every single day in the U.S. there are 650,000 emergency service callouts to 911 and other emergency services? globally, there are 2 billion such emergency services calls every year. But given how connected and smart the physical world is now becoming, I mean, identifying people on the street just by the way they walk, it's kind of sobering to realize how antiquated those systems still are. Emergency services are basically just reliant on humans to communicate details of an emergency verbally to other humans.

But what if there was a better way for emergency systems to take advantage of our growing real-world data systems to get better, faster, more accurate details of an emergency situation in order to make actionable dispatches of help quicker? This is what a New York-based startup called RapidSOS is trying to do, and it just raised a $30 million funding round to do it. Quoting TechCrunch, partners on the two sides of RapidSOS's marketplace include on one side, Apple, Google, Uber, car carcour, companies and others making connected devices and apps, which integrate RapidSOS's technology to provide 911 response centers with more data such as a user's location and diagnostic details that can help determine what kind of response is needed, where to go, and so on. And on the other side, you have the emergency services that need that information to do their work and organize assistance. RapidSOS offers a few different products to the market. It's most popular, the RapidSOS NG-911 Clearinghouse,

works either with a response center's existing software or by way of a web application. This product now covers some 180 million people in the U.S. in terms of the number of people touched by those different emergency response services, the company says. The Rapid SOS API, meanwhile, is used by a number of device makers and apps to be able to channel that information into the Rapid SOS system so that when a response center is using Rapid SOS and a caller is using a device or app, with the API integrated with it, that information gets conveyed, end quote. The company also makes a rescue and recovery app called Haven,

which you might remember went viral in the wake of the hurricanes that hit the U.S. earlier this year. Finally today, one last election story. There weren't any Dewey defeats Truman pictures of headlines in this election. That's because newspaper giant, Gannett threw in the towel and didn't even try to feature up-to-the-minute election results in its print editions. All of Gannett's newspapers began directing their readers this past weekend to their online sites if the readers wanted election results. The results weren't covered in today's print editions of Gannett newspapers because Gannett has finally acknowledged that things like election results are old news by the morning after, but also I'm sure they had an eye on saving some money on newsprint, I guess.

Quoting from a Neiman Lab article that spoke about this last week, quote, when longtime readers of the Des Moines Register, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or Fort Myers News Press open up their papers Wednesday morning, they'll hardly see anything in the way of results. They may see stories on voter turnout totals or wrap-ups on the voting scene or a look ahead to what readers can expect in the days ahead. Even on Thursday when nearly all vote totals should be in, don't expect to see newsprint used when cheaper pixels can do the job.

The complete election results will be online. Amelie Nash, executive editor for Local News at Gannett's USA Today Network, told Ken Docter at Neiman Lab, end quote. You know, over the years, I've spoken to a lot of pioneers of digital media on the Internet History podcast, and they all variously recall times when digital news sources couldn't even get credentialed to cover news like elections. Funny enough, the first two digital media reporters

to be credentialed to cover a presidential election were Slates Josh Levin and a young cub reporter by the name of Jake Tapper, who was credentialed to cover the Dole campaign in 1996. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. I wrote and produced the show today. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC.

You can also buy my book wherever books are sold. It's called How the Internet Happened. I get my story ideas from the TechMeme editors every day. You can follow their work at TechMeme.com, of course. And if you follow at TechMeme on Twitter, you get all the news tweeted at you when it breaks in real time. Talk to you tomorrow.