Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/05 - Facebook Gets Docu-dumped by the UK

Episode Date: December 5, 2018

The UK Parliament docu-dumps on Facebook, Qualcomm fires the starter pistol on 5G rollout, an actual test drive on Waymo’s new ride hailing service, and behind that $100 million Friends deal.Sponsors:Metalab.coDataDogHQ.com/ridehomeLinks:Note by Damian Collins MP (UK Parliament)Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 855 and its news under-display fingerprint sensor (TechCrunch)Qualcomm announces first ultrasonic fingerprint reader: Headed to the Galaxy S10? (CNET)Fortnite’s Minecraft-like creative mode launches tomorrow (The Verge)RIDING IN WAYMO ONE, THE GOOGLE SPINOFF’S FIRST SELF-DRIVING TAXI SERVICE (The Verge)The story behind Netflix’s $100 million ‘Friends’ deal (Recode) 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, December 5th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the UK Parliament docudumps on Facebook.

Qualcomm fires the starter pistol on 5G rollout, an actual test drive on Waymo's new ride hailing service, and behind the $100 million friends deal, here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As promised, the UK Parliament has released redacted copies of sensitive, internal Facebook documents and communiques seized last month from a company suing Facebook. Actually, I've linked to the PDF they released in the show notes if you want to peruse them for yourself. At the time that I'm writing this, people are just starting to dig through the documents, so I'm sure there will be some, well, plenty of headlines made over the next several days. But here are some of the highlights that I've been able to pull down from the early tweets and early

stories that have popped up. It looks like Facebook entered into what are being called white listing agreements with companies including Netflix and Airbnb, giving them access to friends data, even after Facebook introduced new privacy policies

in 2014. Contrast that with what Damien Collins, the chair of the digital culture media and sport committee that released the documents called quote, taking aggressive positions against apps, end quote, that Facebook thought of as competitors.

For example, there is an email showing CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approving a decision to deny access to Facebook data to the app Vine. So why might these two details be interesting? Well, first, playing favorites with your platform can raise anti-competitive questions. And Facebook has always maintained and did so in front of Congress and many other places that it does not sell user data. But did any money change hands for these alleged white listing deals? Quoting Collins,

Facebook have clearly entered into white listing agreements with certain companies, which means that after the platform changes in 2014-2015, they maintained full access to friends data. It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not, end quote. or as Maxim Tucker tweeted quote this Facebook correspondence disclosed just now by UK Parliament shows the company gave more user data to companies they liked

shut out companies they didn't and use data to buy potential competitors so much for their neutral platform argument end quote Also this little tidbit from the summary at the beginning of the data dump I'll just read it here Facebook knew that the changes to its policies on the Android mobile phone system, which enabled the Facebook app

to collect a record of calls and texts sent by the user would be controversial. To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features of the upgrade of their app, end quote.

Then there is an email that is purportedly written by Mark Zuckerberg dated October 7, 2012, where he appears to be brainstorming ways that developers can generate revenue by well, in the words of Jason Kint, quote, this certainly appears to be an email

from Mark Zuckerberg at minimum brainstorming how to sell access to user data, end quote. David Gilbert tweeted about the same email, quote, wondering how much Mark Zuckerberg values your Facebook account? Well, here's the answer. 10 cents per year.

You'll have to read the email to see how that math worked out, actually. As I said, I'm sure people will be finding tons of details to talk about in this trove of documents over the next several days. But let's end with a couple of summary tweets for now. Matt Stoller tweeted, these internal Facebook docs show Zuckerberg oriented his business strategies around squashing competitors,

exploiting market power, and violating user privacy while lying about it, end quote. Sarah Fryer tweets, The biggest reveal here isn't the data privacy stuff. It's how ruthless Facebook is as a competitor, end quote. And James Ball said, quote, won't come as a surprise to many developers, but there's some stuff in there that will very much raise eyebrows for others. The 5G scrimmage is well and truly underway. Yesterday in Hawaii, Qualcomm had what it termed,

a coming out party for 5G, announcing its flagship Snapdragon 855 mobile platform, which it calls the world's first commercial mobile platform supporting multi-gigabit 5G. apparently these new chips will work on both the Verizon and AT&T forthcoming 5G networks but also 4G as well of course they get three times better interference improvement and quoting TechCrunch the 855 also features a new multi-core AI engine that promises up to three times better AI performance compared to its previous mobile platform as well as specialized computer vision

silicon for enhanced computational photography think something akin to Google's nightlight. And video capture. The company also briefly noted that the new platform has been optimized for gaming. The product name for this is Snapdragon Elite Gaming, but details remain sparse, end quote. Qualcomm also showed off a prototype 5G phone, but it didn't let anyone touch it, which is fine. It looks like your average smartphone, to be honest. But there was one other interesting detail announced at the same press event,

Qualcomm also announced what it calls the 3D sonic sensor, a new under-the-display fingerprint sensor for smartphones that bounces sound waves onto your skin to map fingerprints. Quoting CNET. Qualcomm's technology generates sound waves that map your fingerprint based on the pressure reading of the sound wave bouncing off your skin. It works with wet and grimy hands and can take a reading through metal and glass. The sound waves can also detect your blood flow. and would reject a print from a severed finger. This ultrasonic fingerprint sensor could very well form the backbone of the in-screen fingerprint reader, rumored to appear in the Galaxy S-10, end quote.

It is funny how in their quest for thinness and lightness, but also maintaining massive screen size, smartphone makers have had to engineer clever solutions to problems that they themselves have created, because they've eliminated things that already. worked fine. You know how they've done away with home buttons and headphone jacks. Fortnite's next major mode launches tomorrow. It's called Fortnite Creative, a new mode that is part of the game's seventh season. It sounds like it's an expansion of the previous playground mode,

but amped up to put more of a focus on building rather than blowing each other away. Lots of people are calling it the Minecraftification of Fortnite. Here's how Epic Games describes Fortnite creative in a blog post. It's a brand new way to experience the world of Fortnite, available on December 6th. Design games, race around the island, battle your friends in new ways, and build your dream Fortnite. It's all happening on your own private island

where everything you make is saved. Battle Pass owners will have access to a private island for the first week of season 7. During this early access week, Battle Pass owners can invite their friends to play on their island. Starting December 13th, all players will have access to a private island for free, end quote. I actually didn't get to mention this yesterday,

but Epic Games also announced yesterday a PC and Mac game store to rival Steam's Game Store and to specifically go right at Steam's bread and butter. Epic says 88% of the revenue generated on this new games platform will go to developers. Compare that to the 70% of the 70% split on steam. All right, credit where credit is due, we need to mark this as a major milestone. Waymo today launched its self-driving car service called Waymo One. If you live in the Phoenix area, you can use an app to order a ride from an autonomous

vehicle, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Although you can really only do this if you're one of the 400 or so people who are part of Waymo's early rides test program. And for some time in the foreseeable future, the cars will still come with a human driver behind the wheel ready to take over if anything goes wrong. The current territory covered by this service is roughly 100 square miles, but the service will slowly expand to more neighborhoods in the Phoenix area over time. When will it come to your neck of the woods? Well, that gets back to the whole, will this really be a thing by 2020 question? Waymo does have permission to test driverless cars on California roads.

But then for other states or municipalities, they would still need to wait on regulator and legislative permission to expand the service nationwide. Fine. But what's it like to actually use this service today? The Verges Andrew J. Hawkins got to test it out. He rode recently in one of Waymo's Chrysler Pacifica minivans that make up the Waymo One fleet. He ordered a ride on the app and, quote, the rides are uneventful, but it is exciting to experience

the little flourishes that have been added for ride-hailing customers. The minivans still smell new, or at least recently cleaned. The screen on the back of the driver's headrest features a large blue start button that I could press to initiate the ride.

There's also a physical button in the headliner of the vehicle that performs the same task. After pressing the button, a musical chime sounds and a robotic-sounding woman's voice says, here we go. As I said, I'm an experience

Waymo rider, three trips and counting, but this one feels more mature. Before it felt like you were being driven by your half-blind grandmother, but now riding feels mostly normal. The car slows down for speed bumps, accelerates for lane changes, and handles a number of difficult maneuvers like unprotected left turns. And it even surprises me a couple of times, like when it ended up breaking too far into the crosswalk at an intersection and then reversed back a few inches to make room for pedestrians. Of course, it probably shouldn't have stopped so abruptly in the first place,

but it is still comforting to see the car correct its mistakes in real time, end quote. Ah, but one thing we haven't mentioned, how much does this service cost? The ride Hawkins took cost about $7, which he calculated would be the equivalent price that Lyft or Uber would have charged, though, of course, the expectation is that the fares would fall, once human drivers are no longer needed to watch over things. Dan Shue, head of product at Waymo, would only say, quote, thinking about the distance that you're traveling, the time it takes. Those will definitely be part of pricing, end quote.

The internet was worried. The ability to watch the TV show Friends on Netflix was about to go away because the deal to allow it to stream on Netflix was expiring. And when I say worried, I mean panicked. You millennials really love you, some friends. There's been a ton of think pieces about why that is, why a show that's been off the air for 15 years is somehow still the most popular show on television by a lot of measures

and why it's so popular among people that maybe weren't even alive to watch it when it originally aired. It's a feel-good projection of playing adult. Some people say, live in the big city, just hang out with your friends at a couple. coffee shop all day and get into shenanigans. Other people have speculated it's a time capsule of the time period when everything in American life still felt good, optimistic, a less partisan political time, a pre-9-11 time for most of the show's run, and also notably a pre-smartphone

time. Actually, you should watch the show and marvel at how little the internet even features in it. But anyway, crisis averted. Netflix ponied up $100 million, up from $30 million, to license friends in the U.S. from AT&T's newly acquired Warner Media Division for one more year. So friends will still be there for you when you want it through the end of 2019. But then things get interesting. And they get interesting because of those streaming video wars that we've been following. In Recode, who else but Peter Kafka has the blow-by-blow. There were other bidders

interested in Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, Febes, and Monica, including Hulu and Apple. Kafka says Apple hung in there in the bidding for a while and was very serious about it, but Hulu was the more serious contender and probably the reason the price got jacked up to that $100 million mark. But what about a year from now? What about 2020? Well, by that point, WarnerMedia is planning to launch its own streaming service. So naturally, they'd want to leverage Friends as an exclusive to attract people to their new platform, right? Well, quoting Kafka, there's some chicken and egg going on here. Friends is a valuable asset, so WarnerMedia would naturally want that asset in its own service instead of someone else's, unless that Warner Media service ends up being a flop,

in which case, stashing friends there means it's a wasted asset. So here's the hedge Warner Media has ended up with. After 2019, WarnerMedia has the ability to pool friends from Netflix altogether and keep the show as an exclusive, or it can let Netflix stream the show as well at a discount of about 25 percent, which means there's a scenario where WarnerMedia can get another $75 million a year from Netflix and still use the show as a key part of its own streaming service, end quote. But guess what? As Kafka pointed out,

this sort of high-stakes rights bidding is going to happen again real soon. The rights for the U.S. version of the Office are due to expire soon, and Comcast's NBC Universal Division, which owns the rights to the office, claims that Netflix has told them that the Office gets more total viewing hours than anything else on North American Netflix. So Dwight Shrut might be due a bigger payday than even Joey got. And frankly, expect this sort of brinksmanship to continue for any property you can think of. As long as this mad scramble to reconstitute the cable TV bundle has so

many players contesting the game. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Our podcast subreddit is R slash right home. My book on the history of the web is called How the Internet Happened. My other podcast is called the Internet History Podcast. My football team is Arsenal, who is hopefully, as I'm recording this, beating Manchester United handily. But I won't know if they did until about the time that this episode goes live. It's a weird sort of time machine recording this podcast.

By the time the words that I'm saying right now, enter your ears. The game today, the Arsenal menu game, will be old news. But as I actually typed these words, the kickoff of the game was still an hour away. And now, as I'm speaking these words, the game is on mute in the background happening right now. Time. How do it work? Magnets, how do they work? Talk to you tomorrow.