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Javier E

A Murky Road Ahead for Android, Despite Market Dominance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-despite-market-dominance.html

OS tech platform mobile phone economics

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. Google’s once underappreciated side bet has become Earth’s dominant computing platform
  • Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android.
  • Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014
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  • Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business.
  • How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android?
  • Google is sanguine about Android’s prospects and said the company’s original vision for Android was never solely about huge profits. “The bet that Larry, Sergey and Eric made at the time was that smartphones are going to be a thing, there’s going to be Internet on it, so let’s make sure there’s a great smartphone platform out there that people can use to, among other things, access Google services
  • The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices
  • at the same time, given the increasing threats to Google’s advertising business, we might also wonder how long that largess can continue.
  • The situation is especially painful for Google in China, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, where Google’s apps are blocked. Even in the rest of Asia, where many low-cost phone manufacturers do include Google’s apps on their phones, there’s growing interest in finding some alternative to Google’s version of Android. About 30 percent of Android smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2014 were actually modified, or forked, versions of the OS that may not be very hospitable to Google’s services, according to the firm ABI Research
  • even if hot Silicon Valley start-ups still create apps for iOS first, app makers in other parts of the world see Android as a surer path to the masses. “The reality is that folks like you should play a role in educating the Silicon Valley,” she said.
  • Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China.
  • Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps.
  • A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly.
  • Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors — and has signed a “strategic partnership” with Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft — to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android.
  • “We share services revenue with the phone makers — and today they get very little of that from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive. “There are very few companies in the world today that really like Google. Nobody wants Google to run the table with this game. So it’s a good time to be a neutral third party. We’re Switzerland, and we want to share that revenue with our ecosystem partners in a meaningful way.”
  • in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Xiaomi and Cyanogen.
malonema1

Donald Trump's Ego Undermines The GOP Tax Agenda | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...da_us_59ef3aeae4b03535fa93dd9b

Trump US politics taxes

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump has delivered a series of speeches promoting the Republican tax reform agenda and a series of tweets undercutting it.  Download Trump’s speeches focus on how the his party’s tax plan, which has only been sketched in broad outlines, would cut business taxes in a way that would ultimately help working families.  In an effort to replace some of the missing revenue from that corporate tax cut, however, Republicans want to do away with a number of expensive tax breaks that help middle-class families, ostensibly while still delivering the middle class a net benefit.
  • A similar pattern played out earlier this year when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. After the House passed a plan to repeal Obamacare that Trump initially hailed, he later characterized some of its details as “mean.” The repeal effort ultimately failed. 
malonema1

Thousands Plan To Mark Donald Trump's Election Anniversary In A Cathartic Way | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...er_us_59eedf28e4b07cf8380c1714

US Trump

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Americans from coast to coast plan to commemorate the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s 2016 election win by screaming into the void. Download Thousands of Facebook users have signed up to attend events on Boston Common in Boston and in Washington Square Park in New York on Nov. 8. Events are also planned in Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin and in Bellingham, Washington.
  • Some 2,100 people said they will attend the New York protest and 15,000 more indicated an interest in going. More than 4,500 people were registered for the Boston event with 33,000 others showing an interest. 
Javier E

'He checks in on me more than my friends and family': can AI therapists do better than the real thing? | Counselling and therapy | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-do-better-than-the-real-thing

AI therapy chatbot psychology emotions culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.
  • Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.
  • ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece
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  • The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.
  • AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”
  • AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.
  • Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.
  • n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.
  • One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.
  • erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.
  • “There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).
  • A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.
  • Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”
  • Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”
  • Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”
  • One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)
  • AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.
  • Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.
  • With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.
  • Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”
  • His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”
  • Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.
  • Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.
  • Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”
  • Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”
  • A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.
  • Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.
  • Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.
  • ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load
  • We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”
  • Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits
  • But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.
  • n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.
  • Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.
  • ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”
Javier E

Children Lost in War Zones and Disasters Find Their Families With an App - NYTimes.com - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...ind-their-families-with-an-app

children disaster unification family software role model development activism

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Meant to run on hardware already in the field, like Blackberry devices, RapidFTR can add a child to the system with only scant bits of information. If a child cannot give their full name, or is too young or too scared speak, a photo alone can begin the process. The app works both with and without a wireless connection, by syncing to a server later, if needed.
  • His earlier projects in the N.Y.U. program were more whimsical. He created things like automated telephone pranks, but the child reunification app became his master’s thesis, and he later joined UNICEF as an employee. With the assistance of some pro-bono engineering from the software company Thoughtworks, he was able to get the program going and then recruited an army of volunteers to build RapidFTR
  • Mr. Just said that he was aware of at least 70 children who have been reunited with their families through the app so far.
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  • Today the program is entirely open-source and driven by volunteers. Mr. Just, too, has now become a volunteer for his own app, in addition to teaching the “Design for UNICEF” class that he was once a student in.
  • In considering his own project, as well as those of his future students, Mr. Just said, “one of the things I kept telling myself, was: you don’t have to ‘change the world’ to change the world.” SaveE-mailSharePrint
Javier E

Dating Apps Once Ran on Novelty. For Some Users, the Fun Is Over. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...users-the-fun-is-over-4c673b4e

dating match psychology culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Around half of all U.S. adults under 30 have used a dating site or app at some point in their lives, and one in 10 adults with partners say they met their significant other by dating online
  • Online-dating growth has been slowing. Paying users declined 6% in the first quarter of the year at Match Group, whose portfolio includes the League, Tinder and Hinge, compared with a 3% dip in the first quarter of 2023. The Bumble app grew paying users 18% in the first quarter, compared with 31% growth in the period a year earlier. 
  • Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative, according to Pew, and a growing tide of users are sharing their dissatisfaction
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  • People bemoan a perceived rise in bad dating etiquette such as “ghosting” and the sending of unsolicited sexual messages, and blame the way online romance makes it easier to discard potential partners at a touch of a button. “Hacks,” or tricks designed to game the apps for better dates, abound, demonstrating the shortcomings of their designs. 
  • the companies’ growing emphasis on pricier premium services is giving users new reasons to scrutinize the algorithmically driven path to romance.
  • Bumble made its name as a free app that only let women make the first move, for example. But since 2016, it has charged for advantages such as unlimited “swipes” to connect with prospects. The most expensive plan today costs $80 a month
  • “This is not a new phenomenon, and I think that dating apps have crystallized and brought those concerns to the fore, primarily because the prior institutions that were responsible for connecting individuals—such as family, friends, churches, other homes of worship—were not able to assume blame in the same way,” said Jess Carbino, a sociologist who has worked as a consultant for Bumble and Tinder.
  • Unlike apps such as Tinder and Bumble, the League requires profile approval to join. On the app, users get three to five prospects a day unless they upgrade to become a paying member, which runs $99 a week or $399 for a three-month subscription. Once a match is made in the app, users have 14 days to initiate a conversation before the matches expire. 
Javier E

Coronavirus Contact Tracing: Apple and Google Team Up to Enable Virus Tracking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ronavirus-contact-tracing.html

tracing contact tracking tech pandemic crisis apple google

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The technology giants said they would embed a feature in iPhones and Android devices to enable users to track infected people they’d come close to.
  • The technology giants said they were teaming up to release the tool within several months, building it into the operating systems of the billions of iPhones and Android devices around the world. That would enable the smartphones to constantly log other devices they come near, enabling what is known as “contact tracing” of the disease. People would opt in to use the tool and voluntarily report if they became infected.
  • underscores the seriousness of the health crisis and the power of the two companies whose software runs almost every smartphone in the world. Apple and Google said their joint effort came together in just the last two weeks.
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  • With the tool, people infected with the coronavirus would notify a public health app that they have it, which would then alert phones that had recently come into proximity with that person’s device. The companies would need to get public-health authorities to agree to link their app to the tool.
  • There are already third-party tools for contact tracing, including from public health authorities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In March, the government of Singapore introduced a similar coronavirus contact-tracing app, called TraceTogether, that detects mobile phones that are nearby.
  • One challenge for third-party apps is that they must run constantly — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — to be effective. Google said some Android smartphone manufacturers shut down those applications to save battery life.
  • Apple and Google said their tool would also constantly run in the background if people opt to use it, logging nearby devices through the short-range wireless technology Bluetooth. But it would eat up less battery life and be more reliable than third-party apps, they said.
  • “This data could empower members of the general population to make informed decisions about their own health in terms of self-quarantining,” said Dr. Reid. “But it doesn’t replace the public health imperative that we scale up contact tracing in the public health departments” around the world.
  • Other phones will constantly check those servers for the broadcast beacons of devices they had come near in the past 14 days. If there is a match, those people will receive an alert that they had likely come into contact with an infected person.
  • Apple and Google said they were discussing how much information to include in those alerts with health officials, aiming to strike a balance between being helpful while also protecting the privacy of those who have the coronavirus.
  • Once someone reports his or her infection to a public-health app, the tool will send the phone’s so-called broadcast beacons, or anonymous identifiers connected to the device, to central computer servers.
  • Apple and Google said they would make the tool’s underlying technology available to third-party apps by mid-May and publicly release the tool “in the coming months.” The companies said the tool would not collect devices’ locations — it only tracked proximity to other devices — and would keep people anonymous in the central servers.
  • The European Commission, the executive of the 27-nation bloc, said on Wednesday that “a fragmented and uncoordinated approach risks hampering the effectiveness” of such apps.
  • “The danger is, as you roll out these voluntary solutions and they gain adoption, it’s more likely that they are going to become compulsory,” said Mr. Soltani, a former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.
Javier E

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rivacy-facial-recognition.html

privacy surveillance face recognition

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
  • without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year
  • The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
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  • it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
  • “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
  • While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
  • The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it.
  • In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
  • “I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
  • “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”
  • He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo
  • Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition
  • Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are
  • Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”
  • When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.
  • Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”
  • The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners
  • Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.
  • They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,”
  • The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company
  • Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool
  • The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.
  • Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers,
  • Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.
  • “With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”
  • Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.
  • Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party
  • One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.
  • Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.
  • Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them.
  • Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see.
  • After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”
  • “It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”
  • But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin
  • Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.
  • We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”
  • “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”
  • Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.
  • Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name
  • Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.
Javier E

Parler Pitched Itself as Twitter Without Rules. Not Anymore, Apple and Google Said. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...parler-apple-google.html

Culture politics trump policy apple google app distribution censorship

shared by Javier E on 09 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Parler is one of the hottest apps in the world, a social network that has attracted millions of far-right conservatives over the past year with its hands-off approach to policing users’ posts. And with the news that President Trump had been kicked off Twitter and Facebook, Parler was the odds-on bet to be his next soapbox.
  • A day earlier, John Matze, Parler’s chief executive, had said in an interview with The Times about Wednesday’s melee that he didn’t “feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”
  • The edicts from Apple and Google were a stark illustration of the power of the largest tech companies to influence what is allowed on the internet, even on sites and apps that are not their own
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  • But it is now clear that Parler will not be able to maintain its free-for-all status if it wants to be able to keep its wide reach. Apple and Google make the operating systems that back nearly every smartphone in the world, and they roughly split the market in the United States.
  • Google’s suspension is problematic for Parler, but people with Android devices will still be able to get the app, just with a bit more work. Google allows other app marketplaces on Android, and its decision applies only to its flagship Play Store.And people will also still be able to use Parler via web browsers on their phones or computers.
  • Parler’s app has been downloaded more than 10 million times on iPhones and Android devices, with more than 80 percent of the downloads in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, an app data firm. On Thursday, the day after the riot in Washington, people downloaded Parler 39,000 times, more than twice as much as the day prior.
  • Parler had a major advantage: money. Rebekah Mercer, one of Mr. Trump's largest donors and an investor in Breitbart, said on Parler in November that she had started the company with Mr. Matze, a self-described libertarian, “to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended.”
  • After Twitter announced it had banned Mr. Trump on Friday, he posted a message under the official Twitter account for the U.S. president that said his team had been “negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.” He added, “We will not be SILENCED!”
  • While explaining their decisions on Friday, Apple and Google shared images of posts on Parler that they said had crossed the line. They included a post from Lin Wood, the defamation lawyer who sued to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss, that said Vice President Mike Pence should be executed for not helping the fight to overturn the election results. The post was shared thousands of times.
  • Another post they cited said 20 coordinated assassinations were all that would be needed to “take back our country.” It had been shared nearly 200 times and stayed up for at least two days.
  • “If people are breaking the law, violating our terms of service, or doing anything illegal, we would definitely get involved,” Mr. Matze told The Times this week. “But, you know, for the most part, I haven’t seen a whole lot of illegal activity.”
clairemann

How Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free Speech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ler-app-trump-free-speech.html

policy US Politics gop trump

shared by clairemann on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • On the app, which had become a top download on Apple’s App Store, discussions over politics had ramped up. But so had conspiracy theories that falsely said the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump, with users urging aggressive demonstrations last week when Congress met to certify the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • “Republicans have no way to communicate”
  • Parler has now become a test case in a renewed national debate over free speech on the internet and whether tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have too much power. That debate has intensified since Mr. Trump was barred from posting on Twitter and Facebook last week after a violent mob, urged on by the president and his social media posts, stormed the Capitol.
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  • Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss, leading to a rampage that left five people dead. The rally was planned on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. On Parler, people posted advice on which streets to take to avoid the police; some posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol.
  • Parler grew slowly until early 2020, when Twitter began labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets as inaccurate and some of his supporters joined Parler in protest. After November’s election, Parler grew even more quickly as Facebook and Twitter clamped down on false claims that the vote had been rigged. So many users signed up that, at times, they overloaded the company’s systems and forced it to pause new registrations.
  • The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others.
  • “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet,” he said.
  • But Parler had a significant advantage: money.
  • In total, people downloaded Parler’s app more than 10 million times last year, with 80 percent in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, the app data firm.
  • “I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”
  • There is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” Apple said in a statement. Google said, “We do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.”
  • “It’s devastating,” Mr. Matze told Fox News on Sunday. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day.” He said he was struggling to find another company to host Parler’s website.
aidenborst

If you want to travel next year, you may need a vaccine passport - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US pandemic pandemic-recovery covid-19 change travel re-opening

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Now that coronavirus vaccines are starting to roll out in the US and abroad, many people may be dreaming of the day when they can travel, shop and go to the movies again. But in order to do those activities, you may eventually need something in addition to the vaccine: a vaccine passport application.
  • Several companies and technology groups have begun developing smartphone apps or systems for individuals to upload details of their Covid-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that could be shown in order to enter concert venues, stadiums, movie theaters, offices, or even countries.
  • The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as a Covid-19 test result or, eventually, a proof of vaccination by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or pass in the form of a QR code that can be shown to authorities without revealing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists health pass requirements at the points of departure and arrival based on your itinerary.
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  • "You can be tested every time you cross a border. You cannot be vaccinated every time you cross a border," Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business.
  • Large tech firms are also getting in on the act. IBM (IBM) developed its own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and venues to customize indicators they would require for entry including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records.
  • Early on in the pandemic, Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) set aside their smartphone rivalry to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they'd been exposed to someone with Covid-19.
  • "I think where exposure notification ran into some challenges was more of the piecemeal implementation choices, lack of federal leadership ... where each state had to go it alone and so each state had to figure it out independently," said Jenny Wanger, who leads the exposure notification initiatives for Linux Foundation Public Health, a tech-focused organization helping public health authorities around the world combat Covid-19.
  • "If we're successful, you should be able to say: I've got a vaccine certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in one country, with a whole set of its own kind of health management practices... that I use to get on a plane to an entirely different country and then I presented in that new country a vaccination credential so I could go to that concert that was happening indoors for which attendance was limited to those who have demonstrated that they've had the vaccine," said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation.
  • A few companies within the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that strikes a middle ground between the traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that's easier to store and reproduce.
  • CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have all stressed privacy as central to their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and allows them to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.
  • "Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform like a digital health passport, or any solution that handles sensitive personal information," the company said in a blog post. "Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times."
  • "A point of entry — whether that's a border, whether that's a venue — is going to want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision accordingly,"
  • The variance can be wide: the vaccine developed by Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an efficacy of 86% against Covid-19, while the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna each have an efficacy of around 95%.
  • It's also unclear how effective the vaccines are in stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show that you've received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you safely attend an event or get on a flight.
  • Still, Behlendorf anticipates that the rollout and adoption of vaccine passports will happen rather quickly once everything falls into place and expects a variety of apps that can work with each other to be "widely available" within the first half of 2021.
Javier E

TikTok is the new Facebook - and it is shaping the future of tech in its image | Chris Stokel-Walker | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-tech-future-chinese-video-app

facebook TikTok tech social media social network Culture crisis psychology education trends

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • It has even started ripping off other apps’ best features, an art pioneered by Facebook that ByteDance is taking to another level. TikTok Stories was announced earlier this month.
  • ts videos were once no more than 15 or 60 seconds long. Now they can last up to three minutes. Until February, TikTok was predominately a mobile app. Now you can watch videos through your web browser, or even your smart TV. It once had a single video format, then incorporated live streaming. It allows you to buy products through the app, and to tip your favourite creators.
  • With its 732 million monthly active users, TikTok is the app of the moment, and likely the app of the future. It’s the new Facebook.
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  • in March 2020 alone, users spent as much time on it as there has been since the stone age: 2.8bn hours, or nearly 320,000 years.
  • TikTok became the first app not owned by Facebook to cross the 3bn download mark. For context, there are 5.3bn mobile phone users worldwide.
Javier E

Ex-ByteDance Executive Accuses TikTok Parent Company of 'Lawlessness' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-bytedance-lawsuit-china.html

china access privacy data manipulation control social media app

shared by Javier E on 13 May 23 - No Cached
  • A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has accused the technology giant of a “culture of lawlessness,” including stealing content from rival platforms Snapchat and Instagram in its early years, and called the company a “useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.
  • The claims were part of a wrongful dismissal suit filed on Friday by Yintao Yu, who was the head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018. The complaint, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, says Mr. Yu was fired because he raised concerns about a “worldwide scheme” to steal and profit from other companies’ intellectual property.
  • Among the most striking claims in Mr. Yu’s lawsuit is that ByteDance’s offices in Beijing had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members sometimes referred to as the Committee, which monitored the company’s apps, “guided how the company advanced core Communist values” and possessed a “death switch” that could turn off the Chinese apps entirely.
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  • The video app, which is used by more than 150 million Americans, has become hugely popular for memes and entertainment. But lawmakers and U.S. officials are concerned that the app is passing sensitive information about Americans to Beijing.
  • In his complaint, Mr. Yu, 36, said that as TikTok sought to attract users in its early days, ByteDance engineers copied videos and posts from Snapchat and Instagram without permission and then posted them to the app. He also claimed that ByteDance “systematically created fabricated users” — essentially an army of bots — to boost engagement numbers, a practice that Mr. Yu said he flagged to his superiors.
  • Mr. Yu says he raised these concerns with Zhu Wenjia, who was in charge of the TikTok algorithm, but that Mr. Zhu was “dismissive” and remarked that it was “not a big deal.”
  • he also witnessed engineers for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, tweak the algorithm to elevate content that expressed hatred for Japan.
  • he said that the promotion of anti-Japanese sentiments, which would make it more prominent for users, was done without hesitation.
  • “There was no debate,” he said. “They just did it.”
  • The lawsuit also accused ByteDance engineers working on Chinese apps of demoting content that expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, while making more prominent criticisms of the protests.
  • the lawsuit says the founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, facilitated bribes to Lu Wei, a senior government official charged with internet regulation. Chinese media at the time covered the trial of Lu Wei, who was charged in 2018 and subsequently convicted of bribery, but there was no mention of who had paid the bribes.
  • Mr. Yu, who was born and raised in China and now lives in San Francisco, said in the interview that during his time with the company, American user data on TikTok was stored in the United States. But engineers in China had access to it, he said.
  • The geographic location of servers is “irrelevant,” he said, because engineers could be a continent away but still have access. During his tenure at the company, he said, certain engineers had “backdoor” access to user data.
Javier E

AI is about to completely change how you use computers | Bill Gates - 0 views

www.gatesnotes.com/AI-agents

ai gates applications opportunities

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Health care
  • before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.
  • Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.
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  • agents will open up many more learning opportunities.
  • Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past
  • Productivity
  • copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.
  • I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available.
  • Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.
  • To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store
  • Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like
  • For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job.
  • Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it.
  • Entertainment and shopping
  • The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.
  • They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps.
  • Education
  • For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.
  • your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.
  • To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences.
  • The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans.
  • Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.
  • other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?
  • In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.
  • A shock wave in the tech industry
  • Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.
  • Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you
  • they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter.
  • Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.
  • AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.
  • If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.
  • Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.
  • Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.
  • In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?
  • The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.
  • In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.
  • You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.
  • An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.
  • even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.
  • The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people
  • They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.
Javier E

App Quietly Creates a Personal Journal on Your Phone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-journal-on-your-ph-76243.html

electronic data tracking lifestyle surveillance mobile

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Imagine if you could keep a log of everything that you do on your mobile phone. The phone calls that you make (or receive), your emails and text messages, the various places that you visit, and even the music tracks that you listen to on your phone.
  • At first glance, I suspect many readers will be taken aback by how intrusive the software can be as it captures all smartphone activities in the background. It’s a valid concern. But the Internet, combined with smartphones and mobile broadband devices, is pushing us slowly in this direction. The way I see it, we can fight the change unsuccessfully or we can cautiously embrace it. You might not ever subscribe to providing a greater amount of information to the cloud, but within reason, I’m willing to bet your kids will. It’s just a matter of time before more of your personal data is more online than offline. It may take years or decades yet, but it will happen for most.
  • Want to see all of the conversations you had with a particular contact? No problem. Curious what you did and where you were on a certain day in the past? Friday has you covered. Planning a trip and want to associate all of the events to the excursion? Friday supports automatic tagging, which you could enable for a “Family Vacation 2011″ tag before leaving and disable upon your return home. The software also includes analytics to gain insights on how many calls you take or make at various times of the day. var galleryData = [{"title":"friday-events","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-events.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map-filtered","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map-filtered.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Phone Activity Log","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/phone-activity-log.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"What do you want to track","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/what-do-you-want-to-track.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}];
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  • The Android app is clever, not only because it captures your smartphone and app usage profile, but makes it searchable and ties together events with the context of both location and time.
  • Intelligent software such as Friday, my6Sense and others like reQall Rover can help cut through the data clutter by indexing or surfacing important information without raising our stress levels. Yes, that could mean enabling devices to capture our every move, but that’s a price I’m personally willing to pay for easier access to the data I’m looking for.
runlai_jiang

Your Location Data Is Being Sold-Often Without Your Knowledge - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hout-your-knowledge-1520168400

dataleak location

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • like that Jack in the Box ad that appears whenever you get near one, in whichever app you have open at the time—and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.
  • Every time you say “yes” to an app that asks to know your location, you are also potentially authorizing that app to sell your data.
  • They aim to compile a complete record of where everyone in America spends their time, in order to chop those histories into market segments to sell to corporate advertisers.
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  • The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.
  • Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.
  • is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.
  • A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.
  • There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.
  • Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.
  • WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.
  • Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.
  • Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information
  • Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.
anonymous

Parler Sues Amazon, Seeking To Restore Web Service : Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Updates : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...seeking-to-restore-web-service

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Parler, the messaging app favored by far-right activists, has filed a lawsuit against Amazon Web Services alleging anti-trust and breach of contract. The company is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent Amazon from removing Parler from its servers.
  • Amazon had told Parler it would suspend its account at 11:59 p.m. PT Sunday. The website has been offline since that deadline passed.
  • "Over the past several weeks, we've reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence,"
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • As an example, the web hosting service cited a message in which a Parler user commented on a photo from Wednesday's insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, showing people cowering among seats in the gallery of the House chamber.
  • In its court filing, Parler said it needs a temporary restraining order to prevent irreparable harm, citing free speech rights and damage to the company's reputation and competitive standing.
  • When Twitter permanently banned President Trump, "conservative users began to flee Twitter en masse for Parler," the company said. "The exodus was so large that the next day ... Parler became the number one free app downloaded from Apple's App Store."
  • But on Saturday, Apple announced it was suspending Parler from its App Store, preventing users from downloading the app to their devices. One day earlier, Google removed the Parler app from its Play Store. On the same day Apple moved against Parler, Amazon said the conservative platform will need to find a new host.
  • Amazon says Parler has shown it doesn't have an effective way to comply with the web service company's terms of service, and is still forming an approach to content moderation
Javier E

Movie Review: Inside Job - Barron's - 0 views

www.barrons.com/...111904502004575562621077193024

psychology economics great recession documentary review

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Text Size Regular Medium Large "A MASTERPIECE OF INVESTIGATIVE nonfiction moviemaking," wrote the film critic of the Boston Globe. "Rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument," opined the New York Times. The "masterpiece" referred to was the recently released Inside Job, a documentary film that focuses on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
  • THE STORY RECOUNTED in Inside Job is that principles like safety and soundness were flouted by greedy Wall Street capitalists who brought down the economy with the help of certain politicians, political appointees and corrupt academicians. Despite the attempts and desires of some, including Barney Frank, to regulate the mania, the juggernaut prevails to this day, under the presidency of Barack Obama.
  • This version of the story contains some elements of truth.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Yet it's impossible to understand what happened without grasping the proactive role played by government. "The banking sector did not decide out of the goodness of its heart to extend mortgages to poor people," commented University of Chicago Booth School of Business Finance Professor Raghuram Rajan in a telephone interview last week. "Politicians did that, and they would have taken great umbrage if the regulator stood in the way of more housing credit."
  • Rajan, author of Fault Lines, a recent book on the debacle, speaks with special authority to fans of Inside Job. Not only is he in the movie—one of the talking heads speaking wisdom about what occurred—he is accurately presented as having anticipated the meltdown in a 2005 paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" But the things he is quoted as saying in the film are restricted to serving its themes.
  • We get no inkling that Rajan's views on what made the world riskier, as set forth in his book, veer quite radically from those of Inside Job. They include, as he has written, "the political push for easy housing credit in the United States and the lax monetary policy [by the Federal Reserve] in the years 2003-2005."
  • I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.
  • Ferguson replied that their role in subprime mortgages was not very significant, and that in any case their behavior was not much different from that of other capitalist enterprises.
  • As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.
  • On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.
brookegoodman

Trolls exploit Zoom privacy settings as app gains popularity | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...acy-settings-covid-19-lockdown

culture crisis us

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Working and socialising from home has brought new risks to everyday life, as webcam meetings and chatroom cocktail hours contend with privacy invasions, phishing attacks and “zoombombings” – uninvited guests abusing the popular video service to broadcast shocking imagery to all.
  • But the default settings of the service are configured in the expectation of trust between participants, meaning trolls can wreak havoc. Some zoombombers have used the screensharing feature to broadcast pornography and violent imagery. Others have revelled in the opportunity for exhibitionism, while security experts have said the file transfer feature that is switched on by default could be used to spread malware.
  • Other zoombombing instances have been more malicious. Ruha and Shawn Benjamin told NBC News of their experience when a racist troll – wearing nothing but a thong – gatecrashed their reading session for children stuck at home and began repeating the N-word multiple times. “Then we knew it was a malicious, targeted thing. My husband and I are both African American,” Ruha Benjamin said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In a blogpost addressing the rise in zoombombings, the company said: “Like most other public forums, it’s possible to have a person (who may or may not be invited) disrupt an event that’s meant to bring people together.” It offered a list of tips on how to prevent them, such as not posting links on public social media when possible.
  • That same day an app called Zoom became the third most popular paid app on Apple’s App Store. That Zoom is a £3.99 magnifying glass app. The chat service Zoom is free.
clairemann

Sean Hannity: Biden Stair Stumble Explanation Is Biggest Lie Any White House Ever Told | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...lie_n_605c564bc5b66d30c741aefd

Politics culture policy trump US

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Sean Hannity on Wednesday said that the White House’s explanation for why President Joe Biden stumbled up the steps of Air Force One was the biggest lie ever told in the press room. In response, people on social media vigorously pointed out how wrong he was. 
  • Karine Jean-Pierre, the deputy press secretary, told reporters on the plane, “It’s very windy. I almost fell coming up the steps myself.”
  • “Do you believe the lie that ― and I think it’s a lie ― that Joe Biden was pushed to the ground by a gust of wind three times? Because I don’t think there’s ever been a bigger lie told from that podium.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Twitter said, um what?
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