Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/19 - Something, Something... Another Facebook Scandal

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

I’m sorry. I truly am. Another Facebook scandal to tell you about. The Boring Company unveils its tunnel, Zwift is gamification, a fitness app play, a social network, VR, and e-sports all in one startup and why Touch ID might return to the iPhone. Sponsors: Metalab.co Grumpy Old Geeks Podcast 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 19th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, I'm sorry, I truly am, but there's another Facebook scandal to tell you about.

The Boring Company unveils its tunnel. Swift is gamification, a fitness app play, a social network, VR, and e-sports all-in-one startup, and why touch ID might be coming back to the iPhone. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Do I want to do yet another segment about a Facebook data and or privacy scandal? No, I do not. Could I basically write up a template that I could use each time one of these scandals surfaces and then just insert whatever new dates or details were relevant?

I guess I could. Certainly the wrote explanations slash denials slash apologies that Facebook trots out. Every time one of these things happens, they certainly are starting to sound like cookie cutter at this point. It's getting absurd at this late date, but hey, give Facebook credit for ending 2018 as it's essentially spent the whole year the whole time. In an investigation, the New York Times looked at internal Facebook documents, which the Times says reveal that Facebook gave around 150 companies access to more user data than has. previously been disclosed. Some of these partner companies could do things like read private direct messages. Facebook wants to stress that this practice did not violate its consent decree that it has with the Federal Trade Commission relating to the handling of user data.

Quoting from the Times piece, Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent, the record show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages. The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends' posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier. In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies, most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations.

Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year, end quote. In a blog post responding to the Times piece, Facebook said it shared data with integration partners, only when users signed in with their Facebook accounts to access features on those other platforms. To put it simply, this work was about helping people do two things. First, people could access their Facebook accounts or specific Facebook features on devices and platforms built by other companies like Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, and Yahoo. These are known as integration partners.

Second, people could have more social experiences, like seeing recommendations from their Facebook. Facebook friends on other popular apps and websites like Netflix, the New York Times, Pandora, and Spotify. To be clear, none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC, end quote. To which Lori Voss on Twitter responded, Facebook has responded to the New York Times story saying, yes, they had all that access, but they didn't misuse it, and also we shut it down in April, for the ones that we didn't. And anyway, you gave permission.

Here is the core of Facebook's argument. By signing in with Facebook, you gave permission for all these things. While legally sound, this clearly doesn't match what users thought was happening and being defensive about it is going to get them further roasted by the public, end quote. Now, Alex Stamos, who, if you'll recall, until recently was Facebook's chief of security, tweeted a tweet storm that's well worth reading in total, quote, This isn't a good response from Facebook to the New York Times story because it makes the same mistake of blending all kinds of different integrations and models into a bunch of pros, and it's very hard to match up the responses to the Times claims. What they really need is a table that gets updated over the next several days that lists the company, the kind of integration, and what data was accessible, what steps a user took to activate the integration, and when slash whether it was shut down.

There very well could be serious privacy problems in the Times story, but it's hard to tell what is really problematic because they intentionally blur the lines between Facebook allowing third-party clients slash OS integrations like Apple, with data actually going to other companies. I'm sorry, but allowing for third-party clients is the kind of pro-competition we want to see from dominant platforms. For example, making Gmail only accessible to Android and the Gmail app would be horrible. For the New York Times to try to scandalize this kind of integration is wrong. But integrations that are sneaky or send secret data to servers controlled by others really is wrong. Since the Times is apparently sitting on a huge list of historical integrations, it would be better for Facebook to document them than to allow the Times to add their framing, end quote. I would sum up by noting this.

Facebook's response suggests that there could be some very real concern here that the practice revealed by the Times could again draw the scrutiny of the FTC, which I believe had already reopened looking at Facebook's behavior. And also giving certain big partners favored access and positioning on your platform while denying that same access to smaller developers or partners. Could in a certain light be looked at as anti-competitive behavior, of course? In a related story around lunchtime, the Washington Post was reporting that the Attorney General for the District of Columbia is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, marking the first major U.S. regulatory action over that particular scandal. Last night in Los Angeles, Elon Musk's boring company showed off its 10, million dollar 1.14 mile test tunnel that will fling cars to their destinations at 150 miles per hour underground to avoid congestion. Quote, I think this is like really a panacea. Elon Musk said.

Traffic, he said, quote, is like acid on the soul. We are no way saying there shouldn't be other means of public transport. Let's do everything we can along every direction to a alleviate traffic, end quote. So the car that was demoed last night cruising through the Boring Company tunnel only hit speeds of 50 miles per hour. It was just a demo. And if you'll remember the original concept videos of the tunnel, the cars were supposed to sit on sort of like electric sleds or skates or something. But those have been replaced, at least in this demo, with specialized wheels that you would have to mount on your own vehicle to use in any operational tunnel. Quoting from Wired, Gone 2 is the boring company's 16 passenger pod concept, the

centerpiece of what Musk once said was a system that would put pedestrians and cyclists first. This is a system meant to carry people's cars as long as they are fully electric and capable of driving themselves. For those without such vehicles, Musk said cars would continually circulate the loop system to pick up and drop off anyone who wants a ride. Press materials provided by the Boring Company say each tunnel should one day be able to support 4,000 cars per hour, about 16,000 passengers provided each car is nearly full. That's the capacity of about 11.5 full, but not packed, New York City subway trains, end quote. The write-up of the demo by the Los Angeles Times noted that the tunnel was so uneven in places that while on the demo,

it sort of felt like you were riding on a bumpy dirt road. Quote, we kind of ran out of time, Musk said, attributing the rough ride to problems with a paving machine. The bumpiness will not be there down the road. It will be as smooth as glass. This is just a prototype. That's why it's a little rough around the edges, end quote. Apple released iOS 12.1.2 today, and normally I don't tend to cover routine iOS software updates,

but among the usual bug fixes and whatnot, there was one added detail that follows up on something that we covered recently. In the updated software, there are changes exclusive to users in China, changes to the animation for when an app is forced to close. Why would Apple be changing something so minor and doing so specifically? Well, it's because those animations are part of what is involved in that patent dispute with Qualcomm. And if you'll recall, Qualcomm recently won an initial sales ban for iPhones in China surrounding this patent dispute. So these changes are likely an attempt by Apple to cut that sales injunction off at the past, which has been stayed temporarily pending Apple's legal appeal. Zwift is a London-based startup that has to be one of the most unique I've heard about in a long time.

Zwift turns indoor cycling workouts into multiplayer games. The company now has 1 million registered accounts. There are hundreds of Facebook groups dedicated to Zwift communities, and users are self-organizing on average 300 group rides every day. So think of this as a gamification play, a fitness app play, a social network play, perhaps, an esports play. Here's how TechCrunch describes the actual use of the Zwift app. Quote, the service involves you providing your own bike, which you link up with a Zwift trainer, a rack-like piece of equipment that turns a bike into a stationary bike for indoor training,

which in turn picks up your stats and adjusts tension and so on based on the course that you are writing. You cycle in front of a TV typically to get the immersive effect linked up to a Mac, Windows, or iOS app. It's also on Apple TV. You start with a free trial before moving to a monthly fee of $15 or $10 if you are currently on a trial or already subscribe. The higher fee was introduced last month. There are no plans at the moment for VR headsets or. other head-based wearables because so far they have proven to be too bulky to be usable in the physical environment of sometimes grueling cycling. And for now, you also don't use spinners or other

stationary cycling apparatuses because these can't provide the right kind of real-world writing feel. But this might evolve as Zwift partners with more third parties and with companies like Peloton, a big hit with home fitness enthusiasts. You can see how that might evolve. end quote. Zwift just raised a $120 million series B round, and though valuation was not revealed, the company claims it is approaching unicorn status. Cycling currently accounts for 98% of Zwift's business at the moment, but there are moves to expand into running, using treadmills, and eventually moving to other devices like rowing machines, step machines, maybe any exercise device that you imagine. A little bit of news you can maybe use. Remove.B.G is a free online tool that uses

AI to quickly remove the background from any image. If you don't have ready access to Photoshop, but you need to quickly insert, say, your sister into a Game of Thrones screenshot. No worries. You can take any photo, upload it to remove.bg, and the site will automatically identify any people in it. Cut them out from the background and then let you download a PNG of that person with a transparent background behind them. So, sort of neat, right? Might be a little late for this, but it would definitely come in handy when making funny end-of-year holiday cards to send to friends and family. But actually, though, as the Verge notes, this is actually representative of an interesting trend. It's the latest example of how machine learning techniques that were

once cutting edge are being turned into simple consumer tools. In the case of removing an image's background, there are already a few open source algorithms that can handle this particular task. Remove.BG has simply turned them or something like them into a free online utility. Other similar tools include Depart.io, which applies the style of one image like a painting to another, and let's enhance.io, which uses AI to automatically ups, upscale pictures, end quote.

Finally, today, let's come back to the iPhone. Apple, as you know, got rid of touch ID when it ditched the home button, but perhaps touch ID can make a comeback. The website Patently Apple noticed that Apple quietly filed for a patent recently for building touch ID into the display of phones. This would make sense because we've been seeing Android manufacturers beginning to build fingerprint sensors right into the screens themselves. And also, didn't I just do a story about how face ID is not exactly foolproof?

You can trick it by printing a 3D model of your face. And actually, the combination of touch ID and face ID together could make phones extra secure. Quoting from Gordon Kelly and Forbes, first, there are undoubtedly times when unlocking a phone with a fingerprint is more convenient than holding it up to your face. Second, the real strength of biometric security is not in isolation but combination. Simultaneous verification of both fingerprint and face is extremely strong. And with Apple already revealing plans to promote iPhones as potential passport and ID document replacements, such an upgrade would be essential, end quote.

Kelly also notes that this is the second time in recent weeks that a new patent surrounding Touch ID has been revealed in recent months. So while Apple's plans could always change, of course, it does certainly make sense that fingerprint sensing might someday return to iPhone models. Somebody asked me yesterday if I was planning on a year-end roundup episode for this podcast.

And the real reason I won't be doing one is because I just ran out of time. I've been winding down the book promo stuff, as you know. But also, we've got a lot of exciting new stuff planned for this podcast for the new year. New types of episodes, new weekend episodes. Little teaser there. And all of that has taken some effort to prepare for. But sort of in the background, a very real reason. Why I blanched at the idea of doing a year-end roundup episode is,

God, so much of tech news has been depressing this year. Like, if we're being honest, what was the biggest story in tech this year? It's been Facebook doing stupid stuff and getting caught doing stupid stuff and apologizing for stupid stuff over and over and over. I am, as I think you heard, legit sick of it. Zuck, but frankly all of you in tech, my one wish for the new year, could you all start cleaning up your act? Like, can we get back to the changing the world for the better stuff that I was actually dumb enough to actually buy into when I got into this industry 20 years ago? If you all do dumb stuff, I've got to call you on it.

But it really is a lot more fun for me. Personally, if we're being honest, to report on how tech is actually trying to bring about the Jetson's future that we were all promised as kids. That's why I've got my self-driving cars wager. I actually want self-driving cars to be real. I want flying cars to be real. I want sentient AI. I want all of that stuff. As long as it doesn't burn down the world in the process, of course.

Anyway, please Silicon Valley try to improve yourself in 20. For my sanity, if nothing else. Sincerely, long-time fan, first-time implorer for sanity, Brian. Talk to y'all tomorrow.