Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, Mar. 21, 2018 - Zuckerberg Responds

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

Zuckerberg speaks out about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Siri will read your hidden messages, Travis Kalanick's new gig, Facebook Messenger's new features, YouTube's increased ad load, Google gobbles Lytro, and everyone wants to work at a tech company. 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 TechMeme Ride Home for Wednesday, March 21st, 2018. Today, Mark Zuckerberg finally speaks out about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Siri will read your hidden messages.

Travis Kalanick's got a new gig. Facebook Messenger's got new features. YouTube will have an increased ad load. Google gobbled up Lyro. And everyone wants to work at a tech company. Here's what you missed, today in the world of tech. Late this afternoon, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Posting to his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg said he wanted to share an update about the situation,

quote, including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to address this important issue. Zuckerberg went on to say, quote, we have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't, then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again, we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes. There's more to do, and we need to step up and do it. Zuckerberg then went on to relay a timeline of events related to the recent controversy,

including outlining when in 2007, the Facebook platform was first launched to make apps more social, 2013, when Cambridge University researcher Alexander Kogan created a personality quiz app on that platform, 2014 when Facebook limited the data apps could access. After that point, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends, unless their friends had also authorized the app. And then he gave the play-by-play about how Facebook learned about Kogan sharing his data with Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg went on to say, quote, this was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook,

but it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that. Zuckerberg then went on to lay out steps Facebook would be taking to, quote, prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. He said that Facebook would conduct a full audit of any app, suspicious activity and would ban any developer from the platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. Also, Facebook will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

The company will remove developers' access to data if users haven't used a given app in three months, for example. Facebook will also reduce the data that you give an app when you sign in to only your name, profile, photo, and email address. They will also require developers to sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to posts or other private data. Finally, Zuckerberg said that in the next month, Facebook will show all users a tool at the top of the news feed with the apps currently connected to their accounts, as well as an easy way to revoke those apps permissions to your user data. Finally, Zuckerberg concluded by writing, quote, started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving

Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward, end quote. After this message posted, Ann announced that Zuckerberg would be appearing on Anderson Cooper 360 at 9 p.m. Eastern tonight to discuss this whole brouhaha. I'm recording this right now on Wednesday, so depending on when you're listening, that will be happening tonight, or it will have happened on Wednesday night. Obviously, this is a developing story, so check techmeme.com for all the latest details,

as well as all of the relevant context and reactions. Brazilian site Mac Magazine reports that there's a major privacy bug on the iPhone that's related to Siri. You might be familiar with the fact that as of iOS 11, you can set message notifications to be hidden on the lock screen. You can see that a message has arrived, but you can't read the contents until you actually unlock the phone. Well, apparently if you're running iOS 11.2.6 or the beta of iOS 11.1.5.5.5.5.5.5. 3. If you ask Siri to read your notifications to you, she will do so even if you have the messages set to be private on the lock screen. Note that this doesn't work with Apple's own messages app, but it does seem to work with apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype. Apple has yet to respond

to reports of this bug. By the way, if you weren't even aware that you could mask your notifications on the lock screen. You can get that to happen by going to settings, then notifications, then choose the app you want, select previews, and then choose your option to hide or show messages. Last month when Travis Kalanick tweeted that he was thinking about what's next, he wasn't kidding. Kalanick has announced that following a $150 million investment from his new fund, 10100, he is becoming the CEO of City Storage Systems.

City Storage Systems is a holding company focused on the, quote, redevelopment of distressed real estate assets in the areas of parking, retail, and industrial. The 15-person startup was formerly known as Cloud Kitchens and was led by Diego Burdaken, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur and early Uber investor. Cloud Kitchens has called itself the Amazon, of the food delivery world, and its website reads, We provide infrastructure and software that enables food operators to open delivery-only locations with minimal capital expenditure and time.

So that sounds an awful lot like Uber Eats, which was a big passion project for Kalanik during his time at Uber. Apparently, some of the virtual restaurants operated by Cloud Kitchen operate on the Uber Eats platform. So what's the angle here? Is Travis rolling up in Uber Eats competitor, or at least a company that is optimized to serve on-demand food delivery without the need for physical dining rooms? That could be part of it, but the focus on real estate points to a larger vision. If Kalinick believes in the automated on-demand future, and I think we can assume he does,

then he can probably also see all of the myriad ways infrastructure will have. have to be changed to accommodate this future. As M.G. Siegler tweeted, Makes a ton of sense. As Travis Kay knows better than anyone, there are massive cascading effects of the full shift to ride sharing than autonomous. And perhaps nothing bigger than the remaking of cities

in terms of building slash land use. And Metan Sampat tweeted, quote, The big idea is to, one, buy up a real estate investment trust, of relatively underperforming commercial real estate in city cores. Two, turn them into flexible infrastructure for the on-demand economy. And three, create a sort of Amazon Web Services for Adams, not bits. Facebook added two new features to its Messenger app today.

Firstly, for group chats, there's now an administrative feature. One user will essentially be in charge of a group chat, with the ability to vet new members wanting to do. join in on the chat. Non-administrative members can invite someone to the group, but the administrator would have the last word on whether or not they could join. Messenger product manager Drew Moxon said in a blog post announcing the feature, this is especially helpful in large group chats with people you may not yet be connected

to, like when you're planning a friend's surprise birthday party with different groups of friends. Admins also have the ability to remove members if needed and promote. or demote any other person in the group chat as an admin. The other feature that was announced today is that now you can create a joinable link for any existing group chat. You can generate the link,

send it to someone you want to join in on the chat over email or whatever, and if that person clicks or taps on the link, assuming they have Facebook Messenger on their phone, they'll be taken straight to the group. Facebook only added the ability to turn one-on-one chats into group chats last month. Facebook Messenger now claims more than 1.3 billion monthly users, but was recently passed in size

by Facebook's other messaging service, WhatsApp, which claims 1.5 billion monthly users. If over the coming months you start to feel like you're seeing more ads on YouTube, you probably won't be imagining it. As a way to convince more of its billion or so viewers to pay up for a forthcoming subscription music service, YouTube said that it will be increasing the number of ads that it will be serving in between music videos. These ads will be aimed at users who treat YouTube like a music service, passively playing music video after music video over a long period of time. This move was announced at South by Southwest by Leor Cohen,

YouTube's global head of music. For years, YouTube has been the most popular music video site, and record companies and other stakeholders in the music industry, have long complained that they do not make enough money from music streamed on the YouTube platform. There's a lot more people in our funnel that we can frustrate and seduce to become subscribers, Cohen said at Southby. Once we do that, trust me, all that noise will be gone and articles people write about that noise will be gone, end quote. YouTube has tried to sell paid music services before, but according to Cohen, this revived effort will have some more money.

behind it, including a significant marketing campaign, and of course these increased number of ads, which Cohen said would, quote, smoke out people who can afford to pay for a subscription. Leor Cohen is a 30-year music industry veteran, who was once the road manager for Run DMC, and was a senior executive at Warner Music Group before joining YouTube in 2016. Multiple sources are reporting to TechCrunch that Google is close to a quote, the imaging startup Lytro for about $40 million. You might remember Lyro as the camera startup that had groundbreaking depth data and light field features,

which would allow you to refocus images after you took a picture. At one point, Steve Jobs reportedly met with Lyot to discuss using its technologies in the iPhone. But the cameras that Lyot produced never really took off with consumers, and in 2015, Lytro announced it was switching its focus to producing high-end video capture devices for virtual reality.

It is apparently this technology that Google is looking to acquire. Lightro has raised a little over $200 million in funding, and its last round in 2017 valued the company at around $360 million. So it's perhaps unsurprising that one source described the Google deal as a quote asset sale.

Lightro does have 59 patents related to Lightfield and other digital imaging technology, especially related to its ability to essentially make two-dimensional pictures three-dimensional. As TechCrunch points out, this would be especially useful for VR because flatter images can cause motion sickness if they do not move smoothly in a three-dimensional environment. LinkedIn today announced its annual top companies, list for 2018, a survey of where people really want to work right now. LinkedIn says that the survey is based on the actions of LinkedIn's more than 546 million professionals, over 146 million in the U.S. alone, and looks at four main pillars.

User interest in the company, user engagement with the company's employees, job demand and overall employee retention. LinkedIn excludes itself from the list. as well as its parent company Microsoft. So where do people really want to work this year? It's quite a tech-heavy list, actually. Here's the top 10 in descending order. Amazon is number one, followed by Alphabet, Google's parent company, of course,

and then Facebook. Salesforce and Tesla round out the top five. Apple comes in at number six, then Comcast Universal, the Walt Disney company, Oracle, and Netflix rounds out the top 10. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. I produced today's show with the help of TechMeme's brilliant editors.

And on a breaking newsday like today, there's no better time to check in with TechMeme.com to find out the latest. Be back with you tomorrow.