Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2018 - Amazon and Best Buy Join Forces (for TVs)

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

Facebook rolls out better privacy tools globally, Amazon and Best Buy partner to sell TVs, the IRS suffered from a terribly timed outage, YouTube tries to reassure creators, and the great San Francisco scooter debate. Stories:A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook’s new GDPR privacy changes (TechCrunch)Welcome to the Wikipedia for Terms of Service Agreements (Wired)ToSDR.org Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, April 18, 2018. Today, Facebook complies with GDPR, Amazon and Best Buy partner to sell TVs, the IRS suffered from a terribly timed outage, YouTube tries to reassure creators, and the great San Francisco electric scooter debate. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

As was hinted at in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent congressional testimony, Facebook yesterday announced that it was rolling out enhanced privacy controls for all users globally in alignment with the European Union's new GDPR law, which will go into effect in May. There was some ambiguity around whether or not GDPR compliance would be in effect for only European users, but even though the changes will roll out to European Facebook accounts first, they will indeed cover all Facebook users globally. soon every Facebook user will be asked to review information about the type of ads Facebook will serve to them and whether or not they want partners like websites and apps to use data to serve them ads

also you'll be asked whether you want to continue sharing things like political preferences religious views and relationship information on your profile Facebook is also increasing protections for teen users quote even where the law doesn't require this will ask every teen if if they want to see ads based on data from partners and whether they want to include personal information in their profiles. Facebook said in a blog post announcing the new controls. Lots of people were dubious about these new changes.

For example, Reuters pointed out the new settings will not give Facebook users the option to hit decline. Instead, quote, they will guide users to either accept and continue or manage data setting, according to copies the company showed to reporters on Tuesday, end quote. People can choose not to be on Facebook if they want,

Facebook Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman told reporters yesterday. On TechCrunch, Josh Constine had a piece up with the title, A Flaw-by-Flaw Guide to Facebook's New GDPR Privacy Changes, quoting from Constine's piece, with a design that encourages rapidly hitting the agree button, a lack of granular controls, a laughably cheetaheable, parental consent requests for teens, and an aesthetic overhaul of download your information that doesn't make it any easier to switch social networks. Facebook shows it's still hungry for your data.

Constine concluded by writing, quote, overall, it seems like Facebook is complying with the letter of GDPR law, but with questionable spirit. On that note, Wired has an interesting piece up about the website, T-O-S-D-R, short for Terms of Service, didn't read. Wired describes the site as a sort of Wikipedia for terms of service agreements, giving users a sort of cliff notes version of the legalese and rating terms of service agreements from Class A, which means very good to Class F, which means very bad. The site has existed since 2012, and it really does function on the Wiki model. Anyone can submit bullet points and share analysis of service terms, and there's even a browser extension that brings up abbreviated

terms of service for websites that TOSDR has in its system. It's actually a fascinating story about how the service got started, and it's still an evolving project that you could still make meaningful contributions to. The site is TOSDR.org, and I have a link to the wired story in the show notes. So there was a bit of a technical snafu for Tax Day yesterday. The IRS's system for accepting online tax returns went down in the early morning and was not back up until early evening. This was obviously the worst possible day for such a thing to happen as millions of Americans were expecting to file their tax returns

and online tax preparation software such as turbotax were affected by the outage. Apparently there was a system-wide failure that the IRS said required a, quote, hard reboot. As a result, the tax filing deadline was extended through midnight tonight without penalties. The IRS did not specify what exactly went wrong, but throughout the day, visitors to the IRS direct pay website were greeted by a notice telling them to come back on December 31st in the year 9,99. The IRS's acting commissioner, David Coutter, said later, quote, this is the busiest tax day of the year, and the year. the IRS apologizes for the inconvenience this system issue caused for taxpayers. The Washington Post notes that the IRS has faced many rounds of budget cuts in recent years, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017.

A spokesman for Intuit, which owns TurboTax, said Tuesday night, quote, For those that prepared and filed their taxes with TurboTax earlier today during the IRS system issues, TurboTax is now submitting those returns to the IRS and is currently processing newly filed returns as normal. Consequently, if you were wondering why Tax Day fell on April 17th this year instead of the traditional April 15th, it's because April 15th fell on a Sunday, and April 16th, Monday, was Emancipation Day, which is a holiday in the District of Columbia. A bit of an unexpected partnership was announced today between Best Buy, and the company that one otherwise might think would be its sworn enemy, Amazon.

As a part of a multi-year deal, Best Buy will sell 11 TV sets powered by Amazon's Fire TV operating system. The TVs will be manufactured by Toshiba, as well as Best Buy's own brand insignia. Fire TV, of course, can integrate Amazon's Alexa personal assistant, which users can invoke using the included remote control to change channels in such. analysts have long been expecting full Alexa integration using far-field voice controls and always on microphones, and this tie-up might point the way to that sooner rather than later. There is lots of cool things we can do in the future, was the comment from Amazon's Fire TV Vice President Mark Witten.

Stay tuned for more to come over the course of time, added Best Buy Senior Executive VP Mike Mohan. The new TVs will be called the Fire TV. TV editions, and Best Buy will be the exclusive retail partner. Best Buy will sell the TVs in their showrooms, as well as on its website, and for the first time in history, Best Buy becomes an official Amazon seller to sell the TVs on Amazon's website. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, quote, we're super excited about this partnership,

noting that the ability for TV shoppers to assess picture quality in a physical store before purchase, is a key part of the TV buying process. Quote, Amazon has always been a big believer in stores, Bezos said at a press event yesterday to announce the partnership. Physical stores aren't going anywhere, end quote. No word on screen sizes or prices, but the 11 models that are scheduled to ship this year

will be a mix of 4K and traditional HD TVs. The first models are scheduled to go on sale sometime this summer. On Twitter, tech blogger Raju P.P. said, Amazon and Best Buy Partnership. What's next? Pepsi and Coca-Cola? New York State's Attorney General yesterday sent a detailed questionnaire to 13 cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase, Gemini, Krakken, and Bitfinex, asking them to disclose details surrounding ownership of the exchanges, transaction fee structures, basic operational practices, and the timing of public. orders. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a release announcing the inquiry, quote, With cryptocurrency on the rise, consumers in New York and across the country have a right to transparency and accountability when they invest their money. Yet too often consumers don't have the basic facts they need to assess the fairness, integrity, and security of these trading platforms.

Our virtual market's integrity initiative sets out to change that, promoting the accountability and transparency in the virtual currency marketplace that investors and consumers deserve. The exchanges have until May 1st to respond to the inquiry. Some of the exchanges responded today by pointing out that they already comply with plenty of government oversight and regulation, but applauded the move nonetheless as something that might improve the standards of the crypto exchange industry overall. Coin Center's director of research Peter Van Valkenberg told the verge, quote, Far from being unregulated, these businesses must contend with state money transmission licensing laws,

federal anti-money laundering law, CFTC scrutiny for commodities spot market manipulation, SEC scrutiny for securities trading should any tokens traded B securities, and in this case, state consumer protection investigations from the several attorneys general. Charles Cascaria, CEO of New York-based Itbit, one of the exchanges that received the AG's letter told Bloomberg, quote, Our regulation is a lot like any other bank. Those protections in terms of customer safety,

keeping of their assets, if they move assets on the exchange, and making sure that you set up the exchange so that everyone is getting a transparent price. That's not in place in other institutions, so I understand why they want to dig into this and figure out what's going on. Several months ago, YouTube made changes

to its YouTube partner, advertising program. Essentially, the program got slightly more restrictive, and critics would say slightly more elitist. Whereas before basically anyone could monetize their YouTube videos with ads, now you need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers to your channel and 4,000 hours of accrued watch time in order to earn revenue from your videos. This has upset many creators, even those that are popular enough to still qualify for the partner program. Today, YouTube sees you. CEO Susan Wigiski had a blog post where she addressed some publisher and creator concerns. She claimed that over the last year the number of YouTube channels earning five figures in revenue annually increased by more than 35%,

while channels earning six figures a year grew by 40%. Still addressing the concerns of long-tail creators who saw their revenue cut off by the recent changes, Wigiske wrote, quote, while we know some creators found this change frustrating, it strengthened advertiser confidence, making monetization and the broader community on YouTube stronger for creators building their businesses on the platform. For those who have not yet met the new threshold,

keep creating and building your audience. We have resources to help you learn and grow, end quote. Wigiski also announced an expansion of what YouTube calls sponsorships, which it has been testing since the fall. Similar to the subscriptions you can pay for on platforms like Twitch, viewers can pay $4.99 a month to support their favorite YouTube creators. Wajiski said this program would expand to many more creators in the coming months. But that doesn't seem to have calmed the ire of the YouTube creator community.

The comments under Wigiski's blog post contained dozens of angry retorts like Gerald Reynolds, who wrote, quote, Many channels get shadow downgraded. Let us know why so we can make changes to our content and remove any offending videos. Creators having to guess about what is happening to their channel with no remedy to address it is super frustrating. And user Sid Alpha wrote, quote,

View suppression cut the legs out from under my channel for several weeks, decreasing views by over 70% and placing me into a position where I was losing subscribers on a daily basis. TLDR, your communication and clarity still leave much to be desired, and once per quarter is unacceptable given the circumstances. In her analysis of the situation, though, TechCrunch's Sarah Perez had sympathy for the company. Quote, in fairness, however, YouTube is in a tough place. Its site became so successful over the years that it became impossible for it to police all the uploads manually. At first, this was the cause for celebration and the chance to put Google's advanced engineering and technology to work.

But these days, as with other sites of similar scale, the challenge of policing bad actors among billions of users is becoming a Herculean task, and one companies are failing at, too. Bay Area listeners, here's a bit of local news for you. I'm sure you've probably noticed the electric scooters that have been popping up on sidewalks around San Francisco over the last month. or so, there are three different on-demand electric scooter companies that have launched in the city pretty much simultaneously, bird, spin, and lime bike. The companies have raised $255 million in venture funding between them, and though many hail the scooters as an innovative solution to short trips and so-called first-mile last-mile commutes, still others are claiming the scooters are nothing more than a nuisance. Here's how Business Insider described.

the scene, quote, imagine tech workers dressed in hoodies and all birds, sneakers, cruising down the streets of San Francisco on electric scooters, like razor scooters for grownups. At the end of their journey, writers discard their vehicles on the sidewalk with little regard for the pedestrians behind them, end quote. These scooters have popped up in other cities as well, including Santa Monica, Austin, and Washington, D.C., but San Francisco seems to be the main market all three companies are targeting initials. On Monday, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued cease and desist letters to the three companies, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, quote, ordering them to stop doing business until they take stronger efforts to keep users from riding them on sidewalks, parking them so they block sidewalks, ramps, and transit stops, and using them without helmets or driver's licenses, end quote. The problem initially seems to have been that city ordinances don't mention motorized scooters in any of their existing regulations,

so the scooter companies were existing in a sort of legal gray area. Last Friday, Public Works crews did seize 66 scooters, citing city codes that allow them to clear sidewalks of obstructions and impediments. The main bone of contention with the scooters seems to revolve around the fact that they are dockless, so that when a user is done riding, they can simply leave the scooters. scooter wherever. There has even been a Twitter hashtag that has sprung up, hashtag scooters behaving badly, where people post pictures of egregiously parked rides. Late yesterday, in a unanimous vote, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors announced they would require the scooter startups to apply for a permit before continued operations in the city. The permits

will apparently be issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, which told business insider, it could be ready to accept applications as early as May. At the vote yesterday, San Francisco's supervisor Aaron Peskin said, quote, these scooters are certainly something that can help and assist some users in San Francisco's complex world of transportation challenges, but that does not mean that we are going to sacrifice the same spaces that are options for pedestrians, people in wheelchairs, parents with strollers. Those are not the places for the devices to be used, end quote. Two of the three scooter startups told Business Insider they were willing to work with the city,

but at the time of this recording, Lime Bikes has not made any public statement surrounding the vote. That's all for today. The TechMeme Ride Home was produced by Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And as ever, I had the supreme assistance of the TechMeme editors. Visit TechMeme.com anytime day or night for the latest tech news headlines. Talk to you tomorrow.