Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, Mar. 28, 2018 - Facebook Privacy Shortcuts

Episode Date: March 28, 2018

Facebook introduces Privacy Shortcuts, Trump is “obsessed” with Amazon, Waze launches local ads, Shyp shuts down, video streaming will get faster and there’s more music now than ever!  Stories from: @harrymccracken, @NeilShahWSJ 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 28, 2018. Today, Facebook introduces privacy shortcuts. Trump is, quote, obsessed with Amazon.

Waze launches local ads. Ship shuts down. Video streaming is about to get faster. And there's more music now than ever. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Early this morning, Facebook announced a new privacy shortcuts menu, along with simplified settings on mobile that allow you to find, download, and delete any data of your choosing.

Most of these settings already existed on Facebook, but it is now ostensibly easier to find them all for the average user. A blog post announcing the new changes was written by Aaron Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer for policy, and Ashley Beringer, Facebook's Deputy General Counsel. The pair wrote, quote, last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data. We've heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are hard to find and that we must do more to help keep people informed.

Even before this change, people had been downloading their Facebook data in recent weeks, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. and a lot of people seem to be shocked at the amount of information Facebook had on them, as well as the type of information Facebook was storing. So showing people how easy it is to delete some of your data is something of a move by Facebook. But as TechCrunch's Ingrid London pointed out, quote, what today's changes do not do is provide any indications that Facebook plans to do anything different in terms of what information is gathering and using to run its service

and its bigger profitable business. Indeed, even upcoming changes to its terms of service, which will include more clarity on Facebook's data policy, will contain no changes in it, end quote. On Twitter, Jacob Heftman asked, haven't they made this announcement like 10 times before? Bloomberg's Shera Oviday, agreed, tweeting, Facebook has made 100,000 previous changes to its privacy settings

to make them, quote unquote, better for users. But Facebook clearly has a sense that it needs to tread lightly in the face of user opinion possibly turning skeptical. Bloomberg's Sarah Fryer reports that the company has decided not to unveil new home products at its major F8 developer conference in May. Facebook had reportedly been working on new hardware products like connected speakers with digital assistant and video chat capabilities in order to catch up with things like Amazon's Alexa. Facebook apparently saw the smart speaker and digital assistant trend as a way to integrate itself deeper into users' everyday lives. According to the information, the device Facebook has developed is being called portal, and it would use facial recognition technology to help set up video calls between friends and family members. The information reports that given recent controversies,

Facebook now plans to process and store video data on the device, instead of in the cloud or in the company's servers. According to the information, the decision to go this route came after discussions over the past several months with privacy experts. What exactly would portal be? Quoting the information's piece, quote, Facebook points to an example of a young woman in her kitchen being able to video chat with her mother

using facial recognition technology to suggest a call when both are in rooms with the device and share recipes using the device. So, yeah, given the current climate, the idea of a Facebook device knowing what room you're in feels a little bit, as sources told, Bloomberg's friar, quote, now may be the wrong time to ask consumers to trust Facebook

with even more information by placing a connected device in their homes. If you're familiar with the website Axios, then you know that they like to publish stories on deep background or from unnamed sources to try to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at what is really going on in politics. Today, Jonathan Swan published Just Such a Dishy Piece that might have some major implications for some pretty big tech companies. Everyone on Capitol Hill might be looking for answers from the heads of the social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but President Trump is apparently focusing his ire on Amazon. Swan reportedly spoke to five administration sources, and the takeaway from one source was, quote,

He's obsessed with Amazon. Obsessed. According to the sources, President Trump has reportedly mused openly about targeting Amazon on antitrust grounds or changing Amazon's tax treatment. The president apparently believes mom-and-pop retailers are being put out of business by Amazon, and also thinks that Amazon has had an unfair advantage because it gets a sweetheart deal from the U.S. Postal Service. Quote, the whole post office thing, that's very much a perception he has, a source told Swan.

It's been explained to him in multiple meetings that his perception is inaccurate and that the post office actually makes a ton of money from Amazon, end quote. But others believe Trump's fixation on Amazon is due to the fact that Amazon's Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post. Andrew Beatty, the AFP News Agency's White House correspondent, noted on Twitter, quote, for the record, Trump has mentioned Amazon three dozen times since taking office. At least one third of those times he's linked it to the Washington Post, which he calls fake, etc., etc.

Vice President Pence, however, is reportedly more concerned with Facebook and Google. According to Swan's reporting, the Vice President worries about those companies' influence on media coverage as well as their control of the advertising industry and users' personal data. Quoting Swan, When private discussions have turned to the idea of busting Facebook and Google, Pence has listened with keen interest and is open to the suggestion that these two companies need shaking up. Search Engine Land is reporting that GPS and directions app Waze is launching local ads, which will allow small businesses to purchase advertisements

that will pop up on your map when you're navigating to a location. The three types of ads available are a branded pin, which expands to give more information when tapped on, promoted ads around search when users are searching for a specific location, and something called a zero-speed takeover, which is a banner ad that will pop up during traffic stops. Waze has been testing the ads for about a year and said that advertisers saw, quote,

20.4% more monthly navigations when they started advertising with Ways Local. The ads are designed to be simple to set up, again, for small and local businesses, but also there is an enterprise tier for companies with dozens of locations or franchises. Interestingly, this is apparently a completely standalone advertising product that does not tie in to any other Google advertising platforms. and in giving more details to Search Engine Land about the product, Waze revealed, interestingly, that its app now has over 100 million active users and that on average users spend 11 hours per month inside the app.

Search Engine Land notes that that gives Ways engagement parity with the likes of Instagram and Snapchat. Ship, the startup once known as Uber for Shipping, is shutting down operations and laying off all of its staff. Founded in the summer of 2013, Ship raised a total of $63 million in funding and was part of a wave of on-demand app startups that often pitched themselves as Uber, but for fill in the blank. In a fascinating and painfully honest interview with fast companies Harry McCracken, ship founder and CEO Kevin Gibbon gave a no-holds-barred look at the company's rise and fall. Gibbon's assessment of ship's biggest mistake, raising too much capital, which forced ship to deploy that capital and led it to try to do too much too fast. We prematurely scaled, Gibbon told McCracken.

I blame myself for this. Picking the right things to work on at the right time was our biggest failure. Ship had originally launched as an on-demand consumer service that allowed anyone to ship anything. Simply dial up the app and someone would come to you, pick up your item, and take it away to box it up and ship it out. Ship later pivoted towards servicing small businesses and enterprises, but the original focus on consumers had already drained ship of a lot of its capital. A small-scale down ship has recently reportedly been profitable, but as McCracken says in the piece, being the Uber of something is no longer a way to get venture capital.

to write you checks. Ship was not able to raise follow-on rounds to continue operations. Gibbon says VCs all want to fund startups around cryptocurrencies at the moment, but he cautioned entrepreneurs in that space not to make the same mistake

he did. Quote, I've been through it, and before you raise capital, know what you're going to do with it, Gibbon says. As for Ship's legacy, Gibbon said, quote, this business should exist. It absolutely should. Consumers loved it. Small businesses loved it.

But what we didn't do is focus on having a sustainable business from day one. The piece is in Fast Company and it's called How Ship Sunk, the Rise and Fall of an On Demand startup. We took a look at the state of online video yesterday from a content perspective, but in CNET today there was an interesting look at the state of the industry from a technological perspective. Several big tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Cisco and Netflix, have all teamed up to create a new digital video compression technology called AV1. AV1 can apparently match the picture quality of existing video compression technologies all while using 30 to 40% less network capacity to do so. This is important as we move to a

4K world and beyond where video will be using way more data to create images. But AV1 has one other interesting wrinkle. It's a royalty-free standard as opposed to existing video standards that are patented and require royalties to legacy rights holders. So not only is your Netflix video going to be higher quality, it will soon also have less of an impact on the network itself, and cost Netflix less to use. This technology is slated to begin rolling out soon as the consortium behind the standard announced on Wednesday that it had completed the specification process, which is essentially laying the groundwork and the rules about how things like browsers and phones will be able to use the technology.

Quote, you'll see it in major browsers in 2018 and 2019, said Gabe Frost, who is a principal engineering manager at Microsoft, but also part of the consortium that has come up with the standard. Quote, we're spinning this flywheel really quickly. Finally, as we did, of course, and yesterday speaking about the state of the market for video streaming, with Apple poised to enter the game in a big way, today I thought we'd take a look at the state of the music market. There's a really interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal that suggests that if you think that keeping up with the exploding number of TV shows is difficult, don't even get started with music. The gist of the story is that in the old media paradigm of albums and physical records and CDs and the like,

artists tended to stagger releases and not put out too much music for fear of flooding the market. The music industry seemingly made a conscious decision to make music a scarce but valuable commodity. But in a world where streaming music services rule, this is changing. Cheap digital production tools as well as DIY distribution platforms mean that artists are positively flooding the market with music 24-7. quoting from the piece, not long ago, record labels operated on a less-as-more strategy, seeking to avoid cannibalizing an artist's album sales

by putting out yet another one too soon. In the CD era, the costs of producing and distributing each album made it important to make higher-grossing albums to ensure profits. With streaming, those costs aren't as high and labels have a greater incentive to own, release, and re-release more music.

later in the piece, quote, artists are increasingly releasing their work in a steady drip instead of relying solely on full-length albums in an effort to keep listeners coming back, end quote. It seems that artists are more about building brands these days, which could be monetized by selling concert tickets and merchandise, and since that sort of thing doesn't really have a season, it makes no sense to pause between releases.

Also, since most people are streaming music now anyway, the idea is your fans should never be without something new to stream from you. After all, the artist only gets paid if a song gets played, so sitting on a three-year-old album that is slowly waning in popularity doesn't bring in the money at all. Some fascinating stats from the piece. The amount of music released globally is now seven times the amount released in 1960. Nearly 150,000 new albums saw at least one sale in the U.S. last year.

The number of global musical releases, including albums, singles, and all other forms of music reached 250,000 last year. In the mid-90s, in comparison, generally considered to be the music industry's heyday, that number was only about 150,000. That's all for the TechMeme Ride Home. The show was produced by Brian McCullough and the TechMeme.com editors. Thanks for listening.