The Vergecast - Zuckerberg testifies, Spotify hardware, and Huawei P20 Pro review

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

After a week of Facebook-intensive news, The Vergecast is here to break it all down for you. Nilay is out this week, so Dieter and Paul welcome senior editor Natt Garun and Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton to the show to go over all the news. Even though Mark Zuckerberg took up most of the site this week, there was a still a lot of other stuff happening. Spotify may be releasing some hardware products, we reviewed the Huawei P20 Pro, and the cast gets into some classic talk about the web. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment “Record resolution revolution” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:03 - Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of Congress 33:17 - Spotify’s first hardware device might be this music player for your car 43:00 - Apple’s RED iPhone 8 43:37 - Huawei P20 Pro review 49:15 - Paul’s weekly segment “Record resolution revolution” 51:34 - Web apps are only getting better 52:52 - HP goes up against the iPad Pro with its $599 Chromebook x2 52:56 - This is the new Gmail design Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. Did you know that 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024? To help fill them, IBM's new education model gives high school students, workplace experience, and an associate's degree. 90 P-Tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com slash P-Tech. That's P-is-in-Paul. Tech as in tech.

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Greetings, mobile accompliceers. This is a flagship podcast of Theverge.com. I am Dieter Bone. Neli is not here, and maybe if you're nice, we'll tell you why. I am joined by lovely people. Paul Miller is here. Hello.

Nat Garon is here. It's been a while. Casey Newton is here. What up? We're going to have the whole staff on because that's what we have to do when we don't have Neil. No, no, no, Eli's not here because Nilai is a father. He's on paternity leave.

Yay. Go find him on Instagram at Reckless and like the picture of the baby. Very cute baby. Very cute baby. She is very cute. Her name is Max, Maxwell, Maxwell, Sia. That's beautiful. Max, Maxwell, Saya.

No, just Maxwell, but Max for short. I suspect most people will call her Max. But yeah, she's a happy baby. Neely seems to be a happy dad. I'm sure he's going to be fine. He'll be fine. Yes, I think, I mean, this will be a great thing for him. I think it's important it's important for technology journalists to have children in their lives because it is the children that are going to tell them what is the next new important thing to focus on, right?

Like you have children in your life to say, hey, I'm using the new Bing BongBong app and everyone at my middle school is doing Bing Bang Now. I mean, The Verge is fundamentally about the future and I believe that children are the future. Oh my gosh. I think the best way to predict the future is to create it by having children. And that is exactly what Neil has done. All right, we're not, we have no more jokes. Casey, you've had a really chill week, right? Who, who doggies?

It has been totally relaxing. You live blogged Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress for approximately 3,000 hours, I think. It was 10 hours. It felt like 3,000 toward the end. There was a moment yesterday where my brain had never felt mushyer. Like I had sort of lapsed into this pure transcription mode where I felt incapable of sorting important questions from unimportant questions. And it actually made me respect Mark Zuckerberg in a new way because he did not have the luxury of

his brain turning into much. He had to be on point for 10 hours in a very high-pressure situation. Okay, so set the scene. So day one was the Senate, day two was the House. He was going there to just answer questions from angry Congresspeople. Like, what's the story? That's basically right. You know, if you've been reading The Verge over the past three weeks, you've probably seen our coverage

of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, and the gist of that scandal is that a researcher tricked a bunch of people into giving away their personal information, which he then sold the Cambridge Analytica, which then used it for a bunch of nefarious political ad-targeting purposes. And although Facebook was aware of this, it apparently did not investigate to see whether Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data as they were supposed to. And so a lot of people got very mad, and Congress called Zuckerberg to account for everything that had been going on. But as often happens at these sort of hearings. While it started with Cambridge Analytica,

it soon moved on to many other topics related to the seemingly never-ending cascade of scandals that Facebook has gotten wrapped up in since the 2016 election. Favorite question? My favorite question that anyone asked? Yeah. Man. Well, from the standpoint of social media and democracy, which is one of the things I care a lot about,

I really appreciated that Lindsay Graham asked Zuckerberg straight up whether Facebook had gotten too powerful and whether it was a monopoly. He asked Zuckerberg to name his biggest competitor. And as we reported, Zuckerberg really couldn't name one. And that question is important because it forces, I think, all of us to reckon with the unchecked nature of power that not just Facebook have, but all of the big tech platforms have, whether you're talking about a Google or an Amazon or an Apple, right? the decisions that these companies make affect, you know, not just Americans, but billions of people around the world. And it seemed like the Senate and the House this week were belatedly waking up to that. I mean, I didn't watch all 10 hours because, oh, my God. Also, disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, a division of Facebook.

There you go. I expected to watch it and see a bunch of senators and Congress people not understand technology. And my expectations were matched. I don't know. Was anybody generally impressed? there were like maybe four things that I saw. I was like, yes, I'm impressed with the level of this question. You, like, you picked a thing and you went and you did it.

You asked the right question. But everybody else was like, well, I'm here. Well, it seems like the whole thing is, I really don't like these kinds of, especially, it's not like it's a criminal investigation of something. Mark Zuckerberg is not part of the government, so they're not like investigating their own. So you end up with like this weird, like a lot of people posturing. and I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, I didn't watch the whole thing or hardly any of it. I relied on the excellent verge coverage to summarize it for me.

But, I mean, a good, a large majority of it is just the congressperson, like, promoting, self-promotion. Yeah, there's a lot of grandstanding and a lot of putting themselves over. And hilariously, a lot of requests for favors from Martin Zucker. Really? Really? Yeah. Axios did a great little piece about everything that lawmakers asked Zuckerberg for. And it was mostly, could you please bring fiber to my rural district? And that gave Zuckerberg an opportunity to say, well, you know, we're building an internet plane that can beam it straight to the ground. So, yeah, there was a lot of Congresspeople grandstanding. But this is a case where it is helpful, and I'm finding it helpful just a day later after the hearings are over to take a deep breath and really go through the transcript. and really identify what was new that we learned from the hearings and what were the really sharp

questions that got asked. And there is a set of questions that I would highlight in that regard that I think you are going to see drive the next wave of Facebook coverage. So you had two representatives, Joe Kennedy and I believe Ben Lujan, who asked about the data that Facebook collects about you that you did not give you. your explicit informed consent to. And as best as I can tell, there are at least three of these categories. So one is, if you are not logged into Facebook or you don't have an account and you visit Facebook, any public page on Facebook on the web, Facebook tracks that. Okay. They say that's for

security reasons. Is that the shadow profile? It is part of a shadow profile. And what they say is, if they did not track it, then you might be able to go in and scrape every public page on Facebook and do God knows what with it. So, okay, so that's the first category. So this is just like, oh, here's a visitor coming from this IP address. They've gone to this page. We're just going to keep an eye on this person and see if they're doing anything correct. Exactly.

Okay. A bot. For example. To add purposes. So there's this thing called the Facebook pixel. It's a piece of code that advertisers can put on websites all around the web to track your visits, whether you have a Facebook account or not. and then Facebook, which has an external advertising network, can then use that information to target ads at you.

Now, this is just a standard, like, this is just a standard tracking pixel that, like, every ad network on the planet does, and Facebook just happens to be another ad network. Do you know if the tracking pixel happens with there's like a like button on a page? Yes, it absolutely does. And my response to Facebook is just another ad network is, well, actually, Facebook is one of the two biggest ad networks in the entire world. Yeah, no, I was playing devil's ad. Facebook is, quote, unquote, just another ad network in the same way that Google is, quote, unquote, just another ad network, right? Sure, sure. So that's category two. And then category three, which actually got no airtime during the hearings, but which I think is important to point out is data that it collects for growth reasons. So if any of your friends uploaded their contacts and your contact is in there, then Facebook has your phone number. And using these three kinds of data that I just described, they can build what Paul just referred to as a shadow profile. It is a bunch of information about you, you know, where you've been on Facebook, where you've been on Facebook, where you've been, on the web, who your friends are, and they've built this really complete picture. Well, I shouldn't

call it a complete picture, but let's say it's like a comprehensive picture of who you are. Now, why is all this important? Well, one of the major lines of questioning during the hearings was, okay, Mark, like, data privacy is really important. You need to give us control over our data. And Mark would say, repeatedly, Senator, Congressman, you have control over your data. You can delete any of your data from Facebook, right? Except when it got to these categories. Now, of three that I mentioned, it is true that if you have a Facebook account, you can opt out of web tracking, okay, which just leaves the other two. But that still leaves these two categories of information that Facebook is collecting about you, whether you have a Facebook account or not,

and you as a human being actually do not have control over that in a meaningful way. And so I think this is what is going to drive kind of that next wave of coverage is Facebook says you can delete the data that, you know, you have volunteered to give it, but actually Facebook is collecting a lot more information about you. And what I just described, there may be more categories of information that we're still waking up to. What about like, where do you, like, anti-tracking browsers and something like Brave or just an ad blocker? How does that fit into this picture? And is it, is anybody on the Facebook side suggesting, like, well, if you don't want to be tracked, set up, set up some defenses, arm yourself? It's a really interesting question, and that may, in fact, be their response. I have a hard

time imagining them recommending that you use a browser or an ad blocker. I just can't imagine them doing it, but that may turn out to be an effective answer. But for so long, Facebook's prime directive has been to grow. And that has meant getting really creative about figuring out who people are. And it's worth mention, why are they doing all this? Well, the reason is, so let's say, you know, Paul, if you'd come back to the internet and immediately decided to create a Facebook account, which maybe you did. And I bring that up because Paul had a great piece on our site today about sort of advice for people who want to quit social media that I recommend everyone go read.

But let's say you deleted your Facebook account or deactivated it. And when you came back, you'd create a brand new one, Facebook would, just from your email address and your phone number, Facebook would actually already know who all your friends were. And they would say, hey, Paul, here's your 68 best friends. And you could go ahead and add all of them. And that's important because what Facebook has found is, the faster that it connects you to all your friends, they'll have you.

You'll spend more and more of your time there. You'll see more ads. It's a better business for Facebook if you're there with all your friends. And they would argue connecting you with your friends is what they're all about. So this is why they're collecting all of this data. But as we saw with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data has other uses, right? I'm really warming up to this metaphor about our public data as toxic waste, right? It's like the byproduct of the thing we actually want to do.

And over time, it just gets kind of more and more poisonous. and it's often many years after we gave it away that it comes back to haunt us. And by the way, let's just keep talking about Facebook. I was going to say, it's like, you know, like when your skin, you're constantly shedding little particles of your skin. And if you don't vacuum every now and then, your rug gets really crappy. And then you get allergies. Exactly.

You start sneezing. That is so gross. I don't know. Like, you're just leaving dead skin all over the internet. That is so gross. And I feel like the way they collect the information to you, super tricky. Like, if you just download Messenger and you, like, you don't need a Facebook account to have Messenger, you just download it. And, like, the first thing you'll say is, like,

would you like to upload your contact book? And you're like, sure, why not? Or if you sign up for Instagram, it's like, would you like to upload your contact book and find your friends? And you're like, sure, why not? And, like, it's like this big blue button that you just click so that most people are just looking at their phone and it's just like, next, next, next, I want to see pictures on Instagram. And they don't realize that the button they press is, yes, upload my entire contact and now all your friends are shadow profiles, as opposed to this very, very tiny tax. It's like, no, don't do that. People just skip it.

And let's talk about how Facebook gets you to share those contacts. So if you do this through Instagram, for example, Owen Williams' Twitter personality tweeted the actual flow on the Instagram mobile app the other day. And here's what happens. You enter your name and your password, and there's a little message that says, your contacts are periodically synced and stored on our servers to remove contacts, go to settings and disconnect, learn more. And then underneath that, there's a giant blue button that says next. And then underneath that in much smaller font, there's tiny blue text that says continue without

syncing context. Of course, you know, the vast majority of the people are just going to click the next button because what they don't realize is the next button is the, yeah, go ahead, upload all of my friends information button, right? It doesn't say that. So, you know, Facebook on one hand is talking a great game about giving you control. over your private information, but there are all of these surfaces of the app that tell a different story, which is still growth at all costs. Well, and correct me if I'm wrong, Facebook calling it pixel, let's be clear how these ad trackers work.

If they can't get your IP address, or they don't know who you are, ad tracking has gotten very sophisticated, and they put like a little canvas object, and they use a profile of your computer, basically how your computer renders that little pixel. gives them information of who you are. They're not just taking the data when it's there. They're not just collecting the dead skin you've left behind. They're walking up to you and scraping it off. I mean, to be fair, I think television does this too, right, to TV programming

to just figure out, like, who's watching and if they're still watching a teleprovision programming. How do they do that? They put pixels on a TV's? Like a pixel on a TV where, like, if they flash a certain type of pixel. Oh, TV manufacturers do this. Yeah. Yeah, like TV. For sure.

Like, they show a pixel on TV during a certain programming at a certain time of day in whatever market you're in to figure out whether you're watching this particular programming. Wait, and then your smart TV sees that and sends the information. The TV is not have to be smart. Like, TV advertisers just can do that and figure out whether you're watching a certain programming based on whatever pixels are showing on your TV. Oh, my gosh. Well, shut it all down.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. Here's what I've learned about this week is that I think Congress and people in general just don't know how offline advertising even works, which is why this whole thing is so freaky to a lot of people. Because this has existed for TV and this exists for offline for when like you sign up for a supermarket loyalty card and then randomly coupons show up to your house. I think this type of like tracking and advertising has happened for a while. And like now that's happening at a scale of Facebook, which you use nine hours a day, like people are freaked out. Right. I would also say it's easy to buy a TV that isn't flashing these secret pixels at you. And it's hard to not use Facebook, right?

Or it's at least harder. Yeah. So, okay. Extreme devil's advocate. Sure. Let Facebook have my stuff. They provide a nice free service to me. And I like talking to my friends.

And I like looking at pictures on Instagram. And if them having a whole bunch of information about who I am and who I'm connected to socially is the price that I pay for that. I'd rather do that than five bucks a month, especially since it's the only option. What's the big deal? I mean, I know the answer, but I just want to hear everybody say it. I think that is a fair question. The story that kicked all of this off was, well, the data that we give away, Facebook turns out not to have much control over. And one thing that we know happened is that a political consulting firm got a hold of it and tried to use it to create

highly targeted ads and to persuade us more effectively because they'd learn things about us that we never would have voluntarily told them, right? Now, there have been plenty of reports that that particular kind of targeting might not have been all of that useful in this case, but in an election where a lot of people were unhappy about the outcome and where the cause, or rather the result, had a lot of causes. I think people have kind of glommed onto this as wow, here is a concrete case where me giving away my data may have had some sort of impact on the world around me. So, you know, even if you think that that impact is overstated, I do think that it exists. And it just sort of opens up this door toward, well, my gosh, what are other people doing with my data? And the whole purpose of these hearings was to try to get a handle on that. I'm saying, well, who else has this data and what are they doing with it?

because again, this gets down to the level of Facebook being able to know who you're married to, not because you've said, I'm married to this person on your Facebook profile, but because through location tracking, they know that you sleep in the same house. And this is real, and this is technology that they bragged about having during a presentation to advertisers last year. So that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Okay. So then the big question that had, like, Zuckerberg was like ready for it. And then it came up in like lots of weird different ways.

It's like, okay, so we obviously have to regulate Facebook. But what does that even look like? So it could look like a lot of things. And I would be quick to add that I do not think that regulation is imminent because we live in a country that seems opposed to regulating big companies generally and particularly during this administration. So in a way, Facebook has a great opportunity to go out and regulate itself and try to avoid a true round of regulation, you know, if and when. and Democrats ever come back into power. But there are other things that could be done in the meantime. And you should read on the verge a story written today by Russell Brandom about a concept that a Yale professor has called an information fiduciary, which sounds like kind of a ridiculous thing.

Okay. But there are similar positions in like the banking and finance industries where sort of as a requirement of being in an industry, you agree to follow certain standards and procedures. and it kind of becomes a good housekeeping seal of approval for your company. And so he's arguing that Facebook, Google, Twitter, they would have an incentive to participate in a system where they agreed to abide by certain standards, and then this information fiduciary would essentially be able to audit their records and see whether they were living up to the promises that they made. And what's appealing about this, if you're a consumer, is that the company,

companies could just sort of agree to do it and you wouldn't need to wait for a new Congress to come up with regulations. So, okay, let's assume that that's coming at some point. But the thing that was on the table right away was the GDPR. Russell's been on the show talking about it before, all these privacy regulations in Europe. And like, it seems like the answer to why don't you just make the GDPR rules available around the world and like to have that be the standard everywhere was like he gave different answers to it. It was also like it was super funny for me to watch a bunch of, I don't know, and Congresspeople who I think in any other context, if you had said, how about you take some European regulation and apply it in America? They would have been like, whoa, no. Hell no. They're like, what about the GDPR there, Zuck? Like, Europe did the work of deciding what it wanted the standards to be when we, in America didn't. And now we're just like, what if we just do that? And the answer seems to be yes, well, no. Well, kind of. Well, we're doing this thing that's like it. But, like, I don't get what their position is on that at all.

They have given mixed messages, and frankly, I think some of the reporting about what Facebook has said has been inaccurate. There were reports that Facebook had said that it would not roll out GDPR protections globally, and then they came back and said, well, we didn't say that. And then finally, yesterday at the hearing, Zuckerberg said, Zuckerberg rather said, yes, we will roll out these protections. And there will be some differences. And I'm willing to take Mark at his word when he says that they are going to roll out these protections and that there will be some essentially minor differences between countries that are just rooted in the fact that we have different legal systems. And I'm sure there's going to be different wording. But, you know, the spirit of the thing is that you as a citizen should be able to request of any company a copy of the data that any other company has developed about you. I mean, that's really the spirit of it.

and that does seem like something that Facebook can live up to. And in fact, they already have a download your information tool, which lets you download all the information that you voluntarily contributed to Facebook. Now, an interesting question would be, well, could you request your shadow profile, right? And so these are some of the debates that I think you'll see playing out over the next six months or a year. Or request the reasoning that went behind why you're being shown an ad at any given moment would be really, really fun and a terrifying technical nightmare for them to...

I love that idea. I love that idea. What's that? Just real quick, Paul. I mean, so much of the fear and the outrage that tech platforms experience now is because they are racing to build these AI systems that can't explain themselves.

And so you wind up with so much uncertainty around what's going on. I believe that one of the big reasons that there is this urban legend that persists that Facebook is spying on all of our phone conversation so that it can target ads at us is precisely because we don't have the button that you just mentioned, Paul, that you can't just hit something that's like, hey, why are you showing me an ad to visit Copenhagen? Because I was just talking about that with my friends. Yeah, but there's no way that they could provide that button.

You just said that they don't know what the AI is doing. You click the button and the button would pop up the same dialogue box every time and it would say, yeah, we don't know, the computer thought it might be good. Or it could say, you know what? This advertiser wanted to reach men between the ages of 30 and 40 who lived in the United States. Like ads actually are a case where the AI could explain itself at least a little bit. So I've been reading a really wonderful book about machine learning called The Master Algorithm. I saw this guy, this guy gave a bunch of TED Talks and stuff when his book came out, and he's a machine learning researcher.

He's kind of a machine learning utopian. He talks a lot about how they just need more and more data. But there's a clear separation of concerns. And I really like this fiduciary idea. But in this book, he presents an option where you have something that's kind of like a bank for your data. So all data about you goes to your bank. It's the, I don't know, whatever, what do you want to call? The Wells Fargo of personal information, right?

Okay. Wells Fargo as a bank with money, if you think about it, it's their job to hold on to your money, to give it back to you if you want it. Uh-huh. And to give it to other people when you say it's okay. Yeah. So I've just been thinking about there's got to be some ways to separate the collection of data from the usage. Because ultimately, we want Facebook to be able to use their data. And I definitely, I'm excited about a lot of these applications of machine learning where if some company had not just the profile that they can build on me by tracking me obsessively, but by combining that with the profile that Netflix can build and that Amazon can build, they can get a much larger picture of who I am.

So what you're saying is data has, we all agree, in the abstract, has some sort of value. and therefore can be used to trade with each other, but there needs to be ways to track it. And also maybe we should consider making it that abstraction concrete in some way. And so we need an institution that stores that value, and then we need maybe little, I don't know, slips of paper that are like, you know,

created by a large institution that, you know, is willing to back them up if necessary. I feel like you're... Or maybe, or maybe this abstract concept of our data that has value there, it should actually be tracked in a really big way, such that we know that these transactions actually occurred. It could be maybe like a really large public ledger

that gets verified by the actions of computer GPUs that do math problems. Paul just invented the blockchain. I didn't invent the blockchain. For the record, on Facebook, there is actually a button that says, why am I seeing this ad? But it doesn't really tell you that much. It just says, like, you saw an ad for The Verge because you are between a certain age and you like,

reading or something super vague like that. So it's about just figuring out how to be way more transparent and specific. That's a good point. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. That's true. Is literally anything going to happen? Yes, literally something is going to happen. And here's how you know, because over the past three weeks, things have been happening. Facebook totally locked down its API. So a bunch of information that it used to share it no longer does. They did a steady drip, drip, drip of announcements in the days leading up to the hearing precisely so they could turn around and say, just look at everything we've been doing since this happened, right? And I fully believe that that's going to continue because the scrutiny is not going away.

Okay. Well, that's a happy note. I like the fiduciary. Imagine a world where Facebook has agreed to this industry standard, and just like the green SSL lock, when you're on a site that is agreeing to this standard, you get a little icon, like the terms of service have that icon. like, oh, I know what that icon means. And then if they don't, that industry group outs them for not following those agreed upon rules. I think that could definitely help us because we're not all going to read the terms and conditions.

And I feel like part of the EU solution is, okay, just get them to agree to everything up front so that we have the flexibility down the line. Is this like a CPA? Is this like a lawyer? Is this like an actuary? Is it all the above? I'm just, I'm trying to imagine the college program, the test. It's like a standards body. You know, I read Russell's story.

I'm not an expert on the proposal, but, you know, it doesn't seem to me to be all of that different from almost like a bar association, but at the company level, right? Where it's like, you know, when you become a lawyer, you agree to uphold certain standards. And if you do not, you can be disbarred. And I think, you know, there would be similar mechanisms with this kind of, you know, information fiduciary. Also, they need a better name. It just sounds ridiculous. And in fact, there actually was a name that got pitched during the hearing by one of the representatives yesterday, which I think was something like, you know, a data privacy czar.

A czar. Essentially, like, that there should be, much as there is a consumer financial protection board, there should be a consumer data protection board. Which I also really like as an idea. Could we talk briefly about how almost half of the answers for how Zuckerberg answered all the Congress people was like, we rely on AI, or like, we're building an AI or like, AI will solve the problem. That seems very, what?

Yeah, AI is a magic talisman, and whenever you're threatened in Congress or elsewhere, you just wave it in front of the face of whoever is talking to you, and you say, oh, no, no, no, the AI will fix the problem. And for some reason, we've just agreed to nod and accept that answer. I think that's appropriate. That's fair. I mean, it's kind of crazy to me because, like, the first, one of the first reasons, like, AI was brought up was when Ted Cruz was like, well, why is, like, Facebook seems to be anti-conservative and there's a bias and, like, blah, blah. And, like, these pages are being blocked.

And Zuckerberg is like, well, like, in the future, like, AI is going to figure out what's inappropriate and we're going to take that down and, you know, all these other people harped on, like, inappropriate content on Facebook. But like, isn't AI, like, algorithms inherently are biased? Like, you're supposed to teach it what to get preference to. So, like, how is this going to fix a problem? I don't, like, I don't really understand what, like, this whole AI narrative is going. It's a great point because automated systems are the reason that many of these pages or posts are being withheld or temporarily suspended in the first place. Like, some keyword triggers a review and the thing gets withheld, right? So it's like AI is at the root of this problem already.

And even Zuckerberg has agreed that training a machine learning system to understand speech well enough to be able to draw these incredibly hard distinctions between what is political speech and what is hate speech. Like that's a that's that's very hard. I mean, that's that is not going to be up and running and working really well within the next five years or maybe even 10 years. Right. So, you know, that said, no one was more disingenuous over the past two days than Ted Cruz. There is no... That's like an evergreen statement. Evergreen statement, pin tweet, whatever you want to call it.

I supported Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in the primary. I just like to have that on the record. No, no, you deserve praise for that, I suppose. Of a kind. Yeah. The important thing that I think to remember is that there is no systematic bias against conservative news on Facebook. If you are a conservative person, you can choose to like only conservative pages and befriend only conservative people, and they will feed you a steady diet of conservative everything for the rest of your life. And Facebook is happy to do it.

And if you look at which pages get the most engagement out of any on Facebook, clustered near the top are a bunch of conservative sites. So we have seen no evidence that conservatives are at any disadvantage to any other ideology on Facebook. And in fact, they may have an advantage because, and we saw that during the 2016 election, where it was some of these sort of conservative-leaning viral hoaxes, such as the Pope endorses Donald Trump, that got more shares than almost anything else. I just wanted to point out something about machine learning and AI that I learned from this excellent book called the Master Algorithm that I I really want everybody to read. But one of the things that the book points out is that an AI algorithm is literally 100% mathematically,

provably ineffectual without bias. Like the content of an AI is the bias that it has learned on training data. Right. So we have the word bias as a pejorative in the sense that you lean one way or the other. But the whole content of a machine learning algorithm is the bias that it has learned from how it's been trained. And so therefore, we're definitely not going to solve bias by magical AI because all we're doing when we're building AI is feeding it bias. And we're hopefully choosing what's the right bias. Well, I'm going to read an ad now, and this is quite the ad for this moment.

Did you know that by 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion, and food production will need to grow by, guess what? How much? Paul, guess how much is going to need to grow by? 70%. That's how much. What if artificial intelligence could help? Farmers are already using it to help increase crop yields. Watson and the IBM Cloud provided. access to weather data and analyze satellite imagery to help them monitor soil moisture levels and reduce water waste. So as the population grows, more food can be put on tables. Let's put

smart to work. Find out more at IBM.com slash smart. Can I say, I heard the word data so often over the past couple of days, and after a certain point, I just started to hear dad-dat, like how babies refer to their fathers. And so just like hearing Yeah, so just like hearing a bunch of senators saying, now tell me about your dad-da. I was like, what is happening here? I can't segue off of that. Sorry.

Nat. Hi. On April 24th, Spotify said it's going to make a quote news announcement. And everyone didn't know what the heck that meant. But we saw a thing that maybe is the thing. What is the thing? So there's several things. We don't know who.

what Spotify can announce. They just IPO, and so that means that they could radically change the service itself. But what we did find is there is a leak of a hardware device. That's basically this thing that you attach to I guess your air vent in the car.

And you can use it to ask it to play any random Spotify music. So think of it as like a digital assistant, but all it does is play Spotify stuff. We don't really know anything about it other than that it's just supposed to be this thing that attaches in your car. And like the leak that we all may not even be what it will actually look like.

What we saw is like this circle. It looks kind of like a button or a pin that you just kind of clip on, kind of like how you would clip on a phone holder in your car. And it has a little screen on it that says what you're listening to. There's a pause, it's a shuffle, there's a rewind button, and that's basically it. And in like a little talking bubble that says, hey, Spotify, play my Discover weekly. And that's all we know. We have no idea whether it has third-party integrations, anything else.

We just know that it can play Spotify if you talk to it. I mean, that's a lot. We know a lot. I mean, assuming this thing exists, it's got a display. So it's like, there's actually a display. It has voice input in some way. It's got controls. It probably, I mean, it'll connect to either either over OX or probably Bluetooth.

And then the thing was that it was maybe going to be part of a subscription. So, like, you just like, you pay like 13 bucks a month as one of the screenshots that we saw. include the data plan? That should include the service, like Spotify premium, because that would be crazy for them to sell that with ads. Okay. Okay. Who wants to go on a marvelous journey with me?

Imagine if there's one mount for your car vent and another mount that you can put on like an arm strap and you can take this running with you. Ooh. Wouldn't that be great? A device that can play. your Spotify without having you to sync having to sink anything without having to carry your phone isn't that just so I think I think anything that is like that Spotify makes that is wearable

they should call bodyify it's like B-O-D-I-F-I I mean I would buy the hell out of this thing a botify yeah I would buy BOTify for sure I have a car I drive it I don't know I once a week once every couple of weeks these days I have Android Auto Nat and I were just talking about this and so I have Android Auto which has Spotify on it and I have would still consider buying this thing. Because Android Auto is hot garbage for me right now. Android Auto works fine for me. I like it just fine.

I mean, like, how much are you asking of your Android Auto? All I'm using it for is just directions and, like, hey, play this random song. It's slow. It disconnects. It, like, you can only tap the screen, I think, four times or five times before the whole thing freezes and tells you that it's unsafe for you to be doing what you're doing. You have to, like, pull over to find your playlist on Spotify. Very oddly that is not happening for me.

But I can sympathize that it's still a relatively new software because it's like only new cars still have them. But like if the Spotify thing, that's the hardware with no name, has third party integration that has like any kind of map integration that's basically just like Android audio but like at Google Home that you stick to your car, I can see that being worthwhile. Okay, so if you could speak to it, you say, hey, Spotify. You don't say, Alexa, tell Spotify.

You don't say, hey, Google. Like, they're building their own voice assistant now, too? Yeah, we know that they are because it's actually already live in the iOS app. Okay. Does not work well when you're on the street is a lesson I learned recently. If you were alone in a quiet room works fantastic. But, man, I tried to get it to play something when I was walking around town the other day, and it was just not happening for me.

So you have to open the app and then, like... Then if you go to... There's a search feature. in the app and if you when you tap that there is a microphone button you tap microphone and then you just say what what you want it's a great idea i mean the thing that i'm most excited about is just that spotify is making hardware period because right now in order to have a great spotify experience that is not on your phone you have to use somebody else's hardware right like you have to plug it into your sono speakers uh you have to connect it to your Alexa device

all I want is like a Spotify version of the HomePod basically except that I want it to come in multiple flavors and sizes so I can have maybe one big one and a few little ones but like I still want the ultimate Spotify hardware and having spent four months now with the Sonos one like I know it's not the Sonos one and I also feel like Spotify can just be smarter about if they work on it like when you're talking to Spotify like right Right now, if I say Alexa, play Angel Olson on Spotify. Half the time, Alexa will play a Spotify radio station with Angel Olson. But the other half of the time, Alexa will just find some random thing that kind of sounds like the words Angel Olson. And it could be literally all music in the world. Where Spotify knows that all I ever do is listen to Angel Olson. Spotify should have a pretty good idea of who I'm trying to listen to and can just sit, me right there. Yeah, if anything, my feeling about Spotify is like, I almost wish that it would

be a little bit more creative in what it suggests. Like, it's kind of like, you know how if you, like, you buy a toilet on Amazon and then for the next like eight months it tries to sell you an additional toilet? Like, I sort of feel that way about Spotify, where it's like, oh, you listen to this song twice yesterday. Maybe we'll make that the lead song on your mix. It's like, no, like, just play me another song, buy that artist. Yeah. This is a classic problem and machine learning that is thankfully addressed by the master algorithm. Do you have a promo code for that, Paul?

It's called Buy it on Audible maybe. A long promo code. Speaking of promo codes, the promo code is promo code and the power user of the internet shirts are in the Verge store right now. I have ordered mine.

I don't know what the turnaround is on those. I've also ordered mine. I ordered the basic one, the one that is actually not weird looking enough. Not ironic. That was the wrong move. I ordered the, like, we, okay, so if you're not familiar with this story,

Mark Zuckerberg during a Q&A with reporters that I was on last week, referred to himself as a power user of the internet, which is obviously true, but just sort of like funny because of the understatement. And so immediately within the verge, we said, we have to make this a T-shirt. And so we whipped up these four designs and put them to a vote on Twitter. And the most, like, boring version one. It looks good. It looks good.

You're right. Let me take it about it. A very talented artist made it. It doesn't look bad at all. It just looks like serious to me. And what I loved about the version of the shirt that I bought is that it looks like a 90s VHS cassette about the internet. Like just those like over the top computer graphics, like neon colors. And so that's what I wanted.

So I bought it. But Dieter, you don't know when it's going to come. Soon. I've got my tracking pixel. Great. Anyway, the hardware thing is not the only thing that Spotify could be doing. There was a report earlier this week saying that they could be making changes to their free service. So hopefully, to me, if anything, they should use the music I listen to and serve me actually better ads since I'm cheap and I won't pay for it.

And I'm okay with listening to an ad for like a minute for, you know. It's not a big deal to me. Anyway. We need to back up. How did you decide not to get Spotify? Do you pay for any music at all? No. Any music service?

Wow. No. I'm super cheap. I listen to music on Spotify for free or on YouTube because I don't care. It's fine. Advertising is a thing that I can ignore for half a minute and then move on to my current life. It's fine.

But I have to admit that Spotify probably has the worst ads. Like they could probably learn from Google and Facebook. on how to target ads better because I keep getting either the same ads or just ones that completely are irrelevant. Like I'll listen to a rock song and get an ad for a concert for like Aaron Carter. And it just makes no sense. These just don't understand it. And like if anything, if they can do, if they're planning to revamp the free subscriptions here,

better ads would be my request. Wow. I'm just shocked. I pay for every single music service. It's embarrassing. I don't pay for title. I don't pay for title. I have paid for.

for every music service, and I've whittled them down to Spotify and to Google Play Music, which I frankly, mostly pay for because I get YouTube Red, which is the most underappreciated streaming service that there is. Did you pay from YouTube Red now? I had it for, like, we bought a Google Home, and it gave us, like, a free thing, and after that, I was just like, meh. What about Netflix? I don't pay for Netflix.

I don't use Netflix. This is amazing. I don't use Netflix. I don't have. I have Hulu. I have sling. That I have. Sling? Sling? Because I don't have cable TV, so that's what I have. Right. Interesting. Very frugal, y'all.

It's fascinating. I'm jealous. What else we have? Phones. Red iPhone 8. It is so red. It is way redder than I expected. I have nothing else to say about it other than it's super red. It is way better than the last red iPhone they made, which is that the front is actually black versus the last one where the front was white and we were like, what the hell were they thinking? So yeah, and this is clearly. play on getting more, you know, of their Asian markets to buy it because red is a lucky color and people love red and people like to be unique. And, yeah. Also, like, charity, right? I mean, there is that, but, like, Apple. Yeah.

You know how Apple loves charity. Yeah. And then Vlad reviewed the Huawei P20 Pro. I don't have one yet. I'm expecting hopefully to get one next week. Aren't they illegal in this country? They are... Not like technically, but kind of.

So, I wouldn't want to be caught with one coming across the border. I'd say that much. The big question is, is the burden of proof on Huawei or the U.S. government at this point? Because the U.S. government has said, no, no, no. And everyone's sort of like, well, tell us why. And they're like, we're not going to... There were studies years ago of people looking into it. Huawei's networking equipment is used around the world.

They're like a leader in 5G tech. And there's a concern. Is it really about spying or is it about a concern that this privately held or quasi-privately held Chinese company that has connections to the Chinese government, the Chinese military, frankly, is to be trusted either for security or simply because if we let them have too much power in defining 5G, they're going to end up being a monopoly in 5G networking equipment. And Erickson and Nortel and whoever else will just fade away. I really want this to be clarified for me. But by whom? Do you think it's up to Huawei to convince the U.S. government or do you think it's a U.S. government to like tell us what the problem is?

I think the U.S. government, here's the thing. If I, Paul Miller, say, don't buy Huawei phones, they spy on you or they are a security risk. If I cannot prove that, that is libel. And so for the government to say that and insinuate that without saying actually why, it feels like liable to me. And like maybe if it's true and then therefore like Huawei can't actually fight it because it's actually true, then that's one thing. But it's just so weird. Also, I liked Vlad's usage of the term super flagship, which I'm a little bit. I think really nicely encapsulates this, this, you know, this new tier that we have of like the sort of the $1,000 phone that is for rich people.

Yeah, that's, that's about right. It also has a notch which I'm done having feelings about notches. I just can't. I don't have the emotional energy to be angry or sad about notches anymore. Here's why, because so, you know, one thing about me is I'm not a hardware person. And I felt that very acutely as this debate was raging about. the notch and I got my iPhone. I was like, oh, I kind of think this notch looks cool. I was like, well, I'm not telling any of my coworkers about that. I'm keeping that to myself. But I've

never had one negative emotion about the notch the entire time I've had my iPhone 10. Wow. I mean, I have had it in landscape annoy me sometimes. But that's about it. It's fine. It's whatever. I like, here's the thing. Every time I consciously am aware of it, I think you're the thing that's like shooting lasers at my face that lets me log into this phone. Like, so I have this very positive association with it, which is like you enable a cool thing. Right. Yeah. Well, all it enables on Android phones is like a screen that's 8% bigger. Because like their cameras and the other stuff that they put inside the notch aren't really

that interesting. They're as interesting as what's on the iPhone. So it's like, sure, it's 8% bigger. I don't care. Yeah, not as interesting as the iPhone. Welcome to Android. I'll have more feelings about this next week when I actually use it. I don't know.

It's very pretty. The camera is fascinating. I'm going to get a review unit. And then we'll see. and then we'll see what happens, you know, having a Huawei phone walking around the streets in America if I get tackled by an NSA agent. Imagine if your technology is spying on you somehow. Can you believe it? They're going to know what you like and what you're enthusiastic about and who you're married to.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Like, this company is getting checked out by every intelligence service on the planet, right? Like, if MI6 isn't freaking out and am I. five isn't freaking out and keeping these phones. Am I four, am I three. I'm just saying.

I don't know. It's very confusing. And so I'm assuming it's like a, it's a trade thing. We're afraid of their trade power. We're afraid of their like owning the 5G standard. But like compared to Qualcomm, I guess,

compared to, I don't know. Like who cares about Erickson? I don't know. Anyway, it's very confusing. I'm very excited to try it. I am,

I am not on board with calling anything a super anything. Okay. Except for a hotel that's a super eight. That I don't, that I'm okay. Would you be comfortable calling Jessica Jones a superhero? Ooh, I would. I am trying to watch season two right now, and man, it is just, it is a slog.

It is a bit of a slug. The first season of Jessica Jones is maybe my favorite Netflix, anything ever. And so season two, I came in with a lot of high hopes about it. It does some cool things, but it's not as good. All they do is punish her and make her sad. And it's really getting to be, like, let her have a good, nice day. They should just be an episode of Jessica Jones. in the middle of season two, where she just goes and gets some ice cream.

Like, that should just be the whole episode. Without spending half an hour on this, the one thing that I will say that I think is actually the key to the season is that both this season and last season are about the kinds of control that men have over women's bodies. And it is the fact that she is constantly oppressed and so are the women in her life that is the actual, like, thematic point of the show. And I think it's worth sitting with. I agree.

Okay, fine. Well, Dieter, if you're interested in watching Superwomen, have a great day, I suggest Instagram stories. That's basically it. A lot of really superwoman just having a great day, buying ice cream. Okay, fair. And you don't have to pay for that.

Paul. I love this. Every week, you go get some ice cream. Uh-huh. And you think about it doing a segment. One out of seven. While you're eating your ice cream every week. It's always the same.

Of the week. I don't know what's this happening. Eli, come back. You're not. We're not holding a ball. It's called record resolution. So there is a company. You really missed a chance for a revolution joke there.

What was that? Because records revolve. It could have been a record resolution revolution. Oh, shoot. You're right. Let's do it over. Let's do it over. You know what?

This week I'm changing the name. It's called record resolution. Revolution. So some company is making HD records. They call it high definition vinyl. What does that even mean? It means that we have the technology. Basically, if you think of it almost like 3D print or make a 3D imagination of a record.

And therefore it means that you can have a louder volume. You can get longer playtime. you can get like a more resolution in the audio. So they're working on a process to, they create a, the audio is first digitally converted to a 3D topographic map. Then lasers engrave the map onto a stamper, which makes an impression in the vinyl.

So it's just, it's just a higher resolution, higher fidelity, like peaks and valleys in the thing that the needle reads. Right. And this is in comparison to, a traditional record, at least in the olden days, how it was made, is it's literally like, it's like playing a record in reverse. You have a needle. Yeah, Thomas Edison yells into a cone and there's a needle at the end of it. And that vibrates and creates indentations in the wax or whatever. I don't know. So anyways, better records, very exciting. Is it? Yeah. Okay. What do you want for me, Tina? I'm sorry. Neal always, Neil always loves my segments.

I, that's a good segment. I just, I saw CDs were making a comeback again. I don't. I don't know. It was very confusing. All right. I want to talk about the web a little bit, which is, of course, because Neely is gone. We were going to talk about the web. Paul, you just wrote a really nice article about what's going to happen with web apps maybe. You want to chat about that briefly? Yeah, I pointed out there's a bunch of interesting things, and I didn't cover every hot new technology, but three of them that I pointed out were progressive web apps, which iOS 11.3 silently included support for progressive web apps. I think they were silent about it because Apple has not really fully embraced the standard, but they are starting to embrace the standard. And it's a lot to explain what a progressive web app is, but kind of the vision is that you can go to a website and then you add it to your home screen, and now it basically behaves like an app.

But it works really well on Android. It works really badly. The progressive part is it progressively loads the rest of the web app in the background when you visit the page the first time. So progressively becomes a full app. And also it can be progressively enhanced. It's also part of the progressive. I don't know. It's very progressive.

It's very progressive. There's a person wearing an apron. Her name is Flo. She delivers the app to you in a box. The other web thing that happened is we finally have another Chrome OS tablet, the HP Chromebook X2. I don't know. This is a tablet in the sense that a surface is a tablet.

Yeah, but you can use it without the keyboard, and it looks like the keyboard actually bends in like a laptop-y kind of way. I'm really curious to see how that hinge works. I'm also really curious to see when Google's going to get around to making tablet mode on ChromeOS not crap, because I use it on a pixel book all the time, and it's still pretty bad. Everything goes to full screen,

and there's no way to really deal with that. We live in this a marvelous time, where Apple has created a beautiful mobile OS, and Google has created a wonderful web browser, and you can't get them both on the same device. Yep. I just want to take a pixel book, and I want to take my iPad.

I just want to sit on them, and then get both at once. Okay, last piece of news, unless we want to do a little lightning round, I think is all these leaks, Tom Warren got some other sites got some of the new version of Gmail, the redesign that's coming. Speaking of web apps, I am excited. I tried using inbox for a long time and gave up.

And so for Gmail to finally get proper real snoozing is actually really exciting for me. Yeah. They're also building in smart replies, which I think is really funny because they're really going all in on this smart reply thing. And it's cool. I'm just really into this calendar pane. Yeah. They are basically doing iOS multitasking in Gmail where you have a second app where you have your notes or calendar or whatever on the sidebar. It makes sense.

I mean, when I go through my inbox, which I now do approximately once per week, I would say like a third of the items that actually require my attention. The reason I haven't given them attention yet is I need to move some information from the email into the calendar. And so there's a world in which, like, the calendar and the inbox should be the same thing. And it's just about, like, moving inbox items onto your calendar. So I'm shocked. It's taken Gmail this long to try this. And, like, I'm still kind of, like, sorting through these screenshots. I can't tell exactly how it's going to work.

But it's well worth the shot. I think it's not going to be what you're hoping for. I'm sorry. It's going to be pretty minor. Nothing ever is, dude. I love the Hangouts is still here. Yeah. Yeah, that really takes me back.

How else is your mom supposed to contact you while you're at work? Wait, your mom contacts you through Hangouts? That used to. That used to be her like go-to method. Clearly, it's a tweet Casey because he'll like everything. One of my favorite things about my own mom is during the AOL Instant Messenger days, she would write a message to me and then sign each message, mom. Wow.

Like she would sign individual chat messages. That's incredible. That's sweet. My mom instead doesn't type in English, so she communicates with me using Facebook Messenger stickers. So to ask me whether I've had lunch, she'll send me a sticker of like a takeout box. And to ask me whether I'm coming home for the weekend, she'll send a person looking sad. Do you reply? Wow.

Do you reply in English or do you apply with stickers? I reply with words, and she will reply back with about approximately five more stickers. It's great. I love her. This is very efficient. I hope that in addition to adding snoozing functionality to Gmail, that they put out an open source spec for email that includes the idea of snoozing that iterates on IMAPs such that if you want to use a third-party email client that also has snoozing, you don't have stupid-ass snooze folders in your Gmail all the time. The idea of snoozing should just be built into the email spec and everyone should just adopt it. And if Google just like said, all right, here it is and here's how apps can interact with it.

And then everybody else can use it too. it's fine and it's free, then we could just we could all pick any app that we want to interact with their service and it would be great. That's what I want.

If only the email spec was easier to consistently implement across clients. What are you talking about? It's super easy to implement. It's IMAP. There's a million email clients. I mean,

it's super hard to make an email client successful. How many, how many, how many IMAP clients do you know of? Name me more than four. Are you kidding? Microsoft Outlook?

Outlooks, I mean, Sparrow is, I mean, they're all gone now. They're all dead now, but accomplish, like every email app on the planet is his IMAP. Oh, okay. But they weren't dead because IMAP was complicated. They're dead because they couldn't make any money because they all got bought by these other companies. Which I think speaks to, though, like, what strategic incentive does Google have to improve functionality in third-party apps that it makes no money from? Because they're just not evil, Casey. Maybe they are.

Whatever. going to say? I was just going to, we missed this last week, but Intel released Core I9 processors for laptops. Like these are H-series processors. This is like a huge speed bump. They're saying 29% overall speed boost, 41% improvement for gaming. This is basically the best time ever in your life to buy a 15-inch, like, high-performance

laptop. You can get a performance. formative machine with a GPU in a portable form factor with like four gigahertz processor. That's turbo boost. It's not always running at four gigahertz.

But it's just an exciting time to love a very specific kind of laptop. Yeah, it's a really great last hurrah for Intel chips. I mean, Apple switched into their own chips in a couple of years. Windows is running on arm now too.

No one wants to stick. No one wants to hang with Intel. Nobody enjoys buying Intel products anymore. I love buying Intel products. I have one of each one of their products. Yeah, if you ever go over to Casey's house, he's got like a wall. He has a T-shirt that says power user of Intel products. I am a power user of Intel products.

I care so much. Intel's last hurrah is their AMD partnership. Once we see some of those products as like laptops, like with built-in GPUs, you'll have like a new size of laptop that can have a tolerable GPU. And that will be fun until Arm takes over the whole world. Yeah. That, I think, is the end of the Vergecast. I want to thank Casey for coming on.

It was wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me. I want to thank Nat for coming on. Glad to be here. I want to thank Paul for being here. Thanks for having me, Dieter. Yeah. You could follow us all on Twitter on backline.

Casey is Casey Newton. Nat underscore Garren? Just Nat Garren. No, just Nat Garron. Paul's future, Paul. We are Verge on Twitter. We're also Verge on Instagram. You should also listen to other podcasts.

I highly recommend season two of Why'd You Push That Button. The last episode that I listened to was about restaurant reviews, and I quite enjoyed it. There's also a podcast from Recode. There's Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. She's got the full interview of her MSNBC interview with Tim Cook. recently, which is really good. There's also Recode Media with Peter Kafka. And you should go to Apple Podcasts

and review us. Because that's helpful. And we need your help because Neely's not here. And this ship is going down real fast if we don't figure it out. So give us a good review. I'd appreciate that. And we should also mention that our good friend, Deeter, has a new show on YouTube called

Processors. It exists. And I watched the first episode, and it was fantastic. Deeter, what would you tell our audience about processor? I would tell you that we're going to try and on Wednesdays, although this coming week I think we're going to have a bonus episode, which I'm pretty excited about. And I'm trying to talk about tech, but also add a little, I don't know, human empathy and kindness to it, which isn't always like obvious.

I'm not going to like end every episode by saying be nice to each other. This isn't like Mr. Rogers does gadgets. But I don't know. I'm just trying to like do a little like actual like thinking and analysis about tech instead of just hands-ons. Eventually it will devolve to just hands-ons. But until that happens when I run out of ideas, there's going to be some really cool stuff, I hope.

And the first episode is really. good. Well, I just wanted to say the first episode was very thoughtful. That's all I wanted to say. This is all too much attention. Rock and roll. Wait, what in case you want to say? No, that's it. That's the end. That was it. No, I said the same thing as you. We're ending the Vergecast. Oh, my God. We're so bad at this. Goodbye, everybody. Paul, rock and roll. Provo code. This episode of the Vergecast that you just listened to was brought to you by IBM. In the course of listening to that podcast, nearly 10,000 new malware variants have launched, but AI can protect you and your data from threats wherever it lives

with IBM security. Put smart to work. Learn more at IBM.com slash smart.