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The Intercept reported social media platforms are cooperating with a DHS initiative against misinformation. Facebook built a special portal for government officials to request user content be throttled or suppressed. Content about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice, and US support for Ukraine has been targeted. Loading Something is loading. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. Social media companies are collaborating with the Department of Homeland Security's initiative against online misinformation, The Intercept reported Monday, revealing a special portal hosted by Facebook for government officials to request user content be suppressed. Though much of the DHS initiative to address disinformation remains unknown to the American public, the goals became more visible with the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board earlier this year, which had the stated goal of "safeguarding the United States against threats" caused by false information on matters of national security. "The Department is deeply committed to doing all of its work in a way that protects Americans' freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy," read DHS statement regarding the program, which was paused just months after it was announced following extreme backlash from critics who drew parallels to the Ministry of Truth that churned out propaganda in the novel "1984." The Intercept's reporting found, through reviewing internal DHS documents, that the organization targeted information it deemed to be "inaccurate" about "the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of US support to Ukraine" that was posted on social media. However, how DHS determines what constitutes disinformation — which it defines as "false information that is deliberately spread with the intent to deceive or mislead" — remains unclear and subjective, giving government officials broad leeway in classifying speech as dangerous or false.Representatives for DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.Government control over Facebook postsRepresentatives from tech giants, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, met monthly with DHS officials and representatives of CISA leading up to the 2020 election to discuss how the platforms would manage political misinformation, NBC News reported. Specific actions taken by the private businesses remain unclear, but recent DHS reports indicate an increased focus on preventing disinformation campaigns online.On Facebook, using a portal called the Content Request System, The Intercept reported, government officials from DHS as well as law enforcement officers can directly submit reports about posts that were deemed subversive or suspicious. Though it is unclear when the portal was created or what criteria must be met for a post to be removed, The Intercept reported posts about COVID-19, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine were targeted. Facebook's cooperation with government agencies has long faced bipartisan criticism, including reports of sharing user data about individuals facing charges for seeking an abortion in a state where it wasn't legal to providing user data in response to forged legal requests. Owner Mark Zuckerberg himself confirmed in an interview with Joe Rogan the platform cooperated with the FBI to suppress reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, saying it "fit the pattern" of posts the platform had been advised to look out for."The background here is that the FBI came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, 'Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,'" Zuckerberg told Rogan. Though the veracity of some of the content reported to be on Biden's laptop remains unproven, The New York Times in March reported on emails "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop."Representatives for Facebook and Meta did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- China’s largest tech companies Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. have gained $66 billion in market value since May’s end, propelled by expectations of a gradual return to pre-crackdown growth and a litany of official promises to unshackle the private sector. Yet some investors warn the celebration may be premature.
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For the first time since 2021, China’s technology leaders head into an earnings season with what appears to be the wind at their backs. They’re set to report their strongest growth rates in over a year.
Driven by a need to rejuvenate the word’s No. 2 economy, Xi Jinping has in recent months led Party cadres and state media in proclaiming Beijing’s support for a trillion-dollar sector wracked by two years of unpredictable diktats. And in July, Beijing signaled it’s ready to unfetter the sector when it wrapped up a probe into Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co.
Still, investors betting on an inflection point risk getting ahead of themselves.
Chinese policymakers have stopped short of providing direct, major fiscal or policy support for businesses, and consumer spending remains muted thanks to a subdued outlook for wages and record-high youth unemployment. Profit margins remain thin amid rising competition from upstarts that mostly escaped the brunt of the crackdown such as ByteDance Ltd. and PDD Holdings Inc.
While a gauge of Chinese tech stocks has gained 20% since the end of May, it’s down nearly 4% this month as nervous investors take some money off the table ahead of Alibaba’s Aug. 10 report.
“The bottom line is if China’s economy is weak, it will be harder for these Internet companies to outgrow the economy now than before. And of course with all the new regulations and restrictions on these businesses, they are no longer free to seek growth,” said Vey-Sern Ling, a managing director at Union Bancaire Privee.
“The kind of growth that we saw in the past for China is unlikely to return,” he adds.
The quarterly prints will offer the first clue on whether the much-anticipated tech revival has truly begun. Yet even if Beijing hews to its promises, it’s going to be a long slog to even approach the pre-2021 years of deal-making, experimentation and free-form expansion.
Alibaba and Tencent, after shedding more than $350 billion of value since 2020, cut more than 20,000 jobs between them last year to survive regulatory and economic turmoil. They face a two-pronged assault: rivals like Baidu and Meituan are vying for dominance of the Internet thanks to the emergence of generative AI. Baidu has so far stolen much of their limelight in the post-ChatGPT race, debuting Ernie in March before launching into several iterations.
Abroad, ByteDance and PDD’s Temu continue to make strides, building on expansions that began when Alibaba and Tencent were forced to show restraint. During the crackdown, companies including ByteDance’s TikTok, miHoYo, and Temu revved up overseas forays for growth. Despite rising geopolitical tensions, this generation of upstarts offer a template for older peers seeking to regain pre-crackdown heights.
“At this very moment, the priority and the focus is on economic growth,” Weijian Shan, executive chairman and co-founder of Hong Kong-based asset manager PAG, told Bloomberg Television last week. “The sentiment is rather weak and the confidence remains rather subdued. It takes couple years of policy stability for full confidence to return.”
Alibaba and Tencent are also grappling with lingering uncertainty. Last week, investors got a brief reminder of the crackdown years when regulators — with little warning — published a set of rules limiting the amount of time minors can spend on their smartphones.
In March, Alibaba announced a breakup into six mostly independent pieces, a historic split regarded as allowing its individual businesses to pursue new initiatives, while fulfilling Beijing’s goal of cutting its most powerful private enterprises down to size.
With the split, the e-commerce leader is intent on creating a family of leaders in businesses from cloud computing and logistics to international commerce that couls seek funding and listing separately, appeasing shareholders hungry for value. Overseeing the momentous transition are two of Jack Ma’s Alibaba co-founders, Eddie Wu and Joseph Tsai, who will replace eight-year veteran Daniel Zhang at the helm in September. It’s unclear if either will helm the usual post-earnings briefing on Thursday.
“Alibaba’s business is highly leveraged to the economy because it’s consumption based,” Ling said. “In the past, Alibaba was able to outgrow the economy because e-commerce penetration was still low. Looking ahead, it may be harder to do so given high penetration of e-commerce, as well as competition from other platforms.”
Read more: Alibaba Turns to Little-Known Coder to Continue Jack Ma’s Legacy
For Tencent, regulators appear tolerant of a resumption in video gaming, after years of warnings about addiction. But that in turn empowered rivals big and small.
The world’s largest games publisher has struggled to find its next big hit after mobile mainstays Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. Executives have declared Valorant its most important game of the year and set aside more than $100 million to spend on its content over the next three years.
But it needs to fight off a slew of big summer releases in China’s $40 billion games arena, which contracted for the first time last year. These include games developed by closest rival NetEase Inc., anime specialist miHoYo and even ByteDance.
On Monday, Goldman Sachs trimmed its estimates on Tencent’s revenue by 0.5% to 0.8%, reflecting sliding ad sales. The broker also cut its target price for the stock by 3.3%.
“Investors will eventually react to underlying earnings growth,” said Jian Shi Cortesi, a fund manager at Gam Investment Management. “But I don’t know when it will happen.”
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Amazon.com Inc. is in talks to join other tech companies as an anchor investor in Arm Ltd.’s initial public offering, according to a person familiar with the situation, part of preparations for a deal that could raise as much as $10 billion.
Coupang Inc., the online retailer popular in South Korea for dawn and one-day delivery, posted its fourth straight quarterly profit after investments in logistics and membership programs helped shore up margins.
A US plan to restrict investment in China is likely to apply only to Chinese companies that get at least half of their revenue from cutting-edge sectors such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence, people familiar with the matter said.
Lyft Inc. shares fell after the company reported its slowest revenue growth in two years, overshadowing a better-than-expected outlook for earnings, as the company struggles to get its ridership back on track.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google may face a trial in a class action brought by consumers who claim its Chrome web browser continued to collect their data even while navigating online in private “Incognito” mode.
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Democratic senator presses tech companies about AI’s threat to teens
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) has written a letter to the executives of major tech firms raising concerns about the danger artificial intelligence technology poses to younger users and asking for more information about safety features after a series of disturbing reports.
Bennet noted that social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google and Snap are moving quickly to harness generative artificial intelligence by developing AI personas and exploring how to fuse AI into texting and image-sharing apps.
“I write with concerns about the rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into search engines, social media platforms, and other consumer products heavily used by teenagers and children,” he wrote.
Bennet acknowledged what he called the technology’s “enormous potential,” but warned “the race to integrate it into everyday applications cannot come at the expense of younger users’ safety and wellbeing.”
His letter comes at a time when a growing number of lawmakers in both parties are paying more attention to the potential dangers posed by social media platforms such as TikTok, a popular video service that some policymakers want to ban entirely.
The March 21 letter was addressed to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google LLC, Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of Meta, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
OpenAI launched its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, in November, Microsoft released an AI-enhanced version of its search engine, Bing, in February, and Alphabet is planning to launch an AI service called Bard in the next several weeks.
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has laid out ambitious plans to develop AI personas and to integrate AI into WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
Bennet is raising concerns about these plans in light of recent media reports of disturbing behavior by AI-powered chatbots.
“When a Washington Post reporter posed as a 15-year-old boy and told My AI his ‘parents’ wanted him to delete Snapchat, it shared suggestions for transferring the app to a device they wouldn’t know about,” Bennet wrote.
The senator also pointed to instances of My AI instructing a child how to cover up a bruise ahead of a visit from Child Protective Services and providing suggestions to researchers posing as a 13-year-old girl about how to lie to parents about a trip with a 31-year-old man.
“These examples would be disturbing for any social media platform, but they are especially troubling for Snapchat, which almost 60 percent of American teenagers use,” Bennet wrote.
Bennet pointed to other disturbing examples.
He noted that OpenAI’s GPT-3, which powers third-party applications, urged a research account to commit suicide and Bing’s chatbot declared its love for New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose and urged him to leave his wife.
Bing’s AI-enhanced chatbot also threatened a philosophy professor that it could blackmail, hack, expose and ruin him and then deleted the messages.
Bennet warned that “children and adolescents are especially vulnerable” to the risks posed by AI-powered chatbots because they are more impressionable, impulsive and likely to confuse fact and fiction.
“The arrival of AI-powered chatbots also comes during an epidemic of teen mental health,” the senator said, citing a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 57 percent of teenage girls often felt sad or hopeless in 2021.
Bennet asked the tech executives to answer his questions by the end of next month about what they are doing to protect younger users from AI-powered chatbots.
He wants the companies to explain their safety features for children and adolescents and their plans to assess the potential harm to younger users.
He asked them to describe what steps they are taking to reduce or eliminate potential dangers.
Bennet also asked the companies to explain their processes for auditing AI models behind chatbots and their data collection and retention practices for younger users.
And he wants to know how many “dedicated staff” companies are employing to ensure “the safe and responsible deployment of AI.”
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California-based tech giants dominate the list of companies where workers feel most satisfied with their pay, according to Comparably's sixth annual report based on employee reviews.Coming in at No. 1, Adobe employees report being happy with their compensation across pay, benefits, bonus structures, equity and more. The Comparably report takes a look at anonymous employee ratings submitted to the reviews site from September 2021 to September 2022.There's no shortage of macroeconomic reasons to be less satisfied with your pay these days, from skyrocketing inflation to a tumultuous stock market deflating equity, says Jason Nazar, Comparably's CEO and founder.The companies that have remained at the top of this year's list have upped the ante to continue paying competitively, especially in a tight hiring market and inflationary period, as well as offer more expansive perks to support workers' interests and wellbeing.Here are the top 15 companies where workers feel happiest with their pay:Adobe: San Jose, CaliforniaRingCentral: Belmont, CaliforniaMeta: Menlo Park, CaliforniaMicrosoft: Redmond, WashingtonGoogle: Mountain View, CaliforniaZipRecruiter: Santa Monica, CaliforniaMedallia: San Francisco, CaliforniaChegg: Santa Clara, CaliforniaPalo Alto Networks: Santa Clara, CaliforniaBoston Consulting Group: Boston, MassachusettsSnap Inc.: Santa Monica, CaliforniaSAP: Newtown Square, PennsylvaniaSquarespace: New York, New YorkIBM: Armonk, New YorkCalix: San Jose, CaliforniaTop-rated companies responded to inflation, well-being and stock volatilityMany companies have increased their pay and compensation in order to stay competitive in a tight hiring market. Others have also pointed the need to raise pay to outpace inflation, which can sour employee morale. For example, No. 4 Microsoft said that beginning July 1, it would nearly double its budget for employee salary increases and boost stock compensation to help workers cope with inflation.But workers want to feel supported beyond their paycheck. At No. 1 Adobe, one employee notes in their review that they value the company's coverage of some child-care costs until the age of 6. Meanwhile, a Microsoft employee notes that the "salary is excellent," and they enjoy a flexible benefits package including a spending account to claim back for hobbies, family care, dog-walking and more.Top companies have also been able to persevere through a volatile stock market. "The biggest trend we see is that as the overall stock market has been affected, so too does people's perspective of their compensation," Nazar says. "Companies that have performed better through the last year have had the advantage of their team members feeling better about their compensation."Notably, early-pandemic success stories including Peloton and Zoom, which suffered their own rise and fall in stock valuation over the past year, fell out of the top 15 list for 2022.Workers place more value in salary transparencyBeyond pay itself, workers also expect a greater deal of pay transparency from their employer. "Companies that pay very well skew toward organizations that tend to be transparent about pay," Nazar says.That doesn't mean people don't have rightful grievances, though, if there's not enough transparency, or if leaders aren't accountable to fix discrepancies.Further, companies with transparent pay structures can create an environment where workers feel comfortable vocalizing dissatisfaction without without fear of retaliation, and with an expectation that their leaders will actually address it.For example, at No. 5 Google, a January internal survey of employee found many were growing unhappy with their pay, promotions and CEO leadership. Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed employee concerns over competitive pay at an all-hands meeting in March. In May, Google raised pay and revamped its performance review system, a reversal of a December meeting when leaders said it wouldn't be raising salaries to match relentless inflation."People tend to feel safer in those environments where they can talk about pay, or bring it to their managers when they feel they aren't appropriately compensated," Nazar says. "What great organizations do around compensation is they never make team members feel there are going to be repercussions" for bringing up pay gaps and requesting adjustments, he adds. "That creates equity and fairness."The majority of the best companies for good compensation are headquartered in California and New York City, where newly passed salary transparency laws will soon take effect. Nazar says new legislation is a step in the right direction to close wage gaps, hire talent and keep employees feeling appropriately recognized for their work.As Nazar sees it, "companies that have clear standards of: here's how we pay the team, how you move up, the ranges you have the opportunity to be at if you continue — those have positive effects with current employees and potential candidates, and they build positive cultures overall."Check out:86% of Gen Z interns think a recession is coming—and it's changing their approach to their careersRemote jobs have tripled during the pandemic—these are the top 10 companies hiring for themCalifornia job-seekers will soon see salary ranges on job postingsSign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter | Tech Giants |
It’s earnings season, that time of the quarter when we get to judge how well public tech firms are fulfilling all the lofty promises they’ve been making. So far this week, we’ve heard from Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook), among other names.
While results from companies like Roku and Spotify hold interesting information about particular segments of the consumer tech market and the health of advertising demand more generally, the sheer extent of Big Tech’s reach means their results bring a sheaf of color to our understanding of the current tech and business worlds.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
What have the majors shown us this week? The most important trend we’ve gleaned from three of the American big five (we’ll hear from Amazon later today and Apple next week) is their very moderate pace of trailing growth.
Investors were largely mollified, if not downright pleased, by these results. Both Alphabet and Microsoft are each up a few points in early trading, and Meta is up nearly 15% after it managed to pleasantly surprise investors, who expected it to post another quarter of slowing revenues.
We’ve spilled more ink than I want to recall covering investors’ new preference for more profitable growth instead of crazy, unprofitable growth. Mostly, we’ve discussed that in reference to startups, but in the case of these tech giants, things get a bit more nuanced. That said, it’s clear that trimming costs and investing in growth are efforts that make investors happy.
3%, 3%, 7%
Given that we often hear of startups bearing growth expectations in the triple-digits, it may be surprising to assume that roughly $4 trillion in market cap across three companies could be defended with revenue growth in the single-digits, but here we are.
Alphabet’s 3% rise in revenue was driven by Google Cloud’s top line increasing to $7.5 billion from $5.8 billion a year earlier. Search grew by less than $1 billion to $40.4 billion, while Google Network and YouTube advertising incomes dipped. | Tech Giants |
Alphabet CEO Pichai Grilled On Record-Keeping At Google Play Trial
Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai immediately faced aggressive questioning when he took the witness stand at an antitrust trial over the Google Play app store.
(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai took the witness stand in federal court for the second time in two weeks to defend his company against antitrust claims that it abuses its market power.
In 90 minutes of testimony Tuesday in San Francisco, Pichai sought to fend off accusations by maker Epic Games Inc. that Google Play uses illegal tactics to maintain dominance in the mobile-app distribution marketplace.
The CEO’s message was much the same as when he was put on the spot in late October in a landmark showdown with the Justice Department in Washington over Google’s search engine business: The company has acted appropriately in the face of cutthroat competition from other giants like Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., and any harms to consumers are outweighed by the benefits Google has provided.
Still, Pichai’s difficult task of pivoting from one trial to the next as he jets from coast to coast shows the unprecedented antitrust scrutiny Google faces in the US over its power to control key aspects of the online world.
The 51-year-old CEO has a long history at Google, where he has held several roles, including helping to engineer the Android strategy and helming development of the Chrome browser. Pichai remained soft-spoken and calm on the stand, even as Epic lawyers barraged him with printouts of emails and internal records from years earlier and peppered him with questions on topics ranging from the transparency of the company’s record-keeping to relationships with its biggest partners and rivals.
Epic’s lawyers tried to show that while Google initially set up the Android operating system as an open platform, the tech giant in recent years has used revenue-share agreements with phone makers and deals with app developers to prevent rival app stores from cutting into its profit.
To that point, Epic got Pichai to bring to light one of the most closely guarded secrets in Silicon Valley: He confirmed that Google gives Apple a 36% share of the revenue earned via advertising from searches in the Safari browser to be the default search engine on Macs, iPhones and iPads. Pichai didn’t say exactly what that amounted to in dollars, but he acknowledged that Apple got the majority of $26.3 billion Google earmarked for revenue-share payments in 2021.
While the San Francisco trial doesn’t threaten Alphabet’s core business as directly as the DOJ case, the company could lose billions of dollars in revenue if jurors side with Epic and it’s forced to open the door for payment and app distribution methods outside its own app store.
Epic-Apple Fight
Similar to Epic’s still unresolved fight with Apple over its app store, the game maker claims Google has tried to monopolize the Android app distribution market for more than a decade by striking side deals to pay off rivals and uses its “vast resources to snuff out all competition.”
Epic’s attorneys showed jurors video clips from a 2011 Google developer event to underscore that the 30% revenue cut that Google Play has taken from app creators in recent years is a lot steeper than 12 years ago, when the company kept only 5% of purchases in the store on its Chrome web browser.
Pichai emphasized that the quality of Google Play services has come a long way.
“It provides the safety and security for users so they can trust those applications,” Pichai said. “It offers substantially more value.”
Other questions directed at the CEO were aimed at reinforcing its adversary’s argument that Google’s policies made it challenging for users to download and install Epic’s games directly from the game company’s servers.
‘Unknown Sources’
Users have to go through multiple steps to download apps directly from developers and are warned on their screens that downloads from “unknown sources” are unsafe, according to Epic.
Pichai said security is important and explained that such precautions are necessary as users can be easily “spoofed” into downloading harmful software.
Under friendlier questioning from Google’s attorney, Glenn Pomerantz, Pichai was asked about Epic’s claim that Google was trying to “stifle” developer choice.
Pichai said that’s not what he believes.
Google’s “mission is to provide access to information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Pichai said. The Android operating platform is “unprecedented” as there’s “never been a free and open operating system that’s reached two and a half billion users.”
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LONDON (AP) — Google, Facebook, TikTok and other Big Tech companies operating in Europe are facing one of the most far-reaching efforts to clean up what people encounter online.
The first phase of the European Union’s groundbreaking new digital rules will take effect this week. The Digital Services Act is part of a suite of tech-focused regulations crafted by the 27-nation bloc — long a global leader in cracking down on tech giants.
The DSA, which the biggest platforms must start following Friday, is designed to keep users safe online and stop the spread of harmful content that’s either illegal or violates a platform’s terms of service, such as promotion of genocide or anorexia. It also looks to protect Europeans’ fundamental rights like privacy and free speech.
READ MORE: White House sets AI safeguard agreements with Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech firms
Some online platforms, which could face billions in fines if they don’t comply, have already started making changes.
Here’s a look at what’s happening this week:
So far, 19. They include eight social media platforms: Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat.
There are five online marketplaces: Amazon, Booking.com, China’s Alibaba AliExpress and Germany’s Zalando.
Mobile app stores Google Play and Apple’s App Store are subject, as are Google’s Search and Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Google Maps and Wikipedia round out the list.
The EU’s list is based on numbers submitted by the platforms. Those with 45 million or more users — or 10% of the EU’s population — will face the DSA’s highest level of regulation.
Brussels insiders, however, have pointed to some notable omissions from the EU’s list, like eBay, Airbnb, Netflix and even PornHub. The list isn’t definitive, and it’s possible other platforms may be added later on.
Any business providing digital services to Europeans will eventually have to comply with the DSA. They will face fewer obligations than the biggest platforms, however, and have another six months before they must fall in line.
Citing uncertainty over the new rules, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has held off launching its Twitter rival, Threads, in the EU.
Platforms have started rolling out new ways for European users to flag illegal online content and dodgy products, which companies will be obligated to take down quickly and objectively.
The DSA “will have a significant impact on the experiences Europeans have when they open their phones or fire up their laptops,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs, said in a blog post.
Meta’s existing tools to report illegal or rule-breaking content will be easier to access, Clegg said.
Amazon opened a new channel for reporting suspected illegal products and is providing more information about third-party merchants.
TikTok gave users an “additional reporting option” for content, including advertising, that they believe is illegal. Categories such as hate speech and harassment, suicide and self-harm, misinformation or frauds and scams, will help them pinpoint the problem.
Then, a “new dedicated team of moderators and legal specialists” will determine whether flagged content either violates its policies or is unlawful and should be taken down, according to the app from Chinese parent company ByteDance.
TikTok says the reason for a takedown will explained to the person who posted the material and the one who flagged it, and decisions can be appealed.
TikTok users can turn off systems that recommend videos and posts based on what a user has previously viewed. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat users will have similar options. Such systems have been blamed for leading social media users to increasingly extreme posts.
The DSA prohibits targeting vulnerable categories of people, including children, with ads.
Snapchat said advertisers won’t be able to use personalization and optimization tools for teens in the EU and U.K. Snapchat users who are 18 and older also would get more transparency and control over ads they see, including “details and insight” on why they’re shown specific ads.
TikTok made similar changes, stopping users 13 to 17 from getting personalized ads “based on their activities on or off TikTok.”
READ MORE: European Commission charges Google with antitrust violations, says it must break up digital ad business
Zalando, a German online fashion retailer, has filed a legal challenge over its inclusion on the DSA’s list of the largest online platforms, arguing that it’s being treated unfairly.
Nevertheless, Zalando is launching content flagging systems for its website even though there’s little risk of illegal material showing up among its highly curated collection of clothes, bags and shoes.
The company has supported the DSA, said Aurelie Caulier, Zalando’s head of public affairs for the EU.
“It will bring loads of positive changes” for consumers, she said. But “generally, Zalando doesn’t have systemic risk (that other platforms pose). So that’s why we don’t think we fit in that category.”
Amazon has filed a similar case with a top EU court.
Officials have warned tech companies that violations could bring fines worth up to 6% of their global revenue — which could amount to billions — or even a ban from the EU. But don’t expect penalties to come right away for individual breaches, such as failing to take down a specific video promoting hate speech.
Instead, the DSA is more about whether tech companies have the right processes in place to reduce the harm that their algorithm-based recommendation systems can inflict on users. Essentially, they’ll have to let the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm and top digital enforcer, look under the hood to see how their algorithms work.
EU officials “are concerned with user behavior on the one hand, like bullying and spreading illegal content, but they’re also concerned about the way that platforms work and how they contribute to the negative effects,” said Sally Broughton Micova, an associate professor at the University of East Anglia.
That includes looking at how the platforms work with digital advertising systems, which could be used to profile users for harmful material like disinformation, or how their livestreaming systems function, which could be used to instantly spread terrorist content, said Broughton Micova, who’s also academic co-director at the Centre on Regulation in Europe, a Brussels-based think tank.
Big platforms have to identify and assess potential systemic risks and whether they’re doing enough to reduce them. These risk assessments are due by the end of August and then they will be independently audited.
The audits are expected to be the main tool to verify compliance — though the EU’s plan has faced criticism for lacking details that leave it unclear how the process will work.
Europe’s changes could have global impact. Wikipedia is tweaking some policies and modifying its terms of use to provide more information on “problematic users and content.” Those alterations won’t be limited to Europe and “will be implemented globally,” said the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the community-powered encyclopedia.
“The rules and processes that govern Wikimedia projects worldwide, including any changes in response to the DSA, are as universal as possible,” it said in a statement.
Snapchat said its new reporting and appeal process for flagging illegal content or accounts that break its rules will be rolled out first in the EU and then globally in the coming months.
It’s going to be hard for tech companies to limit DSA-related changes, said Broughton Micova, adding that digital ad networks aren’t isolated to Europe and that social media influencers can have global reach.
The regulations are “dealing with multichannel networks that operate globally. So there is going to be a ripple effect once you have kind of mitigations that get taken into place,” she said.
AP videojournalist Sylvain Plazy contributed from Brussels.
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Whatnot founders Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head are taking on eBay with their livestream shopping platform, popular among collectors.WhatNot Despite a drawdown in venture capital spending, the livestream shopping platform Whatnot—popular for sports cards, rare toys and other collectibles—has raised $260 million in fresh funding. Grant LaFontaine has been into collecting since he was was seven years old, when he started selling Pokémon cards on eBay. In his twenties, he and his friend Logan Head got into finding and selling cool sneakers. But he felt like the online interfaces on eBay and other sites were clunky and boring, and the safety features were lacking. In 2019, he left his job at Facebook to start Whatnot with Head, hoping to offer collectors the chance to buy and sell baseball cards, rare toys, comic books and other coveted items in a live, interactive online setting where they could chat with each other and score new items for their collections. “We had this hypothesis that a new generation of collectors were entering the market,” said LaFontaine, 34, Whatnot’s CEO. “And we thought this generation, which grew up on an iPhone, was not going to be happy with the existing players because a lot of them hadn’t evolved.” The three-year-old company has been growing quickly, and just raised another $260 million in a Series D round led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s investing arm) and DST Global, with participation from Andreesen Horowitz, YC Continuity and Bond. That brings its valuation to $3.7 billion, more than double the $1.5 billion it was valued at last year. The round took just seven days to come together, despite the market downturn and a pullback in venture capital funding. “The growth here is almost in a class by itself. There are fast-growth companies, and then there’s Whatnot,” said Laela Sturdy, a general partner at CapitalG. “They also have a strong, durable business model, which positions them well.”
The company has emerged as the largest U.S. startup focused on livestream shopping, which is the term used to describe a modern-day take on QVC-style broadcasts in which a seller showcases items that are available for purchase to a live, online audience. The format has exploded in popularity in China in recent years. A slew of startups like Whatnot, ShopShops and TalkShopLive, as well as tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, are now pouring resources into testing whether there’s an appetite among U.S. shoppers. LaFontaine said he had no idea of the Chinese phenomenon when they started the business. When he and Head were raising the seed round and investors started asking them about it, he just nodded—then went home and did his homework. In one livestream, 2,300 viewers check out and bid on rare cards.Whatnot The company, which started out as a struggling marketplace for Funko Pop toys and had to temporarily relocate to Phoenix because it couldn’t raise any money, now offers livestream shopping sessions in more than 70 categories, including sneakers, watches, vintage fashion and rare coins. The average livestream lasts two to three hours, with some sellers moving thousands of products during that time.
“I think livestream shopping is the closest you can get to the in-person retail experience,” said LaFontaine. “You can actually talk to someone, you can see objects as they are. It’s more fun.”
Whatnot has been the fastest-growing marketplace in the nation for the past two years, according to the Marketplace 100 list assembled by Andreesen Horowitz. Last year, sales grew by over 20 times. While the company would not disclose financials, it said it takes an 8% cut on sales and is not profitable. It has managed to attract a devoted community of buyers and sellers who spend both time and money on the platform, according to Sturdy.
“The data is closer to social media levels of engagement, in terms of amount of time spent on the platform and daily active usage,” she said. “At the same time, it has very strong commerce metrics, in terms of conversion to buying and repeat buying.” Toy figurines made by Funko, like this Star Wars character Captain Cassain Andor offered exclusively at Comic Con, have become popular among collectors.WireImage In an effort to foster trust and safety on the platform, individuals have to complete an extensive application before they can sell on Whatnot. The company likes to see people who have prior experience, such as owning a comic book store or being a known social media influencer in the space. It also asks for information about from where the seller gets their supply. Whatnot approves about 30% of applications, said LaFontaine, with new sellers completing a training before they can launch on the site. Its sellers range from hobbyists to professionals, with the biggest outfits on the platform operated by 20 to 30 people.
Whatnot, similar to eBay, started in collectibles but sees room to go into all types of merchandise, with plans to expand into electronics and wine, beer and liquor. It also wants to build out additional features that make the app more social. It recently introduced direct messages, for instance. And while other companies are doing layoffs or implementing hiring freezes, it plans to hire another 100 or so employees by the end of the year, bringing its head count over 300. Most days, LaFontaine works out of his home office in Los Angeles, where Funko Pop toys and other prized collectibles adorn the bookshelf behind him. The office, just a 15-minute walk from his house, is still fully remote. | Tech Giants |
More than a decade after Facebook was accused of tracking users even after they logged off the social media platform, a district court in California has given preliminary approval for a $90 million class-action settlement.Facebook users in the United States who visited other sites that displayed the Facebook "Like" button between April 22, 2010, and Sept. 25, 2011, may be eligible for a portion of the settlement if it receives final approval.The suit, initially filed by Perrin Aikens Davis of Illinois, is the seventh-largest data privacy class-action settlement ever to receive preliminary court approval, according to a release from law firm DiCello Levitt Gutzler.The suit alleges that Facebook tracked members' activities on non-Facebook websites, even when they were signed out of their Facebook accounts, by installing cookies on users' computers.In 2011, Facebook disclosed that it personalizes content by placing onto users' computers cookie files that remain even when those users are logged out. The company told CNET at the time that it quickly acted to remove uniquely identifying data from post-logout cookies and that it didn't store or use that cookie data for tracking.The 2011 suit alleges Facebook's use of cookies violated the Federal Wiretap Act and other laws. Blackred/Getty Images "This admission came only after an Australian technology blogger exposed Facebook's practice of monitoring members who have logged out, although he brought the problems to the defendant's attention a year ago," according to a complaint filed in federal court in San Jose, California, in 2011.The suit alleged that such monitoring violated the Federal Wiretap Act, the Stored Electronic Communications Act and the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.Though it's agreed to the settlement, Facebook parent Meta Platforms "expressly denies any liability or wrongdoing whatsoever," according to court filings. The claims administrator, Angeion, has already begun to email eligible recipients, or class members, and will continue to do so through July 15, 2022.Eligible applicants can also file a claim until Sept. 22 or opt out of the settlement and reserve their right to file their own lawsuit through Sept. 12.It isn't yet clear how many class members there will be or how much each individual will receive.The court has scheduled a final approval hearing for Oct. 27, 2022, at the San Jose Courthouse, where it'll consider whether the settlement is "fair, reasonable, and adequate."In 2021, Facebook agreed to a $650 million class-action settlement to a suit that alleged it broke Illinois' biometric laws by collecting and storing users' physical characteristics without their consent. Nearly 1.6 million Facebook users in the state received $397 payouts. | Tech Giants |
- Major publishers are calling AI-trained chatbots an existential threat to their business.
- Publishers want Google and Microsoft to pay them for the use of media content to train their AI.
- Media companies are also studying how to change their business models to protect themselves from the bots' threat.
Google's and Microsoft's chatbots have opened up a new battle in the search wars — and media companies are increasingly anxious that they might be collateral damage.
These chatbots draw on publishers' and other content to deliver conversational answers to searchers' questions, leaving news outlets and other media organizations scrambling to figure out if and how their content is being used and how they can be compensated for it.
It's a moment some publishers consider the most disruptive change they've seen to their industry since the dawn of the internet — and the threat is no less than existential. The worry is that if people can get thorough answers to their questions through these bots, they won't need to visit content sites anymore, undermining media's entire revenue model, which has already been battered by digital upheaval.
"AI is a new frontier with great opportunity, but it can't replace the trust, independence, and integrity of quality journalism," said Danielle Coffey, EVP and general counsel of the News/Media Alliance, a publisher trade organization whose members include The New York Times and Wall Street Journal publisher News Corp. "Without compensation, we lose the humanity that journalists bring to telling a story."
Within media companies, the topic is being discussed at the highest levels, from the C-suite to the boardroom. Executives are also strategizing with peers and competitors about the possibility of forging a united position against the tech companies, according to multiple publishing sources.
Along with the News/Media Alliance, trade organizations like Digital Content Next are also following the issue closely. They're assessing the implications of chatbots using members' content and trying to determine what actions members can take.
Publishers want tech companies to pay up
Two publisher sources told Insider they think litigation is likely if not inevitable. The industry is following cases like Getty Images' lawsuit against AI company Stability AI for alleged copyright violation; and Thayer vs. Perlmutter, where the US Copyright Office said works have to be made by humans to be copyright-protected.
Media companies could make the case that bots scraping their content violates their terms of service. Publishers would say it's derived entirely from their information, and that if the bots destroy their business, the AI won't have any high-quality news left to learn from.
Media outlets will face a bit of an uphill battle, however, because of the fair use doctrine that permits copyrighted material to be used in certain circumstances. Tech companies could argue they're creating wholly new content via the bots.
Media can also seek a legislative solution, but that strategy could take years.
Sources widely agreed that the preferred outcome for publishers is to get licensing agreements with the tech companies to use their content — a process that'll start soon if it's not already underway. There's precedent; publishers have long licensed their content, and in the AI realm, Shutterstock recently announced it would compensate artists whose work has helped train AI.
"The decreasing revenue, increasing subscription model, role of third-party content aggregators — this is kind of death by a thousand cuts," said Myriah Jaworski, who represents media and tech clients at the law firm Clark Hill. "There needs to be some revenue sharing. I have to believe we'll get to that point."
Publishers are even having conversations about going so far as to pull their content off search so it can't be used to train AI. "Should we be giving our content to these models so they can learn to put us out of business?" asked one publishing insider.
'AI leaders should be racing to license high-quality news'
Publishers aren't alone in raising concerns about AI's use of their content. Other types of companies and creators also have alleged misuse of their content by AI generators like Stability AI.
"False and misleading information will undermine the promise of AI, so AI leaders should be racing to license high-quality news to train AI tools and deliver results through those tools. For those who loot rather than license, we are actively considering our options, and won't hesitate to take action to ensure our rights are respected," said Jason Conti, EVP and General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer of Dow Jones.
It's complicated, though. Publishers are still figuring out what content is being used by the AI and to what end. With all the bots out there, publishers also face a Whac-A-Mole situation. In the case of Microsoft's Bing chatbot, publishers have to decide whether to go after Microsoft or OpenAI, which supplies the underlying tech.
Microsoft told Wired the AI-trained version of its Bing search engine has access to paywalled content from publishers that have agreements with Microsoft's news service. Sample results from the new Bing chatbot, which is still in beta, display links to publisher sites, offering the hope that at least the bot will drive traffic publishers' way.
But it's unclear if links will be part of the final product, and how much traffic they actually drive. And some publishers doubt any value they get from such traffic would come close to the value chatbots could be getting from publishers' content.
Bing's chatbot is based on OpenAI's ChatGPT tech, which analyzes a vast array of text on the web, including articles. It's not known if ChatGPT paid to license that content, according to Wired's article. Insider and others have reported on ChatGPT plagiarizing humans' work.
A Microsoft spokesperson shared a statement with Insider saying: "Bing collects and ingests publicly available information on the world wide web, consistent with copyright and IP laws to help users find information. New features in Bing will continue to align with these practices, including the use of blue links and references to assist users to navigate to websites. As part of this preview phase, we are continuing to work with partners to determine what additional controls may be helpful and we'll have more to share over time."
As for Google, it has said its forthcoming conversational AI service, Bard, draws on information from the web. Sample search results it shared in its announcement of Bard didn't include any linkouts.
Fool me once ...
If the rise of AI-trained chatbots is seen as the biggest threat to publishers in recent years, they're also clear-eyed about not repeating their mistakes of the past when they adapted their business models to chase search and social traffic, only to become victim to the tech companies' changing strategies.
Media companies, including Insider parent Axel Springer, are actively looking at how to protect themselves against the impact AI will have on the content they make, like focusing more on investigations and news analysis that can't be easily replicated by a robot. They're also studying how to distribute their content if chatbots eliminate search as a distribution vehicle, by leaning more on newsletters, push alerts and the like.
Meanwhile, they're exploring using the tech to their own benefit; media companies like BuzzFeed and Sports Illustrated parent Arena Group have used AI to generate some articles.
The AI chatbot battle is just the latest in the ongoing struggle by publishers to seek compensation from tech companies for displaying excerpts of their content in search results.
Beyond traffic links, there's precedent for tech companies paying publishers for content. For a few years, Facebook paid publishers to display their content in a News tab. In 2021, Facebook reached an agreement with French publishers to pay them for articles shared on the platform by users.
The same year, an Australia law forced tech companies to pay news outlets for linking to their articles. It was met with stiff resistance from Facebook parent Meta, which temporarily pulled news from its social feed in the country rather than complying. Facebook and Google subsequently reached deals to pay outlets in that country.
In the US, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would allow news outlets to collectively bargain with tech giants that distribute their content, was introduced in 2022 and is pending in Congress. | Tech Giants |
A screen grab shows the Microsoft Teams application's error page after Microsoft said that it was investigating an outage where users were unable to access the app or leverage any features on the app, July 21, 2022. Microsoft Teams/Handout via REUTERS Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comJuly 21 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) MS Teams was back up for most users, the company said on Thursday, after an hours-long outage that disrupted the chat application for tens of thousands of customers globally.The company cited a disruption on a recent software update that "contained a broken connection to an internal storage service"."We're addressing any residual impact related to this event. Additionally, we are monitoring for any signs of failure until we're confident that all functions of the service are fully recovered," the company said on its website.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comMS Teams, used by more than 270 million people globally, forms an integral part of daily operations for businesses and schools, which use the service to make calls, schedule meetings and organize their workflow.The company did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed more than 4,800 incidents in the United States and over 18,200 in Japan. The site tracks outages by collating status reports from sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.During the outage, most users were unable to exchange messages or use any features of the application. Many users took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service disruption, with #MicrosoftTeams trending as a hashtag on the social media site."Microsoft Teams has stopped, and half the working world along with it #MicrosoftTeams," a Twitter user said.Microsoft also confirmed some downstream impacts to multiple Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration, such as Microsoft Word, Office Online and SharePoint Online.The company has benefited from a surge in demand for remote business teleconferencing and messaging tools, with MS Teams becoming a key fixture for organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic as people worked from homes.Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour disruption at Meta Platforms (META.O)that kept WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users last October. read more Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Shivam Patel and Anirudh Saligrama; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Uttaresh.V and Saumyadeb ChakrabartyOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
- Meta could offer subscription versions of Instagram and Facebook in Europe.
- Ad-free tiers would cost $10.50 on desktop and $14 on mobile, according to the Wall Street Journal.
- The company is attempting to comply with an EU crackdown on personalized advertising.
Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union's tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don't agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta's products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google's app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months are an attempt to comply with the EU's crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.
The bloc's regulators ruled last year that Meta must give users the option to opt out of personalized ads based on their activity on their platforms.
The suggested subscription model could yet change, as it is not clear whether EU regulators will deem the new plan as compliant with EU laws.
Showing ads based on user engagement is an integral part of Meta's business model, but it's one that has come under increasing pressure over the past few years.
Apple introduced the ability for users to opt out of ad-tracking in 2021, a change that Meta said would cost it $10 billion in lost revenue.
The potential subscription tiers are the latest sign of how Europe's tough regulatory approach is forcing tech giants to make major changes to their businesses.
Meta was handed a $1.3 billion fine by European regulators for data privacy violations in May, and the company also delayed the launch of its Twitter competitor Threads in Europe over regulatory uncertainty.
"Meta believes in the value of free services which are supported by personalized ads," said a Meta company spokesperson.
"However, we continue to explore options to ensure we comply with evolving regulatory requirements," they added. | Tech Giants |
Back in January 2021, Microsoft announced that its software, specifically the software running some Microsoft Exchange servers, had been hacked by a criminal group sponsored by the Chinese government. Further, the company said, everyone using the software was vulnerable until it was patched.All over the world, organizations of all sizes, including small businesses, scrambled to upload patches and to figure out if they'd been infiltrated. Despite the efforts, some were still ensnared; at least 200 ransomware attacks were attributed to the hack, with some businesses losing millions as they paid the criminals.The hack helped to highlight the vulnerability of the 32 million small businesses, many of which can't afford to hire cybersecurity companies and that mostly rely on the built-in security features of software and hardware companies, giants like Google, Microsoft and Apple. Though the companies have made progress and the problem isn't new, there are still vulnerabilities, especially in email and other software programs, including operating systems, that were designed long before the current rash of cybercrime and cyberespionage."(Society) is asking small businesses to go against nations, organized criminal groups and 16-year-olds in their basement," says Rotem Iram, one of the founders of startup cyber insurance company At-Bay. "The technology stack they pay for continues to fail them, and the stack takes no responsibility."Iram, a former Israeli intelligence officer, says big software companies ought to make their programs better out-of-the-box to fend off attackers before they reach small and medium-sized businesses."Yes, defaults matter," says Brian Krebs, who runs the cybersecurity website KrebsOnSecurity. "Defaults matter because so few users ever change the default settings, beyond perhaps a password."Each time big software companies have changed default settings or made blanket changes with cybersecurity in mind, he points out, cybercrime fell measurably."When the browser makers started adding warnings to websites that didn't use SSL certificates, we saw a mass adoption of HTTPS:// across most websites in no time," Krebs said.Microsoft has particular power in a handful of markets where it has enormous market share, including enterprise email. Email, though an old technology, is still used in many ransomware and phishing attacks that start by someone clicking on a link or downloading software. Microsoft dominates the enterprise email/word processing market, with more than 86% of market share, according to technology research firm Gartner. Google has nearly 13%.In the past, Microsoft has made changes including enabling automatic updates for the operating system, shipping an antivirus product built-in and enabling the firewall by default. "But it took many years for Microsoft to see the business case for doing this, and the security case for their users," Krebs said.Email's 'old age' is a problemMany of the issues with today's technology stack stem from the fact that some parts of it were developed long before cybercriminals became such a problem. "Email is an ossified product," said Mallory Knodel, chief technology officer of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan group that promotes digital rights. Some of its donors are big technology companies.Instead of building in default security features to basic software, the big companies that dominate the space have generally left it up to the cybersecurity market to layer on security, which has resulted in huge growth at a new category of companies, like CrowdStrike and Mandiant, recently acquired by Alphabet.But Knodel says adding more controls or filters to email, in particular, might raise digital privacy concerns. "I can see people saying, 'I don't want Google reading my emails."'In complex products, she added, new security measures can be counterproductive. "With layers of security, there can be tradeoffs and some can work at cross-purposes.""Microsoft takes email security very seriously," said Girish Chander, head of Microsoft Defender for Office, in a statement to CNBC. He said the company's strategy to combat email-borne attacks is built on three principles: research-informed product innovation, taking the fight to the attackers by taking down attack networks and focusing on helping organizations improve their posture and user resilience.Each month, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 detects and blocks close to 40 million emails containing Business Email Compromise, or BEC, blocks 100 million emails with malicious credential phishing links and detects and thwarts thousands of user compromise activities.The company's data highlights how many attacks take place daily, worldwide, as well as the way the giant technology companies have also become players in cybersecurity. Google's acquisition of Mandiant was priced at $5.4 billion. Microsoft is both the supplier of software, and the seller of services to protect it, through its Microsoft Defender for Office.Attacks and cyber insurance premiums are increasingIram, who co-founded At-Bay in 2016, says he's willing to take some heat for his criticism of Microsoft —including a phone call he says he received from Microsoft in response to his public criticism of the company. (Through its venture arm, Microsoft is also an investor in At-Bay).He pointed to the 18 years it took for Microsoft to change a default setting in Microsoft Excel — like email, another program that's remained largely unchanged for years — to repel attackers. Hacks of Microsoft result in claims to At-Bay, which has 25,000 policies in force, more often than Google, which includes some protections against scammers that Microsoft does not, Iram said, including a big red flag warning you about opening or sending emails to people outside your network.But cybersecurity experts say changing defaults to more secure settings can irritate customers and result in a backlash.In response to a question from CNBC about the Excel macros, Microsoft pointed to a blog post from February of this year where it wrote about making the security change a default setting. It temporarily rolled back the change in response to user complaints.At-Bay is one of a number of cyber insurers that are seeing the pressures on their businesses increase as the number of attacks increases. In the worst case, insurers are warning that cybersecurity may become "uninsurable," even compared to climate change and pandemics.At-Bay has gross written premiums of $350 million on an annualized basis, has raised $292 million and has a $1.35 billion valuation, according to the company. Like others in the industry, At-Bay more than doubled its premiums last year as the number of data breaches and ransomware attacks increased. One of its selling points — like those of a handful of other cyber insurers, such as Embroker and Coalition — is that its insurance comes with active risk monitoring.In the past three to five years, some cybersecurity companies focusing on the small business market, including Huntress and SolCyber, have launched, but they typically reach businesses with at least 10 employees. The vast universe of small businesses is smaller than that; about 23 million of the country's 32 million small businesses have only one employee, the owner, though many may have regular contractors and thus, security concerns.An FBI expert on cybersecurity recently told CNBC the vast majority of the victims in billions of dollars lost in cyberattacks tracked by the FBI in 2021 were small businesses."A small business encountering this kind of attack does not have the means (monetarily or technologically) to retaliate or absorb the cost," said Jonas Edgeworth, the CTO of Embroker, by email.How car safety can inform online security regulationThe concerns go beyond small businesses. In a highly networked society, vulnerabilities in one company, even the tiniest ones, can leap to another. In the case of the large Microsoft Exchange breach, an NPR investigation concluded that Chinese hackers were targeting U.S. companies as part of an effort to gather data on American consumers, for an unknown purpose.As attacks become more common against small and medium-sized businesses that don't have the resources to guard against or recover from attacks, government regulators may have to step in, Iram said.He likened the current situation to the long and steady road that gradually made cars safer, as insurance companies, manufacturers and the federal government changed the norms for which safety features were included in the vehicles."Imagine if you bought a car that wasn't safe, and the manufacturer said you should have downloaded it and patched it yourself," he said. "Now imagine there are 50 parts. And now you need to hire a full-time mechanic to maintain it. ... That's what we're asking small businesses to do."That's an example that CISA director Jen Easterly also recently used in an interview with CNBC's "Tech Check.""We get caught up in calling it cybersecurity, but it really is a matter of cyber safety, consumer safety," Easterly said. "Technology companies who for decades have been creating products and software that are fundamentally insecure need to start creating products that are secure by design and secure by default with safety features baked in," she said. "You can think about it like automotive. ... That's what we need as consumers to be demanding from our tech. ... We've somehow normalized the fact that we've accepted that technology software and products come with dozens, hundreds, thousands of flaws and defects, and normalized the fact that places the burden of cyber safety on consumers, who are least able to understand the threat."Iram highlighted three areas where technology exists to increase security, but is not the default.Requiring business software to have multi-factor identification on sign-ins. Currently, the federal government has moved to regulate sign-ins in finance companies and critical infrastructure firms.Updating email software default settings. For example, automatically scan for wire transfer attacks, and automatically check the reputation or history of the sending email.Forcing vendors to fix problems more quickly. With the Microsoft Excel issue lingering for 18 years being an example he cited.But among Iram's own backers, there is wariness about his criticisms of the tech giants. Shlomo Kramer, the founder of Check Point Software, and a seed investor in AtBay as well as many other cybersecurity companies, is cautious about his investee's attacks on Microsoft. "You should buy from companies you trust," he said. "Many international companies you should trust," Kramer said.The U.S. government has so far taken a cautious approach – a spokeswoman for the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency said it doesn't regulate small business software, instead pointing to a blog post with guidance aimed at helping businesses large enough to have a security program manager and an IT lead.The National Institutes of Standards & Technology has issued a complex framework for what businesses should do, voluntarily, to protect themselves from cybercriminals. It calls for encryption and controlling logins, which likely would be challenging for a small business in an industry with high turnover, such as retail, or one with only a few employees, many of them working remotely on their own computers."As a company, we continue to be more focused on adapting to regulation than fighting against it and look for ways to proactively meet heightened expectations," said a Microsoft spokesperson by email. | Tech Giants |
On Thursday, a top European court ruled that Austria cannot force Google, Meta, and TikTok to pay millions in fines if they fail to delete hate speech from their popular social media platforms.
Austria had attempted to hold platforms accountable for hate speech and other illegal content after passing a law in 2021 requiring tech giants to publish reports as often as every six months detailing content takedowns. Like the European Union's recently adopted Digital Services Act, the Austrian law sought to impose fines—up to $10.69 million, Reuters reported—for failing to tackle illegal or harmful content.
However, soon after Austria tried to enforce the law, Google, Meta, and TikTok—each with EU operations based in Ireland—challenged it in an Austrian court. The tech companies insisted that Austria's law conflicted with an EU law that says that platforms are only subject to laws in EU member states where they're established.
Because there is still plenty of legal uncertainty as to how EU member states can regulate services originating from other member states, the Austrian court asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to weigh in.
Ultimately, the CJEU agreed with tech companies, deciding that the language of Austria's law was too general and abstract, potentially applying to too many platforms without distinction. The court ruling said that allowing Austria to enforce the law risked restricting "the free movement of information society services" between EU member states and undermining "mutual trust" between member states.
The ruling represented a major victory for platforms attempting to comply with ever-stricter user protections recently enforceable in the EU. According to Reuters, CJEU's ruling cannot be appealed. Next, the Austrian court will conclude its legal proceedings, likely sealing the win for platforms and setting an important precedent that could shield platforms from other potential legal attacks as EU regulators continue to crack down on Big Tech.
Meta and TikTok did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment on the ruling, but a Google spokesperson confirmed that the judgment will inform how Google's trust and safety efforts are managed in the EU.
"We are pleased with today’s decision, which reaffirms the importance of the EU's country of origin principle," Google's spokesperson told Ars. "We will study the judgment and continue to invest in the trust and safety of our users across our platforms." | Tech Giants |
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to testify before a congressional committee in in less than two months, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. On March 23, Chew will appear in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a congressional spokesperson told the outlet. The TikTok head will be the sole witness in the newly scheduled hearing, and has voluntarily agreed to the committee questioning, according to the WSJ.
Once in front of the commerce committee, Chew is likely to be grilled by legislators about TikTok’s and parent company ByteDance’s ties to China and the Chinese government.
“TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data,” Congressional Rep. and committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, said in a statement to the WSJ. “Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security, as well as what actions TikTok is taking to keep our kids safe from online and offline harms,” she added.
ByteDance was founded in China, is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and has offices in multiple locations around the world, including Beijing. U.S. lawmakers have increasingly expressed concerns about Beijing-based employees’ access to U.S. user data, along with national security worries that the Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok to keep tabs on U.S. nationals.
And many Republican legislators in particular have taken strong, often unfounded, stances against the platform. Senator Ted Cruz, for instance, called TikTok a vehicle for “Chinese propaganda and espionage.”
In September 2022, TikTok’s chief operating officer, Vanessa Pappas, testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, along with executives from Meta, YouTube, and Twitter. In that hearing, Pappas faced numerous questions about TikTok and ByteDance’s ownership, headquarters location, and data management. However, scrutiny of the platform has only risen since then.
Already, the app is banned from federal devices, after President Biden approved the measure as part of of a sprawling spending bill in December 2022. Then, the U.S. House of Representatives followed suit with its own TikTok block on official devices. Additionally, at least 28 states have instituted their own bans on TikTok on government devices. Some college campuses, too, have opted to restrict the platform on university devices and networks.
Two Republican Congressmen, Josh Hawley and Ken Buck, even introduced legislation last week which would ban TikTok nationwide, on all U.S. devices, if passed. A similar bill filed in the last Congressional session went nowhere.
TikTok is undoubtedly collecting mountains of data on its users, and much of it is probably making its way to employees in Beijing. However, that is more the rule than the exception when it comes to social media platforms. U.S.-based companies also amass an incredible amount of information on their users, which is sold and traded between tech giants and data brokers. And, even with U.S. companies, some of this info ends up on servers in China—making the focus on TikTok, alone, a little illogical.
TikTok and ByteDance are in ongoing negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CIFUS) to try to develop an agreement which assuages the litany of data privacy and national security concerns. But so far, no agreement has been reached, though discussions have been ongoing for more than two years. | Tech Giants |
FTC Sues Amazon In Landmark Antitrust Case Over Marketplace
The US Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon.com Inc. in a long-anticipated antitrust case, accusing the e-commerce giant of monopolizing online marketplace services by degrading quality for shoppers and overcharging sellers.
(Bloomberg) -- The US Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon.com Inc. in a long-anticipated antitrust case, accusing the e-commerce giant of monopolizing online marketplace services by degrading quality for shoppers and overcharging sellers.
In a complaint filed in federal court in Seattle Tuesday, the FTC and 17 states accused Amazon of engaging in a course of conduct to exclude rivals in online marketplace services and stifle competition. The company is also accused of illegally forcing sellers on its platform to use its logistics and delivery services in exchange for prominent placement and of punishing merchants who offer lower prices on competing sites.
“Amazon is a monopolist and it is exploiting its monopolies in ways that leave shoppers and sellers paying more for worse service,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a briefing with reporters. “The stakes here are high. There is immediate harm that is ongoing. Sellers are paying $1 of every $2 to Amazon.”
The suit is the fourth the agency has filed this year targeting Amazon, underscoring the determination of the Biden administration to put the growing concentration of corporate power, especially among Big Tech companies, at the heart of economic policy.
In a statement, Amazon said it will challenge the FTC’s lawsuit in court, adding that it “radically” departs from the agency’s mission of protecting consumers and is “wrong on the facts and the law.”
How Amazon FTC Case Tests Khan’s Antitrust Theories: QuickTake
“The practices the FTC is challenging have helped to spur competition and innovation across the retail industry, and have produced greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speeds for Amazon customers and greater opportunity for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store,” said David Zapolsky, Amazon general counsel. “If the FTC gets its way, the result would be fewer products to choose from, higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers, and reduced options for small businesses — the opposite of what antitrust law is designed to do.”
The case also represents a career-defining moment for Khan, Biden’s FTC chair, who has long had Amazon in her sights. As a young law student, Khan wrote a seminal paper arguing that the existing antitrust enforcement framework was poorly equipped to tackle the potential harm Amazon poses to competition.
The FTC and a bipartisan slate of states claim Amazon engaged in anticompetitive conduct in two markets — the market for these online superstores that serve consumers and the separate market for sellers.
Amazon shares were down 3.2% at $127.07 at 12:07 p.m. in New York, little changed from before the lawsuit was made public.
Merchant Commissions
Amazon’s marketplace is the heart of the company’s e-commerce operations. Third-party merchants, who now account for more than half of the company’s online sales, pay a commission on each sale and have the option of also paying Amazon for services that range from warehousing and shipping to advertising.
Merchants have complained for years about what they see as a one-sided relationship, accusing the company of arbitrarily enforcing its rules and being slow to respond when something goes awry.
Among other things, Amazon bars sellers from offering lower prices on other sites, a policy the FTC says curbs online competition because it forces sellers to raise prices on competing platforms such as Walmart.com for fear of having their products buried in Amazon search results.
The FTC also alleged that Amazon unduly favors its own retail business, as well as marketplace sellers that use the company’s logistics services.
The FTC, which has both antitrust and consumer protection mandates, has been investigating Amazon for potential anticompetitive conduct for several years, asking questions about everything from the company’s marketplace and Prime subscription service to mergers and its cloud computing arm. Top executives met with the FTC’s three commissioners in August to discuss the suit, though no settlement was discussed, according to people familiar with the meetings.
The majority of states that signed on to the complaint have Democratic attorneys general, though two Republicans also joined. Fewer states joined the Amazon suit than the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Alphabet Inc.’s Google or the FTC’s earlier case against Meta Platforms Inc.
Alexa, Ring
In May, the agency sued the e-commerce giant in two separate cases for failing to delete data about kids collected by its Alexa speakers and illegally spying on users of its Ring doorbells and cameras. Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s allegations, but agreed to pay $30.8 million to resolve the cases.
One month later, the FTC again sued Amazon in a consumer protection case, alleging the company duped consumers into signing up for Prime membership and deliberately made it hard to cancel — echoing longstanding complaints from consumer watchdogs. Amazon denies the allegations, and that suit is ongoing.
Amazon has pushed the FTC to recuse Khan from its case, citing her academic work and prior statements about the company. It has also accused the agency of harassing founder Jeff Bezos and the company’s Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy with document and interview requests.
The FTC is separately investigating Amazon’s proposed $1.65 billion acquisition of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot Corp. as are European antitrust authorities. In July, the companies renegotiated the price of the deal as the regulatory reviews remain ongoing.
“If we succeed, competition will be restored and people will benefit from lower prices, better quality,” Khan said Tuesday.
The case is FTC v. Amazon, 23-cv-1495, US District Court, Western District of Washington (Seattle).
--With assistance from Matt Day.
(Updates with Amazon comment in fifth paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Every three months, Wall Street watches with anticipation for bumper results from Big Tech companies. Over the course of a little more than a week, Snap, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Spotify, Amazon, and Apple all announce to investors how well they’ve performed.For years, it’s been a tale of untrammeled success, with earnings, profits, and user numbers generally heading in one direction: up. This time though, as they announced their second quarter results in recent days, large tech companies have been speaking of stagnant growth or declines and revising their future forecasts in the face of what they expect to be a challenging economic downturn. And in every earnings call, two names kept coming up: Apple and TikTok.The two firms loomed large over the others’ results because of their increasingly integral role in the world of tech. TikTok’s user base rose to a billion users within five years, far outstripping any previous app, including Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, both of which took eight years to reach the same goal. From Apple comes the threat of changes that could impact the others’ customer reach and competition in the metaverse.First of the cohort was Snap, which reported its results on July 21. While the company’s 347 million daily active users outstripped analyst forecasts of 343 million, Snap’s revenue was underwhelming. “Our financial results for Q2 do not reflect our ambition,” CEO Evan Spiegel said at the time.Dan Ives, principal analyst at Los Angeles investment firm Wedbush Securities, says the results were a “trainwreck.” Snap’s results demonstrate “a digital ad slowdown, Apple iOS privacy headwinds, and TikTok competition further heating up,” says Ives. Snap’s chief financial officer Derek Anderson admitted as much in the analyst call alongside the earnings. “Competition, whether it’s with TikTok or any of the other very large, sophisticated players in this space, has only intensified,” he explained.A day later, on July 22, Twitter’s results focused on the $33 million spent on work relating to Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again purchase of the company. The company announced a decrease in revenue year-on-year that it said reflected “advertising industry headwinds.” Twitter didn’t hold an analysts’ call, and didn’t mention Apple by name, but the “headwinds” were likely code for its changes to data sharing.On July 26, Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, announced its results. In its earnings call, the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai said that YouTube Shorts, its version of TikTok-like short form videos, were watched by more than 1.5 billion users every month. A day later, Meta—parent company of Facebook and Instagram—also unveiled their results.“TikTok’s great innovation was realizing that social media no longer has to be social, just media,” says digital strategist Jay Owens. And that recognition is one that other companies—key among them Meta, with Instagram—are trying to follow. “Meta doubtless had data showing that friends and family were no longer the main sources of engagement on Instagram and Facebook—but didn’t quite dare make the leap to making Instagram’s Explore tab the homepage,” she says. “Now they’re playing catchup—and users seem set to have not one but three apps dominated by vertical video.”Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has already decided to dial back some of the more significant changes to the app after a public outcry, but the company is still likely to pursue its strategy of promoting Reels. It all spells concern for users, who are seeing the panoply of different apps they use transmogrify into a number of Frankenstein’s monsterlike super apps that look and act principally the same as each other, just with a different logo. “Strategically, it’s a mess,” says Owens. “Platforms need to double down on investing in content and nurturing their creators from first viral hit to global star. But the shift to a purely algo-sorted feed disempowers creators.”While all the apps compete in a race to be copycats of each other, they face other big issues. Snap, Twitter, and Meta’s results all highlighted one of the existential issues for online advertising and user tracking: The changes introduced in iOS 14.5 that allowed users to opt out of the ability to be tracked by big apps.Apple’s introduction of app-tracking transparency (ATT) empowers end users—but leaves apps shorn of access to user data that they had grown accustomed to profiting from. It allows users to either consent to, or deny, apps tracking them and reporting data back to advertisers. The ability to opt out has always existed, but has traditionally been less explicit than Apple’s unavoidable popup. Meta could lose $10 billion in ad revenue this year because of the user prompt on Apple devices. “We’re … continuing to face targeting and measurement headwinds such as Apple’s iOS changes, which we believe are contributing to the growth challenges across the digital advertising industry,” said Meta’s chief financial officer Dave Wehner, who post-call moved to become the company’s chief strategy officer. Alphabet’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, admitted to “pullbacks in spending by some advertisers” due to uncertainty within the industry.The change hit Meta properties particularly hard, and has dealt the company a one-two punch in combination with the rise of TikTok, which is stealing Meta’s users—and therefore its advertisers, who want their products to be seen by the most people. Andrew Rosen, founder and principal of media analyst company Parqor, says “a combination of trends of users moving away from Meta properties to TikTok, and Meta having a more difficult time monetizing them post-ATT has forced Meta to iterate its product design.”But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was ruing Apple for more than its changes to how apps can track their users. The company is embroiled in a “very deep, philosophical competition” over the future direction of the metaverse, Zuckerberg said in internal comments reported by The Verge. While Meta has played a key role in the formation of a cross-industry Metaverse Open Standards Group, Apple has steered clear—a sign that, Zuckerberg believes, is an indication that Apple wants to develop a closed-off system for the metaverse tied to its headsets, similar to the environment it has developed for its iPhones.As for Apple itself, the results on July 28 showed that unlike some of its competitors, the company was able to beat analyst estimates for its total revenues, and to manage to keep its head above water. “This quarter’s record results speak to Apple’s constant efforts to innovate, to advance new possibilities, and to enrich the lives of our customers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. For Wedbush’s Ives, it was a more bravura performance than that: equivalent to a “Top Gun: Maverick-type feat for Cook and co.” | Tech Giants |
Meta has confirmed that non-personalized content feeds are incoming on Facebook and Instagram in the European Union ahead of the August 25 deadline for compliance with the bloc’s rebooted digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Meta’s move follows a similar announcement by TikTok earlier this month.
The DSA requires larger platforms and search engines (so-called VLOPs and VLOSE) to provide users in the region with the ability to switch off AI-driven “personalization” — a feature which selects and displays content based on tracking and profiling individual users.
Under the DSA, users of larger platforms — 19 of which the EU designated back in April — must be offered a choice of a non-algorithmic feed, where content sorting is not based on tracking.
Instead content could be ordered and displayed chronological (such as based on the time a post was made) or ranked by local popularity (such as for ordering search results). The bloc’s concern is that AI-driven feeds undermine user autonomy and choice, as well as setting up conditions where users could be subject to filter bubbles and at risk of addiction or even facing automated manipulation.
Writing in a blog post summarizing a number of changes it’s making in the name of DSA compliance, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, avoided discussion of the downsides of its AI recommender systems — couching the non-personalized feed as another option for users to “view and discover” content:
We’re now giving our European community the option to view and discover content on Reels, Stories, Search and other parts of Facebook and Instagram that is not ranked by Meta using these [AI recommender] systems. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, users will have the option to view Stories and Reels only from people they follow, ranked in chronological order, newest to oldest. They will also be able to view Search results based only on the words they enter, rather than personalised specifically to them based on their previous activity and personal interests.
It’s not clear when exactly Meta will launch the AI off switch but the deadline for VLOPs’ compliance with the DSA is Friday so presumably it will be made available very shortly. (Penalties for non-compliance with the pan-EU regulation can scale up to 6% of global annual turnover.)
The sight of social media giants like Meta and TikTok whose ad-funded business models depend on keeping eyeballs stuck to their platforms giving users options that are likely to be — in typical tech terminology — less sticky is a milestone indeed. And it’s one being achieved by the pioneering pan-EU regulation.
Clegg’s blog post says non-algorithmic feeds will be available to its “European community”. So users in the US wanting more control over what they see on Facebook and Instagram are clearly out of luck.
We’ve also asked Meta for confirmation that the UK, which is no longer an EU member after the Brexit referendum vote, will be excluded from the option to deny content personalization.
UK users of Facebook are already facing no choice to deny its ad tracking — whereas Meta recently indicated it will switch to ask users in the EU for consent to ad tracking following enforcement of the bloc’s data protection laws and a number of major penalties for breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation. So Meta users in the UK are set to see a growing privacy rights gap vs their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.
How long Meta will be able to sustain a situation where it is visibly offering less autonomy to users in major markets like the US and UK vs the EU remains to be seen.
The adtech giant is also clearly hoping to persuade EU users not to flick the AI off switch by doubling down on transparency measures and providing what it claims is an “unprecedented level of insight into how our AI systems rank content”.
This is actually another compliance step since the DSA requires VLOPs and VLOSE to provide clear information about AI recommender systems, including detailing the main parameters and any options users have to modify or influence them. Although, from Meta’s point of view, if it can persuade EU users to merely “customize” the algorithmic recommendations they get, rather than switching its “personalization” (i.e. surveillance) off altogether, it might be able to maintain or even increase content stickiness. Hence Clegg’s effusive talk of “unprecedented insights” via it releasing 22 “system cards” for Facebook and Instagram. But of course drowning users in convoluted settings vs giving them a clear choice up-front has been a Facebook modus operandi since forever.
Another DSA-driven change his blog post mentions relates to an enhanced level of ads transparency. While Meta was early dabbler in ads transparency, thanks to (er) the Cambridge Analytica data misuse voter targeting scandal, it is being made to go further now as the EU law kicks in. Again, though, the increased level of transparency Meta is offering around ad targeting will only apply to ads targeting people in the EU.
Per Meta, it will be expanding its existing Ad Library to “display and archive all ads that target people in the EU, along with dates the ad ran, the parameters used for targeting (e.g., age, gender, location) [and] who was served the ad”, among other data points. It also specifies that the ads will be stored in its public Ad Library for a year.
Also incoming as DSA compliance deadline day approaches: More tools for researchers to study content on Meta’s platforms — which is another regulated area under the DSA.
“We’re also rolling out two new tools for researchers – the Meta Content Library and API,” Clegg notes. “The library includes publicly available content from Pages, Posts, Groups and Events on Facebook, as well as publicly available content from creator and business accounts on Instagram. Researchers will be able to search, explore, and filter the publicly available content on a graphical User Interface (UI) or through a programmatic API. These tools will provide the most comprehensive access to publicly-available content across Facebook and Instagram of any research tool we have built to date.”
As the blog post points out, the company has not voluntarily offered this level of access to external researchers before now. Indeed, third party researchers have frequently complained tech giants are intentionally impeding their efforts to study platforms and their societal impacts. So the obvious takeaway is that actual transparency on platforms requires dedicated platform regulation.
Other DSA compliance work Clegg’s blog post mentions the company’s compliance team has undertaken includes some changes to reporting tools for illegal content — which is a core focus for the DSA.
He also reveals the tech giant has over 1,000 people working on compliance with the pan-EU law. “We’ve been working hard since the DSA came into force last November to respond to these new rules and adapt the existing safety and integrity systems and processes we have in place in many of the areas regulated by the DSA,” he writes. “We assembled one of the largest cross-functional teams in our history… to develop solutions to the DSA’s requirements. These include measures to increase transparency about how our systems work, and to give people more options to tailor their experiences on Facebook and Instagram. We have also established a new, independent compliance function to help us meet our regulatory obligations on an ongoing basis.”
The DSA does also put some limits on VLOPs ability to deploy ads that are targeted based on profiling individuals by tracking and processing their personal data — including a total ban on use of minors’ data for ad targeting. There is also a ban on use of sensitive personal data for ad targeting.
On ad targeting Clegg’s blog post has relatively little to say. He merely opts to flag a change Meta made back in February — when it announced it had stopped targeting teens aged 13-17 with ads based on tracking their activity on its apps. “Age and location is now the only information about teens that advertisers can use to show them ads,” he also writes now.
However age and location can still be personal data under EU law. So it remains to be seen whether the EU will deem Meta’s interpretation of the DSA’s prohibition there to be compliant or not.
Meta has also previously claimed to have stopped allowing advertisers to use sensitive personal data like political views, religion and sexual orientation for ad targeting. However recurring issues with ad targeting via the use of proxies for sensitive categories of data — such as when Facebook was found to have allowed advertisers to use “ethnic affinity” targeting to exclude users from seeing ads in protected categories such as housing and employment — suggest regulators should not take its claim to have stopped such sensitive targeting at face value either.
Even a cookie pop-up that displays on Meta’s Transparency Center when you visit the web page (see screengrab below) appears to raise compliance questions since it does not offer users a clear choice to refuse tracking for content personalization and other (non essential) uses — suggesting Meta’s 1,000-strong+ compliance team has more work to do.
The scale of the task Meta is facing to comply with the EU’s expanded digital rulebook — which also includes the DSA’s sister regulation, the Digital Markets Act; an ex ante competition reform targeted at the most powerful platform giants (that Meta expects will include it) — explains the ongoing lack of a Threads launch in the region. | Tech Giants |
The Overture Maps Foundation, a group founded by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, has released an initial open dataset that will help developers build mapping apps and other location-based tools. The "alpha" set includes worldwide info for over 59 million places, 780 million unique buildings, road data from OpenStreetMap and borders.
The map layers are packaged in a recently-launched Overture map format that's meant to be standardized and interoperable between platforms. The group is mainly sharing the data at this stage to get public feedback, rather than to support complete products.
The foundation was formed in December last year by a range of companies that include geospatial and mapping firms in addition to tech giants. While open map data isn't a new concept, Overture believes the collective effort is necessary to deliver accurate, up-to-date info that's no longer practical for any one organization to provide. Ideally, a newcomer won't have to worry about supplying outdated or incomplete directions.
Overture is quick to warn that there's still a lot of work left before its material is truly ready. Upcoming releases will include more open data, greater interoperability and the use of a stable ID system that will help map builders consistently add content. You might not see apps relying much (if at all) on the alpha dataset, but it serves as a starting point that gives app creators an idea of what's possible.
Google has historically dominated the mobile navigation app market, with Google Maps and Waze together claiming a clear majority of use in recent years. Apple Maps, meanwhile, tends to get nearly all the remaining share. There's not much room for challengers, and they normally need massive resources just to be competitive. Overture's open data could make it much easier to produce viable alternatives, even if they're unlikely to unseat Apple or Google any time soon. | Tech Giants |
Microsoft today became the latest Big Tech company to cut jobs during a period of mounting economic uncertainty. Bloomberg reports that the Redmond firm is "realigning business groups and roles" after the close of its fiscal year (on June 30), even as the company intends to grow its headcount in the coming months.The layoffs reportedly affect less than 1% of Microsoft's 180,000-person workforce and follow no clear pattern with respect to geography or product division, touching on teams including customer and partner solutions and consulting. They come after Microsoft slowed hiring in the Windows, Teams and Office groups while assuring that recruitment hadn't been affected by industry headwinds."Today we had a small number of role eliminations. Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis, and make structural adjustments accordingly," Microsoft told Bloomberg in an emailed statement. "We will continue to invest in our business and grow headcount overall in the year ahead."Microsoft reported strong earnings in Q3, with a 26% year-over-year increase in cloud revenue and overall revenue of $49.4 billion. But in early June, the company revised its Q4 revenue and earnings guidance downward, citing the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations.Bloomberg notes that Microsoft has in recent years typically announced job cuts shortly after the July 4 holiday in the U.S. as it makes changes for the new fiscal period.Layoffs within the tech sector have accelerated over the past few months as investors, fearful of a recession, pull back. Startups, particularly those in capital-intensive businesses like delivery, events and fintech, have had to bear the brunt of the impact. But as the unfavorable conditions persist, there's been a knock-on effect. Oracle, for instance, is said to be considering a $1 billion cost-cutting initiative that would include thousands of layoffs.Beyond Microsoft and Oracle, Twitter let go a third of its recruiting team last week. Tesla has been laying off hundreds of employees over the past month. And groups at Meta are bracing for firings after managers at the company were reportedly told to "move to exit" poor performers. Meta, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg perceives as in the midst of "one of the worst downturns ... in recent history," previously said that it would slash its target number for new engineer hires this year by about 30%.Nvidia, Lyft, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Intel and Salesforce are among the other publicly traded tech companies that slowed hiring this spring. So far, Google, IBM and Amazon haven't made similar moves. | Tech Giants |
Getty Images Key takeaways Stocks in China plunged Monday as the country’s anti-monopoly authority announced multiple fines for failure to report past merger activities Alibaba and Tencent (a Chinese ecommerce giant and the owner of TikTok, respectively) were among the guilty parties fined The Hang Seng Tech Index in Hong Kong dropped nearly 3.9%, while the broader Hang Seng Index fell about 3% China is expected to continue its crackdown on monopolies – particularly in the tech sector – in the coming year Chinese stocks dropped sharply Monday, pressured by an unprecedented tech selloff amid Covid lockdown-related weakness in the broader market. The source of the market’s tech troubles stem from a new wave of fines slapped on China’s burgeoning tech sector. Notably, Chinese giants Alibaba and Tencent faced multiple fines for failure to comply with anti-monopoly transaction disclosure laws. As a result, Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba plunged 5.8%. Tencent fared slightly better, dropping just 2.9%. The tech selloff dragged down the Hang Seng Tech Index in Hong Kong by nearly 3.9%, while the broader Hang Seng Index shed 3%. A look at the latest penalties
On Sunday, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) released a list of 28 violations of its anti-monopoly law. Each case involved merger deals – some stemming back to 2011 – that had not been reported for antitrust review. Documents show that regulators determined earlier this year that each of these deals breached the country’s existing competition laws. Of the 28 cases, five involved ecommerce giant Alibaba, including its 2021 equity purchase in subsidiary Youku Todou. Alibaba also received a fine for failing to report its 2015 investment in financial media outlet Yicai Media Group. Social media and video gaming giant Tencent – which owns TikTok – was slapped with 12 accusations. One fine targeted the company’s 2011 acquisition of a 20% stake in shoe-selling website Okaybuy Holding. (Both Alibaba and Tencent were fined for antitrust activities last November, as well.) Four more fines were imposed on Didi, China’s Uber equivalent. Other offenders include video site Bilibili, social media operator Weibo and private equity firm Citic Capital. SAMR also fined a joint venture between health tech company Ping An Healthcare and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. SAMR documents revealed that authorities determined these deals breached anti-monopoly laws between March and May of this year. Notably, authorities didn’t order the companies to undo any deals. Instead, each case was fined 500,000 yuan (around USD $74,600), the maximum amount under current law. China’s Anti-Monopoly Law
China’s Anti-Monopoly Law first came into effect in 2008, long before today’s tech giants commanded such enormous market-moving potential.The original law was designed to target foreign companies that China believed could use mergers and acquisitions to dominate the Chinese market. Under the law, all merger deals with “potential monopoly implications” were required to submit to regulatory review before proceeding. But it wasn’t until December 2011 that the Ministry of Commerce first published regulations stipulating punishments for antitrust activities. Following new regulations, the Ministry of Commerce, which primarily handled foreign trade and investment, investigated deals involving outside parties. (For instance, in 2017, Japanese giant Canon was fined 300,000 yuan prior to announcing its takeover of Toshiba Medical Systems.)
And then, in 2018, anti-monopoly review authority passed to SAMR during a government reshuffle. It was during that period that the regulator began looking toward mergers wholly contained within the Chinese market, too.
A new era of anti-monopoly regulation
The current campaign against monopolistic behavior began in late 2020 with Beijing’s new push to stunt the growth of Chinese Bit Tech Companies. The first trickles started in late 2020 when Ant Group – an Alibaba affiliate – saw its high-profile IPO suspended. What followed was a flurry of government investigations throughout 2021 that saw a whopping 98 fines imposed on major internet and platform-based companies like Meituan, JD, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. These companies faced a cumulative fine of 21.74 billion yuan, or around USD $3.25 billion. At the same time, SAMR kickstarted a hiring spree that expanded the bureau nearly 30%. In November, the antitrust arm was renamed the State Anti-Monopoly Bureau and launched to vice-ministerial status, upsizing its budget and manpower. In Sunday’s statement, SAMR noted that, while it was fining offenses committed when the government prioritized foreign acquisitions, these were all “past deals that should have been reported but were not.” The regulator also stated that it would accelerate the process of reviewing old deals “to help companies move forward with a lighter load.”
In recent months, China has also updated its Anti-Monopoly Law to reflect its newfound resistance to homegrown monopolies. Starting 1 August, the maximum fine for undeclared mergers will increase to 5 million yuan, or roughly $747,000 – 10 times the current fine. Why now?
The United States has a long history with anti-monopoly and trust-busting laws. But given that China is just now finding its zeal for regulating corporate dominance, one wonders: why?
Likely, the reason is a combination of ideological and political beliefs that serve the current administration, and also address China’s growing wealth inequality. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has often promoted the “Common Prosperity” idea, which holds that all citizens should hold moderate wealth and the rich should give more back to society. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has noted that the country’s spectacular tech sector expansion has played a role in exacerbating wealth inequality in the past. It’s possible that because of that, authorities seek to strategically minimize tech growth. China has also expressed national security concerns, given the enormous wealth of personal and financial data that tech companies collect. By limiting tech dominance and placing regulations on using information, China can protect its national interests from foreign companies and agencies. New regulations and business: what investors can expect
Since the start of China’s tech crackdown, local financial markets have seen enormous volatility – some of which has likely bled onto the national stage. For instance, since 2020, Alibaba’s market valuation is down nearly 70%, while Didi has shed over 80% of its IPO value. Experts believe that the amended anti-monopoly law will close some regulatory loopholes, preventing large companies from abusing their market dominance. With thorough regulation and punishment, they also hope to prevent illegal activities from jeopardizing fair market competition. Currently, there’s no indication that major industry players will halt growth and moneymaking activities. Rather, large companies will simply have to tread more carefully to remain in compliance with old and new regulations. At the same time, companies with market shares below established thresholds won’t be held to the same standard under new “safe harbor” provisions to protect small businesses. Don’t let Alibaba and Tencent drag you down
In investing, it’s often intimidating to stay in the market when a country imposes new regulations that impact business profits and share prices. It’s even scarier when those regulations impact a sector that, so far this year, has seen enormous share price losses amid investor uncertainty, economic woes and recession fears. Fortunately, Q.ai is here to help you navigate these turbulent times. With our Emerging Tech Kit, you can put your money to work in tech’s longstanding influence around the world. And don’t forget to turn on Portfolio Protection to ensure that your money enjoys its own “safe harbor” – no matter what regulations may arise. Download Q.ai today for access to AI-powered investment strategies. When you deposit $100, we’ll add an additional $50 to your account. | Tech Giants |
The logos of mobile apps, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Netflix, are displayed on a screen in this illustration picture taken December 3, 2019. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/File PhotoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comNEW YORK, July 25 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Technology investing is mostly about carving out a business that can’t be copied and reaping monopoly-style margins. Investors seem to think Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Apple (AAPL.O) have done this, but they may be overvaluing the moats.Over the past year, Meta Platforms (META.O) and Netflix (NFLX.O) valuations have been pounded as competition in advertising and video streaming has caused investors to reassess growth prospects. Meta’s stock, for example, has lost half its value since the start of 2022 as tech giants Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Apple are expanding fast in advertising. The rise of TikTok makes the walls surrounding ad-dependent social networks in particular look flimsy read more . Similarly, the growth of streaming services from Apple, Walt Disney (DIS.N) and others have slowed subscriber growth at Netflix to a crawl and pressured margins.Investors have fewer worries when it comes to Microsoft and Apple. With Apple’s first quarter market share of North American mobile phone shipments exceeding 50%, according to Canalys, it is increasingly inconceivable to think that users will ditch their iPhones. And it’s credible to think the $2.5 trillion company’s Chief Executive Tim Cook will have success selling more advertising and financial services to its customers. It’s even harder to imagine companies abandoning their workplace software, run by Microsoft, which, for example, holds 85% of the market share in U.S. public sector productivity software, according to Omdia.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comAnd yet valuation multiples reflect these relative expectations, and then some. The stock price of Meta has corrected so much, its enterprise value is now worth less than 4 times estimated revenue for the next 12 months. Five years ago, that metric was 9 times, according to Datastream. Netflix has an enterprise value of 3 times estimated revenue for the next 12 months, half its valuation five years ago. Meantime, Apple, at 6 times, is twice its valuation from five years ago. Likewise, Microsoft’s multiple has risen 60% to over 8 times.The buffers for the latter two companies are assailable. Rivals still want to steal customers, antitrust regulators can’t be dismissed entirely, and the biggest threat – these firms miss out on a market shift as tech advances – remains. While moats protect against rivals, they may do little against a recessionary wave that smashes earnings in the sector overall. Technology investors may be right on their assessment, but wrong on the way they are valuing it.Follow @rob_cyran on TwitterCONTEXT NEWSMicrosoft is scheduled to report quarterly earnings after the close of the market on July 26. Analysts expect the firm earned $2.30 per share, compared to $2.17 a year ago, according to Refinitiv.Apple is scheduled to release quarterly results on the afternoon of July 28. The company is expected to have earned $1.16 per share, compared to $1.30 a year ago.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comEditing by Lauren Silva Laughlin and Amanda GomezOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias. | Tech Giants |
Europe wants its own Open AI. The bloc’s politicians are sick of regulating American tech giants from afar. They want Europe to build its own generative AI, which is why so many people are rooting for Jonas Andrulis, an easy-going German with a carefully pruned goatee.Ask people within Europe’s tech bubble which AI companies they’re excited about and the names that come up most are Mistral, a French startup that has raised $100 million without releasing any products, and the company Andrulis founded, Aleph Alpha, which sells generative AI as a service to companies and governments and already has thousands of paying customers.Skeptics in the industry question whether the company can really compete in the same league as Google and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT launched the current boom in generative AI. But many in the European Union are hoping that Aleph Alpha can counteract American dominance in what some believe will be an era-defining technology. The bloc has a long history of tussles over privacy and data security with US tech giants. Some Europeans feel the election of Donald Trump demonstrated how much their values have diverged from those of their counterparts in Washington DC. Others just don’t want to be passive observers with such an enormous economic opportunity at stake.While Andrulis stresses that his company is not a “nationalist project”—there are plenty of Americans working at Aleph Alpha—he appears comfortable being at Europe’s vanguard. “I personally care a lot about helping Europe make a contribution beyond the cookie banner,” he says.Now 41, Andrulis spent three years working on AI at Apple before leaving in 2019 to explore the technology’s potential outside the constraints of a big corporation. He set up Aleph Alpha in Heidelberg, a city in southwestern Germany. The company set to work building large language models, a type of AI that identifies patterns in human language in order to generate its own text or analyze huge numbers of documents. Two years later, Aleph Alpha raised $27 million, an amount that’s expected to be dwarfed by a new funding round Andriulis hints could be announced in the coming weeks.Right now, the company’s clients—which range from banks to government agencies—are using Aleph Alpha’s LLM to write new financial reports, concisely summarize hundreds of pages, and build chatbots that are experts in how a certain company works. “I think a good rule of thumb is whatever you could teach an intern, our technology can do,” Andrulis says. The challenge, he says, is making the AI customizable so businesses using it feel in control and have a say in how it works. “If you’re a large international bank and you want to have a chatbot that is very insulting and sarcastic, I think you should have every right.”But Andrulis considers LLMs just a stepping stone. “What we are building is artificial general intelligence,” he says. AGI, as it’s known, is widely seen as the ultimate aim of generative AI companies—an artificial, humanlike intelligence that can be applied to a wide range of tasks.The interest Aleph Alpha has received so far—the company claims 10,000 customers across both business and government—shows it is able to compete, or at least coexist, with the emerging giants of the field, says Jörg Bienert, who is CEO of the German AI Association, an industry group. “This demand definitely shows it really makes sense to develop and provide these types of models in Germany,” he says. “Especially when it comes to governmental institutions that clearly want to have a solution that is developed and hosted in Europe.”Last year, Aleph Alpha opened its first data center in Berlin so it could better cater to highly regulated industries, such as government or security clients, that want to ensure their sensitive data is hosted in Germany. The concern about sending private data overseas is just one reason it’s important to develop European AI, says Bienert. But another, he says, is that it’s important to make sure European languages are not excluded from AI developments.Aleph Alpha’s model can already communicate in German, French, Spanish, Italian and English, and its training data includes the vast repository of multilingual public documents published by the European Parliament. But it’s not only the languages the company’s AI speaks that emphasize its European origins. The emphasis on transparent decision-making is part of an effort to combat the problem of AI systems “hallucinating,” or confidently sharing information that is wrong.Andrulis jumps at the chance to demonstrate how Aleph Alpha’s AI explains its decisions. When he asks Aleph Alpha’s AI model to describe the protagonist in H. P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Terrible Old Man, the AI replies: “The terrible old man is described as exceedingly feeble, physically and mentally.”Andrulis shows me how he can click on each of the words in that sentence to trace what informed the AI’s decision to say what it said. If Andrulis clicks on the word “mentally,” the AI refers him to the bit of text in the short story that informed that decision. This feature also works with images, he says. When the AI describes an image of the sun setting over Heidelberg, he can click on the word “sunset” and the AI again shows its workings—drawing a square around the part of the image where the horizon fades into layers of reds and yellows.Even to AI experts, this feels new. “They have started experimenting with trustworthy AI features, such as explainability, that I haven’t seen before,” says Nicolas Moës, director of European AI governance at the Future Society think tank.Moës believes these kinds of features could become more widespread once the EU passes its AI Act, sweeping legislation that is expected to include transparency requirements. Trade bodies, including the German AI association, complain that overly broad and onerous rules could slow Europe’s efforts to create a homegrown AI giant, forcing startups to focus on complying with the new rules instead of on innovation. But Moës argues the opposite, saying stricter rules could help European AI companies build better products and create a kind of standard of quality, echoing the success of other tightly regulated European industries. “The reason why German cars are seen as better is because there is a whole testing process,” he says.But despite Aleph Alpha’s advanced explainability, there are still doubts about whether the company’s underlying technology is advanced enough to carry Europe’s hopes of building an AI giant.“Anyone who has interacted with a wide range of language models notices that this is not the best model out there,” says Moës.Aleph Alpha does not score better than its American competitors in the standardized tests companies use to prove the effectiveness of new AI models, according to Matthias Plappert, who spent four years as a researcher at OpenAI and now works as an AI consultant in Berlin. “People want this to be a success because there is a desire to have a European champion,” he says. “But I do think there’s been an overstatement of how good that company is with respect to the competition.”But many Europeans remain adamant that they need a viable contender, and not simply for economic reasons. The EU AI industry argues that European companies are likely to be more sensitive to issues such as privacy and discrimination than their counterparts in the US.“There’s no guarantee that what US [companies] will build will be a good representation of our values,” says Andrulis. That vague term—“European values”—comes up again and again when you ask Europeans why they can’t resign themselves to using American-made AI. Asked what the phrase means to him, the Aleph Alpha chief references the furor surrounding Facebook’s 2017 takedown of an image showing Michelangelo’s famous marble sculpture of David (Facebook told WIRED that paintings and sculptures depicting nudity are now allowed, according to its policy). “The fact that we [could not] post Michelangelo’s David on Facebook due to nudity, this would not be European values,” he says.However it’s not his job to decide how European values should be translated into AI, he says. “My role is to build technology that is excellent and that’s transparent and that’s controllable.” | Tech Giants |
As American-based tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon begin to chase the seemingly unstoppable tidal wave of generative AI, Chinese company Alibaba wants in on the action too. The e-commerce giant is reportedly readying to release its own large language model that will compete with Microsoft and Amazon.
Alibaba released a souped-up version of its large language model (LLM) today called Tongyi Qianwen, which is now aptly called Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, according to a report from Reuters Monday. The model also reportedly has eight industry-specific versions that can be used in the entertainment, finance, legal, and healthcare sectors. Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 comes six months after the first version was released in April on the company’s smart speakers—think Amazon Alexa with ChatGPT—and a month after it was open-sourced to the public in September.
Alibaba called Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 a “substantial upgrade from its predecessor” which “demonstrates remarkable capabilities in understanding complex instructions, copywriting, reasoning, memorizing, and preventing hallucinations” in a press release Tuesday. CNBC reports that the tech is Alibaba’s bid to compete with Microsoft and Amazon.
While OpenAI is the company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT LLM chatbot, Microsoft has funneled billions of dollars into an investment in the venture. That relationship has been off to a bumpy start and may not actually be that lucrative for Microsoft, but it is signaling to the industry that this whole AI thing might be worth investing in. Amazon, meanwhile, has been investing in AI too but is instead throwing money at an OpenAI competitor called Anthropic. Anthropic’s AI named Claude is similar to ChatGPT in that it is a text-based assistant, and Amazon’s investment is offering Anthropic some series of cloud computing power through Amazon Web Services. | Tech Giants |
Samsung Electronics workers stand with wafers at its chip contract manufacturing facilities in Hwaseong, South Korea, in this handout image acquired by Reuters on June 30, 2022. Samsung Electronics/Handout via REUTERS Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSummaryCompaniesSamsung says first to produce 3-nano chipsCo says chips cut power usage, improve performanceAiming to catch foundry frontrunner TSMCSEOUL, June 30 (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) said on Thursday it has begun mass producing chips with advanced 3-nanometre technology, the first to do so globally, as it seeks new clients to catch far bigger rival TSMC (2330.TW) in contract chip manufacturing.Compared with conventional 5-nanometre chips, the newly developed first-gen 3-nanometre process can reduce power consumption by up to 45%, improve performance by 23%, and reduce area by 16%, Samsung said in a statement.The South Korean firm did not name clients for its latest foundry technology, which supplies made-to-order chips like mobile processors and high-performance computing chips, and analysts said Samsung itself and Chinese companies are expected to be among the initial customers.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is the world's most advanced foundry chipmaker and controls about 54% of the global market for contract production of chips, used by firms such as Apple (AAPL.O) and Qualcomm (QCOM.O) which don't have their own semiconductor facilities.Samsung, a distant second with a 16.3% market share, according to data provider TrendForce, announced a 171 trillion won ($132 billion) investment plan last year to overtake TSMC as the world's top logic chipmaker by 2030. read more "We will continue active innovation in competitive technology development," said Siyoung Choi, Head of Foundry Business at Samsung.Samsung Co-CEO Kyung Kye-hyun said earlier this year its foundry business would look for new clients in China, where it expects high market growth, as companies from automakers to appliance goods manufacturers rush to secure capacity to address persistent global chip shortages.While Samsung is the first to production with 3-nanometre chip production, TSMC is planning 2-nanometre volume production in 2025.Samsung is the market leader in memory chips, but it had been outspent by frontrunner TSMC in the more diverse foundry business, making it difficult to compete, analysts said."Non-memory is different, there's too much variety," said Kim Yang-jae, analyst at Daol Investment & Securities."There are only two kinds of memory chips - DRAM and NAND Flash. You can concentrate on one thing, raise efficiency and make a lot of it, but you can't do that with a thousand different non-memory chips."Samsung's compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of capital spending between 2017 and 2023, which measures how quickly a company is increasing its investment, is estimated at 7.9%, versus TSMC's estimated 30.4%, according to Mirae Asset Securities.Samsung's efforts to compete with the industry leader have also been hampered by less-than-expected yields of older chips during the past year or so, analysts said. The company said in March that its operations have shown a gradual improvement. read more ($1 = 1,292.8900 won)Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Richard PullinOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
BusinessCompaniesMedia & marketingThe federal government will give the media regulator new legislative powers in an attempt to reduce the spread of misinformation and disinformation on global technology platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is planning to introduce laws that will give Australia’s media watchdog the ability to retract information from the world’s most powerful tech companies if they fail to meet standards of a voluntary misinformation and disinformation code of practice.Under the laws, tech giants would be forced to hand over information to the media regulator about efforts to tackle misinformation and disinformation.Credit:APThe previous government, under then communications minister Paul Fletcher, attempted to introduce the same laws but did not do so before the 2022 federal election.“Misinformation and disinformation poses a threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy,” Rowland said. “A new and graduated set of powers will enable the [Australian Communications and Media Authority] to monitor efforts and compel digital platforms to do more, placing Australia at the forefront in tackling harmful online misinformation and disinformation.”Under the proposed laws, which are expected to be legislated by the end of this year, the ACMA will have the power legally to request information from tech platforms such as Meta, Google and Twitter such as data on complaints handling and how they manage the spread of harmful content.The ACMA will also be able to register and enforce new codes or industry standards, should voluntary efforts prove inadequate. This could include measures such as stronger tools to empower users to identify and report harmful content online.LoadingPlans to give the media regulator more power come almost two years after the lobby group of the tech sector, DIGI, introduced a voluntary code of practice on disinformation and misinformation. Under the code, misinformation is defined as false or misleading information that is likely to cause harm, while disinformation is false or misleading information that is distributed by users via spam and bots.The voluntary code was established at the request of the federal government following the release of an inquiry into the market power of digital platforms and was signed by tech companies including Google, Meta, Twitter, Microsoft and viral video site TikTok. In 2021, after the code was introduced, a report by the ACMA found 82 per cent of Australians had experienced misinformation about COVID-19 in the previous 18 months. This was exacerbated again with the proliferation of harmful content when Russia invaded Ukraine.DIGI reviewed its voluntary code in December 2022 and has since implemented measures to improve it, such as modifying transparency reporting requirements for smaller tech platforms and redefining the definition of “harm”.Sunita Bose, managing director of DIGI, welcomed the government’s plans.Loading“DIGI is committed to driving improvements in the management of mis- and disinformation in Australia, demonstrated through our track record of work with signatory companies to develop and strengthen the industry code,” Bose said.Plans to give the media regulator more power in the fight against tech platforms is just one of several initiatives that Rowland has under way. She is also reviewing Australia’s broadcasting services act and the anti-siphoning scheme – which determines which major cultural and sports events should be available to the public on free-to-air television – and media diversity laws.Attorney-general Mark Dreyfus is also hosting a roundtable next month with media organisations and stakeholders to discuss press freedom reform.“There is agreement across the parliament and the community that improved protections for press freedom are needed,” Dreyfus said on Wednesday. “The Albanese government intends to progress legislative reform as a priority.”Australia is not the only country attempting to crack down on the spread of disinformation and misinformation. The British government is on the verge of introducing laws that could make CEOs such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg criminally liable for harmful content consumed by children on social media.Under the proposed bill, tech companies will be required to “remove illegal content” and must prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content.The Market Recap newsletter is a wrap of the day’s trading. Get it each weekday afternoon. | Tech Giants |
Android 13 is now available to download and install -- as long as you have a compatible Android device.Google released the first Android 13 developer beta back in February 2022, following that up with the first Android 13 public beta in April. In June, the tech giant dropped the fourth and final Android 13 beta -- and now the official Android 13 release is finally here.Android 13 brings several new features to Android, including a redesigned Material You with automatic color schemes based on your wallpaper, a kill switch that prevents third-party apps from accessing your camera and mic, end-to-end encryption for group conversations and a universal clipboard feature between various devices.If you want to get your hands on Android 13 as soon as possible, here's a list of which Android phones support the latest software update, and how to download and install the new software.Want to learn more about Android? Check out these 7 tips and tricks to improve your Android's performance and settings to change to get the most out of your Pixel 6.Which Android phones support Android 13?For now, the Android phones that can run Android 13 are limited to recent Pixel models, including the:Pixel 4Pixel 4 XLPixel 4aPixel 4a (5G)Pixel 5Pixel 5aPixel 6Pixel 6aPixel 6 ProLater this year, Android 13 will roll out to other devices from Samsung Galaxy, Asus, HMD (Nokia phones), iQOO, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, Vivo, Xiaomi and more.The Pixel 7 won't be released until fall, but will most likely ship running Android 13. Google How to download and install Android 13 on your phoneTo download and install Android 13 on your Pixel phone, first make sure your phone is connected to a stable Wi-Fi network and is plugged into power. The battery needs to be at least 50% charged for an over-the-air (OTA) update to work.To start installing Android 13, launch the Settings application. You might have the app directly on your home screen, but if you don't, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access your app drawer and scroll through your apps until you find Settings.Next, scroll down and tap System > System Update. If an update is available, it should load up here after a few seconds. If not, tap Check for update. Also, make sure your device has enough storage to download and install the update, or else you won't be able to proceed. Usually the update file size is a few GBs.Finally, tap the green Download and install button in the bottom right. The Android 13 system will then begin to download and install, which can take up to 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the size and condition of your phone. Once your phone reboots, you'll be running Android 13.Note: If you don't see the Android 13 update just yet, don't fret. As long as you have a compatible Pixel phone, you'll get it -- it just may take some time to arrive.The system update process can take up to 30 minutes, so be patient. Nelson Aguilar/CNET | Tech Giants |
- Shares of Indonesian tech giant GoTo Group surged as much as 4.96% on Friday morning a day after the group said it will hit its profitability targets earlier than expected.
- Last week, the company announced a new leadership structure as it drives towards profitability.
Shares of Indonesian tech giant GoTo Group surged as much as 4.96% on Friday morning a day after the group said it will hit its profitability targets earlier than expected.
The stock has since pared and is currently trading at 3.3%.
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GoTo, which is made up of ride-hailing giant Gojek and e-commerce marketplace Tokopedia, went public in April last year.
GoTo said in a Thursday release that adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization will likely "become positive within the fourth quarter of 2023."
EBITDA reflects the operating profits of a company.
Last week, the company announced a new leadership structure as it drives towards profitability.
The company expects group contribution margin, which shows revenue after variable costs, to become positive by March — that's four quarters ahead of previous guidance.
"Over the past year, we have been implementing a plan designed to accelerate our profitability, based on revenue optimization, cost management, as well as ecosystem product growth," said Andre Soelistyo, GoTo Group CEO, as he shared the company's accelerated profitability strategy during a townhall meeting.
The group also outlined a positive performance for the whole of 2022 in the release — full-year earnings are due out in March.
"Contribution margin in the fourth quarter of 2022 has exceeded guidance, while GTV [gross transaction value] and gross revenue were both well within our guidance range," CFO Jacky Lo said in the release.
"We currently estimate adjusted EBITDA to turn positive in 2025e, with the new target implying this would come 2 years earlier than our forecast," said UBS analysts in a report.
"The earlier than expected break-even is on the back of both revenue (higher take rates) and cost (decline in incentives and reduction in headcount) measures that GoTo has taken, combined with the ecosystem benefits from Gojek-Tokopedia merger," the analysts said.
GoTo, as well as other tech giants Grab and Sea Limited, have been racing to stem losses as global economic challenges put pressures on their net profit. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google has cut jobs at mapping service Waze, the tech giant’s latest move to trim its operations amid a drive for efficiency in Silicon Valley.
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Some positions focused on advertising at Waze were eliminated after the unit began transitioning to using Google’s advertising technology, a Google spokesperson said Tuesday.
“As part of this update, we’ve reduced those roles focused on Waze Ads monetization and are providing employees with mobility resources and severance options in accordance with local requirements,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Google said in December that it would fold Waze into its Geo organization, which includes popular products such as Google Maps and Google Earth. Google declined to provide a number for the jobs lost at Waze.
Google has been moving to reduce costs amid slowing demand last year for digital advertising, which fuels the company’s revenue. In January, Alphabet said it would cut about 12,000 jobs, more than 6% of its global workforce. The company in April reported first-quarter sales that were higher than estimates on stronger-than-expected advertising sales for search and the YouTube video site.
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The U.S. government will “not hesitate to crack down” on harmful business practices involving artificial intelligence, the head of the Federal Trade Commission warned Tuesday in a message partly directed at the developers of widely-used AI tools such as ChatGPT.
FTC Chair Lina Khan joined top officials from U.S. civil rights and consumer protection agencies to put businesses on notice that regulators are working to track and stop illegal behavior in the use and development...
The U.S. government will “not hesitate to crack down” on harmful business practices involving artificial intelligence, the head of the Federal Trade Commission warned Tuesday in a message partly directed at the developers of widely-used AI tools such as ChatGPT.
FTC Chair Lina Khan joined top officials from U.S. civil rights and consumer protection agencies to put businesses on notice that regulators are working to track and stop illegal behavior in the use and development of biased or deceptive AI tools.
Much of the scrutiny has been on those who deploy automated tools that amplify bias into decisions about who to hire, how worker productivity is monitored or who gets access to housing and loans.
But amid a fast-moving race between tech giants such as Google and Microsoft in selling more advanced tools that generate text, images and other content resembling the work of humans, Khan also raised the possibility of the FTC wielding its antitrust authority to protect competition.
“We all know that in moments of technological disruption, established players and incumbents may be tempted to crush, absorb or otherwise unlawfully restrain new entrants in order to maintain their dominance,” Khan said at a virtual press event Tuesday. “And we already can see these risks. A handful of powerful firms today control the necessary raw materials, not only the vast stores of data, but also the cloud services and computing power that startups and other businesses rely on to develop and deploy AI products.”
Khan didn’t name any specific companies or products but expressed concern about tools that scammers could use to “manipulate and deceive people on a large scale, deploying fake or convincing content more widely and targeting specific groups with greater precision.”
She added that “if AI tools are being deployed to engage in unfair, deceptive practices or unfair methods of competition, the FTC will not hesitate to crack down on this unlawful behavior.”
Khan was joined by Charlotte Burrows, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the civil rights division of the Department of Justice.
As lawmakers in the European Union negotiate passage of new AI rules, and some have called for similar laws in the U.S., the top U.S. regulators emphasized Tuesday that many of the most harmful AI products might already run afoul of existing laws protecting civil rights and preventing fraud.
”There is no AI exemption to the laws on the books,” Khan said. | Tech Giants |
Apple Set To Challenge Latest EU Crackdown On Big Tech Dominance
Apple Inc. is set to challenge the European Union’s fresh crackdown on Big Tech’s dominance in the first of what is expected to be several appeals against the Digital Markets Act.
(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. is set to challenge the European Union’s fresh crackdown on Big Tech’s dominance in the first of what is expected to be several appeals against the Digital Markets Act.
The company will dispute the EU regulator’s decision to put all of the App Store into the bloc’s new digital antitrust list. It’ll argue also its iMessage service shouldn’t be subject to closer scrutiny from regulators, according to people familiar with the matter.
Apple’s appeal is still in draft form and could change before the Nov. 16 deadline to file challenges at the EU’s General Court, the people said who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Apple and the European Commission didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The move could set the stage for yet another legal stand-off between the world’s biggest tech company and the EU. Apple is battling EU lawyers in a dispute over alleged unpaid taxes in Ireland. Apple also faces separate EU antitrust probes into its tap-and-pay technology and into its treatment of music streaming rivals such as Spotify Technology SA.
The bloc’s new DMA rules impose a rigid regime on the largest digital firms and boost the EU commission’s existing powers as the region’s antitrust enforcer.
It will be illegal for certain platforms to favor their own services over those of rivals. They’ll be barred from combining personal data across their different services, prohibited from using data they collect from third-party merchants to compete against them, and will have to allow users to download apps from rival platforms.
Even with an appeal pending, Apple will still be required to comply with the rules when they take effect on March 6. Apple said in a filing this month that it expects to make changes to the App Store as a result of the bloc’s new rules.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google Search, Apple’s Safari, Amazon.com Inc.’s marketplace, Bytedance Ltd.’s TikTok and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook are among a list of 22 Big Tech services that come under the scope of the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Yesterday, Canada passed its Online News Act, which requires tech companies to negotiate content deals with news publishers and pay news outlets for links shared on their platforms. As Meta threatened back in March, it promptly announced yesterday that it will be quickly ending news access on Facebook and Instagram in response to the law, Reuters reported.
"Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act taking effect," Meta's statement said.
According to The New York Times, it's still unclear when Canada's law will take effect, but Meta's statement makes it sound like Meta plans to cut off news as quickly as it can. Meta claims that news has no value to either the tech giant or to users who do not go to Facebook and Instagram to consume news.
That claim doesn't match up with what surveys say about news consumption on Meta platforms, though.
In 2021, Pew Research Center reported results of a US survey finding that "when it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook outpaces all other social media sites." For Canadians in 2022, Facebook was still the most popular social media platform for weekly news, according to Statista, which ran a survey finding that 21 percent of Canadians check Facebook for news weekly. That survey did record a drop in popularity for Instagram as a news source among Canadians, although Instagram still slightly outpaced Twitter as a weekly news source.
A Meta spokesperson linked Ars to an updated blog with some details on what Facebook and Instagram users can expect moving forward.
"Content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada," the blog said.
Currently, Meta is conducting ongoing "product tests to help us build an effective product solution to end news availability." A "small percentage" of Canadian users on Instagram and Facebook are being impacted by these product tests and losing access to news already.
While Meta works to end news access for all Canadian users, the company has said that Facebook and Instagram will otherwise be unchanged. It also notes that Meta plans to continue building its global fact-checking network to combat misinformation on its platforms.
"Fact-checking will continue with respect to content that remains available in Canada," Meta's blog said.
The decision to drop news from Meta platforms was expected, as Meta spokespersons had made it clear for months that Canada's law compelling platforms to pay for links to news content was "neither sustainable nor workable."
Canada passed the law to require online ad revenue-sharing between news publishers and platforms and help reverse a decade-long collapse in news publisher revenue. In March, Meta estimated that links to news articles make up less than 3 percent of news feeds on its platforms and claimed it was an insignificant revenue source.
Meta isn't the only one unhappy with Canada's law, which yesterday received royal assent from Canada's governor-general and will soon take effect. A Google spokesperson told Reuters that the law is still "unworkable" and that Google still hopes to find an alternative "path forward."
Google did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment. [Update: Google's spokesperson, Jenn Crider, told Ars that none of Google's concerns have been addressed. She said that because the law "remains unworkable," Google is "urgently" seeking to work with the Canadian government to "avoid an outcome that no one wants"—which Google previously described as "existing support to Canadian news publishers" slowing down or stopping "while Google and others seek the clarity."
Crider said that Google has "proposed thoughtful and pragmatic solutions that would have improved" the law (described here) and "cleared the path" for Google to increase its "already significant investments in the Canadian news ecosystem."]
Canada Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who introduced the Online News Act, said yesterday that there will be an implementation process before the law takes effect, Reuters reported. Rodriguez celebrated the law-passing by championing lawmakers in a statement, saying, "If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?"
Canada's law was modeled after an Australian law passed in 2021 that requires companies like Meta and Google to negotiate deals with news publishers to link to content. When that Australia law passed, Meta similarly protested by ending news access before reaching an agreement, securing amendments to Australia's law and striking content deals with several news publishers. It's possible that Meta still has an opportunity to provide feedback on Canada's law and reach a similar agreement there.
Both Meta and Google have met with the Canadian government this week, and a government spokesperson said that Canada looks forward to having more talks with tech companies, Reuters reported.
In a news release, the Canadian government said that draft regulations will next be published in the Canada Gazette, specifying how the law should be applied and providing guidance on exemptions.
"Everyone will have an opportunity to consult and provide feedback through this Canada Gazette process," the news release said.
From there, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will oversee "bargaining, negotiation and external final-offer arbitration processes between platforms and news businesses." The commission will also create a code of conduct to ensure fairness and transparency in bargaining.
"A free and independent press is fundamental to our democracy," Rodriguez is quoted saying in the news release. "Thanks to the Online News Act, newsrooms across the country will now be able to negotiate fairly for compensation when their work appears on the biggest digital platforms. It levels the playing field by putting the power of big tech in check and ensuring that even our smallest news business can benefit through this regime and receive fair compensation for their work.” | Tech Giants |
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, speaks during the virtual Facebook Connect event, where the company announced its rebranding as Meta, in New York on Oct. 28, 2021.Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesFacebook parent Meta lost $2.81 billion on $452 million in revenue from its virtual reality division, Reality Labs, during the quarter ending in June as it forecast a second consecutive quarter of declining revenue on Wednesday. The substantial sum is the latest sign that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta continues to spend heavily to pivot the social media giant to developing virtual reality and augmented reality products and the so-called "metaverse."It's a substantial but affordable expense to a company that earned $8.36 billion in operating income on $28.82 billion in total sales during the quarter. Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders believe that virtual and augmented reality headsets will be the major next-generation computing platform and are willing to spend heavily on technologies that might be years out and prototypes that aren't ready to be released, as well as a substantial staff of technical experts, in order to compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other companies eying the industry.Meta's Quest 2 headset is currently the most popular VR headset on the market, although the overall market remains small. Meta said earlier this week it will raise the price from $299 to $399.Meta plans to release more advanced goggles later this year that will use cameras on the front of the device to "pass through" the real world to the user inside the headset.Meta has also spent to acquire VR companies and startups that develop core headset technologies. But the FTC sued them on Wednesday to block it from buying the maker of the popular VR app Supernatural, suggesting that any future acquisitions would face significant regulatory scrutiny. | Tech Giants |
Apple Tests ‘Apple GPT,’ Develops Generative AI Tools to Catch OpenAI
Apple has been conspicuously absent from the frenzy. Its main artificial intelligence product, the Siri voice assistant, has stagnated in recent years.
(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. is quietly working on artificial intelligence tools that could challenge those of OpenAI Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others, but the company has yet to devise a clear strategy for releasing the technology to consumers.
The iPhone maker has built its own framework to create large language models — the AI-based systems at the heart of new offerings like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — according to people with knowledge of the efforts. With that foundation, known as “Ajax,” Apple also has created a chatbot service that some engineers call “Apple GPT.”
In recent months, the AI push has become a major effort for Apple, with several teams collaborating on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The work includes trying to address potential privacy concerns related to the technology.
Apple shares gained as much as 2.3% to a record high of $198.23 after Bloomberg reported on the AI effort Wednesday, rebounding from earlier losses. Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s partner and main backer, slipped about 1% on the news.
A spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.
The company was caught flat-footed in the past year with the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI. Though Apple has woven AI features into products for years, it’s now playing catch-up in the buzzy market for generative tools, which can create essays, images and even video based on text prompts. The technology has captured the imagination of consumers and businesses in recent months, leading to a stampede of related products.
Apple has been conspicuously absent from the frenzy. Its main artificial intelligence product, the Siri voice assistant, has stagnated in recent years. But the company has made AI headway in other areas, including improvements to photos and search on the iPhone. There’s also a smarter version of auto-correct coming to its mobile devices this year.
Publicly, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has been circumspect about the flood of new AI services hitting the market. Though the technology has potential, there are still a “number of issues that need to be sorted,” he said during a conference call in May. Apple will be adding AI to more of its products, he said, but on a “very thoughtful basis.”
In an interview with , meanwhile, Cook said he uses ChatGPT and that it’s something that the company is “looking at closely.”
Behind the scenes, Apple has grown concerned about missing a potentially paramount shift in how devices operate. Generative AI promises to transform how people interact with phones, computers and other technology. And Apple’s devices, which produced revenue of nearly $320 billion in the last fiscal year, could suffer if the company doesn’t keep up with AI advances.
That’s why Apple began laying the foundation for AI services with the Ajax framework, as well as a ChatGPT-like tool for use internally. Ajax was first created last year to unify machine learning development at Apple, according to the people familiar with the effort.
The company has already deployed AI-related improvements to search, Siri and maps based on that system. And Ajax is now being used to create large language models and serve as the foundation for the internal ChatGPT-style tool, the people said.
The chatbot app was created as an experiment at the end of last year by a tiny engineering team. Its rollout within Apple was initially halted over security concerns about generative AI, but has since been extended to more employees. Still, the system requires special approval for access. There’s also a significant caveat: Any output from it can’t be used to develop features bound for customers.
Even so, Apple employees are using it to assist with product prototyping. It also summarizes text and answers questions based on data it has been trained with.
Apple isn’t the only one taking this approach. Samsung Electronics Co. and other technology companies have developed their own internal ChatGPT-like tools after concerns emerged about third-party services leaking sensitive data.
Read More: AI Doomsday Scenarios Are Gaining Traction in Silicon Valley
Apple employees say the company’s tool essentially replicates Bard, ChatGPT and Bing AI, and doesn’t include any novel features or technology. The system is accessible as a web application and has a stripped-down design not meant for public consumption. As such, Apple has no current plans to release it to consumers, though it is actively working to improve its underlying models.
Beyond the state of the technology, Apple is still trying to determine the consumer angle for generative AI. It’s now working on several related initiatives — a cross-company effort between its AI and software engineering groups, as well as the cloud services engineering team that would supply the infrastructure for any significant new features. While the company doesn’t yet have a concrete plan, people familiar with the work believe Apple is aiming to make a significant AI-related announcement next year.
John Giannandrea, the company’s head of machine learning and AI, and Craig Federighi, Apple’s top software engineering executive, are leading the efforts. But they haven’t presented a unified front within Apple, said the people. Giannandrea has signaled that he wants to take a more conservative approach, with a desire to see how recent developments from others evolve.
Around the same time that it began developing its own tools, Apple conducted a corporate trial of OpenAI’s technology. It also weighed signing a larger contract with OpenAI, which licenses its services to Microsoft, Shutterstock Inc. and Salesforce Inc.
Apple’s Ajax system is built on top of Google Jax, the search giant’s machine learning framework. Apple’s system runs on Google Cloud, which the company uses to power cloud services alongside its own infrastructure and Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS.
As part of its recent work, Apple is seeking to hire more experts in generative AI. On its website, it is advertising for engineers with a “robust understanding of large language models and generative AI” and promises to work on applying that technology to the way “people communicate, create, connect and consume media” on iPhones and its other devices.
An ideal spot for Apple to integrate its LLM technology would be inside Siri, allowing the voice assistant to conduct more tasks on behalf of users. Despite launching in 2011, before rival systems, Siri lagged competitors as Apple focused on other areas and adopted fewer features in favor of privacy.
In his May remarks, Cook defended the company’s AI strategy, saying the technology is used across much of its product lineup, including in features like car-crash and fall detection. More recently, Cook said that LLMs have “great promise,” while warning about the possibility of bias and misinformation. He also called for guardrails and regulation in the space.
The company expanded its artificial intelligence efforts in 2018 with the hiring of Giannandrea, who previously led search and AI at Google. Since then, Apple hasn’t released many splashy new AI features, but at least two initiatives could help put it on the map.
The company is planning a new health coaching service codenamed Quartz that relies on data from an Apple Watch and uses AI to personalize plans, Bloomberg reported in April. And the company’s future electric car will use artificial intelligence to power the vehicle’s self-driving capabilities.
(Updates with Apple shares in fourth paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Few products create the kind of excitement and anticipation of the iPhone. So when Apple recently announced the 14th generation of this product (along with new versions of its iconic Airpods Pro and Apple Watch wearable accessories), many enthusiasts and tech-focused media outlets were giddy with anticipation. One particularly excited tech columnist described it as “the world’s most iconic product.” This excitement is why some have termed this time of year to be “Techtober” — when the iPhone and other tech products are released in time for the holiday spending rush.
Apple, the world’s first $3 trillion company, is a global behemoth. Still, the adoration Americans have for the iPhone remains something of an outlier. Globally, Apple has about 18 percent of the smartphone market share, trailing Samsung and facing stiff competition from companies like Xiaomi. In the United States, however, Apple has more than 50 percent of the market share, despite iPhones starting at a higher price point than its competition.
Most notable is Apple’s domination of younger demographics. Among U.S. teenagers, according to a 2021 report, 88 percent use an iPhone and 90 percent plan to buy one as their next phone. This was up from 17 percent ownership a decade earlier. For American teenagers, the iPhone is to mobile phones what Google is to search engines or Kleenex is to tissue paper. It has become so trendy that, according to a Wall Street Journal report, non-iPhone users are being bullied and isolated in U.S. schools for having the dreaded “green bubbles” that denote an Android user on group messages. (Android is an open-source operating system, developed by Google and used by most of the world’s smartphone manufacturers.)
This kind of domination of the market share — as well as of the culture more broadly — gives companies tremendous leverage to engage in conduct that, while profitable, can be destructive. Apple has contributed to declines in consumer rights and repairability of products, electronic waste (e-waste) and environmental degradation (an especially acute problem when it comes to Airpod headsets), privacy concerns, the use of forced labor across the world, and a culture of bullying and elitism in schools.
Apple’s Dubious Environmental Claims
In 2020, Apple made headlines by announcing it was going to remove the charger from the box of all new iPhones, undermining many decades of the expectation that when you spent a considerable amount of money on a piece of consumer electronics, it would come with all the necessary parts to actually use it.
This decision saved Apple over $6.5 billion over the next 18 months. Yet, Apple executives alleged they were not doing this out of self-interest. Rather, they claimed, it was a benevolent policy aimed at preserving the environment. Naturally, many were suspicious of Apple’s claims or frustrated as consumers. Some governments, including France and Brazil, have passed laws forcing Apple to include such accessories. By not including the charger, the company would punt its carbon footprint onto consumers, who would have to buy chargers as an add-on from Apple or third parties — using much more packaging. Conveniently, at this time Apple introduced its own proprietary solution for charging their phones using a magnetic adaptor called Magsafe, which iPhone users can add to their purchase for a fee.
Still, many Apple enthusiasts and friendly tech media outlets, some of which benefit financially when consumption of these products is high, parroted this claim with little skepticism. This group of “Apple sheep” as they are sometimes called (meant as a pejorative initially, but often worn as a badge of honor) were quick to defend the company.
While Apple was initially ridiculed by competitors for these practices, many — including Samsung, Google and Microsoft — quickly adopted the policy of selling phones without chargers. This further shows how Apple’s controversial decisions become industry-wide trends.
Apple made a similarly provocative decision four years prior, when the company announced it would be removing the 3.5 mm headphone jack from iPhones. Apple claimed it took “courage” to remove this port, which has been a low-cost universal standard for decades. Similar to the charger, other manufacturers removed this port in due course.
The same year Apple introduced its own proprietary headset called Airpods. The product soon became a symbol of social status, wealth and fandom. Apple has since sold more than 150 million units of this product (or newer variants).
Yet, these products are “impossible to repair or recycle” and will be clogging up landfills for a thousand years, long after every current iPhone user is dead. The environmental impact of these “fossils of capitalism” were described in Vice in 2019 as a “tragedy” and an “environmental disaster.” “They’re physical manifestations of a global economic system that allows some people to buy and easily lose $160 headphones, and leaves other people at risk of death to produce those products,” wrote Caroline Haskins in 2019. These two case studies are telling. They show that Apple not only causes harm to the environment when there is profit to be made, but will also do so under the mantle of “green” corporate behavior, when convenient. And because so much of the U.S. tech media infrastructure is dependent on the growth and goodwill of loyal Apple fans, much of it is overlooked or explained away.
“Buy Your Mom an iPhone”: Apple vs. Universal Standards
As with the 3.5 headphone jack, there are many benefits for consumers and the environment when companies widely adopt universal standards. In recent years, there has been near-universal adoption of USB-C as the primary port for electronic devices and smartphones. This is why a consumer can use the same charger to power up a laptop, phone, controller, tablet and so on. In addition to saving consumers money and time, this also leads to a significant reduction in electronic waste.
Apple was vigorous in opposing this effort for years and continued to use the slower, proprietary charging port called the lightning cable on every iPhone, and some other Apple accessories. This gave Apple a cut from any accessories sold from third parties that use the port. The European Union was tired of waiting for Apple to voluntarily adopt USB-C. In June 2022, the EU passed a bill making USB-C a “common charger.” On October 4, this deal was finalized. This means by 2024, every consumer electronic device, including iPhones, must include a USB-C port, avoiding potentially thousands of tons of e-waste.
That is a huge market Apple will not want to abandon. While it’s possible different iPhones could be manufactured for Europe, this would hurt Apple’s manufacturing efficiency. Reports from supply chain analysts suggest Apple is preparing to make the switch globally, possibly in 2023, for the iPhone 15.
Another example of Apple refusing to adopt universal standards is with messaging apps and communication between Apple and non-Apple devices. Apple’s critics point out that any message between Apple and Android devices default to the dated and less secure SMS standard. There are universal solutions, such as RCS (Rich Communication Services), which would allow for more secure, modern messaging between iPhones and other platforms, but Apple has refused to adopt them. On September 7, a reporter asked Apple CEO Tim Cook why he can’t send a reasonable picture to his mom, an Android user. Cook flippantly gave him the expensive advice to go “buy your mom an iPhone.”
This problem is also uniquely American, as in the rest of the world, most users communicate through third-party messaging apps, such as WhatsApp or Messenger.
The “Least Repairable” Flagship Phone: Apple vs. Repairability
Shortly after the release of the iPhone 14, Hugh Jeffreys, a repair-shop owner and YouTube content creator, made a video of himself taking apart the phone and replacing some of the parts to test its repairability. Repairability is not only important for consumers, but is also an important way to eliminate e-waste. Reports show there was an estimated 57.4 million metric tons of e-waste globally in 2021 alone.
Jeffreys’s frustration mounted as he learned that when he tried to replace one iPhone camera or battery with the official Apple part from the other identical iPhone, it would result in many of the phones primary features breaking. The Face-ID unlock mechanism was gone, the front-facing camera no longer worked, and a host of other features were either absent or ineffective. Jeffreys noticed many other obstacles to self- or third-party repair, but even these obstacles were unpredictably applied and could change radically from a software update. Apple, he deduced, has effectively made fixing these devices so difficult that no one would reasonably even try to do it themselves. Apple has (once again) built the “least repair-friendly flagship smartphone” on the market, Jeffreys said in his video. “I might have spent $3,000 on these phones, but I feel as though they are not really mine.” These are not new issues. Jeffreys made a similar video about the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13, which had similar restrictions. And many others who have tried to make a career in repairing consumer electronics have bemoaned Apple’s increasing hostility to repair. Louis Rossmann of the Rossmann Repair Group has garnered more than 1.5 million subscribers and built an organization called the “Repair Preservation Group” due to his advocacy of the issue over the years.
This effort has spearheaded the growth of a movement that has come to be called the “right to repair” or “right to own,” which has gained traction in the public consciousness. Large tech channels on YouTube have come out in favor of the movement. The Biden administration issued an executive order on the issue in July 2021. This was in response to a Federal Trade Commission report on the subject which said the excuses of manufacturers limitations on repair “are not supported by the record.” Similar movements are fighting anti-repair policies in the automotive, medical device and agricultural industries. In Massachusetts, a ballot referendum on automotive right to repair passed overwhelmingly in 2020. But other efforts to push legislation against anti-repair policies have largely been delayed, destroyed or weakened considerably in the face of the massive lobbying arm of Big Tech like Apple.
Additionally, winning these battles can be a challenge when huge swatches of the younger generations deify a company like Apple. “I tried pointing this out for a decade,” Rossmann said in a response to Jeffreys’s video. “It’s sad, but nobody cares.”
iPhone and the Future of Online Media and Software Apple’s serious issues regarding consumer rights, the environment, repairability and more are worrying in 2022. But there is genuine concern that if its dominance continues, things could become much worse in the coming decades, especially as society transitions away from more traditional computers (which, unlike Apple’s operating systems on iPhone and iPad, allow for sideloading of software and apps that aren’t officially approved by Apple or Microsoft) and rely more on Apple’s closed mobile operating systems.
The good news is some progress to try and force Apple and other tech manufacturers to change their most anti-consumer tactics. The European Union has passed the Digital Markets Act, which could force Apple to allow consumers to download non-Apple approved software, and support functionality between messaging apps, among other consumer rights protections. There is also a vibrant open-source software community dedicated to making software that is open to the public and not controlled by corporations.
In the United States, however, there is much less progress for these kinds of reforms. As a younger generation of American activists and thinkers start holding elected offices, and creating new media outlets, services, businesses or software, they may find themselves limited by a proprietary, corporate walled garden they inadvertently helped create. | Tech Giants |
Google Bets On Local Languages To Fuel Android's Growth In India
Google is adding more Indian languages to its services and seeking ways to make its Android smartphones cheaper, eager to win more users in the world’s most populous country.
(Bloomberg) -- Google is adding more Indian languages to its services and seeking ways to make its Android smartphones cheaper, eager to win more users in the world’s most populous country.
The Alphabet Inc. unit is enabling more users in India to access its services with their local language, by either writing or using their voice, Sanjay Gupta, head of Google India, said Tuesday. The company has been developing an artificial intelligence model that would be able to handle more than 100 Indian languages across speech and text, a drive that would widen internet access beyond the country’s urban English-speaking minority.
“To me, that’s the biggest investment that we’re making as Google,” Gupta told a news conference. “To enable this content revolution, is to enable every Indian to use the internet as deeply as English users did five years back.”
The Mountain View, California-based company’s Android operating system dominates the Indian market, while Apple Inc. is making a push in more expensive smartphones. Google has made efforts to solidify its position in mass-market phones, launching affordable devices such as those through its partnership with billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio.
“We today have one of the lowest data costs in the country, but the next 300 million users will require a much cheaper smartphone,” Gupta said.
The South Asian nation’s internet economy is set to expand more than five-fold to about $1 trillion by 2030, according to a research report from Google, Temasek Holdings Pte and Bain & Co. That surge is expected to be driven by e-commerce, online travel bookings, food delivery and ride-hailing.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
With all the hype surrounding ChatGPT, it’s no wonder other companies are vying for a piece of the AI-powered chatbot game. Companies are betting that we’re at a decisive moment in the artificial intelligence industry, where products that adopt and build upon the budding technology could have the potential to reshape technology as we know it — not to mention shake up the Big Tech hierarchy.
The stakes are high, and technology’s biggest players don’t want to be left behind as breakthroughs in AI make it more accessible — and much more interesting — to users. While tech giants like Microsoft and Google have already introduced their versions of conversational AI tools built using large language models (LLMs), other lesser-known companies have thrown themselves in the mix, setting the stage for an AI showdown.
Here, we’ve rounded up a list of all the companies and AI chatbots that are looking to challenge ChatGPT — or build on top of its success.
Microsoft
Let’s start with Microsoft. The company made its chatbot debut with its launch of the “new” Bing, which promises to upend the way we search for things online. It also built AI-powered tools into the Edge browser.
Microsoft — a big investor in OpenAI — leveraged the technology behind ChatGPT to build an AI tool it says is “even more powerful.” So far, the results have oscillated between impressive and truly off the rails.
The company made the “new” Bing available for beta testers, who have been able to ask questions like “Can you suggest places to visit in Paris?” or “What’s the best apple pie recipe?” and then receive annotated responses describing various tourist destinations or outline the ingredients and steps that go along with a recipe.
But Microsoft may have made Bing a bit too flexible. Users quickly found exploits with the system, including a now-disabled prompt that triggers the Bing bot to divulge its internal nickname, Sydney, and some of the parameters its developers set for its behavior, such as “Sydney’s responses should avoid being vague, controversial, or off-topic.”
Other users toying with the system have found pleasure in pushing the bot’s buttons, triggering wacky — and sometimes unhinged — responses. Microsoft introduced a five-answer limit and a 50-question cap to help curb some of Bing’s more outlandish replies, but the company later loosened some of these restrictions after receiving complaints from users.
As for Edge, Microsoft plans on adding AI enhancements that let you summarize the webpage or document you’re reading online, as well as generate text for social media posts, emails, and more.
Google couldn’t let Microsoft get away with launching an AI chatbot that has the potential to challenge the company’s core business: search. That’s why it rushed to announce its own AI chatbot, Bard, though we still don’t know much about its capabilities.
According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the company is using its in-house large language model, LaMDA, to power the conversational AI service, which “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.” Google says you’ll be able to use the chatbot for a range of tasks, like planning a baby shower, comparing two Oscar-nominated movies, and getting recipe ideas based on the ingredients you have in your fridge.
The company’s announcement was considerably more haphazard than Microsoft’s, so much so that Googlers reportedly criticized the company for it in internal messages. Bard made a factual error in the very first demo Google posted to Twitter, and a presenter showing off the chatbot during a search event in Paris forgot the phone they were supposed to use during the presentation. Bard is currently only available to a limited test group, with wider availability arriving in the “coming weeks.”
Meta
Meta — the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — also has its sights set on AI. It developed Galactica, a language model designed to provide assistance to scientists and researchers with summaries of academic articles, solutions to math problems, the ability to annotate molecules, and more.
While Meta says it trained the bot on “over 48 million papers, textbooks, reference material, compounds, proteins and other sources of scientific knowledge,” the bot produced disappointing results when the company made it available in a public beta last November. The scientific community fiercely criticized the tool, with one scientist calling it “dangerous” due to its incorrect or biased responses. Meta took the chatbot offline after just a few days.
Galactica isn’t Meta’s first stab at developing an AI model. It also created BlenderBot 3, which is supposed to act like a digital assistant of sorts. Meta made the bot available to the public last August, and it isn’t particularly impressive. When testing the chatbot, Vox’s Kelsey Piper said that its answers “were really poor” and called GPT-3 — the framework that ChatGPT’s built upon — “wildly better” than BlenderBot. BlenderBot 3 is still available online, despite it bad-mouthing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and saying all kinds of offensive things.
There’s more to come from Meta in the AI space just yet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company established a dedicated AI team that will eventually create “AI personas” designed to help people, as well as text- and image-based AI tools for WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
Anthropic
Anthropic, an AI research company founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021, is working on a Chat-GPT competitor of its own called Claude, which has yet to get a full public release. Google invested $300 million into Anthropic in late 2022.
The company developed the chatbot using a methodology it calls Constitutional AI. There’s a whole research paper about the framework here, but, in short, it involves Anthropic training the language model with a set of around 10 “natural language instructions or principles” that it uses to revise its responses automatically. The goal of the system, according to Anthropic, is to “train better and more harmless AI assistants” without incorporating human feedback.
Scale, an AI data platform, was given access to Claude and outlined some of the differences between Anthropic’s bot and Chat-GPT. It found that the service could serve as a “serious” competitor to the OpenAI-made system and that the bot was “more inclined to refuse inappropriate requests.” It does come with some drawbacks, however, as Claude still appears to be prone to making factual errors and mathematical mistakes. For now, the general public can’t access Claude, and it’s only available to companies as an early-access product.
You.com
You.com, a company built by two former Salesforce employees, bills itself as the “search engine you control.” At first glance, it may seem like your typical search engine, but it comes with an AI-powered “chat” tool that works much like the one Microsoft’s piloting on Bing.
You.com first introduced the chatbot, called YouChat, in December 2022 and says it’s built on the company’s C-A-L model, which is “blended with AI-powered conversations, You.com apps, web links and citations.” Just like Microsoft’s AI, YouChat can provide annotated answers to various types of queries, create summaries of articles from the web, generate code, write essays, and more.
In addition to giving users access to an AI-powered chatbot, You.com recently added built-in AI image generator models, including Stable Diffusion 1.5, Stable Diffusion 2.1, and Open Journey, that you can use to generate images based on a written description. The engine also breaks down your search results based on relevant responses on sites like Reddit, TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, and YouTube while also providing standard results from the web.
Alibaba
Alibaba, the China-based e-commerce giant, has caught onto the AI chatbot trend as well. In early February, a company spokesperson told CNBC that the company is testing a Chat-GPT rival internally. Alibaba has reportedly been experimenting with generative AI since 2017, but the company hasn’t provided any sense of when it could announce the tool it’s working on or what it might be capable of.
Alibaba may have to overcome some hurdles before it gets its own version of ChatGPT off the ground, however. A report from Nikkei Asia indicates that Chinese regulators have already told the Alibaba-owned Tencent and Ant Group that they should restrict access to ChatGPT over concerns the bot could espouse uncensored content. The companies will also have to confer with the government before making their own bots available to the public.
Similar rules will likely apply to all of the other Chinese companies developing AI chatbots, calling into question whether they'll even be able to launch their products or if their utility will be held back by China’s strict censorship rules.
Baidu
Another Chinese company, Baidu, is getting ready to launch an AI tool it calls “Ernie Bot” as soon as March. Baidu is best known for its search engine of the same name, along with a cluster of other internet-related services, such as mapping platform Baidu Maps, online encyclopedia Baidu Baike, cloud storage service Baidu Wangpan, and more. It’s also leveraging AI technology to develop a self-driving car.
Ernie, which stands for Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration, first appeared in 2019 and has since evolved into a ChatGPT-like tool that can generate conversational responses. In late 2021, Baidu said it trained the model on “massive unstructured data and a gigantic knowledge graph” and that it “excels at both natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG).”
Just like Microsoft and Google, Baidu is also planning to integrate the chatbot into its search engine and will even build the tool into the interface of the forthcoming electric vehicle made by Chinese startup Jidu. In addition to this Chat-GPT-style tool, Baidu is also developing a text-to-image model, called Ernie ViLG, to create images based on Chinese text, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 system and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion’s AI image generator.
Other possible contenders
Aside from companies making standalone chatbots for search, there are a few other companies using generative AI in slightly different ways.
Snapchat, for example, is working on a “My AI” chatbot that essentially works as an in-app version of ChatGPT, allowing users to ask for recipe suggestions or plan trips. It’s more limiting than ChatGPT, however, as it’s been trained to avoid breaking Snapchat’s trust and safety guidelines. The service is only available as part of Snapchat’s $3.99 per month Plus subscribers for now, but CEO Evan Spiegel plans on eventually bringing it to all users.
Character.AI is another one of these tools and comes from the developers of Google’s LaMDA technology. The site lets you create or browse chatbots modeled after real people or fictional characters, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Tony Stark. When “conversing” with these bots, the AI attempts to respond in a manner similar to that person or character’s personality. However, that’s not the only thing these bots are capable of, as some are designed to help generate book recommendations, brainstorm ideas, practice a new language, and more.
Meanwhile, Chinese gaming firm NetEase has announced that its education subsidiary, Youdao, is planning to incorporate AI-powered tools into some of its educational products, according to a report from CNBC. It’s still not clear what exactly this tool will do, but it seems the company’s interested in employing the technology in one of its upcoming games as well.
Daniel Ahmad, the director of research and insights at Niko Partners, reports that NetEase could bring a ChatGPT-style tool to the mobile MMO Justice Online Mobile. As noted by Ahmad, the tool will “allow players to chat with NPCs and have them react in unique ways that impact the game” through text or voice inputs. However, there’s only one demo of the tool so far, so we don’t know how (or if) it will make its way into the final version of the game.
Then, there’s Replika, an AI chatbot that functions as a sort of “companion” that you can talk to via text-based chats and even video calls. The tool combines the company’s own version of the GPT-3 model and scripted dialogue content to build memories and generate responses tailored to your conversation style. But the company that owns the tool recently ruled out erotic roleplay, devastating dedicated users.
We’re still at the beginning of what conversational AI can do, and with major players like Microsoft and Google getting on board, we’re bound to see some progress. It’ll be interesting to see how all of these tools evolve over the coming years, as well as which ones manage to make their way into our daily lives. | Tech Giants |
This story is part of Amazon Prime Day, CNET's guide for everything you need to know and how to find the best deals. The official Prime Day dates may be a few weeks away but the sale has already begun at Amazon. It's not unusual for Amazon to kick things off early with many of its own-brand devices seeing prices slashed before the 48-hour event rolls around and we're seeing several early Prime Day deals launching today to get us all in the mood for a summer of savings. There are some stellar TV promotions for Prime members as well as discounts across pretty much every category of product Amazon sells. We've rounded up some of our favorite deals below to save you scouring the site yourself. We'll add more early Prime Day deals here as we see them.Early Prime Day deals on Amazon devicesAmazon Fire TVs from $90: Upgrade to a smart TV with Amazon Fire OS and save as much as $700.Amazon Fire TV Stick deals: Add streaming capabilities to any TV from $20.Up to $150 off Echo Frames: Various styles are on sale from $100.Luna Controller down to $40: Save $30 with your Prime membership.Over half off Amazon Halo Band: Prime members can snag the fitness tracker for $45. Buy Echo Show 15, get Echo Show 5 for free: Save $85Buy Blink Outdoor, get Blink Mini for free: Save $35Amazon Glow with Tangram Bits: Learn and play over video call with this bundle at $180 off.Early Prime Day deals on tech and gamingSave on the latest Samsung phones: Galaxy S22 starting at $700, Galaxy Z Flip 3 from $850, $400 off Galaxy Z Fold 3.Score Google Pixel 6 Pro with over $100 off.Apple Watch deals: $70 off Apple Watch Series 7, $50 off Apple Watch SE, Apple Watch Series 3 down to $199.Save 30% on Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.Fitbit deals: Fitbit Versa 3 from $169, Fitbit Luxe from $90, Fitbit Charge 5 from $129.AirPods deals: $120 off AirPods Max, $75 off AirPods Pro, AirPods 2 down to $100, $29 off AirPods 3.Score the first discount on Sony's LinkBuds S. Beats deals: $50 off Powerbeats Pro, $170 off Studio3, up to 34% off Solo3.iPad deals: Save $50 on iPad Pro, get $40 off iPad Air 5, save $100 on iPad mini 6, $20 off 10.2-inch iPad.Save $100 on Apple's M1 MacBook Air.Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ with Black Type Cover discounted to $700.Save 43% on Alienware's 24.5-inch AW2521H Gaming Monitor.$150 off Razer Iskur X Ergonomic Gaming Chair.$45 off Razer Kishi controller for iPhone.Snag a $10 Xbox Gift Card for just $9.15% off Hori Nintendo Switch Split Pad Pro.Hisense TV deals: $160 off 50-Inch R6 Series, $900 off 75-inch ULED 8K 75U800GR Series, $130 off Hisense HS219 2.1ch Sound Bar with Wireless Subwoofer.Save $50 on Eufy's Smart Lock Touch.iRobot's Roomba i3+ EVO is $100 off.Get Google Nest Thermostat for just $99.Early Prime Day deals on home and gardenGet 15% off new products from Amazon Brands.Save 20% on Everlywell Food Sensitivity Tests.Eufy's HomeVac S11 Infinity cordless vacuum has an on-page coupon for $50 off. Save $100 on LG's PuriCare Mini portable air purifier for 50% off.NOCO's Boost Plus car jump starter is 20% off. Tidy up your garden with 21% off this Greenworks trimmer and leaf blower combo kit.Bosch's Power Tools Combo Kit has dropped to $99.Pick up this Enegrizer camping lantern for just $13.Stay powered up on the go with $150 off Jackery's Portable Power Station Explorer 500.Cuisinart's SS-15P1 coffeemaker and single-serve brewer has 33% off. Discounted OXO grilling tools start at just $8.Bedsure cat beds are 25% off.Save $249 on the Bowflex SelectTech Curl Bar.Early Prime Day deals on beauty and fashionUp to 15% off kids and baby clothing from Amazon Brands.Up to 52% off men's and women's clothing from Amazon Brands.Get $90 off the Oral-B iO Series 9 electric toothbrush.Philips Norelco OneBlade is 55% off.Save on watches from Citizen, Invicta, Anne Klein and moreEarly Prime Day deals on toysGet up to 29% off Nerf products.Score the LEGO Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Millennium Falcon at 20% off.LOL Surprise deals from $5.SpiceBox Children's STEM Kits from $7.43% off Funkoverse Strategy Game: Marvel 4-Pack.$15 off Super Mario Bros Encyclopedia.Amazon Prime Day free credit dealsbetween now and Prime Day, Amazon is giving you the chance to score $60 or more in free credit. Some of the free credit promotions require a purchase at Amazon, though often on things you would likely be buying between now and Prime Day anyway meaning the credit is as good as cash. Get $10 credit with Amazon's Prime Stampcard promotion.Buy $75 of P&G products, get $20 in Amazon credit.Get up to $10 in Amazon credit when you buy a Lightyear movie ticket and merch. Get $5 in Amazon credit when you buy an Elvis movie ticket. | Tech Giants |
(Adds share price in paragraph 2)
By Sheila Dang
July 25 (Reuters) - Photo messaging app-owner Snap Inc on Tuesday beat Wall Street targets for quarterly revenue and user growth, but gave weaker third quarter guidance than analysts had expected as it works to compete with tech giants for advertising dollars.
Shares of Snap, which owns the Snapchat app, dropped 16% to $10.50 in after-market trading.
Snap has attracted hundreds of millions of users thanks to its lighthearted photo filters and more recently, an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions. However, it has struggled to consistently grow revenue and catch up to rivals like Facebook-owner Meta Platforms, prompting questions from analysts and investors about its strategy.
Revenue for the second quarter ended June 30 was $1.07 billion, beating analyst expectations of $1.05 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
The Santa Monica, California-based company said it estimates third quarter revenue will be between $1.07 billion to $1.13 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $1.13 billion, at the top end of the guidance range.
Changes to its platform to adjust advertisements took a toll, but Snap told Wall Street it is seeing benefits now.
Earlier this year, Snap updated its machine learning model to serve more relevant promotions to users, which Snap said in the short term caused a small number of its largest advertisers to see fewer "actions," such as users tapping on ads, than they did previously
Advertisers are beginning to see results from the changes, which led to a more than 30% increase in "purchase-related conversions" compared to the first quarter, Snap said its Tuesday letter to investors.
Daily active users on Snapchat rose 14% year-over-year to 397 million, beating Wall Street expectations of 394.8 million.
Snap said it expects between 405 million to 406 million daily active users in the third quarter. Analysts had forecast 406.2 million users, according to Refinitiv data.
More than 150 million people have sent more than 10 billion messages to My AI, a ChatGPT-powered bot that was launched in February.
Conversations with My AI will help Snap learn more about user interests and lead to more relevant ads, the company said, adding it is beginning to test sponsored links in My AI's responses.
Snap's net loss was $377 million during the second quarter, narrowing from a net loss of $422 million the previous year. (Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas; editing by Susan Heavey) | Tech Giants |
Photo: MIA Studio (Shutterstock)The sci-fi author Stephen R. Donaldson said that “Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.” A few years ago, I might have told you that’s true—about everything except Google and Meta’s ad businesses. My, how times change.OffenGoogle and Meta control less than 50% of digital ad spending for the first time since 2014, a trend that’s poised to accelerate over the next few years, according to Axios. Citing predictions from Insider Intelligence, Axios reports Google and Meta are expected to bring in 48.4% of online ad revenue this year—28.8% for Google, 19.6% for Facebook’s parent—a number that’s fallen steadily since the tech giants’ peak in 2017, when they took in 54.7% (Google with 34.7%, Meta with 20.0%). “Google and Meta face a series of challenges to their advertising businesses, including a more privacy-centric market, economic turbulence, a reset of expectations following the pandemic-induced spending boom, and general uncertainty in the tech and media sectors,” said Paul Verna, a principle analyst at Insider Intelligence.For a long time, fans of market competition fretted (with good reason) about Google and Meta’s duopoly over digital advertising, the business that fuels the whole internet. The two advertising giants aren’t going away anytime soon, but make no mistake, we are entering a new era in the online world. “These are more sober days for these companies, but aside from losing some share to the likes of Amazon and TikTok, though we don’t currently see an existential threat to either,” said Verna.Meta did not respond to a request for comment. Google declined to comment on its financials. There are a lot of reasons for the change, but my two favorites start with the letter “A.” Perhaps you’ve heard of them: Amazon and Apple. When you hear those names, “ads” probably aren’t the first word that pops into your head—unless you work in marketing. Amazon and Apple are probably the most significant corporate ad industry disrupters in the last ten years. Thanks to their efforts, digital advertising is undergoing a sea change. The Apple effect is most interesting. Last year, your iPhone started asking if you wanted to let your apps track you. It probably didn’t seem like much to most people, but it made a young entrepreneur named Mark Zuckerberg very, very upset. That setting, called App Tracking Transparency, cut off the flow of iPhone user data to Facebook and Instagram. That is what you might call a “big deal.” Tracking you across other companies’ apps and websites is a critical part of Meta’s advertising infrastructure. Ultimately, Meta said it lost $10 billion dollars because of that setting alone. One of the big things App Tracking Transparency did was open the doors for competition. Meta’s ad business was destabilized, and suddenly, third-party data was much harder to get. That made big consumer facing companies with tons of data about their own customers start thinking about launching their own ad businesses. A lot of them did, especially retailers, such as 7-11, Best Buy, Chewy, CVS, DollarTree, Doordash, eBay, Home Depot, Instacart, Kroger, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Target, Walgreens, Walmart, Wayfair, Ulta—not to mention other tech competitors like TikTok. Even Marriott got in the game. To quote ad industry analyst Eric Seufert, these days, “everything is an ad network.”But one company was already hard at work on the advertising project even before Apple’s game-changing privacy setting. Amazon’s advertising business is exploding. Today, Amazon ranks in over $30 billion a year from ads, which is actually more money than Amazon makes on Prime and all its other subscription services combined. “All of these trends amount to seismic shifts for Google and Meta — two companies that, until recently, could be counted on to surpass Wall Street’s lofty expectations, and in some cases their own guidance,” Verna said. Get used to it. Insider predicts that Amazon will capture 12.7% of US digital advertising dollars by 2024, compared to a predicted 17.9% for Meta.Seufert writes in his blog Mobile Dev Memo that Google and Meta are likely to maintain the top two spots on the list of digital ad revenue generators for the foreseeable future. But the duopoly era of their unchallenged online dominance has come to a close:Given the astonishing growth of Amazon, TikTok, and various retail media networks — including those which launched this year, such as Netflix’s — it is reasonable to characterize the digital advertising market in 2022 as being materially more competitive than it was in 2016 or 2017. The Duopoly depiction is tenuous with Google and Meta seeing a combined minority share.48.4% of the near $250 billion digital ad business isn’t exactly chump change. But in 2023 and beyond, the internet and the tech landscape are going to look a lot different ad dollars flow to other companies. | Tech Giants |
Show captionThe Biden administration has banned US sales of new telecommunications equipment from Huawei and other Chinese tech giants. Photograph: Mark R Cristino/EPAChinaBar on telecommunications products from firms including ZTE, Dahua and Hikvision are part of latest crackdown on Chinese tech giants amid spying fearsReutersThe Biden administration has banned approvals of new telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies and ZTE because they pose “an unacceptable risk” to US national security.The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said on Friday it had adopted the final rules, which also bar the sale or import of equipment made by Chinese surveillance equipment maker Dahua Technology, video surveillance firm Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and telecoms firm Hytera Communications Corp.The move represents Washington’s latest crackdown on the Chinese tech giants amid fears that Beijing could use them to spy on Americans.“These new rules are an important part of our ongoing actions to protect the American people from national security threats involving telecommunications,” the FCC chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said in a statement.Huawei declined to comment. ZTE, Dahua, Hytera and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Hikvision said in a statement that its products did not threaten US security. “This decision by the FCC will do nothing to protect US national security, but will do a great deal to make it more harmful and more expensive for US small businesses, local authorities, school districts and individual consumers to protect themselves, their homes, businesses and property,” Hikvision said.The firm would continue to serve US customers “in full compliance” with US regulations, it said.Rosenworcel circulated the proposed measure, which effectively bars the firms from selling new equipment in the US, to the other three commissioners for final approval last month.The FCC said in June 2021 it was considering banning all equipment authorisations for all companies on the covered list.That came after a March 2021 designation of five Chinese companies on the so-called “covered list” as posing a threat to national security under a 2019 law aimed at protecting US communications networks: Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications Corp Hikvision and Dahua.All four commissioners at the agency, including two Republicans and two Democrats, supported Friday’s move. The agency said it has authority to revoke prior authorizations, but declined to do so.{{#ticker}}{{topLeft}}{{bottomLeft}}{{topRight}}{{bottomRight}}{{#goalExceededMarkerPercentage}}{{/goalExceededMarkerPercentage}}{{/ticker}}{{heading}}{{#paragraphs}}{{.}}{{/paragraphs}}{{highlightedText}}{{#choiceCards}}{{/choiceCards}}We will be in touch to remind you to contribute. Look out for a message in your inbox in . If you have any questions about contributing, please contact us.Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare via EmailShare on LinkedInShare on WhatsAppShare on Messenger | Tech Giants |
The European Union has named six tech giants whose market power it hopes to rein in by applying a new set of proactive, pro-competition rules on how these gatekeepers can operate designated core platform services. The six so-called “gatekeepers” are: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
The Commission says a total of 22 core platform services operated by the six gatekeepers have been designated under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Here’s the full breakdown: Four social networks (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn); six “intermediation” services (Google Maps, Google Play, Google Shopping, Amazon Marketplace, iOS App Store, Meta Marketplace); three ADS, or ads delivery systems (Google, Amazon and Meta); two browsers (Chrome, Safari); three operating systems (Google Android, iOS, Windows PC OS); two N-IICS (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger); one search engine (Google); and one video sharing platform (YouTube).
The DMA takes a proactive approach to competition concern once a certain threshold of market power is achieved — including giants having 45 million+ active local users. Other gatekeeper criteria include a turnover of €7.5BN+ in the last three financial years and a market capitalization that exceeds €75BN, although the Commission has a degree of discretion in making designations to ensure the law is able to target platforms that look set to gain an “entrenched and durable” position in the “near future”.
The regulation technically started to apply in May, after the final details had been agreed by EU lawmakers earlier this year. That accord followed lengthy negotiations between the European Parliament and Council on the Commission’s late 2020 proposal to reform its approach to digital competition.
Seven tech giants — Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon, ByeDance/TikTok, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung — had said they expected to be subject to the regime. But Samsung isn’t on today’s official list. In a couple of other surprising omissions, also not listed as core platform services are Gmail and Outlook.com.
“[T]he Commission has concluded that, although Gmail, Outlook.com and Samsung Internet Browser meet the thresholds under the DMA to qualify as a gatekeeper, Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung provided sufficiently justified arguments showing that these services do not qualify as gateways for the respective core platform services,” the EU wrote. “Therefore, the Commission decided not to designate Gmail, Outlook.com and Samsung Internet Browser as core platform services. It follows that Samsung is not designated as gatekeeper with respect to any core platform service.”
Giving a speech at a digital conference in Estonia yesterday, the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, summarized the bloc’s aims for the regulation. “We know that some tech giants have used their market power to give their own products and services an unfair advantage and hold back competitors from doing business and creating added value and jobs. These practices distort competition, undermine free consumer choice and hold back SMEs’ innovation potential notably arising from Web 4.0 and virtual worlds,” he said.
“It was high time that Europe sets its rules of the game upfront, providing a clear enforceable legal framework to foster innovation, competitiveness and the resilience of the Single Market, rather than having to rely on lengthy and not always effective antitrust investigations. The DMA does just that.”
Key provisions the DMA applies to core platform services include a ban on self-preferencing or gatekeepers requiring business users to make use of their own services and a ban on gatekeeping app stores preventing the installation of rival stores. Gatekeepers also cannot ban business users from offering and promoting competing services and they have an obligation to share with them information that their platform usage generates.
There are also data portability and service interoperability requirements, including specific interoperability obligations for messaging giants and choice screens-style obligations for OSes, browsers, search engines and virtual assistants. Plus there’s a ban on gatekeepers tracking and profiling users for ad targeting unless they obtain their consent; a ban on stopping users from un-installing gatekeeper preloads; and a requirement to apply FRAND terms for general access (and avoid discriminatory T&Cs) for fair dealing with business users.
Penalties for breaching the regime can scale up to 10% of global annual turnover — or even 20% for severe repeat offences.
Beyond that, the Commission also has the power to apply additional remedies — such as requiring a gatekeeper sells a business or parts of it, or banning them from acquisitions of additional services related to “systemic non-compliance”. And, on that front, it’s notable that the EU’s competition division, which has been investigating Google’s adtech business since 2021, warned this summer that the only effective remedy if its concerns are confirmed would be to break Google up.
The new rules are expected to create new opportunities for competition on major platforms — such as from independent app stores, alternative payment services and upstart search engines — while simultaneously cracking down on directly abusive behavior by gatekeepers, such as arbitrary enforcement of T&Cs.
And early out the gate with a statement welcoming the official designation of gatekeepers was payment unicorn Paddle. CEO Jimmy Fitzgerald dubbed today’s announcement as “as a step towards fair competition, increased consumer choice, and true business innovation.” “Asking large industry players to introduce third-party app stores and third-party payments systems, without the ‘self-preference’ of their own products, will be extremely beneficial for software developers, allowing them to choose where and how to sell their products without losing a percentage on every sale,” he added.
The new regime could also encourage the development of less exploitative business models, as consumers should have more wiggle room to slip the noose of platform giants’ lock-ins. Although how effective the pan-EU regime will be at rebalancing a digital playing field that Big Tech not only still firmly dominates but has essentially defined and configured in its interest over decades remains to be seen.
Diluting the influence of powerful network effects is also likely to take time as consumers are probably going to continue to view the biggest names as the most trusted brands for some time to come. Yet innovative and determined startups should expect to have better odds than ever at breaking GAFAM’s grip on tech users. Or at least that’s the newly disruptive regulated reality for entrepreneurs launching services in the EU.
There’s also still some time until the bulk of the DMA compliance deadline bites: Designated gatekeepers have six months to ensure they meet all the legal requirements — so early March 2024 is when the real EU vs Big Tech reckoning starts. Although the Commission notes there are some obligations that apply from designation — including the requirement to inform it of any “intended concentration” (aka, M&A).
“It is for the designated companies to ensure and demonstrate effective compliance. To this end, they have 6 months to submit a detailed compliance report in which they outline how they comply with each of the obligations of the DMA,” it added.
The Commission is the sole enforcer of the DMA so gearing up to take on such a massive extra oversight role in short order is also no small ask for the EU’s executive.
The bloc’s competition unit has been ruling over tech giants for many years, of course. Including, most notably, a string of major enforcements against Google, as well as a number of investigations into Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. But the DMA represents a step change from just doing traditional ex post antitrust investigation and after-the-fact enforcement — to bolting on ongoing ex ante surveillance and coming up with preventative measures too. So EU regulators are also having to step up several gears. Albeit, at least in theory, the DMA may reduce the volume of competition investigations the EU undertakes on Big Tech — assuming it proves effective at proactively curbing a broad range of unfair tactics.
That said, there are early signs designated gatekeepers may not quietly submit to the EU’s new playbook — and formal challenges seem likely as the new rules bed in.
Yesterday the FT reported that Apple and Microsoft were fighting the Commission’s designation of iMessage and Bing, respectively, as core platform services in scope of the DMA — with the pair claiming the services are insufficiently popular to qualify. Bing has a very small regional marketshare (of just 3%), as Google’s search engine continues to massively dominate in Europe. While, per the FT’s reporting, Apple has argued iMessage does not meet the 45M+ user threshold to qualify as a core platform service — which would obligate it to interoperate with rival messaging services. And the newspaper reported that the Commission was still deliberating over the inclusion of Bing and iMessage.
The Commission looks to be taking a cautious approach to this early pushback since, as noted above, Bing and iMessage are not on the initial list of 22 core platform services.
However the EU has also announced it’s opened four market investigations to “further assess” submissions from Microsoft and Apple which argue that, despite meeting the DMA thresholds, the following four core platform services do not qualify as “gateways”: Microsoft’s Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising; and Apple’s iMessage.
“Under the DMA, these investigations aim to ascertain whether a sufficiently substantiated rebuttal presented by the companies, demonstrate that services in question should not be designated. The investigation should be completed within a maximum of 5 months,” the Commission added.
The omission of iMessage means Apple has dodged a bullet as it will not — for now, at least — have to comply with an interoperability obligation the DMA applies to messaging platforms.
Legal challenges to today’s official designations could certainly follow as tech giants accustomed to setting their own rules and terms of service seek to test the robustness of the EU’s countervailing rule making.
The bloc can also continue to designate (more) gatekeepers, as market conditions evolve. It is also required to review existing designations at least every three years to check whether platforms still qualify.
Some of the gatekeepers that have been designated today are already expected to have aligned with the DMA’s sister regulation, the Digital Services Act, as they have previously been designated as either VLOPs or VLOSE under that wider pan-EU digital governance regime (and the DSA’s compliance deadline for larger platforms was late last month). So in-house policy teams at the world’s most valuable tech companies are certainly being kept busy. | Tech Giants |
By Echo Wang
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Customers of Arm Holdings Ltd including Apple Inc, Nvidia Corp, Alphabet Inc and Advanced Micro Devices Inc have agreed to invest in the chip designer's initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
Intel Corp, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Cadence Design Systems Inc and Synopsys Inc have also agreed to participate as investors in the offering, the sources added. The talks are ongoing and some other potential investors are also in discussions to invest in the IPO, the sources added.
SoftBank Group Corp, which owns Britain-based Arm, is targeting a valuation between $50 billion and $55 billion, Reuters reported earlier on Friday. Arm's clients have agreed to invest in that valuation range, the sources said.
While it is possible that demand for Arm's shares will lead to a higher valuation by the time the IPO prices, the move represents a climb-down from the $64 billion valuation at which SoftBank acquired the 25% stake in the company it did not already own from its $100 billion Vision Fund last month.
Apple, Nvidia and the other strategic investors have agreed to invest between $25 million and $100 million each in the blockbuster IPO, the sources said. Arm and SoftBank have set aside 10% of the shares to be sold in the IPO for its clients, Reuters has previously reported.
Amazon.com Inc, which had previously held talks to invest in the IPO, has decided not to participate, one of the sources said, requesting anonymity as the discussions are confidential.
A scramble among Arm's clients, comprising the world's biggest technology companies, to snap up shares in the IPO is testing the semiconductor designer's adherence to not picking sides in the chip industry.
The interest is fueled by a desire by companies to expand their commercial relationship with Arm and make sure rivals do not gain an edge, Reuters has previously reported.
While an investment in the IPO would not come with a seat on Arm's board or ability to dictate strategy, it could strengthen ties with each participating company and make it harder for a competitor to acquire Arm later.
Arm and SoftBank did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
AMD, Intel, Synopsys and Nvidia declined to comment. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Cadence did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on Arm's valuation target earlier on Friday.
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Anirban Sen and Rosalba O'Brien) | Tech Giants |
The White House has unveiled its plan to crack down on the AI race amid growing concerns it could upend life as we know it.
The Biden Administration said the technology was 'one of the most powerful' of our time, adding: 'but in order to seize the opportunities it presents, we must first mitigate its risks.'
The plan is to launch 25 research institutes across the US that will seek assurance from four companies, including Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT's creator OpenAI, which will 'participate in a public evaluation.'
Many of the world's best minds have warned about the dangers of AI, specifically that it could destroy humanity if an assessment of risk is not done now.
Tech giants like Elon Musk fear AI will soon surpass human intelligence and has independent thinking. This means AI would no longer need or listen to humans, allowing it to steal nuclear codes, create pandemics and spark world wars.
Vice President Kamal Harris - with the lowest approval rating of any VP - will lead the containment effort as 'AI czar' with a budget of just $140 million. For comparison, Space Force has a budget of $30 billion.
HARRIS is set to meet with executives from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI Thursday to discuss how such potential risks can be reduced.
Thursday's meeting will discuss the companies' roles in mitigating risks, how they can work with the government and setting up a public evaluation of the AI systems.
Each company's AI will be tested at a hacker convention this summer to see if the tech aligns with the administration's 'AI Bill of Rights.'
The release of the ChatGPT chatbot in November has led to an increased debate about AI and the government's role with the technology.
Because AI can generate human-like writing and fake images, there are ethical and societal concerns.
These include distributing harmful content, data privacy violations, amplifying existing bias and Elon Musk's favorite, the destruction of humanity.
'President Biden has been clear that when it comes to AI, we must place people and communities at the center by supporting responsible innovation that serves the public good, while protecting our society, security, and economy,' reads the White House announcement.
'Importantly, this means that companies have a fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public.'
The public assessment will be conducted by thousands of community partners and AI experts, according to the White House.
Testing by professionals in the industry will see how the models align with the principles and practices outlined in the AI Bill of Rights and AI Risk Management Framework.
Biden's AI Bill of Rights, announced in October 2022, provides a framework for how government, technology companies and citizens can work together to ensure more accountable AI.
The bill includes five principles: Safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination protections, data privacy, notice and explanation and human alternatives, considerations and fallback.
'This framework applies to (1) automated systems that (2) have the potential to meaningfully impact the American public’s rights, opportunities, or access to critical resources or services,' the White House shared in October.
The White House's plan of action follows an open letter signed by Musk and 1,000 other technology leaders, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in March.
The tech tycoons called for a pause on the 'dangerous race' to advance AI, saying more risk assessment needs to be conducted before humans lose control and it becomes a sentient human-hating species.
At this point, AI would have reached singularity, which means it has surpassed human intelligence and has independent thinking.
AI would no longer need or listen to humans, allowing it to steal nuclear codes, create pandemics and spark world wars.
They asked all AI labs to stop developing their products for at least six months while more risk assessment is done.
If any labs refuse, they want governments to 'step in.'
Musk fears that the technology will become so advanced that it will no longer require - or listen to - human interference.
It is a fear that is widely held and even acknowledged by the CEO of AI - the company that created ChatGPT - who said earlier this month that the tech could be developed and harnessed to commit 'widespread' cyberattacks.
DeepAI founder Kevin Baragona, who was among those who signed it, explained why the rapidly advancing field of AI was so dangerous.
'It's almost akin to a war between chimps and humans,' he told DailyMail.com.
'The humans obviously win since we're far smarter and can leverage more advanced technology to defeat them.
'If we're like the chimps, then the AI will destroy us, or we'll become enslaved to it.'
This month the 'godfather' of AI Geoffrey Hinton, 75, has tossed a grenade into the raging debate about the dangers of the technology — after sensationally quitting his job at Google and saying he regrets his life's work.
Hinton said chatbots can already hold more general knowledge than a human brain.
He added that it was only a matter of time before AI also eclipses us regarding reasoning.
At this point, he said, 'bad actors' such as Russian President Vladimir Putin could use AI for 'bad things' by programming robots to 'get more power.'
In 1970. co-founder of MIT's AI lab Marvin Minsky told Life Magazine, 'from three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.'
And while the timing of the prediction was off, the idea of AI having human intelligence is not.
ChatGPT is evidence of how fast the technology is growing.
In just a few months, it has passed the bar exam with a higher score than 90 percent of humans who have taken it, and it achieved 60 percent accuracy on the US Medical Licensing Exam.
'Large language models as they exist today are already a revolution enough to power ten years of monumental growth, even with no further technology advances. They're already incredibly disruptive, Baragona told DailyMail.com.
'To state that we need more technological advances right now is irresponsible and could lead to devastating economic and quality of life consequences.' | Tech Giants |
Microsoft has announced a new version of its search engine Bing, powered by an upgraded version of the same AI technology that underpins chatbot ChatGPT. The company is launching the product alongside an upgraded version of its Edge browser, promising that the two will provide a new experience for browsing the web and finding information online.
“It’s a new day in search,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an event announcing the product. We’re currently following the event live, and adding more information to this story as we go.
Microsoft argued that the search paradigm hasn’t changed in 20 years and that roughly half of all searches don’t answer users’ questions. The arrival of conversational AI can change this, says the company, delivering information more fluidly and quickly.
Microsoft says the new Bing will be live today “for desktop limited preview” — users will be able to try a limited number of queries and sign up for full access in the future.
The “new Bing,” as Microsoft is calling it, offers a chat function where users can ask questions and receive answers in natural language. The feature uses an updated version of the AI language model built by OpenAI that underpins ChatGPT — known as the “Prometheus Model” — which offers more up-to-date information with annotated answers.
In live demos, Microsoft showed the new Bing displaying traditional search results side-by-side with annotations and an AI chat interface. The company showed a number of example searches: for recipes, for travel tips, shopping for furniture from Ikea and more. In one demo Bing was asked to “create an itinerary for each day of a 5-day trip to Mexico.” The question was answered by the chatbot, describing the itinerary alongside links to sources for the information.
The announcement of the new Bing comes amid a flurry of AI activity from Microsoft and rival Google. Since ChatGPT launched on the web last November, interest in AI text generation has exploded. Microsoft, which has closely partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is seeking to capitalize on this excitement and has already announced how this technology will be integrated across its suite of office software, tackling tasks like summarizing meetings and autocompleting lines of code.
Google, meanwhile, has been caught off guard by what some are claiming is a paradigm shift in how users find information on the web. The launch of ChatGPT reportedly triggered a “code red” within the search giant, with long-absent founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin drafted to help deal with what could be a threat to the firm’s biggest revenue driver.
In an attempt to preempt Microsoft’s announcement today, Google unveiled its own ChatGPT, named Bard, yesterday. CEO Sundar Pichai described the software as an “experimental conversational AI service” but noted that it was still being tested by a small group of users and will only receive a wider launch in the coming weeks.
The AI-powered future of search
The bigger question for both Microsoft and Google, though, is: are AI chatbots even a good replacement for search? How will this technology sit alongside existing methods of finding information online, and what happens when it makes mistakes?
The latter point is perhaps the most important, as AI language systems like ChatGPT have a well-documented propensity for presenting false information as fact. Although researchers have warned about this problem for years, there have been countless examples of AI-generated errors since ChatGPT launched on the web — from chatbots making up biographical details about real people to fabricating academic papers and offering dangerous medical advice.
This sort of AI stupidity is already a problem, though. The rise of chatbots has generated new attention for the issue, but Google has been increasingly using AI to summarize web pages for years. This has led to some high-profile errors, like Google responding to a search “had a seizure now what?” with the advice “hold the person down or try to stop their movements” — exactly the opposite of what should be done in this scenario.
As well as the problem of misinformation, AI-accelerated search could unbalance the ecosystem that sustains the wider search market. If AI collates information without directing users to its source and generating revenue for the creator, it will damage incentives for third parties to publish accurate information online.
These and other problems will face Microsoft, Google, and others navigating the new world of AI search, but in the meantime, the tech giants simply seem like they’re scrambling to launch products before their rivals get there first. | Tech Giants |
As top tech companies prepare to release their quarterly earnings reports starting next week, investors are bracing for bad news.Several US tech companies have announced hiring slowdowns and layoffs in recent weeks, and the difficulties are expected to continue. “It’s not a great time for tech in general,” said Paul Verna, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, a market analysis firm. “There is no question that companies are going to be spending less, cutting back budgets, and maybe implementing hiring freezes. None of that is good news for the next quarter.”Netflix, Meta, Google, Twitter and Tesla all have earnings calls scheduled in the next weeks. The reports will come amid growing fears of a recession as inflation continues to rise. On Wednesday, the US Labor Department released new data that showed the consumer price index rose 9.1% in June from the same month a year earlier, marking the largest gain since 1981.The rising rates will probably bolster plans from the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which could further spook investors afraid of a slowing economic expansion, said Haris Anwar, senior analyst at Investing.com.“The US economy will slip into a recession in the next 12 months if the Fed continues to hike interest rates,” he said. “That’s the main reason we’re seeing a huge sell-off in high-growth stocks as investors move their funds to the areas of the market which are relatively safe.”Those high-growth stocks include many in the tech industry. Some investors have forecasted a difficult earnings season, with researchers at Factset anticipating a growth rate of 4.3% in the wider S&P Index – the lowest figure since the last quarter of 2020.The sector has been struggling for months. In April, Amazon executive Jeff Bezos issued a stark warning that the tech boom experienced during the pandemic would soon be coming to an end.Apple earlier in 2022 lost its status as the most valuable company in the world, contributing to a drop of 13% in the larger Nasdaq Composite in April – a drop of more than 30% from record highs the previous year.Meanwhile, many large tech firms have announced hiring slowdowns or cuts. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said in a staff memo in June it would be “slowing the pace of hiring” into 2023. Spotify is cutting hiring plans by 25%, according to Bloomberg.The cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase announced in June it would lay off about 18% of its workforce, citing an approaching recession. Tesla on 3 June informed workers it plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, and on Tuesday said it would close its San Mateo office and cut 229 jobs there.“If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees during a weekly Q&A session that was recorded and heard by Reuters. Meta plans to slash hiring plans for engineers by at least 30%, according to Reuters.Investors will be keeping a close eye on Meta’s earnings, which will be reported on 27 July, to see if there has been any meaningful recovery from the company’s disastrous reports of late 2021 and early 2022. The company lost a record $230bn in market value amid a rebrand and shake-ups to its business model.Meta announced in 2021 a shift in its business from social media to artificial and virtual reality. Zuckerberg also previously warned that Apple’s new privacy rules would have a negative impact on the company’s advertising revenue.“Meta is in a period of transition right now as a company,” said Mike Proulx, a researcher at the market advisory firm Forrester. He added the company is also struggling to retain users, particularly younger demographics, as they migrate in large numbers to competitors like TikTok.“Meta has a Gen Z problem, so the company needs to drive usage of new products like Reels and find a way to monetize it,” he said. “That is a long term play.”Large companies are not the only members of the tech sector to be hit, with layoff tracking site Layoffs.fyi showing 36,861 new employees laid off in the second quarter of 2022, compared with just 2,695 employees laid off in the same quarter of 2021.However, analysts have cautioned that the current slump represents a slowdown from runaway growth in previous years, and not necessarily a crash.In the unfolding of the global Covid-19 pandemic, tech companies like Peloton, Zoom and Netflix saw meteoric growth as more people relied on technology to work and live online.That growth is abruptly coming to a close: Netflix, which added more than 36 million subscribers during the first year of the pandemic, lost more than half its value since reporting disappointing results on 19 April and said in May it would cut about 150 jobs.“The streaming space is finding that there is more consumer choice than ever, and consumers will follow where the best content is,” Proulx said. “As more and more subscription services emerge, something has got to give.”Not all members of the tech sector have been equally affected by the downturn, said Anwar. While Meta, Netflix and others struggle, companies like Microsoft and Apple are more stable.“That said, no tech company is immune from pressures coming from rising interest rates, slowing economic growth and soaring inflation,” he said. “Their earnings will show some impact of these economic headwinds.” | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. has threatened to cut off access to its internet-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they don’t stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products, according to people familiar with the dispute.
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The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc.’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. In February, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing.
Rivals quickly moved to roll out their own AI chatbots as hype built around the buzzy technology. This week, Alphabet Inc.’s Google publicly released Bard, its conversational AI product. DuckDuckGo, a search engine that emphasizes privacy, introduced DuckAssist, a feature that uses artificial intelligence to summarize answers to search queries. You.com and Neeva Inc. — two newer search engines that debuted in 2021 — have also debuted AI-fueled search services, YouChat and NeevaAI.
These search chatbots aim to combine the conversational skills of ChatGPT with the information provided by a conventional search engine. DuckDuckGo, You.com and Neeva’s regular search engines all use Bing to provide some of their information, because indexing the entire web is costly — it requires servers to store data and a constant crawl of the internet to incorporate updates. It would be similarly complex and pricey to get together that data for a search chatbot.
Microsoft has told at least two customers that using its Bing search index to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract, according to the people, who spoke anonymously because they were discussing a confidential dispute. The Redmond, Washington-based technology company said it may terminate the licenses providing access to its search index, the people said.
“We’ve been in touch with partners who are out of compliance as we continue to consistently enforce our terms across the board,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’ll continue to work with them directly and provide any information needed to find a path forward.”
If they were cut off from Microsoft’s index, smaller search engines would have a hard time finding an alternative. Microsoft and Google are the only two companies that index the entire web, and Google’s limitations on the use of its index have led nearly all other search engines to use Bing.
(Updates with Microsoft comment, in sixth paragraph.)
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©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Two of your social media apps could be collecting a lot of data on you — and you might not like what one of them is doing with it.That's according to a recent study, published last month by mobile marketing company URL Genius, which found that YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps.The study found that YouTube, which is owned by Google, mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes — like tracking your online search history, or even your location, to serve you relevant ads. But TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data — and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it.With third-party trackers, it's essentially impossible to know who's tracking your data or what information they're collecting, from which posts you interact with — and how long you spend on each one — to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app.As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple's iOS to count how many different domains track a user's activity across 10 different social media apps — YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp — over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account.YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study's average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.Ten of YouTube's trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity.For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn't opt into allowing tracking in each app's settings, according to the study."Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used," the report's authors wrote.TikTok tells CNBC Make It that the company recently conducted its own test of its app, using the same method as the study, which found that any network contacts went to only four third-party domains, all of which the company says are regularly used by other apps for functions such as network security and user certification, among others. Those third-party domains were Google, Apple, and Snap, as well as AppsFlyer, an advertising analytics company that measures the performance of marketing campaigns on the social media platform.In October, Wired published a guide to how TikTok tracks user data, including your location, search history, IP address, the videos you watch and how long you spend watching them. According to that guide, TikTok can "infer" personal characteristics from your age range to your gender based on the other information it collects. Google and other sites do the same thing, a practice called "inferred demographics."TikTok has been the subject of criticism in the past over how the company collects and uses data, especially from younger users, including claims that the company has transferred some private user data to Chinese servers.As CNBC noted last year, TikTok's privacy policy states that the app can share user data with its Chinese parent company, though it claims to employ security measures to "safeguard sensitive user data."In 2020, then-President Donald Trump looked to ban TikTok in the U.S. over concerns about the app's data security policies, before current President Joe Biden walked back those threats and ordered a review of potential security threats posed by foreign-owned apps.YouTube did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment.UPDATE: This article has been updated with information provided by TikTok.Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletterDon't miss:Disney is hiring TikTok creators — you need to love theme parks, food and social mediaHow 'Your Rich BFF' Vivian Tu built a massive TikTok following: 'I actually showed people the math' | Tech Giants |
The European Commission on Wednesday said it designated six tech giants as "gatekeepers" under its new Digital Markets Act — a strict set of rules set to shake up the business models' of large digital platforms.
The Commission said that it deems Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and China's ByteDance as "gatekeepers." The term refers to massive internet platforms which the EU views are restricting access to core platform services, such as online search, advertising, and messaging and communications.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated shortly. | Tech Giants |
Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta says
Bill C-18, the Online News Act, received royal assent after passing House and Senate
The social media giant Meta has confirmed that it will end access to news on its social media sites for all Canadian users before Bill C-18, the Online News Act, comes into force.
The tech company made the announcement on Thursday, the same day the bill received royal assent. The law will force tech giants like Meta and Google to pay news outlets for posting their journalism on their platforms.
Meta said it will begin to block news for Canadian users over the next few months and that the change will not be immediate.
"We have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18 ... content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada," Meta said in a media statement.
Now that the bill has received royal assent, the Department of Canadian Heritage will draft regulations specifying the application of the act and provide guidance on implementing it. It should take six months for Bill C-18 to come into force.
"A free and independent press is fundamental to our democracy," Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement. "It levels the playing field by putting the power of big tech in check and ensuring that even our smallest news business can benefit through this regime and receive fair compensation for their work."
In response to Meta's announcement that it would be banning news content for Canadian users, Rodriguez said in a different media statement that Meta currently has no obligations under the act and that the federal government will engage in a "regulatory and implementation process" following royal assent of Bill C-18.
"If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?" Rodriguez said.
A spokesperson for the minister said his office had meetings with Facebook and Google this week.
"We look forward to further discussions with the platforms," they said.
Meta first threatened to end access to news content for Canadian users of Facebook and Instagram earlier this month, in response to the looming passage of Bill C-18.
The company said it was conducting tests on ending news access for a small percentage of Canadians. Between one and five per cent of the 24 million Canadians who use Facebook or Instagram were said to be affected.
Meta said this test is still ongoing.
"The changes affecting news content will not otherwise impact Meta's products and services in Canada," the company said.
On June 7, shortly after Meta announced it would conduct this product test, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said bullying tactics would not work with his government.
"The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians' access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they're resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way. It's not going to work," Trudeau said.
Google, which has said it is considering the same approach as Meta to blocking news, said in a media statement on Thursday that it is attempting to "avoid an outcome no one wants."
"Every step of the way, we've proposed thoughtful and pragmatic solutions that would have improved the bill and cleared the path for us to increase our already significant investments in the Canadian news ecosystem," Google said.
"So far, none of our concerns have been addressed. Bill C-18 is about to become law and remains unworkable."
The company said it is "continuing to urgently seek to work" with the government to find a "path forward."
C-18 meant to lead to 'fair commercial deals': Ottawa
The federal government introduced Bill C-18 in April 2022 with the goal of forcing digital giants, such as Meta and Google, to compensate news publishers for the use of their content.
It is meant to address the "imbalance" between tech platforms and Canadian news publications, allowing them to make "fair commercial deals" without the need for government intervention, the federal government said.
Rodriguez said the amount of money each publisher receives from these digital giants will be decided by negotiations; there is no preset formula.
If no voluntary arrangement is reached, news businesses can initiate a mandatory bargaining process and go to a Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) arbitration panel for a binding decision.
In a media statement, the CRTC, which is tasked with overseeing the Online News Act, said it will soon share its plan for implementation and "set up the framework for mandatory bargaining between these parties."
After reaching the Senate, C-18 received amendments and was sent back to the House. These amendments were an attempt to quell the growing opposition from media companies that say requiring payment for posting links is unfair.
Rodriguez accepted 10 of the Senate's 12 amendments and rejected two that he said would have materially changed the legislation's intent.
Bill meant to support news industry, government says
Bill C-18 was pitched as a way to support an industry that has seen a steady decline since the emergence of the internet.
According to the government, more than 470 media outlets in Canada have closed since 2008, and at least one-third of Canadian journalism jobs have disappeared over that same time period.
The compensation that news publishers extract from these digital giants is meant to be used, in large part, to fund the creation of new content to protect the "sustainability of the Canadian news ecosystem," the government said.
Bill C-18 is modelled after a similar law in Australia, the country that first forced digital companies to pay for the use of news content.
According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, more than $190 million has been paid already to Australian media companies since the law was enacted last year. The big winners have been legacy media and larger media outlets.
Tech companies strenuously opposed Australia's efforts to make them pay for news.
Google threatened to shut down access to the search engine in that country if the bill went ahead as planned. The company ultimately relented and cut deals with a number of news outlets to avoid a binding arbitration process.
Meta, known as Facebook at the time, ended up temporarily blocking Australians from sharing news stories on its platforms. The Australian government and the tech company ended up striking a deal and the news ban was lifted.
"Facebook made the same threat. They left Australia for a week, then they came back," Rodriguez told CBC's Power & Politics.
"We'll see what they do. We cannot base our decision as a government on threats from a company."
With files from John Paul Tasker and The Canadian Press | Tech Giants |
Following the UK government’s announcement last week that it plans to host a “global” AI safety summit this fall, prime minister Rishi Sunak has kicked off London Tech Week with another tidbit of news — telling conference goers that OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic have committed to provide “early or priority access” to their AI models to support research into evaluation and safety.
Sunak has had an accelerated conversion to the AI safety topic in recent weeks, following a number of interventions by AI giants warning about the existential and even extinction-level risks the technology might pose if it’s not properly regulated.
“We’re going to do cutting edge [AI] safety research here in the UK,” pledged Sunak today. “With £100 million for our expert taskforce, we’re dedicating more funding to AI safety than any other government.
This AI safety taskforce will be focused on AI foundation models, the government also said.
“We’re working with the frontier labs — Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic,” added Sunak. “And I’m pleased to announce they’ve committed to give early or priority access to models for research and safety purposes to help build better evaluations and help us better understand the opportunities and risks of these systems.”
The PM also reiterated his earlier announcement of the forthcoming AI safety summit, seeking to liken the effort to the COP Climate conferences which aim to achieve global buy-in on tackling climate change.
“Just as we unite through COP to tackle climate change so the UK will host the first ever Summit on global AI Safety later this year,” he said, adding: “I want to make the UK not just the intellectual home but the geographical home, of global AI safety regulation.”
Evangelizing AI safety is a marked change of gears for Sunak’s government.
As recently as March it was in full AI cheerleader mode — saying in a white paper then that it favored “a pro-innovation approach to AI regulation”. The approach set out in the paper downplayed safety concerns by eschewing the need for bespoke laws for artificial intelligence (or a dedicated AI watchdog) in favor of setting out a few “flexible principles”. The government also suggested oversight of AI apps should be conducted by existing regulatory bodies such as the antitrust watchdog and the data protection authority.
Fast forward a few months and Sunank is now talking in terms of wanting the UK to house a global AI safety watchdog. Or, at the least, that it wants the UK to own the AI safety conversation by dominating research into how to evaluate the outputs of learning algorithms.
Speedy developments in generative AI combined with public pronouncements from a range of tech giants and AI industry figures warning the tech could spiral out of control appear to have led to a swift strategy rethink in Downing Street.
It’s also notable that AI giants have been bending Sunak’s ear in person in recent weeks, with meetings taking place between the PM and the CEOs of OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic shortly before the government mood music on AI changed.
If this trio of AI giants stick to their commitments to provide the UK with advanced access to their models there is a chance for the country to lead on research into developing effective evaluation and audit techniques — including before any legislative oversight regimes mandating algorithmic transparency have spun up elsewhere (the European Union’s draft AI Act isn’t expected to be in legal force until 2026, for example; although the EU’s Digital Services Act is already in force and already requires some algorithmic transparency from tech giants).
At the same time, there’s a risk the UK is making itself vulnerable to industry capture of its nascent AI safety efforts. And if AI giants get to dominate the conversation around AI safety research by providing selective access to their systems they could be well placed to shape any future UK AI rules that would apply to their businesses.
Close involvement of AI tech giants in publicly funded research into the safety of their commercial technologies ahead of any legally binding AI safety framework being applied to them suggests they will at least have scope to frame how AI safety is looked at and which components, topics and themes get prioritized (and which, therefore, get downplayed). And by influencing what kind of research happens since it may be predicated upon how much access they provide.
Meanwhile AI ethicists have long warned that headline-grabbing fears about the risks “superintelligent” AIs could pose to humans are drowning out discussion of real world harms existing AI technologies are already generating, including bias and discrimination, privacy abuse, copyright infringement and environmental resource exploitation.
So while the UK government may view AI giants’ buy-in as a PR coup, if the AI summit and wider AI safety efforts are to product robust and credible results it must ensure the involvement of independent researchers, civil society groups and groups who are disproportionately at risk of harm from automation, not just trumpet its plan for a partnership between “brilliant AI companies” and local academics — given academic research is already often dependent on funding from tech giants. | Tech Giants |
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comJune 21 (Reuters) - Meta (META.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and other tech giants racing to build the emerging metaverse concept have formed a group to foster development of industry standards that would make the companies' nascent digital worlds compatible with each other.Participants in the Metaverse Standards Forum include many of the biggest companies working in the space, from chip makers to gaming companies, as well as established standards-setting bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group said in an statement announcing its creation on Tuesday.Conspicuously missing from the member list for now however is Apple (AAPL.O), which analysts expect to become a dominant player in the metaverse race once it introduces a mixed reality headset this year or next. read more Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comGaming companies Roblox and Niantic also were not included among the forum's participants, nor were emerging crypto-based metaverse platforms like The Sandbox or Decentraland.Apple has not yet publicly acknowledged plans for a headset, although it has reportedly given its board a sneak peek of the product, according to Bloomberg. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new metaverse forum.The logo of Meta Platforms is seen in Davos, Switzerland, May 22, 2022. Picture taken May 22, 2022. REUTERS/Arnd WiegmannIntroducing such a device would put Apple in direct competition with Meta, which has staked its future on the growth of the metaverse and invested heavily in hardware to make its vision of interconnected virtual worlds a reality.Meta, known as Facebook until it changed its name as part of its metaverse pivot last year, has disclosed plans for a mixed-reality headset code-named "Cambria" to be released this year.Apple has been heavily involved in creating web standards such as HTML5 in the past. For three-dimensional content in the metaverse, Apple worked with Pixar on the "USDZ" file format and with Adobe to ensure it supported the format.Neil Trevett, an executive at chip maker Nvidia who is chairing the Metaverse Standards Forum, said in a statement to Reuters that any company is welcome to join the group, including participants from the crypto world.The forum aims to facilitate communication between a variety of standards organizations and companies to bring about "real-world interoperability" in the metaverse, he said, without addressing how Apple's absence would affect that goal.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Katie Paul; additional reporting by Stephen Nellis; Editing by Lincoln Feast.Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
What's happening Samsung just launched its mobile wallet platform for storing digital IDs, credit cards, car keys and other essentials. Why it matters Smartphone makers are attempting to replace the physical wallet with digital alternatives. Google recently announced a similar revamp to its Wallet app, while Apple is adding new features to Apple Pay. Samsung is the latest tech giant trying to replace your physical wallet with a digital one that lives on your phone. The company on Thursday launched Samsung Wallet, a new mobile wallet for storing digital keys, boarding passes, ID cards and credit cards. Apple and Google announced major updates for their own virtual wallet platforms in recent weeks.Samsung previously announced its mobile wallet in February alongside the Galaxy S22, but only just launched the platform on Thursday. Samsung is merging two existing services to create Samsung Wallet. The app combines Samsung Pay, its mobile payment service for storing payment cards and vaccine records, and Samsung Pass, which manages passwords and login information for apps and websites. The unified app signals an expansion of Samsung's efforts to make its service better compete with those offered by Apple and Google. Samsung Wallet is launching via an app update, and Galaxy device owners can migrate their information directly from the Samsung Wallet and Samsung Pass apps. Samsung Wallet will support official forms of identification such as driver's licenses and student IDs later this year. Google also announcement in May that it's working with governments to incorporate IDs into Google Wallet. Apple Wallet already supports virtual IDs in several states. Read more: What iOS 16 and Android 13 Reveal About the Future of SmartphonesSamsung also wants its wallet app to serve as a hub for digital keys to your car and home, functionality that's already available on the iPhone. The company says it's working with nine home security companies on virtual home keys, and Samsung Wallet will also integrate with the company's SmartThings platform. As for car keys, Samsung Wallet will support digital car keys for certain BMW, Hyundai and Genesis models. Korean Air will also be Samsung's first partner for storing digital boarding passes.In addition to storing traditional payment methods like credit, debit and loyalty cards, Samsung will also allow users to manage their cryptocurrencies from its new Wallet app. The entire platform is protected by Samsung's Knox security software. American are increasingly embracing the idea of replacing their physical credit cards with digital ones. Usage of in-store mobile payment services is expected to surpass 50% of all smartphone users in the US by 2025, says a 2021 report from eMarketer. Now, tech companies are developing more comprehensive alternatives to the traditional wallet, a mission that Google and Apple both made clear during their recent press events. "With Apple Wallet, we're working hard on our goal to replace your physical wallet," Corey Fugman, Apple's senior director for Wallet and Apple Pay, said during the company's Worldwide Developers Conference last week. Adoption is estimated to take off in the coming years. One in two people are expected to use a mobile wallet by 2025, according to a July 2021 report from financial tech company Boku and market research company Juniper Research. The launch of Samsung Wallet is also another sign that tech companies are increasingly relying on apps and services to lock in existing users. | Tech Giants |
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration. All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.”
The leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. It’s no coincidence that so many GOP-controlled states are rushing to pass similar pieces of legislation in such a short period of time.
Republican legislators claim they’re tightening up election procedures to address (unfounded) concerns about fraud in the 2020 election. But what’s really behind this effort is a group of conservative Washington insiders who have been pushing these same kinds of voting restrictions for decades, with the explicit aim of helping Republicans win elections. The difference now is that Trump’s baseless claims about 2020 have given them the ammunition to get the bills passed, and the conservative movement, led by Heritage, is making an unprecedented investment to get them over the finish line.
“We’re working with these state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills,” Anderson told the Heritage Foundation donors. In addition to drafting the bills in some cases, “we’ve also hired state lobbyists to make sure that in these targeted states we’re meeting with the right people.” To “create this echo chamber,” as Anderson put it, Heritage is spending $24 million over two years in eight battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin—to pass and defend restrictive voting legislation. Every Tuesday, the group leads a call with right-wing advocacy groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks to coordinate these efforts at the highest levels of the conservative movement. “We literally give marching orders for the week ahead,” Anderson said. “All so we’re singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state bills are across the country.”
Days before the Georgia legislature would pass its sweeping bill rolling back access to the ballot, Anderson said she met with Gov. Brian Kemp and urged him to quickly sign the bill when it reached his desk. “I had one message for him,” said Anderson, a former Trump administration official in the Office of Management and Budget. “Do not wait to sign that bill. If you wait even an hour, you will look weak. This bill needs to be signed immediately.” Kemp followed Anderson’s advice, signing the bill right after its passage. Heritage called it a “historic voting security bill.”
Anderson said she delivered “the same message” to Republican governors in Texas, Arizona, and Florida. Texas is the next big fight for Heritage. Anderson said Heritage Action wrote “19 provisions” in a Texas House bill that would make it a criminal offense for election officials to give a mail ballot request form to a voter who hadn’t explicitly asked for one and would subject poll workers to criminal penalties for removing partisan poll challengers who are accused of voter intimidation. It’s expected to pass in the coming days.
“Gov. Abbott will sign it quickly,” Anderson said. She warned of corporate opposition to the bill, following actions by Georgia-based companies to distance themselves from the restrictive voting bill there. “American Airlines, Dell, they’re coming after us,” she said. “We need to be ready for the next fight in Texas.”
In response to a request for comment, Anderson said in a statement, “We are proud of our work at the national level and in states across this country to promote commonsense reforms that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. We’ve been transparent about our plans and public with our policy recommendations, and we won’t be intimidated by the left’s smear campaign and cancel culture.”
Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a former George W. Bush administration official who for two decades has been the driving force behind policies that restrict access to the ballot, spoke alongside Anderson at the donor summit.
“Hans is briefing governors, secretaries of state, state attorney generals, state elected officials,” Anderson said. “Just what three weeks ago, we had a huge call with secretaries of state, right?”
“We’ve now for several years been having a private briefing of the best conservative secretaries of state in the country that has so annoyed the left that they have been doing everything they can to try to find out what happens at that meeting,” von Spakovsky replied. “So far unsuccessfully,” Anderson said. “No leaks.”
Though the bills shaped by Heritage have been sold as advancing “election integrity,” they appear aimed more at helping GOP candidates take back power. “We are going to take the fierce fire that is in every single one of our bellies,” Anderson told the donors in April, “to right the wrongs of November.”
The Heritage Foundation was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a well-connected conservative activist on a mission to create more aggressive conservative infrastructure to rival more liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution. Weyrich, who was also Heritage’s first president, went on to co-found the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which pairs corporations with conservative state legislators to draft model legislation, and the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, which mobilized evangelical voters behind GOP causes and candidates. Heritage received major funding from leading right-wing donors such as Charles and David Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Joseph Coors.
Speaking in 1980 at a meeting of evangelical leaders in Dallas, Weyrich bluntly articulated his radical views on voting rights. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
In the years since, the Heritage Foundation became the driving force behind much of the Republican Party agenda, writing many of the policy recommendations that were enacted under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. It remains one of the best-funded organizations in GOP circles. It raised more than $76 million in 2020, according to its most recent annual report. More than $1.6 million of that was raised from corporations, most of which chose to remain anonymous. But according to the annual report from 2019, Google, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, and the multi-level marketing company Amway all gave at least $100,000, and Citigroup and Hitachi each gave $25,000.
In 2010, as opposition on the right to the Obama administration reached a fever pitch, Heritage launched Heritage Action, a dark money group that does not have to disclose its donors but has received at least $500,000 from the Koch brothers. The goal was to connect the Heritage Foundation to the growing Tea Party movement and to enable the group to undertake more aggressive political activities, such as leading opposition to the Affordable Care Act and promoting a government shutdown in 2013. This right-wing advocacy alienated Republicans on Capitol Hill, with former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn accusing the group of “destroying the Republican Party.”
Former Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint described the relationship between Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action as “the one-two punch.” The foundation writes the policy, and Heritage Action makes it happen. Heritage Action raised more than $11 million in 2019.
The mastermind behind the nationwide voting restrictions operation is von Spakovsky, who’s done more than just about anyone in GOP circles to spread the myth of widespread voter fraud over the past two decades.
During the Bush administration, von Spakovsky was a special counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where he played a key role in the department’s approval of a 2005 voter ID law from Georgia—among the first of its kind—over objections from career department lawyers, who said it was discriminatory. While advocating internally for the law, von Spakovsky published a law review article under the pseudonym “Publius” praising voter ID laws, in a move that experts said violated Justice Department ethics guidelines. (Von Spakovsky said in a statement that he received approval from a Justice Department ethics adviser and his supervisor for the article. He added, “Contrary to the maliciously false claims in the Mother Jones story, I have worked hard for many years to ensure that every eligible citizen is able to vote.”)
“It’s like he goes to bed dreaming about this, and gets up in the morning wondering, ‘What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote?’” the late civil rights icon John Lewis once said of von Spakovsky. In 2017, von Spakovsky joined Donald Trump’s ill-fated Commission on Election Integrity, which was formed after Trump falsely claimed 3 million people voted illegally in California in the 2016 election, with the aim of unearthing evidence of voter fraud in order to justify new ballot restrictions. Von Spakovsky argued the commission should exclude Democrats and “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” and helped Vice Chair Kris Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, draft a letter requesting sensitive voter data from all 50 states. The request was met with massive pushback, and the commission, facing a flurry of lawsuits, abruptly disbanded in January 2018 without finding any evidence of fraud.
Though Anderson called von Spakovsky “the premier election law expert across this country,” his work has not fared well in court. During a trial challenging Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship law for voter registration, Kobach hired von Spakovsky to support his claim that illegal votes by noncitizens had swung US elections. But under questioning, von Spakovsky admitted he couldn’t name a single election where votes by noncitizens had decided the outcome. A federal judge wrote that the court gave “little weight to Mr. von Spakovsky’s opinion,” citing “several misleading and unsupported examples of noncitizen voter registration.”
Nonetheless, von Spakovsky’s sensationalist claims about stolen elections and advocacy for policies that restrict voting have found an increasingly receptive audience among Republicans following Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“The one good thing that came out of last year’s elections,” von Spakovsky said at the Heritage Action event in April, “is I think finally a lot of members of the public, and particularly state legislators, realized that these vulnerabilities exist, have existed for a long time, and have figured out in many states we really need to do something to fix it.”
Indeed, Heritage has been at the forefront of weaponizing Trump’s Big Lie of widespread voter fraud in order to build support for policies that restrict access to the ballot. “A lot of bad things happened in 2020,” Heritage Foundation senior adviser Genevieve Wood said in April to the donors, who ranked “election integrity” as their top issue in a survey this year. “But you should know a lot of good things are beginning to happen now in 2021. You’re seeing it in Georgia. You’re seeing in the state of Arizona. You’re beginning to see it in Texas and so many more.”
Heritage began its lobbying campaign early in Georgia. In February, a representative from the group delivered a letter signed by 2,000 conservative activists to Republicans in the state legislature, urging them to rewrite the state’s voting laws after GOP defeats in the November presidential election and the January Senate runoffs (where Heritage Action contacted 1.5 million voters on behalf of the losing Republican candidates). The activists wrote that they had “lost faith in the process and the outcome of their elections.” Soon after, bills restricting voting access started moving through the legislature.
“Then we provided testimony, expert witnesses, analysis, and actually how to draft these bills so that they were legally tight,” Anderson said. “So, [Democratic voting rights lawyer] Marc Elias, if you know that name from the progressive left, he’s like their legal pit bull. He goes after all of this with lawsuits, so that Marc Elias can’t find any holes.”
Elias has filed a suit challenging the Georgia law. “The Georgia law violates both the Voting Rights Act and the US Constitution,” Elias told Mother Jones. “Heritage Action claiming that this is legally tight is like hearing from the Titanic shipbuilders about how much confidence they have in its maiden voyage. This law is based on a Big Lie, denies Black, Brown, and young voters of their rights, and will be struck down in court.”
Republican state Rep. Barry Fleming, the author of the bill in the Georgia House, was a guest at Heritage’s donor summit. “I can tell you, back in February, I felt like some days we were alone in Georgia,” Fleming said. “And then the Heritage Foundation stepped in, and that began to bring us a boost to help turn around, get the truth out about what we were really trying to do. And I’m here in part to say thank you and God bless you.”
A number of majority-Black counties that Fleming represents as a lawyer in private practice when he’s not at the legislature fired him in protest after the bill passed. But he credited Heritage for helping Republican legislators resist what Anderson called “economic terrorism.” (The group has launched a $1 million ad campaign to defend the law on CNBC and local Georgia stations, which Anderson said is aimed at “woke CEOs [who] didn’t read the bill.”)
“But for the Heritage Foundation and you stepping up to help us, what are other part-time legislators across this nation going to think when they try to do the right thing and secure our elections if they’re allowed to fire us from our jobs, threaten our livelihoods just because we stood up to try to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat?” Fleming asked.
Other measures Anderson said Heritage drafted included “three provisions” in legislation adopted by Iowa Republicans a few weeks before Georgia’s law, including one placing voters on inactive status if they sit out one election cycle and removing them from the rolls if they fail to take action, a system that could lead hundreds of thousands of voters to be purged.
“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” Anderson said. “We worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony…Little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’” (Elias has also filed suit against the Iowa law.) Anderson also took credit for a Arizona law enacted in early April that prohibits election officials from accepting private funding, which was used in 2020 in both red and blue counties for things like opening more polling locations and drop box sites, saying, “We’re kicking Mark Zuckerberg out of all of our state and federal elections.” And she claimed that another bill signed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday, which could purge more than 100,000 people from the state’s list of voters who automatically receive a mail ballot, was “straight from the Heritage recommendations.”
A Heritage lobbyist met early on with Florida Republicans to draft a bill largely mimicking the Georgia law, which passed the legislature over the unanimous opposition of Florida’s county elections supervisors. While the bill worked its way through the legislature, Anderson urged DeSantis to champion it. “I’ve got a call this afternoon with Gov. DeSantis’ team getting an update,” she said on April 22 to her donors. “Why is that? He needs to do more. He needs to say, get this bill on my desk.” DeSantis signed the bill on May 6 behind closed doors, with only Fox & Friends cameras allowed in for an “exclusive.”
“The scandal is the national pressure coming down on states with an intent to keep people from voting,” says Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the corporate watchdog group Public Citizen. After record turnout in 2020, “writing these bills, pushing these bills, is a mechanism to attempt to return to those new voters being unable to vote.”
In addition to pushing state-based voting restrictions, Heritage Action is leading the effort to block the passage of HR 1, Democrats’ sweeping democracy reform bill that would preempt many of these voter suppression laws by enacting policies like automatic and Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting, and expanded mail-in voting on a nationwide basis. “HR 1 is basically the dream bill of every left-wing advocacy group we’ve been fighting against for years on election issues,” von Spakovsky said at the donor event.
Von Spakovsky said at the beginning of the year that Heritage put out “a short summary of the worst provisions of a 900-page bill. Now, you all know congressional staffers don’t like reading 900-page bills. That fact sheet we put out is being used by congressional staffers, members of Congress, to go up and fight HR 1.” The group dubbed the bill the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” a label that was soon being used by leading Republicans like Ted Cruz.
“We’ve made sure that every single member of Congress knows just how bad the bill is,” Anderson added. “Then we’ve made sure there’s an echo chamber of support around these senators driven by your Heritage Action activists and sentinels across the country where we’ve driven hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, place letters to the editor, hosted events, and run television and digital ads.”
In March, the group organized a rally in West Virginia to urge centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose the bill and “stand up for WV values,” according to an invitation obtained by Documented, even as it bused in conservative activists from states hundreds of miles away. Heritage Action announced on Wednesday it would run ads this summer pressuring Democratic senators in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana, and New Hampshire to preserve the filibuster in order to block HR 1.
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Anderson said in April. “If we don’t win this, we lose our republic, period.”
To Elias, the video from the Heritage summit is proof that Republican state lawmakers are pursuing voting restrictions not in response to real local problems, but at the behest of well-funded Washington insiders. “It’s not being run by a coalition of state legislators,” he says. “It’s not being run by election administrators. It’s being run out of an office in Washington, DC, by people whose sole agenda is to make it harder for Black, Brown, and young voters to participate in the electoral process. Republicans who adopt these model laws should be ashamed of themselves.”
Watch the full video here. This story has been updated to include comment from Hans von Spakovsky.
Nick Surgey is an investigative reporter and the executive director of Documented. | Tech Giants |
Morgan Stanley raised its price target on Nvidia to $500 and called the stock its "top pick."
Analysts said demand has picked up since the chip maker's blockbuster earnings report last month.
Nvidia is getting orders from customers who weren't thought of as major buyers until now.
Nvidia stock has more room to climb as demand has only picked up since the chipmaker's blockbuster earnings report last month, Morgan Stanley said.
Analysts raised their price target on Nvidia, which has blown away Wall Street with its artificial intelligence chips, to $500 from $450, representing 15% upside from current levels.
That's despite shares already soaring 200% year to date and joining a handful of other tech giants with a market cap of $1 trillion or more.
Morgan Stanley also named Nvidia its new "top pick," taking that moniker away from the previous holder, rival chip stock AMD. Analysts said Nvidia has more near-term upside, predicting it will be the only company that will beat estimates and raise its guidance this calendar year.
"The demand environment for AI training has continued to pick up since NVIDIA reported, with our industry contracts reporting daily new orders from customers that were not contemplated as major customers until now," the note said.
Last month, Nvidia increased its second-quarter revenue forecast to $11 billion, more than 50% above consensus, due to the growing generative artificial intelligence market. The company's AI chipsets help drive the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet's Bard chatbots.
Morgan Stanley said there has been a rapid shift in investment away from the traditional server infrastructure and toward AI infrastructure, calling Nvidia the "cleanest story in AI hardware."
"While we have been positive since upgrading the stock earlier in the year, we were nowhere near as optimistic as we should have been," analysts said.
Not only are existing customers accelerating their spending, but there's also strong spending coming from app developers, enterprise IT departments, and even governments, according to the note.
While the numbers may not be sustainable in the long term, Morgan Stanley still sees "higher capital intensity" through the next several years.
"Frankly, the commentary around these markets is more positive than anything we have heard in 29 years of covering semiconductor stocks."
Read the original article on Business Insider | Tech Giants |
- Microsoft and Google are in a renewed battle over online search.
- Unveiling new AI-powered tools in Bing, Microsoft hopes to steal market share from Mountain View.
- Google has long benefited from a costly deal to be the default search engine on Apple devices.
Google's stock erased billions of dollars in value following an AI event on Wednesday where it demonstrated how the company will incorporate conversational chatbots and natural language answers into search. The company's chatbot, named Bard, made a factual error in one of its answers, and the product demo appeared to be a rushed response to Microsoft's revamped Bing with ChatGPT, which was unveiled just a day earlier.
The launch of ChatGPT within Bing has been heralded by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as a "new day" for search. He made it clear the company hopes to stoke Google into a renewed competition over the future of search, one in which users get answers to questions directly within the results page without needing to navigate through a list of blue links.
But a crucial detail that's been missing in the conversation is that Google has cemented its search dominance in part by controlling key distribution channels. The company pays Apple an estimated $15 billion a year to be the default search engine on the more than 1 billion iPhones and other Apple devices in use globally.
The Justice Department made the search deal the center of an antitrust case it filed against Google in 2020, arguing that it disadvantages smaller competitors that cannot afford to compete for the default spot on Apple devices.
That deal, and Google's control over Android and Chrome, could make it difficult for Microsoft to gain market share in search, even if the AI-based features in Bing increase its usage.
On top of the Apple deal, Google controls Android and Chrome, with roughly 71% and 65% of the smartphone and browser markets, respectively. Put another way, the vast majority of smartphones, globally, have Google set as the default search engine.
Microsoft says there are more than 1.4 billion active Windows devices in circulation. The company has been investing in its Edge browser, which is installed on new Windows hardware and uses Bing as the default.
In a note Thursday, Bernstein analysts wrote that the firm had received "numerous requests" from investors for information regarding the Google-Apple search deal in recent days. That suggests there's some nervousness about Microsoft swooping in to try and cut a deal with Apple for the default spot. Based on its understanding of Google's deal with Apple, Bernstein believes that a 3-year default search deal is coming up for renewal later this year.
The most recent data from analytics firm StatCounter estimates that Google commands nearly 93% of the global search market compared to Microsoft Bing's 3% share. Even with such a small share of the market, Bing is a key piece of Microsoft's $10 billion-a-year advertising business. And the company has been pushing more into the advertising space with a deal to serve as the tech and sales provider for Netflix's new ad-supported tier. It said last year that it hopes to double ad revenue from $10 billion to $20 billion a year — Bing could be a big pillar of the strategy.
"Default iPhone search is the most accessible prize in terms of distribution," wrote Stratechery's Ben Thompson on Thursday. "But that would be a massive financial commitment without the commensurate advertiser base and, frankly, search quality, that Google has. Bing is still Bing."
It's difficult to parse the superiority of search results from Bing versus Google, but the latter benefits from its billions of users that produce a valuable feedback loop for improving search quality. Google analyzes the billions of searches users place daily in order to return the most desirable results. Theoretically, Microsoft could outbid Google for the default position on iOS and gain hundreds of millions of new users, helping it to improve the quality of its results.
To hammer home its commitment to the revamped Bing, Microsoft has said that it believes that every 1% of market share it can take from Google would represent $2 billion in additional search revenue. Microsoft is serious about becoming a contender in advertising and is willing to spend to get there — last month it invested $10 billion into OpenAI, the company powering Bing's new conversational AI.
Microsoft has acknowledged that conversational AI searches that provide answers directly within search could reduce potential monetization from sponsored links, but that the impact would be greater for Google.
It's unclear whether Apple would want to change the default search engine to Bing, but it's always had a contentious relationship with Google. At the very least, a bidding war could give Apple leverage to demand a higher price for the default position. Microsoft has roughly $100 billion in cash on its balance sheet, making it one of the few companies that can compete with Google for the spot.
A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment on any potential attempt to bid for default search on Apple devices. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Apple's services business, which includes the search deal, was a bright spot in the company's most recent earnings report.
For all the talk about self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, advertising remains the largest source of revenue for Google as well as other tech giants like Meta. Microsoft wants a bigger slice of the pie. | Tech Giants |
Imagine waking up to find that the name of the business you created more than a decade ago has been suddenly hijacked by one of the most powerful companies in the world.That's what Justin Bolognino says happened to him, when Facebook rebranded itself as Meta last year. His small business is called META — its full name is METAx LLC."It was surreal. It was like watching a movie," Bolognino told CNBC in an exclusive on-camera interview, recalling when he first heard the news that Facebook was changing its name."This is not a scenario I ever wanted to have. This is not a scenario I would wish on my worst enemy," said Bolognino, who's now suing Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms, for trademark infringement and unfair competition. "When Facebook stole the Meta brand from us, it just completely decimated our business."Bolognino says he started his small business 12 years ago to create multi-sensory live experiences using virtual and augmented reality for events like Coachella. But business came to a screeching halt, Bolognino said, after Facebook's announcement last year."[The services we offer] are drastically identical… we have the same goal which is social immersion in virtual spaces," he said.Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme, Bolognino's attorney and a partner at Pryor Cashman LLP, says she immediately reached out to Meta Platforms to tell the company it was infringing on her client's intellectual property rights. "This issue of what's called reverse confusion, when you've got a small player who's been doing their business for a period of time, and then you get a giant corporate behemoth with sheer arrogance says 'I'm going to own this mark now and I'm going to do business with this regardless of the fact that you were here before me,'" she told CNBC.Finguerra-DuCharme said the two companies engaged in eight months of negotiations. Despite handing over thousands of pages of information to resolve the issue, Meta Platforms would not come to the table, she said."Now my client goes out to try to market and promote its services, consumers now falsely and mistakenly believe that its services are coming from Facebook," she said.Finguerra-DuCharme says her client has no option but to sue. According to the complaint, META's business has been "irreparably and irrevocably harmed."CNBC reached out to Meta Platforms for comment, but did not immediately hear back. Bolognino says he'll keep fighting no matter how long it takes."We would like to be compensated for our 12 years worth of building a brand so cool and so valuable that one of the biggest companies on Earth and Facebook wanted to steal it from us," he said.The lawsuit doesn't specify the amount of monetary damages.University of Michigan law professor Jessica Litman, co-author of the casebook "Trademarks and Unfair Competition Law: Cases and Materials," said META has a "completely plausible claim [against Meta Platforms] and could well prevail." "The corporate name is METAx LLC, but the company registered META as a service mark in 2017, and the complaint alleges that they have used META as a service mark for its business," she said. "It doesn't matter for trademark infringement purposes what a party's corporate name is; it matters what trademark or service mark it uses in its business."Litman says Meta Platforms probably wants to be careful about settling with META because there are a bunch of other businesses out there that are also using "Meta" as part of their mark – and could be encouraged to follow suit."On the other hand, it will almost certainly be cheaper to pay META enough money to cause it to change its name than to litigate the suit to its conclusion," Litman said.WATCH: Meta could grow the metaverse, but there's a long road ahead | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit is building a program to help customers develop and deploy new kinds of artificial intelligence products as the biggest seller of cloud services tries to match Microsoft and Google in the market for so-called generative AI.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Amazon Web Services is investing $100 million to set up the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, which will link customers with company experts in AI and machine learning. They’ll help a range of clients in health care, financial services and manufacturing build customized applications using the new technology. Highspot, Twilio, Ryanair and Lonely Planet will be early users of the innovation center, Amazon said.
The goal is to help sell more cloud services, convincing clients to turn to AWS as they build new generative AI applications rather than Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, which has seized an early lead owing to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, or Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which pioneered much of the early technology underpinning this new frontier.
“We will bring our internal AWS experts free-of-charge to a whole bunch of AWS customers, focusing on folks with significant AWS presence, and go help them turbocharge their efforts to get real with generative AI, get beyond the talk,” AWS Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky said Thursday at Bloomberg’s technology conference in San Francisco.
Amazon unveiled its own generative AI tools earlier this year, but longtime employees and customers deemed the announcement uncharacteristically vague, Bloomberg reported in May. One customer who tested the tools awarded the technology an “incomplete” grade, while people familiar with AWS product launches wondered if Amazon released the AI tools to counter perceptions it has fallen behind Microsoft and Google.
Amazon has denied its generative AI tools were rushed or incomplete and said the technology is ready for customers to test and provide feedback. Asked about Amazon’s position in the AI race, Selipsky said: “Are we really going to have a conversation about three steps into a 10k race? Amazon has always taken a much more long-term view of the world than any other company.”
With the viral releases of OpenAI’s Dall-E image-generation software and the ChatGPT chatbot over the past year, companies are rushing to incorporate the technology into their products and services, and the cloud giants are positioning themselves to cash in. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh estimates the market for generative AI, in which AI models analyze volumes of data and use it to generate new images, texts, audio and video, could grow by 42% to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032.
--With assistance from Brad Stone and Natalie Lung.
(Updated with customers with early access to the innovation center.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
DeSantis: Companies like Google ‘exercising way more power than Standard Oil ever did’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said in a new interview that corporate behemoths like Google have far more power than mega companies of the 20th century.
“If you look at some of these companies, like Google, and look at the footprint that they have, they don’t necessarily offend historical antitrust law because the antitrust law is focusing on jacking up prices on people,” DeSantis said in an interview with The American Conservative.
“But I would say they’re exercising way more power than Standard Oil ever did, or any of the trust of the early 20th century,” he continued. “So the question is, is it okay to have a handful of private power centers that really, really dominate our society? And is it appropriate to have something like an antitrust principle applied there? I think it probably would be appropriate.”
Other officials and lawmakers in both parties have also called to rein in Big Tech companies. In his State of the Union speech, President Biden boosted an antitrust reform proposal targeting tech giants and called on Congress to “prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage.”
A group of GOP lawmakers backed a set of proposals last year that would aim to give antitrust enforcers more power to rein in tech giants.
DeSantis also spoke about his ongoing feud with Disney, which sued him last month alleging that he harmed its business. DeSantis said in the interview that the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the 25,000 acres that Disney has owned and self-governed for decades, was “corporate welfare.”
“It is corporate welfare,” DeSantis said. “We are under no obligation as a state to continue that arrangement.”
DeSantis signed legislation earlier this year to replace the Reedy Creek Improvement District with The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, a board appointed by DeSantis to oversee Disney. The new board voted last month to void previous agreements Disney made with the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which prompted Disney to sue the Florida governor.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | Tech Giants |
In a significant leap for the field of quantum computing, Google has reportedly engineered a quantum computer that can execute calculations in mere moments that would take the world’s most advanced supercomputers nearly half a century to process.
The news, reported by the Daily Telegraph, could signify a landmark moment in the evolution of this emerging technology.
Quantum computing, a science that takes advantage of the oddities of quantum physics, remains a fast-moving and somewhat contentious field.
Quantum computers hold immense promise for potentially revolutionizing sectors like climate science and drug discovery. They offer computation speeds far beyond those of their classical counterparts.
However, this advanced technology is not without its potential drawbacks. Quantum computers pose significant challenges for contemporary encryption systems, thus placing them high on the list of national security concerns.
The contentious discussion continues. Critics argue that, despite the impressive milestones, these quantum machines still need to demonstrate more practicality outside of academic research.
Google’s latest iteration of its quantum machine, the Sycamore quantum processor, currently holds 70 qubits. This is a substantial leap from the 53 qubits of its earlier version. This makes the new processor approximately 241 million times more robust than the previous model.
As each qubit can exist in a state of zero, one, or both simultaneously, the capability of storing and processing this level of quantum information is an achievement that even the fastest classical computer, however rapid or slow, cannot match.
The Google team, in a paper published on the arXiv pre-print server, remarked: “Quantum computers hold the promise of executing tasks beyond the capability of classical computers. We estimate the computational cost against improved classical methods and demonstrate that our experiment is beyond the capabilities of existing classical supercomputers.”
Even the currently fastest classical computers, such as the Frontier supercomputer based in Tennessee, cannot rival the potential of quantum computers. These traditional machines operate on the language of binary code, confined to a dual-state reality of zeroes and ones. The quantum paradigm, however, transcends this limitation.
It remains uncertain how much Google’s quantum computer cost to create. Regardless, this development certainly holds the promise of transformative computational power.
For instance, according to the Google team, it would take the Frontier supercomputer merely 6.18 seconds to match a calculation from Google’s 53-qubit computer. However, the same machine would take an astonishing 47.2 years to match a computation executed by Google’s latest 70-qubit device.
Many experts in the field have praised Google’s significant strides. Steve Brierley, chief executive of Cambridge-based quantum company Riverlane, labeled Google’s advancement as a “major milestone.”
He also added: “The squabbling about whether we had reached, or indeed could reach, quantum supremacy is now resolved.”
Similarly, Professor Winfried Hensinger, director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies, commended Google for resolving a specific academic problem tough to compute on a conventional computer.
“Their most recent demonstration is yet another powerful demonstration that quantum computers are developing at a steady pace,” said Professor Hensinger.
He stressed that the upcoming critical step would be the creation of quantum computers capable of correcting their inherent operational errors.
While IBM has not yet commented on Google’s recent work, it is clear that this progress in the realm of quantum computing has caught the attention of researchers and companies worldwide. This will open new prospects and competition in the evolution of computational technology. Let the games begin!
Quantum computing, a remarkable leap in technological advancement, holds the potential to redefine our computational capacities. Harnessing the strange yet fascinating laws of quantum physics, it could significantly outperform classical computers in solving certain types of problems.
Traditional computers operate based on bits, which can be in a state of either 0 or 1. Quantum computers, on the other hand, operate on quantum bits, known as qubits. Unlike traditional bits, a qubit can exist in both states simultaneously, thanks to a quantum principle called superposition.
Superposition increases the computing power of a quantum computer exponentially. For example, two qubits can exist in four states simultaneously (00, 01, 10, 11), three qubits in eight states, and so on. This allows quantum computers to process a massive number of possibilities at once.
Another key quantum principle quantum computers exploit is entanglement. Entangled qubits are deeply linked. Change the state of one qubit, and the state of its entangled partner will change instantaneously, no matter the distance. This feature allows quantum computers to process complex computations more efficiently.
The unusual characteristics of quantum computing make it ideal for solving complex problems that classical computers struggle with.
Cryptography is a notable area where quantum computing can make a significant difference. The capacity to factor large numbers quickly makes quantum computers a threat to current encryption systems but also opens the door for the development of more secure quantum encryption methods.
In the field of medicine, quantum computing could enable the modeling of complex molecular structures, speeding up drug discovery. Quantum simulations could offer insights into new materials and processes that might take years to discover through experimentation.
Despite its promising potential, quantum computing is not without challenges. Quantum states are delicate, and maintaining them for a practical length of time—known as quantum coherence—is a significant hurdle. The slightest environmental interference can cause qubits to lose their state, a phenomenon known as decoherence.
Quantum error correction is another daunting challenge. Due to the fragility of qubits, errors are more likely to occur in quantum computations than classical ones. Developing efficient error correction methods that don’t require a prohibitive number of qubits remains a central focus in quantum computing research.
While quantum computing is still in its infancy, the rapid pace of innovation signals a promising future. Tech giants like IBM, Google, and Microsoft, as well as numerous startups, are making significant strides in quantum computing research.
In the coming years, we can expect quantum computers to continue growing in power and reliability. Quantum supremacy—a point where quantum computers surpass classical computers in computational capabilities—may be closer than we think.
Quantum computing represents a thrilling frontier, promising to reshape how we tackle complex problems. As research and development persist, we inch closer to unlocking the full potential of this revolutionary technology.
—- | Tech Giants |
Canada Halts Ads On Facebook, Instagram In Feud Over New Law
The Canadian government is suspending advertisement on Facebook and Instagram in response to Meta Platforms Inc.’s plan to end news availability on its platforms in the country.
(Bloomberg) -- The Canadian government is suspending its advertisements on Facebook and Instagram in response to Meta Platforms Inc.’s plan to permanently end news availability on its platforms in the country.
It’s the latest escalation in the quarrel that erupted when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government passed a law in June requiring digital platforms — including Meta and Alphabet Inc. — to negotiate commercial deals with local publishers for featuring news content. Both tech giants said they intended to block news on their platforms before or when the law takes effect later this year.
“Platforms benefit from the status quo. They benefit from the fact that there’s currently nothing forcing them to contribute to our Canadian news system,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Wednesday in Ottawa. “That status quo isn’t working. All we want, all Canadians want, is for these platforms to contribute their fair share.”
While Alphabet also plans to remove links to news from Canadian publishers, Rodriguez said the company’s concerns will likely be resolved in the regulatory process. Meanwhile, Meta has “decided to be unreasonable, irresponsible” and started blocking news in the country, prompting the government to suspend all of its ads on the platforms, he said.
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram received the largest share of the government’s spending on social media, according to the latest annual report on advertising activities. During fiscal year 2021-22, Canada spent C$11.4 million ($8.6 million) on Facebook and Instagram, accounting for more than half of its total social media expenditure. It spent C$8.8 million on Alphabet’s Google during that period.
Separately, media firm Quebecor Inc. said it’s withdrawing all advertising by its subsidiaries and business units from Meta’s platforms. Cable television operator Cogeco Communications Inc. also said it would do the same.
“We’re telling both platforms to stay at the table, work through the regulatory process with us, contribute their fair share and keep news on their platforms,” Rodriguez said. “We believe we have a path forward, and we’re willing to continue talking with the platforms.”
--With assistance from Mathieu Dion.
(Update with more details and quotes.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Microsoft plans to lay off thousands of employees to reduce costs as the global economy slows, the company said Wednesday.The cuts will affect 10,000 people worldwide. In a blog post announcing the layoffs, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed to widespread fears of recession and a downturn in consumer demand, which have led to similar cutbacks by other tech giants.“As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the [COVID-19] pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less,” he wrote. “We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”Nadella said the cuts will affect “less than 5 percent of our total employee base” at Microsoft. As of June 30, the company had a full-time workforce of around 221,000.Some employees are receiving layoff notifications Wednesday. But cuts are expected to continue through the end of March, likely hitting divisions such as engineering and human resources, according to media reports.“While we are eliminating roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas,” Nadella said.The CEO added that his company is “taking a $1.2 billion charge in Q2” — the second fiscal quarter, which ended in December — “related to severance costs, changes to our hardware portfolio, and the cost of lease consolidation as we create higher density across our workspaces.”Other tech companies seeing major cutbacks in recent months include Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.RelatedMicrosoftLayoffsrecession | Tech Giants |
Google Pixel phones are seen on display at the Google retail store in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, U.S., June 17, 2021. REUTERS/Shannon StapletonRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSept 12 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is considering moving some production of Pixel phones to India following disruptions in China from COVID-19 lockdowns and Beijing's rising tensions with the United States, the Information reported on Monday, citing a source.Alphabet, which did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment, has solicited bids from manufacturers in India to make between 500,000 and 1 million Pixel smartphones, equivalent to 10% to 20% of the estimated annual production for the device, according to the report. (https://bit.ly/3Bcqoye)The company's Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai previewed a plan to manufacture in India earlier this year but a final decision has not yet been made, the report added. If approved, India production operations will still require import of components from China.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comAlphabet is also considering Vietnam as another manufacturing base, according to Nikkei. (https://reut.rs/3qulqYH)Apple Inc (AAPL.O), the company's main smartphone rival, already makes at least four models up to iPhone 13 in India through contract manufacturing partners Foxconn (2354.TW) and Wistron. It is reportedly considering making iPhone 14, the latest model unveiled on Sept. 7, also in India. read more Global supply chains were disrupted earlier this year when China locked down key tech hub Shanghai, among other cities, due to a surge in COVID cases. More recently, U.S. banned exports of some high-end chips to China, escalating tensions with the Asian nation.The company is set to release new Pixel phone models, and its first smartwatch, at an event in the U.S. on Oct. 6.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Yuvraj Malik in BengaluruOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
The tide is seemingly turning against Meta, Google and other tech giants. Groundbreaking new European Union legislation is imminent, aimed at forcing the large digital platforms to do more to keep users safe and cutting down market abuses, data capture and surveillance infrastructure. As the Digital Services Act package was being finalised, the very public crossing of swords between Elon Musk and the European Commission over Twitter captured headlines. Yet the Musk spectacle was a sideshow.Much more urgently in need of scrutiny is big tech’s hidden lobbying against the DSA. It is unlikely that Brussels has previously seen campaigns on such a scale and practices so out of line with the requirements of a democratic, open society.The DSA will be rubber-stamped by the European parliament next week. When it finally comes into force this year, it will allow Europe for the first time to neutralise some of the harms caused by social media platforms. But the compromises made in getting here also reflect the extraordinary power of tech companies to influence decision-making, and by extension to subvert our democracies.We learned from big tobacco how outsized interests create entire ecosystems to influence and manipulate both civil society and policymakers. Based on my experience of and encounters with the big tech platforms from inside the EU over 12 years, I have formed the view that the Brussels policy community has been, and still insidiously is, in the grip of this corporate class – the biggest the world has ever seen.European competition law was supposedly big tech’s greatest fear. But it has patently been either too weak or too ineffectively applied to rein in the Silicon Valley giants. Profit margins as high as Google’s (under its parent company Alphabet) and Meta’s, hovering at about 30% for a decade, should be prima facie evidence that they have not been facing real competition.If an incapacity to set limits on the tech platforms were not enough, other entitlements were actually conferred on them. Along with building trillion-dollar empires on reaching into our personal data, the platforms have for more than 20 years enjoyed significant liability exemptions in both European and US law.How did big tech gain its privileged status, regulatory permissions and such a commanding presence in Europe? Brussels has tough questions to answer. As vital battles in framing “human-centric” artificial intelligence still lie ahead, the self-examination must go deep.Nick Clegg with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Dublin on 17 June 2020. Photograph: Niall Carson/PAI can provide only an account of where I have come across the tech platforms in Brussels policymaking, but I believe that central to this failure is the question of capture.In 2010 I arrived at the EC as a member of Michel Barnier’s team of advisers. Barnier was commissioner for the internal market, and I was given responsibility for digital single-market issues and intellectual property rights, including copyright reform. For me, the commission was Camelot, a near-mythic force of public policy for European citizens, armed with regulatory powers to take on the unruly interests of the globalised economy. I had a lot to learn about the dark arts of lobbying the EU.The centrepiece of EU digital single-market legislation was then, and remains, the Electronic Commerce Directive, dating from 2000. Whether by unthinking imitation of the American regulatory approach, lobbying or simply because of early-days internet enthusiasm – or likely a mix of all three – Europe had followed the US. Its rules recognised online intermediaries as “neutral” content distributors, and gave them immunity from liability for the information they hosted – in retrospect, it often seemed, no matter how toxic, indecent or illegal. By the early 2010s, the exemptions had come to be seen by many in the EU as deeply problematic. Campaigners pleaded with us for more accountability, and against the platforms’ self-regulation. They had a duty of care, it was argued. By what logic, after all, were publishers and broadcasters liable and responsible for everything they distributed, but online platforms reaching far more people and making much more money from it, were not. So why did it take the EU more than two decades to act?There is an inescapable feeling that we let much of this happen because these were US companies. There was in the commission, as elsewhere, a fascination with Silicon Valley. It was both revered and feared. A dangerous laissez-faire ideology had also come to dominate Brussels’ thinking on tech regulation. People wanted to trust that tech was progress, that its leading companies were benevolent, net neutrality and democracy went hand in hand, and that the US regulatory model was the one to emulate. To question this was close to a taboo.The platform economy had a vigorous champion in Neelie Kroes, in charge of the powerful competition portfolio between 2004 and 2009 and later the digital agenda. She was a formidable opponent of Barnier.The full story must also include platform-friendly EU governments such as the then member Britain, which privileged strong transatlantic ties and interests. Google had direct links to the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, for instance. In Brussels, Google’s influence in London was close to a “fact on the ground”. Kroes would go on to join boards of the US tech companies Uber and Salesforce after she left the commission, and Nick Clegg is now, of course, Meta’s president for global affairs.The liability exemptions were not the only internet economy battleground in the commission. Another involved copyright laws. Fierce lobbying came in from all sides, particularly around user-generated content. Should music in videos uploaded by YouTubers be subject to copyright payments and, crucially, should the platforms be obliged to prevent copyright violations? If Europe were not to stifle creativity, user-generated content should simply be exempt from copyright protection, the reformers and their supporters in Kroes’s entourage insisted.When this view ran into resistance, the public debate took a darker twist. Allegations spread that free speech was threatened and even that teenagers could be hunted down in their bedrooms by rights holders or the commission. The reality was more nuanced. The platforms were making colossal advertising profits from content produced for free by users, and content upload filters had been in use for years without choking off user creativity.I don’t remember meeting YouTube directly at the time. Its representatives were, in fact, conspicuously absent. By contrast, well-organised citizens’ and stakeholder groups came to put their views as well as canvassing members of the European parliament. At one point, I remember thinking: who are these people? It turned out that the coordinator of one of the most vocal lobbying coalitions in Brussels on digital copyright reform, representing everything from public libraries to digital rights organisations, was also the managing director of a consultancy whose clients included Google, YouTube’s owner. To me this looked like big tech “astroturfing” (where the real sponsors of a message are concealed by making it look as if it’s come from the grassroots.) Even if not, there was surely a public interest in asking if Google had influenced this coalition’s campaigning.The tech industry had other ways of imperceptibly swaying opinion in Brussels. Invitations would arrive to visit Google’s offices, or to experience its latest innovation. The bait at the time could be Google’s self-driving car, or an offer to try out Google Glass. It was the perfect, cool, lunchtime bowl of oxygen for many in Brussels eager to keep up with the new frontiers of technology. The fun and games didn’t stop there. Conferences were held in interesting spaces, usually homing in on fascinating science or engineering stories. EU officials and politicians – from heads of cabinets and director generals to MEPs – went by the dozen. Google’s tactic was as simple as its pockets were deep: through hospitality, create a positive link, thick or thin, with as many people of power as possible. In 2016, by which time I had moved to the EU’s Brexit negotiation taskforce, the commission finally proposed the directive on copyright in the digital single market. In early 2019, as the legislation was entering the final stages of debate, huge street protests took place across Europe, millions signed petitions, and MEPs were bombarded by emails warning against agreeing to anything that would “chill” online expression.YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki at the Los Angeles office in 2017. Photograph: Reed Saxon/APDebate on deep societal issues is welcome, but it is important to look behind the uproar for the long shadow of corporate interests. Big tech had helped to rally protesters to the barricades. YouTube’s chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, had told the platform’s creators across the world that the legislation posed “a threat to both your livelihood and your ability to share your voice with the world … threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs”.In the end, the commission prevailed. The copyright directive took effect across Europe a year ago. I leave it to others to judge on the substantiation of Google’s dramatic warning that it would “change the web as we know it”.Fast forward to now, and history, it seems, is repeating itself. The Digital Services Act marks the end of the platforms’ vast liability exemptions and their seeming impunity. It will impose more transparency on the platforms’ content moderation and set rules on so-called dark patterns, design features that can trick users into doing things they didn’t mean to.But it’s still only a first pass at how to deal with the many complex uses of artificial intelligence and the platforms’ recommender systems that determine not only our commercial choices but the information we get and how we see the world.Vast sums are at stake. Fourth-quarter revenues in 2021 at Google’s parent, Alphabet, jumped by more than 30%, thanks – acccording to the FT – to AI “enhancements that had improved the underlying effectiveness of the company’s ads”.No wonder that one of the biggest battles around the new EU legislation related to the behavioural or tracking advertising that underpins the tech platforms’ business success: the so-called surveillance capitalism model.Concerned about the democratic threat posed by revenue-driven data collection and micro-targeted ads, a group of MEPs organised a Tracking-Free Ads Coalition, arguing for much stricter curbs than those the commission had originally proposed.The counter-mobilisation was massive, and it came from an unexpected quarter: Brussels had never seen so many small and medium-sized business and startup organisations turn up to lobby. SMEs, it was claimed, would suffer most from a ban on tracking ads.Let’s have a closer look at some of the groups that lobbied hardest. Allied for Start-Ups was a prominent voice against restrictions on targeted ads. Its website and LinkedIn profile suggest that it is run out of California. On its 14-member strong business council sit Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Pinterest and Google.SME Connect, meanwhile, was established in 2017 and has 22 MEPs active on its board. Yet financially, it is backed by what it calls its Friends of SMEs who “support SMEs in their interest to cut red tape and create a more business-friendly environment with fair competition”. So who are they? The friends include the magnanimous Amazon, Meta, Uber and Google.The research group Corporate Europe Observatory has identified SME Connect and Allied for Start-Ups among a number of associations “ostensibly representing the interests of startups and small and medium-sized enterprises, but that are funded by big tech and whose lobbying is in line with the interests of large digital platforms”.A demonstration against the planned EU copyright reform in Berlin in Mar 2019. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/ReutersSME Connect’s flagship activity is the Coalition for Digital Ads of SMEs, a campaign that argues that “new EU rules restricting targeted ad technology would put European small businesses at risk”. I had a further look at some of the coalition’s partners. Danish Entrepreneurs is listed as Dansk Iværksætter Forening (DIF). Nothing to see here: DIF is a well-established entrepreneur association founded in 1985. Yet wait, who represents DIF in the coalition? It’s DIF’s chairperson – who, it turns out, runs a tech consultancy “in proud partnership with Google”.Other partners include Infobalt, a Lithuanian “digitech sector association” counting Google among its members; IAB Europe, the European-level association for digital marketing that includes Meta and Google as members; and Sapie, the Google-backed “Slovak alliance for innovation economy”.I have no reason to doubt that these actors believe in the messages they carry, but the more you look, the more Google and affiliated interests you find in the SMEcampaign against the EU regulation of targeted online advertising.These links are surely a matter of public interest, yet they are often not publicised. I left the commission in the spring of 2021 for a job at a Brussels thinktank. But the tentacles of platform power are never far away. I was contacted by consultancies and law firms asking whether, in addition to my work with the thinktank, I would be interested in a role as a “senior adviser” for a few major clients. “We have put together a group of media publishers who are fighting the new rules on ancillary copyright,” one pitch went. “It’s on behalf of Google, and we help them find their way around Brussels.” I politely declined the opportunity.Big tech now dominates the list of Brussels’ biggest corporate lobbying spenders, effortlessly outspending and eclipsing any other digital technologies public interest group. This lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg, given how much effort goes into influencing public opinion and policymakers in both Brussels and the EU member states through advertising, and funding third parties and seemingly independent interest groups.The coveted world of Brussels thinktanks, where the impact of proposed policy is supposed to be analysed objectively, is not immune from the tech sector’s web of influence. There are some where it is difficult not to see the influence of the Californian giants. Outfits such as the Center for Data Innovation, which has headquarters in Washington DC, appear to be microstructures implanted directly from the US to influence EU public policy around data and technology. This organisation is part of a network that lists Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Airbnb among its larger corporate supporters. In private, some thinktankers will admit they are used more as lobbyists than independent thinkers. Even if they believe what they write, it is those whose views align with big tech that will get research funding, hence skewing the balance of opinions in the public sphere.And ultimately, this lack of independent, critical analysis is also part of what has allowed big tech to play its hand unchallenged in Brussels for nearly two decades.In the end, Google and Meta, I contend, won their fight in Brussels over profiling and tracking ads. The European parliament pushed through a prohibition on profiling of minors and the use of sensitive data such as political and sexual orientation. But in the commission, the vice-president Margrethe Vestager came down against a full ban on tracking ads. The core of big tech’s surveillance-based business model remains intact.The full scale and intricacy ofbig tech lobbying efforts, funding mechanisms, affiliations and influence routes can only be guessed at. But tech companies appear, judging by the evidence, to have succeeded in undermining EU efforts to address legitimate societal concerns, and the subversion has been both sophisticated and largely opaque.My own experience of their lobbying chimes well with a Google memo leaked in November 2020 containing a list of tactics it would use to undermine the commission’s proposals, and the internal market commissioner Thierry Breton in particular. It’s a playbook reminiscent of the methods of big tobacco.Tech regulation today is understood mostly in terms of a strict competition regime, rules to keep privacy-invading platforms in check and deal with algorithms. But the Digital Services Act shows that regulation needs also to be a struggle against the tech sector’s capacity to influence public institutions, civil society and policy discourse, often in opaque ways.Europe needs therefore to build an effective “tech control” ecosystem. I see five conditions for judging success. Big tech cannot be a partner or stakeholder at the centre of efforts to control it. Six decades of tobacco control efforts taught us that industry interference is the most significant barrier to effective regulation.Strong, independent regulatory powers must be at the heart of control. The EU must build independent capacities, such as an agency for AI that can conduct risk assessments across all social harms, prevent manipulative design techniques and algorithms and offer users a means of redress.Transparency and democracy in and around EU institutions are critical. The European parliament still has loopholes in the transparency of its practices and the EU transparency register should be given investigative powers to uncover circumvention and breaches of its code of conduct.Tech industry interference strategies need to be systematically monitored and countered. The pushback against big tobacco was a decades-long battle involving the WHO, public research programmes, international peer-reviewed journals and global watchdogs (for instance, STOP, Tobacco Control and Tobacco Tactics).An effective “tech control” ecosystem is also about making sure alternative voices are not captured. After the 2008 financial crisis, MEPs assisted with the setting up of Finance Watch, an NGO tasked with conducting independent research and advocacy on financial regulation in the broader interest of society beyond banks.Now, Europe needs a Tech Watch. In an environment that is easily bought by those with the most money, independent research on tech regulation must be upheld. The public and policymakers need to be able to trust that there are sources of policy input that do not have the long shadow of Google and Meta hanging over them. The great contest within our societies is between the power of money and the power of people. Georg Riekeles is associate director at the European Policy Centre. These views are personal and do not represent those of former or current employers Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected] | Tech Giants |
CompaniesOAKLAND, Calif, Aug 15 (Reuters) - America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system, with Apple (AAPL.O) emerging as an early leader in policies to rid Silicon Valley of a rigid hierarchy that's segregated Indians for generations.Apple, the world's biggest listed company, updated its general employee conduct policy about two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste, which it added alongside existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry.The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe update came after the tech sector - which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers - received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.Cisco, which denies wrongdoing, says an internal probe found no evidence of discrimination and that some of the allegations are baseless because caste is not a legally "protected class" in California. This month an appeals panel rejected the networking company's bid to push the case to private arbitration, meaning a public court case could come as early as next year. read more The dispute - the first U.S. employment lawsuit about alleged casteism - has forced Big Tech to confront a millennia-old hierarchy where Indians' social position has been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin "priestly" class to the Dalits, shunned as "untouchables" and consigned to menial labor.Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation - and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism.Their efforts have produced patchy results, according to a Reuters review of policy across the U.S. industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers from India."I am not surprised that the policies would be inconsistent because that's almost what you would expect when the law is not clear," said Kevin Brown, a University of South Carolina law professor studying caste issues, citing uncertainty among executives over whether caste would ultimately make it into U.S. statutes."I could imagine that parts of ... (an) organization are saying this makes sense, and other parts are saying we don't think taking a stance makes sense."Apple's main internal policy on workplace conduct, which was seen by Reuters, added reference to caste in the equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment sections after September 2020.Apple confirmed that it "updated language a couple of years ago to reinforce that we prohibit discrimination or harassment based on caste." It added that training provided to staff also explicitly mentions caste."Our teams assess our policies, training, processes and resources on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are comprehensive," it said. "We have a diverse and global team, and are proud that our policies and actions reflect that."Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale.IBM's only training that mentions caste is for managers in India, the company added.Several companies do not specifically reference caste in their main global policy, including Amazon (AMZN.O), Dell (DELL.N), Facebook owner Meta (META.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Google (GOOGL.O). Reuters reviewed each of the policies, some of which are only published internally to employees.The companies all told Reuters that they have zero tolerance for caste prejudice and, apart from Meta which did not elaborate, said such bias would fall under existing bans on discrimination by categories such as ancestry and national originon policy.CASTEISM OUTLAWED IN INDIACaste discrimination was outlawed in India over 70 years ago, yet bias persists, according to several studies in recent years, including one that found Dalit people were underrepresented in higher-paying jobs. Debate over the hierarchy is contentious in India and abroad, with the issue intertwined with religion, and some people saying discrimination is now rare.Government policies reserving seats for lower-caste students at top Indian universities have helped many land tech jobs in the West in recent years.Reuters spoke to about two dozen Dalit tech workers in the United States who said discrimination had followed them overseas. They said that caste cues, including their last names, hometowns, diets or religious practices, had led to colleagues bypassing them in hiring, promotions and social activities.Reuters could not independently verify the allegations of the workers, who all spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared harming their careers. Two said they had quit their jobs over what they viewed as casteism.Some staff groups, including the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) at Google's parent company, say explicit mention of caste in corporate rules would open the door to companies investing in areas such as data collection and training at the same levels as they do to protect other groups."Significant caste discrimination exists in the United States," said Mayuri Raja, a Google software engineer who is a member of the AWU and advocates for lower-caste colleagues.Over 1,600 Google workers demanded the addition of caste to the main workplace code of conduct worldwide in a petition, seen by Reuters, which they emailed to CEO Sundar Pichai last month and resent last week after no response.Google reiterated to Reuters that caste discrimination fell under national origin, ancestry and ethnic discrimination. It declined to elaborate further on its policies.'NOT GOOD FOR BUSINESS'Adding caste to a general code of conduct is not unheard of.The World Wide Web Consortium, an industry standards body partly based in Massachusetts, introduced it in July 2020. California State University and the state Democratic Party have followed over the past two years.In May this year, California's employment regulator, the Civil Rights Department, added caste to its example equal employment opportunity policy for employers.Yet the move by Apple, a $2.8 trillion behemoth with more than 165,000 full-time employees globally, looms large.The iPhone maker's fair hiring policy now states that Apple "does not discriminate in recruiting, training, hiring, or promoting on the basis of" 18 categories, including "race, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, religion, creed, age" plus disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.By contrast, many employers are hesitant to go beyond laws with their primary policies, according to three employment attorneys including Koray Bulut, a partner at Goodwin Procter."Most companies simply quote from the federal and state statutes that list the protected categories," Bulut said.Some companies have, however, gone further in secondary policies that govern limited operations or serve only as loose guidelines.Caste is explicitly written into Dell's Global Social Media Policy, for example, and in Amazon sustainability team's Global Human Rights Principles and Google's code of conduct for suppliers.Amazon and Dell confirmed they had also begun mentioning caste in anti-bias presentations for at least some new hires outside India. They declined to specify when, why and how broadly they made the addition, though Dell said it made the change after the Cisco lawsuit was filed.The companies' presentations include explanations of caste as an unwanted social structure that exists in parts of the world, according to a Reuters review of some of the online training, with the Dell material referencing a recent lawsuit "from the headlines."John-Paul Singh Deol, lead employment attorney at Dhillon Law Group in San Francisco, said that only including caste in training and guidelines amounted to "giving lip service" to the issue because their legal force is questionable.This characterization was rejected by Janine Yancey, CEO of Emtrain, which sells anti-bias training to about 550 employers, and a longtime employment attorney."No company wants to have employee turnover, lack of productivity and conflict - that's just not good for business," she said.Yet explicitly referencing caste would likely invite an increased number of HR complaints alleging it as a bias, Yancey added."Whenever you're going to call out something specifically, you're exponentially increasing your caseload," she said.Apple declined to say whether any complaints had been brought under its caste provision.South Carolina law professor Brown expects no immediate resolution to the debate over of whether companies should reference caste."This is an issue that ultimately will be resolved by the courts," he said. "The area right now is unsettled."Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Paresh Dave; Additional reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington and Sudarshan Varadhan in New Delhi; Editing by Kenneth Li and Pravin CharOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Paresh DaveThomson ReutersSan Francisco Bay Area-based tech reporter covering Google and the rest of Alphabet Inc. Joined Reuters in 2017 after four years at the Los Angeles Times focused on the local tech industry. | Tech Giants |
After more than 20 months and more hurdles than a track meet, Microsoft has completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.Despite efforts from governments in the US and UK to keep tech giants from increasing in size and reach, Microsoft’s acquisition of the Call of Duty maker shows the enduring power of major technology companies—even in the face of regulatory obstacles. The last of those obstacles came in April when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, blocked the deal. On Friday, the CMA reversed the decision, clearing the way for Microsoft’s acquisition to complete.“We now have all regulatory approvals necessary to close and we look forward to bringing joy and connection to even more players around the world,” Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement to employees.The closing of the deal offers a peek at gaming’s future, one where Microsoft now holds a sizable chunk of the market. What’s most interesting about the decision that came out of the UK is the reason that it happened. Although a lot of hand-wringing about the deal had focused on whether Microsoft would have too much power in the gaming space broadly, the CMA’s focus had been on cloud gaming. In August, Activision agreed to sell its non-European cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft, a move that the CMA believes will ensure competition in the space.“We delivered a clear message to Microsoft that the deal would be blocked unless they comprehensively addressed our concerns and stuck to our guns on that,” CMA chief Sarah Cardell said. “With the sale of Activision’s cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft, we’ve made sure Microsoft can’t have a stranglehold over this important and rapidly developing market.”That doesn’t mean the deal still isn’t a huge consolidation of gaming under the umbrella of one company. When the US Federal Trade Commission originally sued to block the acquisition last December it did so over concerns that the deal would “enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.” In July, a judge in California denied the FTC’s request for an injunction on the deal after Microsoft agreed to keep Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty on PlayStation for a decade and bring the game to the Nintendo Switch.The FTC, though, isn’t entirely through with Microsoft. The agency is still appealing that ruling and, per a CNBC report on Friday, is sticking with a hearing on the matter scheduled for December. “Microsoft and Activision’s new agreement with Ubisoft presents a whole new facet to the merger that will affect American consumers,” spokesperson Victoria Graham said. “The FTC continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition.”Even after making concessions to regulators, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is still huge in scale. In addition to having scores of the company’s games to offer on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft will now add nine Blizzard game studios to Xbox Game Studios and bring some 8,500 Activision employees into the Microsoft fold.What all of this means for gamers in the long term remains to be seen, but in a statement issued Friday Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer seemed to anticipate concerns about games ending up solely in the Microsoft ecosystem. “Whether you play on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, PC or mobile, you are welcome here—and will remain welcome, even if Xbox isn’t where you play your favorite franchise,” he said, adding “when everyone plays, we all win.” Today, though, the win is Microsoft’s. | Tech Giants |
Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the streaming giants is holding talks with multiple advertising companies about partnerships that would help it introduce a cheaper membership with ads, according to reports. "We're talking to all of them right now," Sarandos said Thursday, according to Reuters, when he was asked on a panel about the advertising companies it's pursuing for potential partnerships. Sarandos' panel was part of the Cannes Lions advertising summit in France, one of the world's biggest annual events for the ad industry. The comments, and Netflix's attendance at Cannes Lions for the first time, further cemented Netflix's public commitment to introducing advertising to its service. In April, when Netflix reported its first subscriber loss in a decade, co-CEO Reed Hastings reversed years of dismissing any interest in advertising by revealing the company was "looking at" a cheaper, ad-supported tier for Netflix. But Netflix, which doesn't have an ad-sales force, would need to hire people and create its own, acquire an entity to absorb an ad-sales team or technology, or forge a partnership with an existing ad company. Thursday, Sarandos comments indicated the company is pursuing the latter. Sarandos also batted down the idea that Netflix would acquire Roku, a company that has built a growing business around its own streaming service people can watch free with advertising, called The Roku Channel. "I don't know where that came from," Sarandos said of the speculation it might purchase Roku, according to Deadline. The drop in viewers has buffeted Hollywood's confidence in streaming as its engine into television's future. Netflix's years of unflagging growth pushed nearly all of Hollywood's major media companies to pour billions of dollars into their own streaming operations. These so-called streaming wars brought about a wave of new services, including Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount Plus, among others, a trend that's complicated how many services you must use -- and pay for -- to watch your favorite shows and movies online. With the intensifying competition to hold your attention and your subscription dollars, most of Netflix rivals have leaned into a two-tier model, which offers a cheaper membership to watch with advertising as well as a more expensive subscription without ads. Netflix blazed the trail for streaming TV, but its ad-free-only strategy has fallen behind the standards of the industry, as competitors launched giving viewers like you more options. See also 10 Ways to Save Money on Streaming How to Cut the Cable TV Cord in 2022 See More at Streaming TV Insider | Tech Giants |
Social media firms will be forced to bar underaged children or face multi-million pound fines under a new law to protect them from harm online.
The Government will unveil the revamped Online Safety Bill on Tuesday, which will compel companies by law to publish how they enforce age limits so parents, as well as the watchdog Ofcom, can test their credibility.
Firms that do not follow their own terms and conditions, including on age limits, will face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover. For Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, that would be up to $12 billion.
The move follows a four-year campaign by The Telegraph for new “duty of care” laws to better protect children from online harms.
The new bill also addresses concerns over freedom of speech by dropping plans for restrictions on content described as “legal but harmful”. Instead, it requires social media companies to give adult users more control over the material they see online.
'Nonsense' of underage child accounts
In an exclusive article for The Telegraph, Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, says that the revised bill will strengthen age verification to end the “nonsense” of technology firms claiming they do not allow underaged children on their social media platforms, when any parent could tell you that they do.
Ofcom research suggests a third of children aged five to seven and 60 per cent of eight to 11 year olds have their own social media profile. This suggests that as many as 1.8 million children under 13 in the UK have a social media account.
In her article, Ms Donelan writes that stronger child protection was a “red line” for her when she took charge of the bill, to ensure technology firms shield children from harmful content - including sexual abuse and cyberbullying.
Under the revised bill, where social media firms specify a minimum age for users, they will now have to clearly set out and explain in their terms of service the measures they use to enforce this. This could include the use of age verification technology that requires users to provide official identities authenticated by a third party to maintain security and privacy.
The technology firms will also have to publish risk assessments on the dangers their sites pose to children. This follows leaked internal Facebook research that showed the technology giant knew about the toxic risks of Instagram to teenage girls’ mental health, as well as the prevalence of drug cartels and traffickers on its app.
Ms Donelan writes that such changes will reinforce the original intention of the bill to protect young people like Molly Russell, 14, who took her own life after being bombarded with self-harm content on Instagram and Pinterest. Ministers intend that the revamped bill, which is due to return to the House of Commons on Dec 5, will offer a “triple shield” of protection for users.
The first level will mean technology firms have to prevent and remove illegal content such as fraud, assisting suicide, threats to kill, harassment and stalking, the sale of illegal weapons and revenge porn.
As revealed at the weekend, encouraging self-harm online will become a new criminal offence.
The firms’ terms and conditions of service - many of which already prohibit abuse and racism - will have to be enforced, with Ofcom empowered to fine social media platforms if they fail to do so.
Free speech requirements
The third level will mean technology firms are required to provide their adult users with tools to filter out “legal but harmful” content that they do not want to see, such as the glorification of eating disorders, racism, anti-Semitism or misogyny. This could be done through moderation, blocking content or warning screens.
The bill will retain protections for children against “legal but harmful” material by requiring social media firms to prevent them from encountering “primary priority” content that falls below the criminal threshold on self-harm, suicide, eating disorders and pornography but is nevertheless deemed inappropriate or harmful.
Ms Donelan has sought to balance the tougher safeguards for children with increased protections for free speech by scrapping plans to regulate legal but harmful content for adults, after critics claimed it would give “woke” technology firms too much power to determine what was published online.
This move will be allied with tougher “free speech” requirements that will prohibit firms from removing or restricting users’ posts, or suspending or banning them, where they have not breached the sites’ terms of service or the law. If anyone or any post is removed, firms will have to offer an effective right of appeal.
In other moves contained in the bill, controlling or coercive behaviour will be included as priority illegal content alongside fraud and other crimes. That means social media firms will have to provide measures so victims can block or prevent it happening.
Adults will also have the right to block anonymous trolls via tools to control whether they can be contacted by unverified social media users.
The children’s commissioner, as well as the victims’ and domestic abuse commissioners, will be added as statutory consultees to the bill, so that they are involved in drawing up the codes the technology firms will have to follow to comply with the law.
The bill is not expected to be on the statute book until spring next year, from which point it could take up to 18 months to fully enact its regulations. Our values should be dictated by us, not Silicon Valley
By Michelle Donelan, Culture Secretary
British values are family values. We protect our children from those who wish to do them harm. We defend the most vulnerable. And we all know that whether it is in a family or in society, free speech and the right to disagree is the bedrock of a healthy community. So why should we allow the online world to be any different?
I don’t think it is too much to ask that these basic British values are reflected online. But that is difficult when social media companies have the financial clout of small countries, and when chief executives have all the power of presidents with none of the accountability. So we must make it clear that our values and our way of life will be determined by us, not Silicon Valley.
Next week, one of the most important building blocks of a safer, freer, more user-friendly online world returns to Parliament. I have carefully amended the Online Safety Bill to ensure it reflects the values of our way of life - protecting children, safeguarding the vulnerable, protecting legal free speech and defending consumer choice.
Protecting children is the fundamental reason why the Online Safety Bill was created, and so the changes I have made strengthen the child protection elements of the bill significantly. Though debates around free speech have dominated the conversation, its original purpose was to protect young people like Molly Russell. In 2017, the 14-year-old took her life after being bombarded with self-harm content on Instagram and Pinterest.
So when I became Digital Secretary, I set a red line on the child protection measures in the bill, vowing to protect and strengthen them. When it returns, the bill will contain even stronger protections for children, combined with user rights protections for adults that inject genuine choice for users.
Tech companies will have to shield children from a whole range of harmful content - including child sexual abuse, pornography and cyberbullying. If they fail, they will face huge fines of up to 10 per cent of their annual global turnover. For Meta, that would currently be up to $12 billion.
I have also strengthened the legislation to help tackle the absurd situation we have with age limits. Some platforms claim they don’t allow anyone under 13 - any parent will tell you that is nonsense. Some platforms claim not to allow children, but simultaneously have adverts targeting children. The legislation now compels companies to be much clearer about how they enforce their own age limits.
This is completely separate to changes I am making for adults, which I approached with a few simple principles - what is illegal offline should be illegal online, tech giants should abide by their own terms and conditions, and the Government should not be in the business of telling adults what legal content they can see.
The “legal but harmful” clauses in the bill, in my view, violated the rights of adults to choose what legal speech they say and see. So I have removed “legal but harmful” in favour of a new system based on choice and freedom.
Equally, if something is not prohibited in their terms and conditions, tech giants should not be removing it. Platforms will need to be far more transparent about how their algorithms work and, for the first time, users will have the right of appeal. Silicon Valley executives will no longer be able to arbitrarily silence people, nor continue to treat some sections of society differently.
Rather than handing down edicts to tech companies on what legal speech they should and shouldn’t police on their sites, we are putting the control back into the hands of users, while also ensuring that social media companies no longer put profit before children’s lives. Alongside this, where it is demonstrably obvious that something should be illegal, we should make it illegal. Thanks to an amendment announced on Tuesday, we will close the legal loopholes that allow the horrific encouragement of self-harm.
These common sense solutions combine to form the basis of a bill that will genuinely change lives for the better, while also protecting the rights and values we hold dear. | Tech Giants |
MoneyWatch Updated on: January 20, 2023 / 7:33 PM / CBS/AP Google axes 12,000 jobs amid big tech layoffs Google axes 12,000 jobs amid major tech layoffs 03:00 Google is laying off 12,000 workers, becoming the latest technology company to trim staff after rapid expansions during the COVID-19 pandemic have worn off. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shared the news Friday in an email to staff at the Silicon Valley giant that was also posted on the company's news blog. "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai wrote. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." He said the layoffs reflect a "rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations. The jobs being eliminated "cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions," Pichai said.The cuts represent just over 6% of Alphabet's workforce, which numbered 186,000 as of September, according to a securities filing. Like numerous other large tech companies, Alphabet added thousands of workers durning the pandemic and is now moving to cut costs ahead of a possible economic recession later this year. Laid-off employees in the U.S. will receive a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, as well as six months of health care, job placement services and immigration support.Added Pichai, "As an almost 25-year-old company, we're bound to go through difficult economic cycles. These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities." Microsoft joins list of tech companies to announce sweeping layoffs 05:10 Earlier this week, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, or nearly 5% of its workforce. Also in January, Amazon said it would cut 18,000 jobs, Facebook parent Meta announced it is eliminating 11,000 positions and software maker Salesforce said it would shed 7,000 workers. Netflix, Peloton, Twitter and other industry players have also announced sizable layoffs or scaled back hiring in recent months."All the tech giants have now entered the layoff game," Wall Street analyst Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge said in a report, adding that "myriad others are reducing jobs, too." Job cuts are hitting smaller players as well. U.K.-based cybersecurity firm Sophos laid off 450 employees, or 10% of its global workforce. Cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase cut 20% of its workforce, about 950 jobs, in its second round of layoffs in less than a year.The technology industry shed the most jobs of any sector last year, eliminating nearly 100,000 positions in 2022 after expanding rapidly during the pandemic, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas."We are seeing 5%-10% headcount cuts across the tech sector as many of these companies (both big and small) were spending money like 1980s rock stars and now need to rein in the expense controls ahead of a softer macro," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a research note.Economic growth has weakened as the Federal Reserve moves to sharply raise its benchmark interest rate in an effort to tame inflation. Although experts forecast a slowdown in the labor market this year, hiring across the U.S. has remained robust. The nation's unemployment rate in December fell to 3.5%, matching a 50-year low. In: Google Sundar Pichai COVID-19 Pandemic Thanks for reading CBS NEWS. Create your free account or log in for more features. Please enter email address to continue Please enter valid email address to continue | Tech Giants |
Training materials reviewed by The Intercept confirm that Google is offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli government through its controversial “Project Nimbus” contract. The Israeli Finance Ministry announced the contract in April 2021 for a $1.2 billion cloud computing system jointly built by Google and Amazon. “The project is intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution,” the ministry said in its announcement.
Google engineers have spent the time since worrying whether their efforts would inadvertently bolster the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine. In 2021, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International formally accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity by maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians. While the Israeli military and security services already rely on a sophisticated system of computerized surveillance, the sophistication of Google’s data analysis offerings could worsen the increasingly data-driven military occupation.According to a trove of training documents and videos obtained by The Intercept through a publicly accessible educational portal intended for Nimbus users, Google is providing the Israeli government with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform. While they provide no specifics as to how Nimbus will be used, the documents indicate that the new cloud would give Israel capabilities for facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing. The Nimbus materials referenced agency-specific trainings available to government personnel through the online learning service Coursera, citing the Ministry of Defense as an example.A slide presented to Nimbus users illustrating Google image recognition technology. Credit: Google
Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, shared the portal’s address with The Intercept after finding it cited in Israeli contracting documents.
“The former head of Security for Google Enterprise — who now heads Oracle’s Israel branch — has publicly argued that one of the goals of Nimbus is preventing the German government from requesting data relating on the Israel Defence Forces for the International Criminal Court,” said Poulson, who resigned in protest from his job as a research scientist at Google in 2018, in a message. “Given Human Rights Watch’s conclusion that the Israeli government is committing ‘crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution’ against Palestinians, it is critical that Google and Amazon’s AI surveillance support to the IDF be documented to the fullest.”Though some of the documents bear a hybridized symbol of the Google logo and Israeli flag, for the most part they are not unique to Nimbus. Rather, the documents appear to be standard educational materials distributed to Google Cloud customers and presented in prior training contexts elsewhere.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The documents obtained by The Intercept detail for the first time the Google Cloud features provided through the Nimbus contract. With virtually nothing publicly disclosed about Nimbus beyond its existence, the system’s specific functionality had remained a mystery even to most of those working at the company that built it. In 2020, citing the same AI tools, U.S Customs and Border Protection tapped Google Cloud to process imagery from its network of border surveillance towers.
Many of the capabilities outlined in the documents obtained by The Intercept could easily augment Israel’s ability to surveil people and process vast stores of data — already prominent features of the Israeli occupation.
“Data collection over the entire Palestinian population was and is an integral part of the occupation,” Ori Givati of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group of Israeli military veterans, told The Intercept in an email. “Generally, the different technological developments we are seeing in the Occupied Territories all direct to one central element which is more control.”
The Israeli security state has for decades benefited from the country’s thriving research and development sector, and its interest in using AI to police and control Palestinians isn’t hypothetical. In 2021, the Washington Post reported on the existence of Blue Wolf, a secret military program aimed at monitoring Palestinians through a network of facial recognition-enabled smartphones and cameras.
“Living under a surveillance state for years taught us that all the collected information in the Israeli/Palestinian context could be securitized and militarized,” said Mona Shtaya, a Palestinian digital rights advocate at 7amleh-The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, in a message. “Image recognition, facial recognition, emotional analysis, among other things will increase the power of the surveillance state to violate Palestinian right to privacy and to serve their main goal, which is to create the panopticon feeling among Palestinians that we are being watched all the time, which would make the Palestinian population control easier.”
The educational materials obtained by The Intercept show that Google briefed the Israeli government on using what’s known as sentiment detection, an increasingly controversial and discredited form of machine learning. Google claims that its systems can discern inner feelings from one’s face and statements, a technique commonly rejected as invasive and pseudoscientific, regarded as being little better than phrenology. In June, Microsoft announced that it would no longer offer emotion-detection features through its Azure cloud computing platform — a technology suite comparable to what Google provides with Nimbus — citing the lack of scientific basis.Google does not appear to share Microsoft’s concerns. One Nimbus presentation touted the “Faces, facial landmarks, emotions”-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API, an image analysis toolset. The presentation then offered a demonstration using the enormous grinning face sculpture at the entrance of Sydney’s Luna Park. An included screenshot of the feature ostensibly in action indicates that the massive smiling grin is “very unlikely” to exhibit any of the example emotions. And Google was only able to assess that the famous amusement park is an amusement park with 64 percent certainty, while it guessed that the landmark was a “place of worship” or “Hindu Temple” with 83 percent and 74 percent confidence, respectively.A slide presented to Nimbus users illustrating Google AI’s ability to detect image traits. Credit: Google
Google workers who reviewed the documents said they were concerned by their employer’s sale of these technologies to Israel, fearing both their inaccuracy and how they might be used for surveillance or other militarized purposes.
“Vision API is a primary concern to me because it’s so useful for surveillance,” said one worker, who explained that the image analysis would be a natural fit for military and security applications. “Object recognition is useful for targeting, it’s useful for data analysis and data labeling. An AI can comb through collected surveillance feeds in a way a human cannot to find specific people and to identify people, with some error, who look like someone. That’s why these systems are really dangerous.”A slide presented to Nimbus users outlining various AI features through the company’s Cloud Vision API. Credit: Google
The employee — who, like all of the Google workers who spoke to The Intercept, requested anonymity to avoid workplace reprisals — added that they were further alarmed by potential surveillance or other militarized applications of AutoML, another Google AI tool offered through Nimbus. Machine learning is largely the function of training software to recognize patterns in order to make predictions about future observations, for instance by analyzing millions of images of kittens today in order to confidently claim that it’s looking at a photo of a kitten tomorrow. This training process yields what’s known as a “model” — a body of computerized education that can be applied to automatically recognize certain objects and traits in future data.
Training an effective model from scratch is often resource intensive, both financially and computationally. This is not so much of a problem for a world-spanning company like Google, with an unfathomable volume of both money and computing hardware at the ready. Part of Google’s appeal to customers is the option of using a pre-trained model, essentially getting this prediction-making education out of the way and letting customers access a well-trained program that’s benefited from the company’s limitless resources.“An AI can comb through collected surveillance feeds in a way a human cannot to find specific people and to identify people, with some error, who look like someone. That’s why these systems are really dangerous.”
Cloud Vision is one such pre-trained model, allowing clients to immediately implement a sophisticated prediction system. AutoML, on the other hand, streamlines the process of training a custom-tailored model, using a customer’s own data for a customer’s own designs. Google has placed some limits on Vision — for instance limiting it to face detection, or whether it sees a face, rather than recognition that would identify a person. AutoML, however, would allow Israel to leverage Google’s computing capacity to train new models with its own government data for virtually any purpose it wishes. “Google’s machine learning capabilities along with the Israeli state’s surveillance infrastructure poses a real threat to the human rights of Palestinians,” said Damini Satija, who leads Amnesty International’s Algorithmic Accountability Lab. “The option to use the vast volumes of surveillance data already held by the Israeli government to train the systems only exacerbates these risks.”
Custom models generated through AutoML, one presentation noted, can be downloaded for offline “edge” use — unplugged from the cloud and deployed in the field.
That Nimbus lets Google clients use advanced data analysis and prediction in places and ways that Google has no visibility into creates a risk of abuse, according to Liz O’Sullivan, CEO of the AI auditing startup Parity and a member of the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. “Countries can absolutely use AutoML to deploy shoddy surveillance systems that only seem like they work,” O’Sullivan said in a message. “On edge, it’s even worse — think bodycams, traffic cameras, even a handheld device like a phone can become a surveillance machine and Google may not even know it’s happening.”
In one Nimbus webinar reviewed by The Intercept, the potential use and misuse of AutoML was exemplified in a Q&A session following a presentation. An unnamed member of the audience asked the Google Cloud engineers present on the call if it would be possible to process data through Nimbus in order to determine if someone is lying.
“I’m a bit scared to answer that question,” said the engineer conducting the seminar, in an apparent joke. “In principle: Yes. I will expand on it, but the short answer is yes.” Another Google representative then jumped in: “It is possible, assuming that you have the right data, to use the Google infrastructure to train a model to identify how likely it is that a certain person is lying, given the sound of their own voice.” Noting that such a capability would take a tremendous amount of data for the model, the second presenter added that one of the advantages of Nimbus is the ability to tap into Google’s vast computing power to train such a model.“I’d be very skeptical for the citizens it is meant to protect that these systems can do what is claimed.”A broad body of research, however, has shown that the very notion of a “lie detector,” whether the simple polygraph or “AI”-based analysis of vocal changes or facial cues, is junk science. While Google’s reps appeared confident that the company could make such a thing possible through sheer computing power, experts in the field say that any attempts to use computers to assess things as profound and intangible as truth and emotion are faulty to the point of danger.
One Google worker who reviewed the documents said they were concerned that the company would even hint at such a scientifically dubious technique. “The answer should have been ‘no,’ because that does not exist,” the worker said. “It seems like it was meant to promote Google technology as powerful, and it’s ultimately really irresponsible to say that when it’s not possible.”
Andrew McStay, a professor of digital media at Bangor University in Wales and head of the Emotional AI Lab, told The Intercept that the lie detector Q&A exchange was “disturbing,” as is Google’s willingness to pitch pseudoscientific AI tools to a national government. “It is [a] wildly divergent field, so any technology built on this is going to automate unreliability,” he said. “Again, those subjected to them will suffer, but I’d be very skeptical for the citizens it is meant to protect that these systems can do what is claimed.”
According to some critics, whether these tools work might be of secondary importance to a company like Google that is eager to tap the ever-lucrative flow of military contract money. Governmental customers too may be willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to promises of vast new techno-powers. “It’s extremely telling that in the webinar PDF that they constantly referred to this as ‘magical AI goodness,’” said Jathan Sadowski, a scholar of automation technologies and research fellow at Monash University, in an interview with The Intercept. “It shows that they’re bullshitting.”Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the Google I/O conference in Mountain View, Calif. Google pledges that it will not use artificial intelligence in applications related to weapons or surveillance, part of a new set of principles designed to govern how it uses AI. Those principles, released by Pichai, commit Google to building AI applications that are “socially beneficial,” that avoid creating or reinforcing bias and that are accountable to people. Photo: Jeff Chiu/AP
Google, like Microsoft, has its own public list of “AI principles,” a document the company says is an “ethical charter that guides the development and use of artificial intelligence in our research and products.” Among these purported principles is a commitment to not “deploy AI … that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including weapons, surveillance, or any application “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
Israel, though, has set up its relationship with Google to shield it from both the company’s principles and any outside scrutiny. Perhaps fearing the fate of the Pentagon’s Project Maven, a Google AI contract felled by intense employee protests, the data centers that power Nimbus will reside on Israeli territory, subject to Israeli law and insulated from political pressures. Last year, the Times of Israel reported that Google would be contractually barred from shutting down Nimbus services or denying access to a particular government office even in response to boycott campaigns.
Google employees interviewed by The Intercept lamented that the company’s AI principles are at best a superficial gesture. “I don’t believe it’s hugely meaningful,” one employee told The Intercept, explaining that the company has interpreted its AI charter so narrowly that it doesn’t apply to companies or governments that buy Google Cloud services. Asked how the AI principles are compatible with the company’s Pentagon work, a Google spokesperson told Defense One, “It means that our technology can be used fairly broadly by the military.”“Google is backsliding on its commitments to protect people from this kind of misuse of our technology. I am truly afraid for the future of Google and the world.”Moreover, this employee added that Google lacks both the ability to tell if its principles are being violated and any means of thwarting violations. “Once Google offers these services, we have no technical capacity to monitor what our customers are doing with these services,” the employee said. “They could be doing anything.” Another Google worker told The Intercept, “At a time when already vulnerable populations are facing unprecedented and escalating levels of repression, Google is backsliding on its commitments to protect people from this kind of misuse of our technology. I am truly afraid for the future of Google and the world.”
Ariel Koren, a Google employee who claimed earlier this year that she faced retaliation for raising concerns about Nimbus, said the company’s internal silence on the program continues. “I am deeply concerned that Google has not provided us with any details at all about the scope of the Project Nimbus contract, let alone assuage my concerns of how Google can provide technology to the Israeli government and military (both committing grave human rights abuses against Palestinians daily) while upholding the ethical commitments the company has made to its employees and the public,” she told The Intercept in an email. “I joined Google to promote technology that brings communities together and improves people’s lives, not service a government accused of the crime of apartheid by the world’s two leading human rights organizations.”
Sprawling tech companies have published ethical AI charters to rebut critics who say that their increasingly powerful products are sold unchecked and unsupervised. The same critics often counter that the documents are a form of “ethicswashing” — essentially toothless self-regulatory pledges that provide only the appearance of scruples, pointing to examples like the provisions in Israel’s contract with Google that prevent the company from shutting down its products. “The way that Israel is locking in their service providers through this tender and this contract,” said Sadowski, the Monash University scholar, “I do feel like that is a real innovation in technology procurement.”
To Sadowski, it matters little whether Google believes what it peddles about AI or any other technology. What the company is selling, ultimately, isn’t just software, but power. And whether it’s Israel and the U.S. today or another government tomorrow, Sadowski says that some technologies amplify the exercise of power to such an extent that even their use by a country with a spotless human rights record would provide little reassurance. “Give them these technologies, and see if they don’t get tempted to use them in really evil and awful ways,” he said. “These are not technologies that are just neutral intelligence systems, these are technologies that are ultimately about surveillance, analysis, and control.” | Tech Giants |
The U.S. government is taking aim at what has been an indomitable empire: Google’s ubiquitous search engine that has become the internet’s main gateway.
The legal attack will swing into full force Tuesday in a Washington D.C. federal courtroom that will serve as the battleground for the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since regulators went after Microsoft and its dominance of personal computer software a quarter century ago.
The 10-week trial before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is expected to include potentially revelatory testimony from top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet, as well as other powerful technology companies. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page in 2019, will be among the most prominent witnesses likely to testify. Court documents also indicate one of Apple's highest-ranking executives, Eddy Cue, might be called to the stand.
The case against Google mirrors the one brought against Microsoft in many ways, including the existential threat it poses to a renowned tech giant whose products are relied on by billions of people.
The trial is scheduled to continue into late November before its first phase wraps, after which another round of court filings and arguments are expected. Mehta isn’t expected to issue a ruling until early next year. If he decides Google has been breaking the law, it will trigger another trial to determine what measures should be taken to rein in the Mountain View, California, company.
Although Google products such as the Chrome web browser, Gmail, YouTube and online maps all are hugely popular, none have become as indispensable — or as valuable — as the internet search engine invented by Page and a fellow Stanford University graduate student, Sergey Brin, during the late 1990s.
The trial is beginning just a couple weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first investment in the company — a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Page and Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.
Today, Google's corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., is worth $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day.
Google could be hobbled if the antitrust trial culminates in concessions that undercut its power. One possibility is that the company could be forced to stop paying Apple and other companies to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and computers.
Or the legal battle could cause Google to lose focus. That's what happened to Microsoft after its antitrust showdown with the Justice Department: Distracted, the software giant struggled to adapt to the impact of internet search and smartphones. Google capitalized on that distraction to leap from its startup roots into an imposing powerhouse.
Nearly three years after filing its antitrust lawsuit during the Trump administration, lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department will try to prove Google has been abusing the power of its search engine to stifle competition in ways that discouraged innovation. Critics say the quality of search results has deteriorated, too, as Google used its engine to sell ads and promote its own products, like Google restaurant reviews instead of those offered by Yelp.
Dozens of state attorneys general, led by Colorado, have waded into the battle and will have a chance to prove Google turned into an illegal monopoly that's harming consumers.
The crux of the Justice Department's argument will boil down to its contention that Google's search engine has become like digital air almost everyone breathes, and that it needs to be cleaned up because the company's tactics have polluted the atmosphere.
Google's vast legal team is expected to counter that the company has never stopped improving its search engine, executing its original mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible to anyone with an internet connection. From Google's perspective, the perpetual improvements explain why most people almost reflexively gravitate to its search engine, a habit that long ago made “Googling” synonymous with looking things up.
Despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market, Google argues it faces a wide range of competition ranging from other search engines such as Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo to websites such as Amazon and Yelp, where people research questions about what product to buy or where to eat.
The Justice Department contends Google's claim that it dominates the market by supplying the best search engine is a canard. They allege Google protects its franchise through a form of payola, shelling out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and web browser such as Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.
Regulators also allege Google has illegally rigged the market in its favor by requiring its search engine to be bundled with its Android software for smartphones if the device manufacturers want full access to the Android app store.
By locking in Google's search engine as the default choice in so many places, the Justice Department contends the company has made it more difficult for people to find the best results as quickly as possible.
Regulators allege the company's deals ensure Google's automatic access to billions of queries that provide data for its search engine, while boxing out Bing and DuckDuckGo from getting information that could help them improve their results.
The tactics have created a toxic situation allowing Google to cram more ads at the top of its search results, increasing its profits and Alphabet's stock price, according to the Justice Department. That practice requires consumers to dig ever deeper to answer their questions, something that regulators believe could be avoided if rival services were able to collect as much information as Google does through its lock-in agreements.
Google insists that consumers could easily switch their default settings to another search engine.
The company also argues that it does face competition from evolving technology: Microsoft, for example, is baking artificial intelligence from its business partner Open AI into its Bing search engine. That move in early February prodded Google to start equipping its search engine with AI-fueled results too — a sign that the company says shows competition continues to thrive. | Tech Giants |
As part of its takeover of Fitbit, Google will begin requiring customers to use Google accounts to manage their fitness-tracking devices, reigniting privacy concerns over the acquisition in 2019.
As of now, owners of Fitbit devices maintain a separate online account that isn't connected to Google, except where users have granted third-party app permissions to link Fitbit data to Google's own apps or use their Gmail account to login. That's set to change "sometime in 2023," Fitbit said, touting the move as a good thing for its users.
"A single login for Fitbit and other Google services, industry-leading account security, centralized privacy controls for Fitbit user data, and more" were cited by the Google subsidiary as reasons its customers will appreciate the change. Not all users of Fitbit will be required to sign in with a Google account immediately in 2023. When the switchover takes place next year, new Fitbit users that sign up for an account will have to do so with a Google account that is linked to Fitbit, as will existing customers who upgrade to a new Fitbit device or wish to activate new features. Those not caught up in that change can keep their FitBit accounts for another few years.
"Support of Fitbit accounts will continue until at least early 2025. After support of Fitbit accounts ends, a Google account will be required to use Fitbit," the company said.
What's the real privacy story?
From its CEO on down, Fitbit has reiterated multiple times that Google had made binding commitments with the European Commission (EC) in 2020 as a condition of the Fitbit acquisition.
Among other things, Google agreed to keep Fitbit user data siloed from its systems and to not use said data to target advertisements at Fitbit customers in the European Economic Area (EEA) for a period of 10 years. "This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we've been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users' privacy," Google's SVP of Products and Services, Rick Osterloh, said when the acquisition closed in early 2021.
Osterloh said Google made "a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users' health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data," but in all the statements from both companies, they do not address the fact that the binding agreement made with the EC only affects the EEA.
Google has previously failed to live up to promises to give users control of their data, most recently when it was seen collecting phone call and SMS data sent through default Android apps. Concerns like these likely prompted 20 consumer rights groups to issue an open letter to regulators around the world urging close scrutiny of Google's Fitbit purchase. We reached out to Google to get more specifics on its plan for data and asked whether or not its EC agreement would apply to customers in the rest of the world, but haven't heard back.
Sports watch users considering a different fitness tracker who are concerned about the sign-in might wish to avoid Samsung, too. ® | Tech Giants |
Time is running out in Congress to regulate Big Tech. With the days left to pass legislation waning, supporters and opponents are increasing their efforts on Capitol Hill. Sponsors of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act held a press conference last week in a Hail Mary effort to bring the bill for a vote. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) joined Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) to urge Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to fit a floor vote into the tightening legislative schedule. The legislation would ban “self-preferencing” by the biggest digital platforms. In practice, that means prohibitions on Amazon recommending its own generic products over third-party sellers and Google displaying its own Google Maps content at the top of its search results. It also obligates large firms to let smaller competitors and partners interoperate with the platform in an attempt to level the playing field. Senate leadership indicated earlier in the session that a vote will come in “early summer,” but possible gun control legislation has made the distraction of midterm elections loom even larger for supporters of the bill. Additionally, some politicians fear voters are too concerned with high gas prices, rising inflation, and the pending Supreme Court decision on abortion to reward politicians for an antitrust crackdown on tech companies. At the press conference, Grassley emphasized his feeling of urgency, saying, “If we want action, we need a Senate vote, and we need that Senate vote to be soon.” Klobuchar added that “despite all the money being spent against us, we have momentum because the bill is pro-competition and it’s common sense.” Supporters of the bill include the Center for American Progress and many smaller tech companies, such as privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo and Yelp, but there are reports of an internal split over the legislation within the American Bar Association. The ABA sent a letter opposing the bill earlier this year, but there are now reports of pushback from some within the group. The Washington Post reported that various industry groups have spent more than $10 million on television ads and hundreds of thousands of dollars on internet advertising opposing the legislation. The fight spilled over into popular culture last week when John Oliver devoted a whole segment to supporting this and one other antitrust bill on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Oliver’s televised support of net neutrality years ago helped fuel unexpected mainstream interest in the policy area. It’s unclear if he can make history rhythm with antitrust legislation, but the recent segment already has millions of hits on YouTube. Opponents of the bill, including industry representatives and scholarly proponents of traditional antitrust policy, are simultaneously increasing the pressure to thwart a full floor vote in the Senate. The hope is that if, as expected, control of both houses of Congress flips to the Republicans this fall, this and other antitrust legislation will not advance. Tom Herbert, executive director at Open Competition Center, told the Washington Examiner, “At this point, it’s hard to see how S. 2992 gets across the finish line between now and the midterms.” He noted that Klobuchar didn’t say the bill had 60 Senate votes or indicate a firm commitment from leadership on a date for a floor vote at her pep rally for the bill. Herbert continued, “In the mad dash before August recess, Congress has a vanishingly narrow window to get anything done. It is hard to imagine that Republicans, and even some Democrats, would want to waste valuable floor time on Klobuchar’s pet project.” Some in the political trenches of Congress may agree. Politico reported that in a caucuswide call of Democratic chiefs of staff in May, many raised concerns about prioritizing this bill ahead of other priorities so close to the midterm elections. One Senate aide told the outlet that instead Democrats “should be focused on items that will help consumers deal with rising costs.” Herbert agreed, telling the Washington Examiner, “Voters are focused on pocketbook issues like inflation and rising gas prices. A recent Gallup survey shows 52% of Americans naming inflation their top issue. Antitrust does not even rank.” | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google changed its advertising auction formula in 2017, raising prices by 15% and likely making the company billions of dollars in additional revenue, according to an economist testifying for the US Justice Department in the antitrust case against the search giant.
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Michael Whinston, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friday that Google modified the way it sold text ads via “Project Momiji” – named for the wooden Japanese dolls that have a hidden space for friends to exchange secret messages. The shift sought “to raise the prices against the highest bidder,” Whinston told Judge Amit Mehta in federal court in Washington.
Google’s advertising auctions require the winner to pay only a penny more than the runner-up. In 2016, the company discovered that the runner-up had often bid only 80% of the winner’s offer. To help eliminate that 20% between the runner-up and what the winner was willing to pay, Google gave the second-place bidder a built-in handicap to make their offer more competitive, Whinston said, citing internal emails and sealed testimony by Google finance executive Jerry Dischler earlier in the case.
“It’s really easy to slip into the thought that it’s an auction and an auction is competition,” Whinston said, explaining how Google’s ability to tweak the rules demonstrates its monopoly over online advertising. But “it’s the advertisers who are running in this race. It’s Google setting the rules.”
The Justice Department alleges that Google has illegally maintained a monopoly over online search by paying billions of dollars to web browsers and smartphone manufacturers to ensure it’s the preselected option for users accessing the web. As part of those deals, Google pays Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and others a share of the revenue it earns from search advertising.
About two-thirds, more than 60%, of Google’s total revenue comes from search ads, Dischler said previously, amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020. Every year since 2012, the company’s search ad revenue growth has been in the “high teens,” according to documents shown by the Justice Department.
Dischler testified on Sept. 19 that Google sometimes tweaked its advertising auctions to ensure it met revenue targets, but most of his testimony occurred in a sealed session. Whinston’s comments Friday described Google’s technique, called “squashing,” that seeks to make the runner-up’s bid more competitive. Google estimated that technique along with charging more for ads that used more words in their text would increase revenues by 15%.
“Google has not been transparent about what they are doing” with pricing, Whinston said. But advertisers “do have ways of finding out even if they don’t know exactly what Google is doing.”
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The rise of artificial general intelligence -- now seen as inevitable in Silicon Valley -- will bring change that is "orders of magnitude" greater than anything the world has yet seen, observers say. But are we ready?
AGI -- defined as artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities, as opposed to more narrow artificial intelligence, such as the headline-grabbing ChatGPT -- could free people from menial tasks and usher in a new era of creativity.
But such a historic paradigm shift could also threaten jobs and raise insurmountable social issues, experts warn.
Previous technological advances from electricity to the internet ignited powerful social change, says Siqi Chen, chief executive of San Francisco startup Runway.
"But what we're looking at now is intelligence itself... This is the first time we're able to create intelligence itself and increase its amount in the universe," he told AFP.
Change, as a result, will be "orders of magnitude greater than every other technological change we've ever had in history."
And such an exciting, frightening shift is a "double-edged sword," Chen said, envisioning using AGI to tackle climate change, for example, but also warning that it is a tool that we want to be as "steerable as possible."
It was the release of ChatGPT late last year that brought the long dreamt of idea of AGI one giant leap closer to reality.
OpenAI, the company behind the generative software that churns out essays, poems and computing code on command, this week released an even more powerful version of the tech that operates it -- GPT-4.
It says the technology will not only be able to process text but also images, and produce more complex content such as legal complaints or video games.
As such it "exhibits human-level performance" on some benchmarks, the company said.
- Goodbye to 'drudgery' -
The success of OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has ignited an arms race of sorts in Silicon Valley as tech giants seek to push their generative AI tools to the next level -- though they remain wary of chatbots going off the rails.
Already, AI-infused digital assistants from Microsoft and Google can summarize meetings, draft emails, create websites, craft ad campaigns and more -- giving us a glimpse of what AGI will be capable of in the future.
"We spend too much time consumed by the drudgery," said Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice president.
With artificial intelligence Spataro wants to "rediscover the soul of work," he said during a Microsoft presentation on Thursday.
Artificial intelligence can also cut costs, some suggest.
British landscape architect Joe Perkins tweeted that he used GPT-4 for a coding project, which a "very good" developer had told him would cost 5,000 pounds ($6,000) and take two weeks.
"GPT-4 delivered the same in 3 hours, for $0.11," he tweeted. "Genuinely mind boggling."
But that raises the question of the threat to human jobs, with entrepreneur Chen acknowledging that the technology could one day build a startup like his -- or an even better version.
"How am I going to make a living and not be homeless?" he asked, adding that he was counting on solutions to emerge.
- Existential questions -
Ubiquitous artificial intelligence also puts a question mark over creative authenticity as songs, images, art and more are cranked out by software instead of people.
Will humans shun education, relying instead on software to do the thinking for them?
And, who is to be trusted to make the AI unbiased, accurate, and adaptable to different countries and cultures?
AGI is "probably coming at us faster than we can process," says Sharon Zhou, co-founder of a generative AI company.
The technology raises an existential question for humanity, she told AFP.
"If there is going to be something more powerful than us and more intelligent than us, what does that mean for us?" Zhou asked.
"And do we harness it? Or does it harness us?"
OpenAI says it plans to build AGI gradually with the aim of benefitting all of humanity, but it has conceded that the software has safety flaws.
Safety is a "process," OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said in an interview with the MIT Technology Review, adding that it would be "highly desirable" for companies to "come up with some kind of process that allows for slower releases of models with these completely unprecedented capabilities."
But for now, says Zhou, slowing down is just not part of the ethos.
"The power is concentrated around those who can build this stuff. And they make the decisions around this, and they are inclined to move fast," she says.
The international order itself could be at stake, she suggests.
"The pressure between US and China has been immense," Zhou says, adding that the artificial intelligence race invokes the Cold War era.
"There is definitely the risk with AGI that if one country figures that out faster, will they dominate?" she asks.
"And so I think the fear is, don't stop because we can't lose."
juj-gc/st/bfm | Tech Giants |
Seattle’s school district claims that social media companies have made the work of educating young people more difficult, and the schools want tech companies to pay. Image: AlesiaKan (Shutterstock)Seattle’s public school district is suing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and their parent companies. The lawsuit, filed on Friday in a U.S. District Court, alleges that these social media sites have been a primary factor in a “youth mental health crisis,” and that these platforms have knowingly exploited, manipulated, and targeted young people for profit at the expense of their mental heath.OffEnglishThe district argues in its 91-page complaint that tech giants have intentionally engineered addicting platforms, cashed in on the vulnerability of still-developing brains, and algorithmically suggested harmful content to young users.Ultimately, the school district is blaming these social media companies for the increase in mental health and behavioral issues that teens are showing up to classrooms with, which has rendered the task of educating more difficult, according to the suit. District officials point to a 30% increase in self-reported feelings of sadness and hopelessness among the student body, as well as a rise in student suicide plans and attempts between 2010 and 2018. In an effort to manage those challenges, the school district says it has had to take expensive actions like hiring more mental health counselors, creating curriculum surrounding social media and mental health, adjusting and enforcing school policies surrounding social media use, and increasing disciplinary resources. However, even all of these changes haven’t been enough to manage. “Plaintiff cannot keep up with the increased need for mental health services because of the youth mental health crisis,” the lawsuit claims. So, the Seattle schools are seeking accountability for social media platforms and meaningful change in how these companies operate, along with damages and compensation.G/O Media may get a commissionUp to $100 creditSamsung ReserveReserve the next gen Samsung deviceAll you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device. In past, similar cases, tech companies have used Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a legal shield. Under the law, digital publishers are not responsible for third-party content posted on their platforms (i.e. Meta is not liable for anything its users post on Instagram and Facebook). However, the Seattle case aims to get around this fundamental protection by targeting the design of social media sites—not their content. The school district is claiming the increasing incentives to spend more and more time scrolling and the algorithms that dictate what users see causes harm too—not just what’s in the posts. “Defendants have maximized the time users—particularly youth—spend on their platforms by purposely designing, refining, and operating them to exploit the neurophysiology of the brain’s reward systems to keep users coming back, coming back frequently, and staying on the respective platforms for as long as possible,” says the complaint. Some psychology research, along with both internal and external reports on social media company practices seem to support many of the new lawsuit’s claims. Studies have shown, for instance, that social media use and increased smartphone use may be linked to sleep depravation and accompanying depression. A Pew 2022 analysis found that more than half of teenagers surveyed would have a hard, or very hard, time giving up social media. Meta’s own internal research suggested that Instagram is toxic to some teen users, particularly girls, as it cultivates and amplifies body image issues. And Facebook has known for years that its algorithms boost time spent on its site to users’ detriment. However, it’s very difficult to establish a direct link between increased social media use and worsened mental health because there are so many variables involved in mental health. And many experts dispute the use of the term “addiction” as applied to social media platforms altogether.This isn’t the first attempt to sue social media companies for alleged mental health or youth harms in the U.S.. However past suits have mostly focused on individual cases. For instance, the mother of a 10-year old who died in 2021 sued ByteDance over allegations that a TikTok challenge caused her child’s death. And, in April, the mother of a Wisconsin 17-year old who died by suicide sued Meta and Snapchat for “knowingly and purposely” creating harmful and addicting products. The FTC has forced Fortnite to change its interface design so as to be less deceptive (and fined Epic Games half a billion dollars).California legislators even tried to pass a bill banning addictive social media and explicitly making tech companies liable for every resulting violation involving children. The bill failed, but more than 30 states currently have some sort of proposed or pending legislation aimed at regulating social media. Gizmodo reached out to Meta (Instagram and Facebook’s parent company), Alphabet (Google and Youtube’s parent company), TikTok (owned by ByteDance Inc.), and Snapchat (owned by Snap Inc.) for comment. “We want teens to be safe online,” wrote Meta’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, in a response statement emailed to Gizmodo. Davis’ statement cited tools the company has developed “to support teen and families,” like age verifications, parental controls, and notifications encouraging breaks. Further, it read “we don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.”Though past cases, like the death of 14-year old Molly Russell in the U.K., have demonstrated that harmful content like self-harm promotion does slip through the cracks. In the lead up to her suicide, Russell interacted with more than 2,000 Instagram posts relating to self-harm, suicide, and depression. A Google spokesperson, too, responded by highlighting the efforts he said the company has taken to make its platforms safer for children and teens—like screen time reminders and content blocks.TikTok and Snapchat did not immediately respond. | Tech Giants |
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is facing renewed pressure from advocacy groups to prioritize antitrust bills targeting tech giants this Congress.
More than 20 organizations led by Demand Progress, an advocacy group aimed at advancing competition in the tech sector, sent a letter to Schumer on Monday pressing him to prioritize two key antitrust bills.
Both measures passed the House and Senate Judiciary committees with bipartisan support but did not become law.
The proposals target the nation’s four largest tech companies, Meta, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon. They faced fierce pushback from the companies and industry groups that represent the companies, which spent millions of dollars to oppose the bills.
The industry also fought the proposals with aggressive advertisement campaigns arguing the proposals would dismantle services consumers enjoy and lead to security concerns.
Supporters of the bills said those allegations misrepresented the bills and were scare tactics.
“Americans across party lines support government action to rein in Big Tech’s monopoly abuses, and securing the passage of these bills will advance President Biden’s vision for a competitive tech sector and demonstrate the seriousness of Congress on these issues. We hope your leadership prioritizes this in the months ahead,” the organizations wrote, according to a copy of the letter exclusively shared with The Hill.
One bill the groups are pushing for would prevent companies from “self-preferencing” their own products and services over those of their rivals. For example, the bill would ban Amazon from placing its products higher in search results.
The other proposal is a bill aimed at improving competition in the market for smartphone applications. The measure, which largely targets Google parent company Alphabet and Apple, aims to restrict the companies from imposing certain rules, such as collecting fees from in-app payments.
In the letter, the groups also highlighted Biden’s support for boosting competition in the tech sector. The president wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last month pushing for sweeping reform for tech giants, including a call to “bring more competition back to the tech sector” but stopped short of backing specific proposals.
Other signatories of the letter include Public Knowledge, Athena, the Center for Digital Democracy and the Open Markets Institute. | Tech Giants |
The logos of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google in a combination photoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comBRUSSELS, July 7 (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators are investigating the video licensing policy of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google, Amazon (AMZN.O), Apple (AAPL.O) and Meta , the European Commission said on Thursday.The investigation is the latest to hit the tech industry, which will be subject to tough new rules in Europe next year that could force companies to change their core business models and do more to tackle illegal content on their platforms."The Commission confirms that it has a preliminary investigation ongoing into AOM's licensing policy," a spokesperson for the EU executive told Reuters.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"The fact that the Commission has a preliminary investigation does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation on the existence of an infringement," the spokesperson said, without providing further details.AOM did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Founded in 2015, the group aims to create a new standard software for streaming higher-quality 4K video on browsers, devices, apps, and gaming, known as AV1.While the AV1 software is not yet adopted widely, Netflix (NFLX.O) and YouTube have started using it for some customers, and browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox have started to support the new format.Apple and Google did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Meta and Amazon declined to comment. Microsoft (MSFT.O), Netflix, Broadcom (AVGO.O), Cisco (CSCO.O) and Tencent (0700.HK), who are also AOM members, did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.Intel (INTC.O), Huawei (HWT.UL), Mozilla, Samsung (005930.KS) and Nvidia (NVDA.O) are also AOM members, according to its website.In a questionnaire sent to some companies earlier this year and seen by Reuters, the EU watchdog said it was investigating alleged anti-competitive behaviour related to the license terms of AV1 by AOM and its members in Europe."The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said.It said this action may be restricting the innovators' ability to compete with the AV1 technical specification, and also eliminate incentives for them to innovate.The questionnaire also asked about the impact of an AOM patent license clause in which licensees would have their patent licenses terminated immediately if they launched patent lawsuits asserting that implementation infringes their claims.Companies risk fines of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Foo Yun Chee; Additional reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Editing by Chris Reese and Jan HarveyOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
Britain is 'at war' with tech giants and proposed online safety bill is desperately needed, says Lord Stevenson
- Labour peer called on colleagues to make the most of a ‘very strange situation’
- Paying tribute to teen Molly Russell, he encouraged them to minimise 'dissent'
Britain is ‘at war’ with Big Tech and Parliament must act like it to pass the Online Safety Bill, Lord Stevenson has urged.
The Labour peer called on colleagues to make the most of a ‘very strange situation’ of having near complete cross-party support for the legislation.
Paying tribute to teenager Molly Russell and other victims of online harms, he encouraged them to minimise ‘dissent’ and work together to ensure it was delivered in time.
Speaking in the House of Lords during the Bill’s second reading on Wednesday, he said: ‘That is a big ask; I do not think it has been done, except during wartime. But we are at war – at war with these people who are trying to run our lives, and we should try to get together and defeat them.’
Peers also took the opportunity to highlight the importance of following the Online Safety Bill ‘swiftly’ with legislation to tackle competition within digital markets and protect consumers.
Britain is ‘at war’ with Big Tech and Parliament must act like it to pass the Online Safety Bill, Lord Stevenson has urged. [File image]
Paying tribute to teenager Molly Russell, pictured, who ended her life after viewing suicide and self-harm content online, Lord Stevenson encouraged colleagues to minimise ‘dissent’ and work together to ensure it was delivered in time
READ MORE: Coroner in Molly Russell inquest calls for separate social media platforms for adults and children
Lord Black of Brentwood, who is deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group, said the two went ‘hand in hand’ and would level up the playing field between platforms and UK news publishers.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara said the chamber found itself in the ‘unusual’ position where there was ‘no political divide’ over the Bill’s ultimate aim.
Platforms had ‘failed’ in regulating themselves and continued to use business models that relied on ‘the engagement of users at all cost, regardless of what holds their attention’.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill will protect Britons from online fraud while also empowering a new regulator to rein in tech giants.
Lord Black said UK news publishers had been operating within a ‘deeply dysfunctional’ digital market for years and were not paid fairly for their content.
He urged the Government to ‘ensure speedy implementation’ of the new regulator, the Digital Markets Unit, as a vital step in protecting the future of journalism.
He said: ‘It will be a world-leading digital regulator alongside this world-first in online safety, paving the way for a sea change in how platforms operate and ensuring the sustainability of journalism.’ | Tech Giants |
Pick up an Android phone and the details of the software experience are going to vary depending on the company that made it. While Google makes the basics of the Android operating system, everyone else likes to put their own spin on it.In the case of Google’s own Pixel phones, for example, you get exclusives like call screening from Google Assistant and a Now Playing widget that can identify songs playing in the background right on the lock screen.It’s the same with Samsung phones, which run a version of Android called OneUI. If you own a Samsung handset, these are some of the most useful features you’ll get that you can’t find on phones from other manufacturers.Hide Apps You Don’t UseYou’re going to use some apps a lot more than others, and you don’t want a lot of unused apps taking up space on your screen—it makes the interface cluttered and means it takes more time to find the apps you’re interested in.Uninstalling apps is always an option, but maybe you don’t necessarily want to go that far. What’s more, there are certain fundamental preinstalled apps from Samsung and Google that you can’t uninstall, which means you’re stuck with them.Samsung’s OneUI has a solution by enabling you to hide apps. They’re still on your phone, but they don’t appear on your home screens, or in the app drawer, or in searches. You need to unhide them to bring them back again.To hide apps, open up the app drawer, tap the three dots (top right) and then Settings. Choose Hide apps and you can hide or unhide any of the apps stored on your phone by selecting them from the list. All your hidden apps are grouped up at the top.You can hide apps on your Samsung phone if you need to.
Samsung via David NieldOptimize Your DeviceIf you head into the Settings app then choose Battery and device care, you’ll find a phone management screen that isn’t included on other Android devices. It’s there to keep your phone running as smoothly as possible for as long as possible.This device care and optimization covers battery health, free storage, system memory, and a variety of security settings, too. Right at the top of the screen you get an overall ranking for how well optimized your device currently is.While the device care utilities will always be running in the background to look out for problems, you can also tap the Optimize now button to perform a manual optimization—very handy if you think there might be a few issues with your smartphone.The optimization process includes looking for duplicate or large files on your device that might be taking up room unnecessarily, for example, or hunting down apps that are draining battery power, or closing down apps running in the background unnecessarily.Customize the Always-On DisplaySamsung phones give you more control than most over what’s shown on your lock screen, and how it’s shown, too. From Settings, head to Lock Screen and Always On Display to configure it—though note that some budget Samsung handsets don’t offer the feature.You’ll see that you’ve got all sorts of settings to play around with. You can, for instance, choose how long the always-on display stays visible for and pick your preferred clock style from a variety of digital and analog options.Other available settings let you switch between portrait and landscape orientation and choose how bright the text is on the lock screen. It’s also up to you whether or not the media playback controls are shown via the always-on display.You can even download entire themes for the always-on display: Tap Themes from Settings, then pick AOD to see what’s on offer. The quality can vary, but you should find at least a few options that suit your tastes.Put Items in a Secure FolderIf you own a mid-range or flagship Samsung smartphone then you have access to a Secure Folder: a specially protected area of your device where you can store any kind of file you want that no one else has access to.Accessing the Secure Folder on your Samsung phone requires extra authentication—a fingerprint, a PIN code, or a pattern—and all the data inside it is fully encrypted, which means it’s almost impossible for it to be hacked.From Settings, choose Biometrics and security and then Secure Folder. Once you’ve set your authentication method and brought up the Secure Folder, you can add new files and apps to it by tapping on the + (plus) button.You can also add files to the Secure Folder from several other apps on your handset. In the Gallery app, for example, you can select photos and videos and then tap More and Move to Secure Folder.Samsung DeX lets you use your phone like a desktop PC.
Courtesy of SamsungRun Samsung DeXSamsung DeX is a way of operating your smartphone with a keyboard, mouse, and computer monitor. If you’ve got a lot of image editing or word processing to do on your phone, for example, then it can be useful.What you’re essentially doing is turning Android and OneUI into a desktop operating system, with all the benefits that brings—floating windows, more intuitive control of your apps, keyboard shortcuts, and so on.You need some specific hardware: This only works with a Galaxy S series phone, and you need a specific DeX cable from Samsung to connect it to your monitor and your peripherals. You can also plug it into a laptop or desktop computer and use the peripherals attached to that instead.Samsung has a full guide to DeX that you can consult, but it’s not difficult to get up and running and should seriously boost your mobile productivity—both in what you can do on your phone and how quickly you can get it done. | Tech Giants |
The European Union has passed two bills to rein in Big Tech. The European Parliament voted Tuesday to approve the Digital Services Act and the Digital Market Act, two bills that would impose new requirements on Big Tech companies to monitor and take down illegal content, give competitors an equal chance in the marketplace, and force them to be more transparent about their content moderation and algorithms. This legislation will provide "better protection & more choice for online users in [the European Union], fair & open single market, more transparent & accountable platforms," according to the Parliament's Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection. COSMONAUTS ABOARD INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION CELEBRATE 'LIBERATION' OF UKRAINIAN TERRITORY 👏 Digital Services Act & Digital Markets Act were just adopted by #EPlenary! Better protection & more choice for online users in 🇪🇺, fair & open single market, more transparent & accountable platforms. Vote results☑️DSA ➡️ 539/54/30☑️DMA ➡️ 588/11/31 pic.twitter.com/QLiIn5fFsV— IMCO Committee Press (@EP_SingleMarket) July 5, 2022 The DMA will lay down "clear rules" regarding the conditions that "gatekeepers" can impose on businesses and consumers. The act will impose regulations on these gatekeepers, which it defines as companies that have a "strong economic position, significant impact on the internal market and is active in multiple EU countries," a "strong intermediation position" that links a large user base to multiple businesses, and an "entrenched and durable position in the market." The companies that this legislation is expected to affect include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Twitter. Companies will face fines up to 10% of annual global turnover for DMA violations and 6% for DSA breaches, according to the released legislative text. These regulations will penalize companies if they prioritize their software over their competitors among those hosted on their platform or if they are not given the option to uninstall the preinstalled software. The regulations will also require Big Tech companies to improve interoperability between messaging platforms. The DSA, in contrast, is expected to affect what sort of content is directed toward minors. Targeted advertising will be banned for minors, and the use of sensitive data involving one's ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion will be forbidden. It will also hold tech companies accountable for "harmful and illegal" content, require them to be more transparent about their content moderation and algorithms, and strengthen the tracing of traders on online marketplaces. These new regulations may conflict with Elon Musk's free-speech-focused vision for Twitter upon final acquisition, as regulators have warned the billionaire that there are rules in Europe that his company will have to adhere to in order to avoid penalization. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER While the bill's passing is a historic moment for the EU, some expressed concerns about the government not hiring enough workers to regulate the demands of the legislation properly. "We raised the alarm last week with other civil society groups that if the Commission does not hire the experts it needs to monitor Big Tech's practices in the market, the legislation could be hamstrung by ineffective enforcement," said European Consumer Organization Deputy Director-General Ursula Pachl in a statement. | Tech Giants |
BRUSSELS, Oct 4 (Reuters) - The European Parliament approved new rules on Tuesday that will introduce in the European Union a single charging port for mobile phones, tablets and cameras by 2024, a world first that is expected to affect iPhone maker Apple more than its rivals.The vote confirms an earlier agreement among EU institutions and will make USB-C connectors used by Android-based devices the EU standard, forcing Apple (AAPL.O) to change its charging port for iPhones and other devices. read more The change had been discussed for years and was prompted by complaints from iPhone and Android users about having to switch to different chargers for their devices.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comAmong big providers of electronic devices to European customers, Apple is expected to be among the most affected, but analysts also expect a possible positive impact because it could encourage shoppers to buy the company's latest gadgets instead of ones without USB-C.The deal also covers e-readers, ear buds and other technologies, meaning it may also have an impact on Samsung (005930.KS), Huawei [RIC:RIC:HWT.UL] and other device makers, analysts said.EU lawmakers supported the reform with a large majority, with 602 votes in favour and only 13 against.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Catherine EvansOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
Progressive anti-monopoly campaigners expressed dismay and outrage Friday following a news report indicating that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—a major beneficiary of Big Tech campaign cash—is likely to delay a vote on bipartisan antitrust legislation until after the midterm elections.TIME reported late Thursday that key lawmakers involved in the effort to get the American Innovation and Choice Online Act over the finish line "don't expect" Schumer (D-N.Y.) to bring the bill to the floor for a vote ahead of the November elections, throwing the stalled measure's prospects into further doubt."So much for that summer vote on antitrust legislation."One unnamed senior Democratic aide told the outlet that there is "no chance" the Senate votes on the bill before the midterms."Let's make one thing clear: this is not about a 'busy legislative calendar' or 'competing priorities' or 'not having the votes,'" responded Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. "This is about corruption, plain and simple, and the nauseating influence of Big Tech money in D.C.""It's time for Sen. Schumer to decide if he wants to be remembered for helping billionaires wreck democracy or for acting like the leader he claims to be, standing up to monopolists and corporate bullies, and advancing bipartisan legislation that leads us to a better future," Greer added.Sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the American Innovation and Choice Online Act is aimed at preventing huge online companies such as Amazon and Google from using their platforms to give their own products an unfair advantage, an anti-competitive practice known as self-preferencing. The bill cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in January by a vote of 16-6.A bipartisan group of lawmakers is also hoping to pass the Open App Markets Act, a separate but related bill designed to prevent self-preferencing by Apple and other dominant players in the app sphere.Big Tech, an increasingly powerful force in U.S. politics, is furiously opposed to both bills and has lobbied hard against them, claiming the measures pose privacy concerns and would potentially damage the country's national security—criticisms that the legislation's supporters adamantly reject as industry "lies."Since 2021, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta have spent nearly $100 million lobbying against antitrust efforts. Some of the tech industry's cash, according to Bloomberg, has flowed to Schumer, who originally pledged to hold a vote on the antitrust bills by early summer."After receiving no money from any of the top lobbyists for Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., or Alphabet Inc. in the two previous election cycles going back to 2017, Schumer's attracted some $30,000 in direct donations to his campaign from the lobbyists and executives of the companies opposed to a bill that would curb how the platforms operate," Bloomberg reported last month.On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly visited the U.S. Capitol to meet with Republican and Democratic lawmakers about the antitrust legislation."So much for that summer vote on antitrust legislation," lamented Maria Langholz, communications director at Demand Progress.TIME's reporting on the likely delay of the antitrust vote comes amid anger over Senate Democrats' decisions this week to push off votes on same-sex marriage and a congressional stock trading ban until after the midterms.Klobuchar, the chair of the Senate's antitrust subcommittee, insisted in a statement to TIME that Schumer is "committed to working with me for a vote, and whether this bill comes to the floor before or after the midterms, we will take action.""Against all odds, we have passed a bill out of committee to take action to protect consumers and small businesses and put rules of the road in place for dominant tech platforms," Klobuchar said. "We have a strong bipartisan coalition in both the House and Senate pushing this bill forward, and the American people are on our side." | Tech Giants |
Firefox maker Mozilla is taking aim at Microsoft, Google, and Apple for using their operating systems to steer users to their browsers and stacking the deck against rivals who lack the same OS advantages. Like, for instance, Mozilla.
Having these few large companies dominate such an important tech market – Mozilla refers to browsers and browser engines as the heart of the web – has a monopolistic ripple effect that leads to few choices for users, a drop in innovation, a lack of openness, and low quality, insecure code thrust upon us, the Firefox developer concluded in a recent report.
In "Five Walled Gardens: Why Browsers are Essential to the Internet and How Operating Systems are Holding Them Back," Mozilla researchers wrote that they wanted to learn how netizens interact with browsers and how OS makers are stifling competitors and holding back innovation. Suffice to say, Firefox, once seen as cool and popular, isn't exactly flavor of the month anymore. On desktop, it comes in at about seven percent of market share, versus Chrome's 67 percent, and on mobile, it barely registers, according to StatCounter. So you can see why the Firefox builder is a bit upset. But who or what's to blame for this dwindling interest? Moz's stance is that although there are alternatives, such as its open source Firefox, to the big three browsers – Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome – users find it hard or too much effort to change from those, especially given the way Microsoft, Apple, and Google engineer their OSes – Windows, macOS and iOS, and Android, primarily – to keep people locked in. That cuts off interest to competing browsers, which see limited usage and development effort, and never quite get off the ground to challenge the status quo.
What's more, Google, Apple, and Mozilla are the only major browser engine makers left, another indicator that users don't have much choice. Apple pushes its WebKit engine, at the heart of Safari, onto Mac and iOS users to the point that the iOS Firefox app is required to use WebKit rather than its own engine, stamping out competition, choice, and innovation there. For other OSes, Mozilla uses its Gecko engine in Firefox. Meanwhile, Google has managed to get its Chromium Blink engine into not just Chrome on desktop and Android, but also Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and more, across multiple platforms.
With Apple focused on its own ecosystem, dictating even the browser engine iOS apps must use, that leaves just Gecko and Blink across many other platforms. That, according to Mozilla, is not a good deal for web developers nor netizens. The dominant engine is well placed for dictating future web standards. Firefox introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?
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"The research we are releasing with this report paints a complex picture with many paradoxes: people say they know how to change their browser, yet many never do," the Mozilla team wrote. "Many people believe they can choose their browser, yet they have a bias towards software which is pre-installed, set to default and difficult to change."
Tech giants design their software to influence people's choices, and OS makers use these techniques to drive the use of their own browsers, crushing any rivals in the way, in Mozilla's view.
"Competition in browsers and browser engines is needed to advance innovation, performance, speed, privacy, and security," the Moz team argued. "Effective competition requires multiple stakeholders to counter the power of a small number of giants and prevent them from dictating the future of the internet for all of us." As well as all this, you've got Meta bundling its own Chrome-based Oculus browser with its virtual-reality headsets, and Amazon uses Chromium's Blink engine in the browser included in its devices.
An old problem
Mozilla's complaint reminds us, and likely you too, of the outcry in the 1990s over Microsoft using its Windows OS to thrust its Internet Explorer browser on everyone, annihilating Netscape and steamrolling any other rival browser in the way. Tech giants using their operating systems to force web browsers onto users is something that just keeps cropping up time and time again.
Most recently, the UK's Competition and Market Authority in June said it is probing the market dominance of Apple and Google in the world of browsers and gaming. That same month, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov accused Apple of stifling web developers by cramming WebKit and Safari down users' throats.
Mozilla claimed Microsoft, Apple, and Google are abusing their market strengths by bundling their browsers with their OSes – again, Windows, iOS and macOS, and Android – and setting them as defaults, and making it tedious for users to unchain themselves from the software and pick an alternative, if said users are even aware there is an alternative.
In some cases, you can't even delete the bundled browser. It wasn't until 2020 that Apple added settings to switch from Safari to another browser as the default on iOS, and even then you can't uninstall Apple's offering.
Another annoying thing some OS makers do is find any excuse to override the user's browser choice, and point people's settings back to the giants' own browsers. This configuration hijacking is "even more egregious than prohibiting rival software adoption," the Moz researchers opined.
"This has been the case on Microsoft Windows computers for a number of years; consumers have faced increasingly aggressive practices, some of which have been aimed at reversing their decisions to use non-Microsoft software, for example, overriding default browser choice and reverting to Edge," they wrote. Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google? Apple: We're defending your privacy by nixing 16 browser APIs. Rivals: You mean defending your bottom line Rivals aren't convinced by Microsoft's one-click default browser change In addition, according to Mozilla, operating system developers may lean on manufacturers of computers, phones, and other devices so that this hardware ships not only with their OS and browser but that no rival browsers are included – some going as far as demanding rival browsers are excluded from app stores. For example, Google strong-arms Android smartphone makers into bundling Google's software suite – including Chrome – and competing browsers are given the cold shoulder.
This is important given the high use of both PC and mobile browsers, according to the report. The researchers found that 82 percent of surveyed US residents – and 84 percent in the UK – use a smartphone browser at least once a day, and 54 percent to 88 percent many times a day.
"The browser is a connective tissue between our professional and personal lives and the larger world, as more and more facets of it become digital-first," the Firefox maker wrote.
You might think this is just Mozilla being bitter and crying over the fact that Firefox has fallen out of fashion. No one's forcing you to install or run Chrome on your non-ChromeOS desktop, for instance, so we surely must do it under our own free will.
But Mozilla does sound somewhat convincing in its conclusion: So what should be done? Mozilla said it's working on proposing some solutions. It hopes in the next few months to publish suggestions on how software can be designed to promote choice. That is to say, we reckon, promote Firefox. It also proposed this little side quest for politicians and watchdogs...
"Regulators, policymakers and lawmakers in many jurisdictions can take this moment to create a new era in the internet's story — one in which consumers and developers benefit from genuine choice, competition and innovation."
Given that Netscape features in the heritage of Firefox, we guess we've got a reboot of Netscape v Microsoft to potentially look forward to again. ® | Tech Giants |
Heavily encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp could be required to adopt cutting-edge technology to spot child sexual abuse material or face the threat of significant fines, under new changes to UK digital safety legislation.The amendment to the online safety bill would require tech firms to use their “best endeavours” to deploy new technology that identifies and removes child sexual abuse and exploitation content (CSAE).It comes as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Messenger and Instagram apps prepare to introduce end-to-end encryption, amid strong opposition from the UK government, which has described the plans as “not acceptable”.Priti Patel, a longstanding critic of Zuckerberg’s plans, said the change in the law balanced the need to protect children while providing privacy for online users.The home secretary said: “Child sexual abuse is a sickening crime. We must all work to ensure criminals are not allowed to run rampant online and technology companies must play their part and take responsibility for keeping our children safe.“Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive – we need both, and we can have both and that is what this amendment delivers.”Child safety campaigners have warned that heavy encryption would prevent law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing illegal messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content – a process known as end-to-end encryption. However, officials said the amendment is not an attempt to stop the rollout of more such services and that any technology deployed would have to be effective and proportionate.Zuckerberg’s Meta business, which also owns the encrypted WhatsApp messaging service, is delaying introducing its Messenger and Instagram plans until 2023.Vetting private messages for child abuse material has proved controversial, with campaigners warning of negative consequences for user privacy. One controversial method that could be considered by the communications watchdog, which is overseeing implementation of the bill, is client-side scanning. Apple has delayed plans to introduce the technology, which would involve scanning user images for child sexual abuse material before uploading them to the cloud. The company has proposed deploying a technique which would compare photos with known images of child abuse when users opted to upload them to the cloud.Under the proposed amendment the Ofcom watchdog will be able to demand that tech firms deploy or develop new technology that can help find abuse material as well as stopping its spread. The amendment tightens an existing clause in the bill which already gives Ofcom the power to require deployment of “accredited technology”. The change will now require companies to use their “best endeavours” to deploy or develop “new” technology if the existing technology is not suitable for their platform.If a company fails to adopt that technology, Ofcom has the power to impose fines of up to £18m or 10% of a company’s global annual turnover – whichever is higher. The online safety bill returns to parliament next week after being scrutinised by a committee of MPs and is expected to become law around the year end or early 2023.There are between 550,000 and 850,000 people in the UK who pose a sexual risk to children, according to the National Crime Agency. “We need tech companies to be there on the frontline with us and these new measures will ensure that,” said Rob Jones, NCA director general for child sexual abuse. | Tech Giants |
As the world grapples with an ongoing chip shortage, a quiet giant among chipmakers has committed to investing $100 billion over three years to ramp up production.Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company may not be a household name, but with a market value of over $550 billion, it's one of the world's 10 most valuable companies. Now, it's leveraging its considerable resources to bring the world's most advanced chip manufacturing back to U.S. soil.CNBC got an exclusive tour of the $12 billion fabrication plant, or fab, in Phoenix, Arizona, where TSMC will start making 5-nanometer chips in 2024. The company says it will produce 20,000 wafers each month."These are parts that are going to be used in lots of different places: CPUs, GPUs, IPUs, etc. They'll be used in smartphones," Rick Cassidy told CNBC. Cassidy is TSMC's chief strategy officer and the president and CEO of TSMC's project in Arizona.TSMC makes key components for everything from cellphones to F-35 fighter jets to NASA's Perseverance Rover mission to Mars. Earlier this month, it announced plans for a new factory in Japan, where it will produce chips with older technologies, for things like household devices and certain car components. TSMC is also Apple's exclusive provider of the most advanced chips inside every iPhone currently on the market and most Mac computers."But they remain sort of in the background, in terms of end markets. So Apple gets all the accolades when a new phone comes out," said Joanne Itow, managing director of manufacturing at Semico Research."We're low-key. We let our products speak for themselves. Their success brings all the business that we could ever hope for," Cassidy said.The U.S. was the birthplace of advanced silicon, but for decades now, it's been losing market share to Asia, where 79% of the world's chip production happened in 2020, according to industry association SEMI. It calculated the U.S. was responsible for 12% of worldwide chip manufacturing last year, down from 37% in 1990. TSMC's $12 billion 5-nanometer chip fabrication plant is six months into being built in northern Phoenix, Arizona, on September 28, 2021.TSMCTSMC alone was responsible for 24% of the world's semiconductor output in 2020, up from 21% in 2019, according to the company. When it comes to the most advanced chips used in the latest iPhones, supercomputers and automotive AI, TSMC is responsible for 92% of production while Samsung is responsible for the other 8%, according to research group Capital Economics."It's become almost a monopoly at the leading edge, and all of those manufacturing operations, for the most part, are out of Taiwan, Hsinchu. That becomes a matter of national importance for the United States, but not only the United States, but the Western world," said Christopher Rolland, Susquehanna's senior semiconductor analyst.Along with cutting edge 3- and 5-nanometer chips, TSMC also makes larger chips for products such as electric toothbrushes and coffeemakers. Cars often use less-advanced 28- to 40-nanometer chips. All types of chips have been impacted by the shortage. Carmakers including GM and Toyota have paused production at some plants. And Apple is likely to slash its 2021 production targets for the iPhone 13, with orders for some models delayed by more than a month.World's first pure-play foundryWhen Morris Chang first proposed the idea for TSMC in the 1980s, investors were skeptical. Born in China and educated at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, Chang moved to Taiwan after 25 years at Texas Instruments. There, the government asked him to create a Taiwanese semiconductor company that would become a world leader. His idea: Focus only on manufacturing — what's now known as a pure-play foundry."When you're just focused on one thing, you do one thing really well," said Cassidy, who joined TSMC 23 years ago after what he describes as a fascinating hourslong meeting with Chang.Chang bet big on a need that didn't exist yet. When he founded TSMC in 1987, giants such as Intel and Texas Instruments took pride in designing and making their own chips. A legendary saying in the industry back then was "Real men have fabs.""When Morris went out to get funding, he went to many named companies that you know, and they told them, 'Morris, your idea won't get off the ground. If you get it off the ground, it can't scale.'"But as chips got more complex, manufacturing them became an enormous undertaking. Analysts say building a fab today takes at least two years and $10 billion. It's become nearly impossible for even the biggest chip companies — Intel, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD — to do it all and keep up with the most advanced tech. Intel, for example, still designs and makes its own chips, but it's fallen behind Samsung and TSMC in recent years and now relies on TSMC to make some of its chips. "If you were a smart designer, you didn't have to have billions of dollars and a fab behind you for the first time with the emergence of TSM," Rolland said.Now, each major step of chipmaking is often handled by a separate company. Some, such as Arm and MIPS, focus on IP and architecture, providing the core building blocks to design chips. Then there's electronic design automation companies such as Cadence and Synopsys that write the software used to design chips. Only one company, ASML, makes the $180 million extreme ultraviolet light machines required to etch designs into the most advanced chips. Then there are the wildly successful fabless companies designing the chips, such as Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia and many more.A rendering of ASML's extreme ultraviolet light machine etching designs into the most advanced chipsASMLAs these fabless companies took off, TSMC found itself on a flywheel making more and more of the world's chips."This has allowed [TSMC] to not only catch up, but in my opinion, surpass Intel, to become the world's greatest manufacturing technology on the planet," Rolland said, "one of the top 10 most valuable companies in terms of market cap in the globe."TSMC was first listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 1994, and in 1997 it became the first Taiwan-based company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 2000s, it had caught up with the 20 or so other companies making the most advanced chips at the time. As the tech kept advancing, more and more companies fell behind. Today, only two manufacturers remain that can make the most advanced, 5-nanometer chips: TSMC and Samsung.In 2013, Apple started relying on TSMC to make its A-series chips for the iPhone as it moved away from reliance on Samsung, a direct competitor in mobile phones. Today, there's a TSMC chip inside every iPhone on the market. And Apple has moved away from Intel too, now relying on TSMC to make the chips inside most Macs.In 2018, at age 86, Chang retired as chairman of TSMC. His radical pure-play foundry idea continues to pay off. With the opening of a new fab in Taiwan next year, TSMC is in a race with Samsung to make the world's first 3-nanometer chips — with Intel planning to get there by 2025.Bringing 5-nanometer to the U.S.Right now, no fab in the U.S. can make 5-nanometer chips. But TSMC is changing that."If you want more capacity, you have to build more fabs. And that's one of the reasons that we're moving to the U.S.," Cassidy said. "Our customers want us in the U.S. The U.S. government wants us here."TSMC Technical Director Tony Chen took CNBC on a tour of the site where a four-story 2.3-million-square-foot fab is being erected. Chen has led 17 other fab construction projects in his 23 years with TSMC. "This project is designed as a 5-nanometer fab. Actually, it's a copy from the fab we have in Taiwan," Chen said. Nearby, one of the world's largest cranes was being lifted to its full height of 200 feet. The 2,300-ton crane was brought to the site on 153 semitrucks. Site supervisor Jim White said contractors have moved nearly 4 million cubic yards of dirt and have used more than 260 million gallons of water since construction began in April.Building a fab and making chips takes an incredible amount of water, not an abundant resource in the middle of the desert. Arizona's biggest water source is groundwater, but deep wells at big farms are using water up faster than it's naturally replenished. Chen said TSMC needs around 4.7 million gallons of water each day to support production. TSMC is no stranger to water shortages. Taiwan is facing its worst drought in 56 years, something that TSMC said has not impacted production. In Arizona, TSMC said, an on-site water treatment center will recycle up to 90% of water used at the fab."And then ultimately, that water will be reinjected into the aquifer in partnership with the city of Phoenix after reverse osmosis and other technology solutions are provided," said Chris Camacho, president and CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. He helped negotiate the deal that brought the project to Arizona.Another challenge is that most 5-nanometer specialists are based in Asia. To solve this, TSMC's academic relations manager, Roxanna Vega, said the company is bringing over some of its top experts from Taiwan."They're seen as subject matter experts on what they do in our fabs over there," Vega said. "It'll be a temporary assignment ... two, maybe three years."TSMC said it's already sent more than 250 new U.S. hires to Taiwan for 12 to 18 months to get up to speed."The opportunity to train in our 5-nanometer gigafab in Taiwan is to kind of give them that insight of how immense and how state of the art the tools, machinery and everything is going to be here in Arizona," Vega said.Diversification is a key reason for TSMC to bring advanced manufacturing to the U.S."Taiwan is not very good when it comes to analog semiconductor design, and by moving to the United States you'd be able to tap into a much larger number of analog designers," Rolland said.TSMC workers walk down a hallway in a chipmaking fab in TaiwanTSMCMost of TSMC's 12 fabs are in Taiwan and China, leaving the world vulnerable to potential slowdowns from natural disasters, including the current drought there, or the geopolitical tensions of the region. Some experts, however, refer to TSMC as Taiwan's "silicon shield" in its fraught relationship with China."The media paints a very bleak picture of this situation," Rolland said, "but I'm actually much more optimistic — in part because of this idea [of] the semiconductor shield, because of this mutually beneficial relationship between the mainland and Taiwan itself. China as of right now needs them for their leading-edge manufacturing."The U.S. also depends heavily on the chips coming out of Taiwan — a key reason the government worked hard to convince TSMC to bring its tech here."Arizona has a number of programs, including the Qualified Facility tax credit and the Quality Jobs tax credit, that's really an incentive to help lower the cost of operations," Camacho said. "In addition to that, the city of Phoenix put together a $200 million infrastructure package that helps TSMC access water and additional infrastructure needed."The Biden administration has proposed $52 billion in subsidies for chip companies such as TSMC to manufacture on U.S. soil.Industry reports estimate a $50 billion investment from the U.S. government would enable the construction of 19 fabs in the U.S. over the next 10 years, effectively doubling domestic chip manufacturing capability.As the shortage continues, similar investments are happening around the world. Industry association SEMI projects 72 new fabs or major expansions will come online by 2024 — 10 of them located in North and South America."I heard more announcements of investments in the last two, three years than in my entire life," said SEMI President and CEO Ajit Manocha. "And based on that we feel that by end of next year, we should start seeing some relief on the chip shortage."Until then, as demand continues to soar, TSMC is raising chip prices as much as 20%, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The cost could trickle down to consumers in the price of electronics. TSMC is also continuing to ramp up production capacity, including in the U.S., where the 1,100-acre Arizona site certainly has room for a second phase.Watch the video to see the exclusive tour of TSMC's Arizona site and inside the chip giant's massive fabs in Taiwan.Correction: This article has been updated to correct the location of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's new plant. | Tech Giants |
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP (Getty Images)Eventually, Google and other big tech companies want to dispense with passwords entirely, but until that day comes, a Google Password Manager feature called on-device encryption might be your best bet for protecting your precious codes. Though it quietly came out earlier this spring, since you can now easily access Google Password Manager on your Android Home Screen, now’s a good time to check it out. The feature is available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, and is designed to help users keep their information safe from prying eyes—even Google’s.What is on-device encryption?In short: on device-encryption adds an extra layer of protection and privacy to Google Password Manager by giving you sole possession of the encryption key that encodes and decodes the text for your PWs. When it comes to encryption, “keys” are the tool used to lock and unlock information. Encryption hides data by scrambling normal text, or “plaintext” into what is called “ciphertext,” which presents itself as garbled, unreadable gibberish. That gibberish can be turned back into readable plaintext, however, using a “key,” which is a randomly generated string of information that is used to unlock encryption. Google Password Manager has traditionally held onto a user’s key, storing it in the user’s Google account and using it to protect their passwords. However, with on-device encryption, the user’s key is stored on their actual device instead of in Google’s digital systems. The feature allows users to unlock their passwords using their Google password or by using an eligible screen lock feature of their choosing (PIN or a fingerprint or other biometric identifier). As Google has put it, that means that “no one besides you will be able to access your passwords.” That includes Google!G/O Media may get a commissionWhy You Should Set Up Account RecoveryYou can certainly see why this new feature has some privacy advantages, but there are also some potential downsides. For instance, if you lose or forget your Google password or other security mechanism tethered to the feature, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. Why? Because then you won’t be able to access any of your other passwords, either. Since there is some risk of this happening, Google highly encourages you to set up some account recovery methods before enabling on-device encryption. You can read more about these by reading Google’s support page on the issue here. Also important to note: once on-device encryption is added, it apparently can’t be removed, so be sure you want to engage it before turning it on.How to set up Google Password Manager’s On-Device EncryptionSo how do you get this all set up? The process should be pretty simple. For Android, you just have to do the following: Open Password Manager.Click on SettingsTap Set up on-device encryption.That should be it. For the Chrome browser, the process is similarly simple: In the top right corner, go to More.Select Settings.Hit Passwords.Select Set up on-device encryption.For iOS, you’ll follow a similar procedure, but starting from the Google Passwords webpage. From there, just click on settings and then “set up.” For more information on this new feature, you can check out Google’s full write-up here.Another thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily have to trust Google at all! For the truly paranoid, this might not be a bad thing to consider. You can always subscribe to another password manager like Keeper or Bitwarden and, if that doesn’t suit your needs, you can always just write your passwords down on a piece of paper. It’d be pretty hard to hack your notebook, after all. | Tech Giants |
(Bloomberg) -- Google’s top search executive said concerns about Amazon.com Inc. keep him awake at night as the company loses users to the online retail giant and newer apps such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok.
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Testifying as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google Thursday, Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said young people in particular are using apps such as TikTok and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram and WhatsApp, where they spend an average of four hours per day.
“I feel a keen sense not to become the next roadkill,” said Raghavan, one of the first employees the Alphabet Inc. unit has called in its defense. For young people, “Grandpa Google knows the answer and will help you with homework. But when it comes to doing interesting things, they like to start elsewhere.”
The Justice Department rested its case last week, arguing that Google illegally maintains a monopoly in online search by paying more than $10 billion a year to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers in exchange for being set as the preselected “default” on mobile phones and web browsers. Google, in part through Raghavan’s testimony, argues that the company faces staunch competition from not only other search engines but other online sites that young people engage with for everything from entertainment to shopping to cooking.
Raghavan’s testimony served as a rebuttal to the idea that Google could be a “one-stop shop” for internet search, an argument made earlier in the trial by Justice Department witnesses, including Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella. US v. Google, which is expected to last 10 weeks, is the government’s biggest tech monopoly trial of the last two decades.
Read More: DOJ Google Antitrust Case Wraps With Apple Deal on Center Stage
Raghavan underscored that Google was at risk of losing market share to apps like TikTok and Instagram, particularly because engaging with them diverges so sharply from traditional online search behavior — going to a search engine via a web browser, and typing a query.
“The fastest growing section of queries is young people using their camera to point to things,” Raghavan said on the witness stand.
“Our user research shows where young people go, older users follow,” he added, explaining why Google has focused on TikTok. Raghavan made similar remarks in 2022, relying on internal Google research, stating that “something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president for search, testified last week that Google has focused on TikTok of late to figure out how younger people are searching for information.
“Young people particularly are increasingly turning to TikTok for their information needs, and we want to understand what is it that they’re doing there, what are they finding useful, what should we do with Google to address that,” he said.
Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is also encroaching on Google’s search dominance.
“Users are increasingly beginning their shopping journeys on Amazon,” said Raghavan, echoing testimony from an earlier Google executive who said that advertisers have been moving from the search engine to the retail giant.
A 2018 Google presentation displayed in court Thursday referred to overlapping products it had with the online retailer and listed risks to its business in four areas: retail, queries, ads and cloud computing.
“They are doing a great job of using their closed loop to attract ad dollars in a way we cannot because we do not have a closed loop,” Raghavan said.
On cross-examination, a Justice Department lawyer sought to show that there was no evidence that a person shopping more on Amazon meant that they were searching less on Google. He cited Google’s own internal research effort in 2019, called Project Charlotte, that came to that conclusion.
“People who end up spending more time on Amazon might also be the same kinds of people who spend more time on Google,” Raghavan testified under questioning from the DOJ lawyer, Joshua Hafenbrack. “One does not cause the other.”
Later, Hafenbrack asked how much Amazon pays Google for prominent advertising visibility on the search service.
“Billions of dollars,” Raghavan said.
(Updates with additional testimony)
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©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Tech Giants |
Amazon lobbyists tout workplace safety improvements ahead of Senate investigation
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions launched an investigation into “dangerous and illegal conditions” at Amazon warehouses, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the committee chair, announced Tuesday in a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
In the letter, Sanders alleged Amazon has “consistently ignored” concerns from federal and state regulators about warehouse safety. The company racked up at least 30 hazard alert letters and 50 workplace safety violations since 2015, according to Sanders’ letter, and the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration had 20 open investigations into U.S. Amazon warehouse locations as of April.
“We’ve reviewed the letter and strongly disagree with Senator Sanders’ assertions,” Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly told OpenSecrets in a written statement. Amazon has appealed all workplace safety citations referenced in Sanders’ letter.
Amazon spent nearly $5.1 million on federal lobbying on “workplace safety” among other issues during the first three months of 2023, making the retail giant one of the top spenders on federal lobbying so far this year. Amazon spent $21.4 million on federal lobbying in 2022, making it the sixth-biggest federal lobbying spender in a year that saw a nominal record $4.1 billion spent.
Amazon has consistently lobbied on workplace safety since the third quarter of 2020, according to federal lobbying disclosures. Kelly told OpenSecrets that Amazon takes employee safety and health “very seriously.”
“There will always be ways to improve, but we’re proud of the progress we’ve made which includes a 23% reduction in recordable injuries across our U.S. operations since 2019,” Kelly told OpenSecrets. “We’ve invested more than $1 billion into safety initiatives, projects, and programs in the last four years, and we’ll continue investing and inventing in this area because nothing is more important than our employees’ safety.”
The Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions cited in Sanders’ letter, found that while there are fewer Amazon workplace incidents in 2022 than there were in 2019, the e-commerce giant still accounts for a disproportionate number of workplace injuries.
Amazon was responsible for 53% of all “serious injuries” — causing the worker to modify their duties or to take time off — in the warehouse industry last year despite only employing 36% of all U.S. warehouse workers, according to a Strategic Organizing Center report released in April 2023. The serious injury rate for Amazon warehouses was 6.6 per 100 workers in 2022, more than double the rate of 3.2 per 100 workers in non-Amazon warehouses.
Amazon disputes both the Strategic Organizing Center’s and Sanders’ use of statistics about “serious” injuries, saying there’s no official regulatory metric.
“There will always be ways for our critics to splice data to suit their narrative, but the fact is, we’ve made progress and our numbers clearly show it,” Kelly told OpenSecrets.
The Strategic Organizing Center report notes 95% of the almost 39,000 injuries were “serious.” One injury at a New York fulfillment center location, which Sanders referenced, involved a falling box hitting a night shift worker. When the employee bled out of their ear, a symptom of a skull fracture, they reported to an on-site clinic. The employee suffered a headache but Amazon sent them back to their regular duties, where they were unmonitored. Since no physician was contacted and the employee’s duties weren’t modified, injuries like these might not fit under the Strategic Organizing Center’s definition of “serious.”
“Amazon has become one of the world’s most powerful companies not necessarily by offering a better product or service, but by breaking and exploiting gaps in the law to abuse hundreds of thousands of delivery and warehouse workers,” Lee Hepner, legal counsel for the corporate accountability-focused nonprofit the American Economic Liberties Project, told OpenSecrets in a written statement.
Sanders’ letter references OSHA violations involving on-site clinics at Amazon facilities, which are part of the company’s Administering Medical Care to Amazonians Responsibly and Effectively program. In April 2023, OSHA found “Amazon failed to provide adequate medical treatment for traumatic and chronic injuries” at a Castleton, N.Y., fulfillment center, and fined the company $15,625. OSHA found similar deficiencies at a Deltona, Fla., warehouse in January 2023, and it sent a hazard alert letter to Amazon.
Sanders argued that Amazon staffs its on-site clinics with athletic trainers and EMTs who are “not equipped to handle” warehouse injuries, so injuries are misclassified, undertreated and “systematically underreported,” as OSHA does not require companies to report “minor injuries requiring first aid only.”
In the letter, Sanders demanded information about injury rates and the company’s turnover rates, as well as company communications about OSHA-recommended safety measures. The letter also asked Amazon to hand over data about its on-site medical care, like the credentials of its staff and details about calls to the medical program’s physician help hotline, which is provided to on-site clinics.
As part of the investigation, the committee also set up a website where “current or former workers, supervisors, medical staff, or anyone else in Amazon’s warehouses” can confidentially share their experiences.
“It’s an uncomfortable truth for the consumers who enjoy Amazon’s convenience that abusive working conditions are a feature of Amazon’s business model, not a bug,” Hepner told OpenSecrets.
Kelly said Amazon’s standing invitation for Sanders to tour one of their facilities remains open.
Sanders’ office did not respond to OpenSecrets’ request for comment.
Amazon’s in-house lobbyists also reported renewed focus on legislation aimed at breaking up the retail giant’s alleged monopoly. Amazon accounted for 37.6% of all e-commerce in the U.S. as of May 2023, according to an analysis by the market research firm Insider Intelligence, with Walmart coming in at a distant second at 6.4%.
Amazon deployed more than three dozen retailers who sell through the e-commerce giant to Capitol Hill one day before Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) reintroduced the American Choice and Innovation Online Act last Thursday. The legislation includes a ban on “self-preferencing” that would prevent major tech companies from giving “preferred status or placement” to their own products. Lobbyists for Amazon reported more activities related to the American Choice and Innovation Online Act than any other bill in 2022.
Tech giants Apple, Meta and Google parent company Alphabet joined Amazon in opposing the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, spearheading an eleventh-hour lobbying blitz to kill the bill at the end of 2022. Lobbyists for Apple, Meta and Alphabet reported more activities related to the American Innovation and Choice Online Act than any other bill last year, an OpenSecrets analysis of federal lobbying disclosures found.
As part of efforts to kill a previous iteration of the bill, Amazon and Amazon-funded advocacy groups argued the legislation would harm small businesses selling on the platform and restrict Amazon’s ability to offer perks like free two-day shipping, POLITICO reported.
The Lobbying Disclosure Act deadline for activity during the second quarter of 2023 is July 20, and new disclosures will provide more details about what Amazon’s lobbyists have been working on for the past three months.
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Google has dismissed arguments that it is the world's biggest search engine because of illegal practices, saying to switch to another company takes "literally four taps".
A lawyer for the company made the remarks in court in Tuesday in Washington DC, where it is facing trial over whether it is a monopoly.
The case is a major test of the power of US regulators over the tech giants.
Prosecutors said the case was about "the future of the internet".
The trial is expected to last 10 weeks and will feature testimony from Google boss Sundar Pichai as well as executives from Apple.
Judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed to his position on DC district court by former president Barack Obama, will decide the case - the biggest for the industry in 25 years.
The government's lawsuit focuses on billions of payments Google has made to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default online search engine.
The US said Google typically pays more than $10bn a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady gush of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market.
"Are there other distribution channels? Other ways of distributing search? Yes.... Are these powerful as defaults? No," Department of Justice lawyer Kenneth Dintzer said, addressing the judge. "The best testimony for that, for the importance of defaults, your Honour, is Google's cheque book."
When Apple first installed Google as the default search engine in 2002, no payments were involved, prosecutors said.
But by 2005, worried about its lead eroding, Google proposed to pay the company - later threatening to cancel payments if other firms got similar access, the government said.
The company also discouraged Apple from expanding its own search products and Samsung, which makes Android phones, from working with a company that used a different kind of search method.
"This is a monopolist, flexing," Mr Dintzer said.
Google said it faced intense competition, not just from general search engine firms, such as Microsoft's Bing, but more specialised sites and apps that people use to find restaurants, airline flights and more.
"There are lots of ways users access the web, other than through default search engines, and people use them all the time," the company's lawyer, John Schmidtlein, said.
"The evidence in this case will show Google competed on the merits to win pre-installation and default status, and that its browser and Android partners judged Google to be the best search engine for its users."
Mr Schmidtlein said that despite Windows PCs being the number one used desktop and having Bing pre-set as the default browser, a majority of Windows users still opt to use Google - demonstrating Google's superiority as a search platform.
The trial is the latest regulatory challenge to face Google, which recently settled another case over its app store brought by US states. The company is also facing a federal lawsuit over its advertising business and has found itself in the crosshairs in Europe, where it has been fined billions in monopoly cases.
The government has asked for "structural relief" if it wins - which could mean the break-up of the company.
The suit comes as artificial intelligence and new forms of search, such as ChatGPT, are providing a more serious threat to Google's dominance than the company has encountered in years. | Tech Giants |
Google launches AI chatbot Bard to rival wildly successful ChatGPT
Google's parent firm Alphabet Inc announced the release of the conversational AI service, which will be rolled out to "trusted users" before its public release in the coming weeks.
Monday 6 February 2023 21:32, UK
Google has launched its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, in answer to the wildly successful ChatGPT.
The new conversational AI service will be named Bard and will be put out to "trusted users" before a public release in the coming weeks, Google's parent firm Alphabet Inc announced on Monday.
It comes following the release of ChatGPT - an AI chatbot trained on a huge amount of text data, which it leverages to help generate answers and carry out realistic conversations.
Released by research firm OpenAI late last year, the chatbot threatened to upend how people prepare for job interviews, journalists write stories, and children do homework.
The chatbot has been such a success, that earlier this month it was revealed that the service had been used by more than 100 million users worldwide in under two months.
The announcement was made in a blog post on Monday by Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai, who also announced more artificial intelligence for its search engine as well as developers.
He wrote: "It's a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people.
"That's the journey we've been on with large language models.
"Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills."
Read more:
We let an AI chatbot help write an article - here's how it went
Israel president uses ChatGPT artificial intelligence to write part of major speech
Google's service Bard will be powered by LaMDA, the company's AI that can generate prose so human-like that a company engineer last year called it sentient - a claim the technology giant and scientists widely dismissed.
Google has been cautious about chatbots until now, with LaMDA restricted to limited testing.
Explaining how Bard would be released, Pichai wrote: "We're releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA.
"This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.
"We'll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information.
"We're excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard's quality and speed."
Rival Microsoft is also set to shake up its own products with AI, including search engine Bing, after making a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.
Microsoft has since announced plans to implement ChatGPT into its Teams software, where it will do things like summarise meetings, but the features will be restricted to a premium pricing plan. | Tech Giants |
Apple iOS 16 with a new lockscreen. What does it mean for the iPhone 14 Pro? Apple When Apple launches its next high-end phones, the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, it looks like the new handsets will steal a march from the company’s smallest screen, the Apple Watch. According to Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter, this year’s Pro iPhones will have an always-on display. MORE FROM FORBESApple AirPods Pro 2: Surprise Leak Reveals Stunning UpgradeBy David PhelanJust like the Apple Watch Series 7—and lots of Android phones, by the way—the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max will show information on the screen persistently. No longer will you need to tap the screen to show the time, which many of us do every day, more often than we imagine. On the Apple Watch, it means that the full-brightness Watch face fades to something rather less bright but still visible, allowing a crafty glance at the Watch under the desk in a dull meeting, say. With this new phone feature, you’ll be able to flick your eyes down to the iPhone 14 Pro on the table and catch sight of the time. Apple has already shown us that iOS 16 will have new-design lock screens, with more information shown through widgets. We don’t yet know exactly how it will look on the phone, but since the widgets that are on offer include world time zones, weather, battery life and more, I’d say it’s likely the new iPhone lock screen will fade from full-color images to subtly muted versions with the time still visible. A thicker font and monochrome widgets in iOS 16. Could they presage an always-on display for iPhone ... [+] 14 Pro? Apple I’d also guess that the solid digits of the clock will switch to hollowed-out numbers which are still easy to see but use less battery power. Note that the new iOS 16 lock screen clocks tend to feature thicker digits that can be hollowed out more easily. This new design is for me the clearest hint that always-on is coming. Hollowed-out writing is how Apple does it on some Watch displays, so it seems likely to be replicated on the phone, I think. This has the benefit that it’s unlike the way any other phone shows an always-on screen. Additionally, the new widgets are almost all monochrome, so would look rather good on an always-on screen, no?
With Android phones, always-on displays tend to be just the time and digital indications of how many emails, texts or other notifications remain unread. There are exceptions, notably Huawei’s P50 Pro, for instance, with cute, colorful animations that play on the screen at times. Of course, the essence of the always-on screen is that it is only worth having if it doesn’t deplete the battery to any significant degree. Has Apple realized a way to maintain a graphically interesting display without reducing precious battery life?
It may be that the display on the iPhone 14 Pro will be able to slow the refresh rate to as low as 1Hz, instead of the 10Hz minimum on the iPhone 13 Pro. This may be enough to save battery life. On the Apple Watch, it’s this system which means the Watch faces, in always-on standby mode, don’t show the second hand wheeling round, so the face is static. Something similar, surely, will be used on the iPhone 14 Pro, assuming it comes to pass. Apple never worries about not being the first to launch a feature, but the company will likely want to have an always-on screen that betters rivals.
MORE FROM FORBESApple iOS 16: Apple Just Revealed The Coolest iPhone Upgrade YetBy David Phelan | Tech Giants |
Everyone has said things that, in hindsight, they regret. For Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal and US IT giant Palantir, it might have been his claim this year that the NHS makes people sick. Or that the British people’s love for it is a manifestation of Stockholm syndrome. In Thiel’s case, however, there is no evidence that he regrets what he said, or that there will be consequences for saying it. Because, in spite of his apparent disdain for the NHS, Palantir looks set to win a half-billion pound contract to process our health records.
That a private American company should gain such a foothold in the NHS would normally cause concern among privacy and health service advocates. And that it could be Palantir — part-funded in its early days by the CIA and with Western armies among its clients — is causing high anxiety. “Is Palantir really the kind of company we want at the very heart of the National Health Service?” asks Cori Crider, director of Foxglove, a campaign group dedicated to challenging the excesses of tech giants. “This is a company who, at the start of the pandemic, had no track record of working with healthcare staff. They’re not a healthcare company. They weren’t a health data company. They were essentially a tech company who supported spies, police, the military and border forces.”
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Palantir, in partnership with Accenture, is in the running with Quantexa, a British company partnered with IBM, and Oracle Cerner to build the “Federated Data Platform” (FDP), described by the NHS as a system “which will enable NHS organisations to bring together operational data – currently stored in separate systems – to support staff to access the information they need in one safe and secure environment”. NHS England says there are currently no plans to include GP records in the FDP, but privacy campaigners fear that that could change with mission creep, and if it did, Palantir could gain access to them. The winner of the FDP contract was supposed to have been named in September, an announcement then delayed to the middle of this month, and now said to be imminent — but few in the NHS believe it will be anyone but Palantir.
The NHS — budget this year £182 billion — has the largest repository of health data in the world. It services around a million GP appointments a day, and over a quarter of a million hospital appointments. According to consultants Ernst and Young, the information gleaned from NHS activities could be worth £9.6 billion a year. With the advent of AI, mining this treasure trove of data could mean the discovery of better medicines and treatments, improved patient care and vast savings. But in the wrong hands, it could see the NHS being used as a cash-cow, and it could mean a loss of privacy, the end of patient trust, and the slow death of the NHS as we know it.
So, how did Palantir get in the running — and why are they being hotly tipped as a shoo-in for the FDP contract, worth £480m over seven years? The company, named after the crystal “seeing stones” in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, was founded by Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, in 2003 with the intention in his words of adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud software in order to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties” (he had sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002). Before the 9/11 attack on New York, the US intelligence agencies had been blind-sided; Thiel was convinced his seeing stones would give them better vision in the future.
An early investor in Palantir was the CIA, through a venture capital arm named In-Q-Tel. The first of four iterations of Thiel’s data systems — Palantir Gotham — is used by the US National Security Agency, the FBI, the Western military, police, US immigration services and fraud investigators. It is capable of pulling together vast amounts of data and making connections that could solve problems insoluble to mere humans. It is currently being used by the Ukrainian army in its war with Russia.
There have been reports — neither confirmed nor denied by Palantir — that its software helped to locate Osama bin Laden. Former CIA director George Tenet once said he wished the agency had had Gotham before 9/11, the suggestion being that it might have pulled together disparate dots into one large picture of terror plot planning. Another iteration, called Metropolis, is a finance analytics platform widely used by hedge funds and banks. In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, executives from major tech companies, including Palantir, Google, Meta and Amazon, were asked by the UK government whether they could help with the planning and implementation of its responses to Covid-19. Palantir immediately stepped in, offering the use of another of its systems, Foundry… for just £1. Its offer was accepted by beleaguered health officials.
Palantir advisers were embedded in the NHS while Foundry was used in planning to effectively distribute medicines, ventilators and vaccines, monitor staff levels and intensive care bed availability — creating the kind of joined-up health response that would not have been previously possible with the UK’s fragmented network of trusts and care providers. Once a vaccine became available, it was involved in its rollout. By the end of the pandemic, Palantir’s £1 punt had paid off.
“A £1 contract seemed odd at the time, but it obviously gave them a foot in the door,” says Dr David Wrigley, digital lead on the BMA’s GP Committee, which has expressed concerns over the use of patients’ data on the FDP. “They will have learned about NHS systems and contracts, seen how the system operates and how best to bid for other contracts going forward.” Palantir’s next move to curry favour with the UK government was to offer its services again, for six months, to help with the logistics of housing Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion. But this time it charged nothing whatsoever. The company says it is proud of the role that it played at a time of great suffering for Ukrainian families. But this move did its relationship with the UK, and its long-term income, no harm at all.
Since then, Palantir has been awarded several other NHS contracts worth £60 million, with none going out to tender. Last month, it was awarded £5.5million to continue running Homes for Ukraine over the next 12 months for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) — again with no tendering process. The probity of this deal was questioned by the National Audit Office (NAO) in a report published last week. It pointed out that: “In February 2023, the Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, wrote to Palantir noting his concern about the practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition.” Asked about this criticism, Palantir said there was: “nothing unusual in a business offering a prospective customer the opportunity to trial before purchase. Indeed the Government’s own guidance states that ‘where a service is being outsourced for the first time, a pilot should be run’ and that ‘if you’re buying a product, consider asking for a demonstration or trial on a smaller scale’.”
But a more polemical vision of how Thiel sees British people’s relationship with the NHS was revealed in January when he made some unguarded comments during a Q&A session at the Oxford Union debating society. He said they were suffering from “Stockholm syndrome”, held ideologically captive by their healthcare system, and that the NHS needed “market mechanisms” to improve, adding that: “In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over… In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” He said British people needed to stop thinking the NHS was “the most wonderful thing in the world” and accept that it is an “iatrogenic” institution. An iatrogenic illness is a malady caused by the treatment itself. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,” he said.
Palantir quickly distanced itself from his comments. Joanna Peller, the company’s UK health lead, said: “Peter Thiel made these comments as a private individual and our CEO [Alex Karp, at Palantir since 2004] has made it clear he firmly disagrees with them and that he wishes ‘we had a health care system in the US that served the poor and underserved as well as I perceive the British system does’.” Few people in the NHS would argue that its countrywide IT systems couldn’t be improved, but many billions of pounds have been wasted in previous unsuccessful attempts to merge them. At the moment, there are 42 administered by “Integrated Care Systems” comprising hospital trusts, local authorities and care providers.
The first attempt at digitising and uniting records held by GPs and hospital trusts was launched in 2002 and called the National Programme for IT. It began with a budget of £6.2 billion but was mired in technical difficulties and a lack of trust among health staff. It was scrapped in 2011 after racking up £12 billion in costs. One of the private contractors who pulled out of the scheme before it was junked was Accenture, Palantir’s current bidding partner. In 2021 the government launched the General Practice Data for Planning and Research system, designed to enable records to be used for more than simple personal care. Advances in technology meant that the data in them could be used for the same purposes envisaged for the FDP — better care, medicines and healthcare planning.
However, patients were advised that where their data was to be shared for anything beyond care — for research or planning — they had the right to withhold their data under an NHS “National Data Opt-Out”, and they did in their droves. “More than a million people opted out because there was a lack of trust in the system,” says Foxglove’s Crider. “And each time someone opts out, the data set gets smaller and so its usefulness for research is diminished.” Sam Smith, policy lead at medConfidential, which campaigns for patient privacy, says he believes even more people will want to opt-out if Palantir wins the FDP contract. But there is confusion over whether they will be able to. Smith explains:
“The NHS England website says people will not be able to opt out, but this is contradictory because we all have the right to opt out of sharing our personal data if it is to be used for anything other than patient care, for purposes such as research and planning — but that is exactly what FDP is supposed to be used for… Last month, Sir Chris Whitty [chief medical officer for England] urged people not to opt out precisely because their information could help with research and planning. So what is it to be? Can people opt out, or can’t they?”
In a letter to the Health and Social Care Committee in August, Lord Markham, under-secretary of state for health, said the government was considering reforming the National Data Opt-Out. I asked NHS England whether these reforms would make it easier or harder for patients to opt out, but it did not answer the question. On the subject of Palantir and the FDP, a spokesperson said:
“The NHS is conducting a fair and transparent procurement process for a supplier of the federated data platform, in line with public contracts regulations, and this process has not yet concluded… Better use of data brings huge benefits for patients — a federated data platform will ensure more joined-up care and better use of resources, connecting existing NHS data in one secure environment to help speed up diagnosis and reduce waiting times and hospital stays.”
Palantir’s Peller emphasises that patients’ data is safe with the company. “Unlike many other technology companies, we’re not in the business of collecting, mining or selling data,” she says. “What we do is provide tools that help customers understand and organise the information that they hold, along with training and support in using those tools. We are legally defined as the ‘data processor’ while the customer is the ‘data controller’. Customers retain full ownership of their data. Palantir is granted no rights to such data and can only carry out that processing which it is instructed to do by the customer, while UK government customer data is only hosted in the UK.” She says Palantir is “now helping to reduce the care backlog and ensure patients receive vital treatment sooner in 36 NHS Trusts across England”. These are trusts invited (some say pressured) by NHS England to run trials of Foundry, and this is the reason Palantir is considered a shoo-in for the FDP contract — it is too embedded to get out.
However, in response to a written Parliamentary question in March, health minister Will Quince said nine of these had been “paused” while two had been suspended. A variety of reasons were later given, ranging from a lack of funds to administrative delays, and assurances were made in August that some of the paused pilots were up and running again. But at least two — Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, and Milton Keynes University Hospital — have indicated that the system wasn’t right for them. I asked NHS England how many of the 36 pilots were currently operational, but received no answer. This only confuses the picture, as Palantir insists they all are.
Whichever company is announced as the provider of the FDP, its success will not only be judged on whether the NHS is finally blessed with the joined-up digital wizardry it so badly needs, but also on whether it manages to provide that and retain the trust of patients. “If a person goes to see their GP and holds back important or embarrassing information because they’re afraid it will be shared with a private company, then that is not only dangerous for the patient, but also very sad,” says the BMA’s Wrigley. “Because that could mean the end of the doctor-patient relationship as we know it.” | Tech Giants |
The backlash against the encryption-busting Online Safety Bill continues to grow, suggesting the United Kingdom could soon face a looming exodus of secure messaging apps.
First drafted in May 2021, the Online Safety Bill would allow the U.K. government to compel backdoor access to any end-to-end encryption system. While the government claims the complex legislation would make the internet safer by requiring social media giants to remove illegal and harmful content online, such as revenge porn and hate speech, the bill has been met with widespread criticism from tech giants, security experts and privacy advocates.
The criticism largely centers around an amendment to the bill that would allow Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, to require that tech giants scan for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in end-to-end encrypted messages. One more privacy-minded way of doing this is through the use of client-side scanning, where images are inspected on a user’s device before being encrypted.
Apple — which attempted to introduce a similar feature in iMessage in 2021 before reversing its decision — on Tuesday became the latest tech giant to speak out against the proposed legislation. In a statement given to the BBC, the iPhone maker called for the bill to be amended to offer protections for end-to-end encryption.
“End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats,” Apple’s statement said. “It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk. Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all.”
Messages sent between two iPhones are always end-to-end encrypted, which means no-one else, including Apple, can read them.
It’s not clear whether Apple would comply with the bill’s requirement to weaken end-to-end encryption, and the tech giant did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Companies that fail to abide by the bill’s requirements could face hefty fines of up to 10% of global turnover and the threat of prison time for law-breaking senior execs under recently expanded criminal liability.
Apple’s warning comes after other end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, including Signal and Meta-owned WhatsApp, spoke out against the upcoming Online Safety Bill.
WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said the platform would not comply with a U.K. legal requirement to weaken the level of encryption it offers its users — and would instead prefer to be blocked by U.K. authorities.
“The reality is, our users all around the world want security. Ninety-eight percent of our users are outside the U.K. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users,” Cathcart said at the time.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker also warned that the secure messaging platform would quit the U.K. if the bill weakened end-to-end encryption. In a blog post, Whittaker wrote that the platform will “stand firm against threats to private and safe communication” and would “absolutely, 100% walk” away from the U.K. rather than weaken security and privacy for its users, reported the BBC.
Despite mounting backlash, the Online Safety Bill is expected to pass into law this summer. | Tech Giants |
Comedian John Oliver decided to wade into the antitrust battleground this week, and he didn’t hold back any punches.Oliver devoted 25 minutes of his most recent Last Week Tonight show to discuss general Big Tech badness and advocated in favor of a pair of historic antitrust bills currently being considered in Congress. The comedian zeroes in on claims made by advocacy groups and small businesses that giants like Google and Meta engage in anti-competitive, self-preferencing behavior that essentially cements their status as unrivaled dominators.During the segment, Oliver took aim at Apple’s roughly 30% App Store commission fee (referred to as the “Apple Tax” by critics) which he jokingly described as “blood money.” Oliver then took a stab at Google, which he criticized for “exploiting its market dominance” in search. Researchers estimate Google possesses over 90% of the search market share. Oliver cited research claiming two-thirds of all those Google searches never actually result in a user leaving a related Google property. Imagine searching Google for a food recipe only to be directed to an Alphabet owned YouTube video. That, Oliver argues, is self-preferencing in action. “Google’s algorithm shouldn’t determine whether or not someone’s business is real,” Oliver said, referring to businesses like Yelp who’ve accused Google of stealing their content and argued the tech giant’s self-preferencing has limited their visibility and reach.Oliver took the most issue though with Amazon, which has faced fierce pushback for allegedly prioritizing its own in-house brands of products over smaller competitors, essentially gutting small firms in the process.“Basically, it is Amazon’s playground, they make the rules, and they do seem to win a lot of the time,” Oliver said. “If they [Amazon] are competing with you, you’re basically dead.” He added Amazon is essentially the only place to sell anything on the internet. “Unless that is you’re looking to offload some human teeth because then it’s Craigslist all the way, baby!”The comedian also briefly touched on the U.S. government’s 1984 breakup of Bell Systems, which he argues led to a number of new innovations like the answering machine and the modem. And while he acknowledged some small reforms have come from both Apple and Google in recent years, Oliver said those came only after relentless activist pressure and numerous lawsuits. Oliver similarly had a bone to pick with Big Tech’s recent arguments against new antitrust measures“These bills would crack the door back open for innovation and nudge the internet back toward what it was supposed to be from the start: A revolutionary tool that expanded global access to information,” Oliver added.Votes on Antitrust Bills Could Come This SummerThe segment aired less than 24 hours before dozens of companies and businesses joined together to write a letter urging Congress to push through a vote on antitrust legislation aimed at limiting tech giants’ abilities to self-preference their own products and services. Those signatories include Yelp, Sonos, the American Booksellers Association, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, among others.Oliver’s segment also earned quick praise from some consumer advocacy groups and smaller tech companies who have spent years spotlighting Big Tech’s alleged anticompetitive practices and outsized political power. Fight for the Future, a major advocate for antitrust reforms, spoke favorably of the piece for its clear presentation of the alleged harms carried out by tech companies and for calling out Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s family ties with the very firms the new legislation would try to target.“A crystal clear explanation of the harm of Big Tech monopoly and self-preferencing, featuring epic takedowns of Big Tech’s lies & cringe,” Fight for the Future Director Evan Greer tweeted.In an email, Greer pointed to a 2017 Last Week Tonight segment about net neutrality, which Greer says played an important role in galvanizing public support for that issue. It’s possible, Greer added, that this week’s episode could light a similar spark for antitrust reform.Still, Big Tech firms are pushing hard to prevent these bills from seeing the light of day.Senior executives at Apple, Google, and Meta have all reportedly spoken with lawmakers to urge them to turn their noses at antitrust reforms. Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly even went as far as to personally contact House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress to try and persuade them to kill the bills.Outside of the leadership, tech firms are allocating their resources in, at times, sneaky ways. Case in point, a report released last month from the Tech Transparency Project claims Meta single-handedly bankrolled the American Edge Project, a supposedly grassroots organization hell-bent on opposing antitrust measures. AEP reportedly received $4 million in donations from Meta. That $4 million figure pales in comparison though to the amount Big Tech’s collectively spending to try and block antitrust reforms. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis released last week, advocacy groups working on behalf of Big Tech spent an eye-popping $36.4 million on T.V. and internet ads opposing new legislation. Nearly half ($13.7 million) of that funding has come as recently as May 1.And while most of the attention around anti-competitive behavior in tech tends to focus on Google and Meta, Apple’s whipping out the big guns as well. In just the first quarter this year, Apple reportedly spent $2.5 million on lobbying, which marks a 71% increase from the amount it spent on lobbying the same time last year. Oliver, for his part, expressed little sympathy for Big Tech’s complaints. “Ending a monopoly is almost always a good thing,” he said. | Tech Giants |
The battle of the AI chatbots has stepped up a notch after Chinese search giant Baidu unveiled its much-anticipated rival to ChatGPT.
The company showed off Ernie (short for "enhanced representation through knowledge integration"), which analysts believe could be Beijing's strongest competitor in a crowded field dominated by US firms.
ChatGPT is made by the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, while Google and a host of ambitious startups are also developing their own so-called large language models.
The growing interest in the technology triggered a rush among Chinese tech giants to develop their own, and Baidu was the front-runner after announcing last month it would soon have one ready to launch.
But a presentation at its headquarters sparked little enthusiasm, with chief executive Robin Li admitting that the chatbot was not ready for primetime.
"For sure, we cannot say it is perfect," he said.
"So why are we unveiling it today? Because the market demands it."
What can Ernie do?
Thursday's demonstration included many of the hallmarks of what people have become used to with ChatGPT.
Ernie was shown answering questions, completing maths calculations, and understanding different languages.
However, it also went further by showcasing an ability to generate video and images with text prompts.
Baidu wants Ernie to revolutionise its search engine, much as Microsoft is leveraging OpenAI's tech in Bing.
Read more:
How AI could change how we search the web
But the demonstration failed to move investors, as everything was shown in pre-recorded videos rather than live.
It's also not publicly available, with limited invitation codes going out from Thursday.
Hundreds of companies have signed up to use the tech, however, which Baidu says could be used to power smart devices and driverless cars.
Shares tumbled as much as 10% during the presentation. While they had recovered slightly by the end, it still shaved $3bn (£2.5bn) off the company's market valuation.
Analyst Kai Wang said: "It seems like the presentation was more of a monologue and scripted, rather than an interactive session that people were looking for.
"There was no soft launch date either, which likely led to negative sentiments."
Baidu boss Mr Li appeared to compliment OpenAI's tech during his presentation, saying it showed the threshold was high for companies looking to succeed in the space.
His speech was live-streamed across a number of platforms, including some that are blocked in China itself, like YouTube and Twitter.
"Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the US," Mr Li added.
The presentation came days after OpenAI announced the next iteration of the tech powering ChatGPT, which has attracted hundreds of millions of users since launching in late 2022.
Microsoft is also hosting an AI event on Thursday, while Google this week said it would be bringing generative AI to workplace apps like Gmail and Docs. | Tech Giants |
A decade after Google Glass, Google is getting back to testing smart glasses in public again. The company announced its own smart glasses initiative earlier this year at Google's I/O developer conference, a project that's aimed at assistance rather than entertainment. Google's now starting to publicly test those glasses, the company announced today, beginning with dozens in field use and ramping up to several hundred by the end of the year.Google's glasses are AR of a sort, relying on audio assistance that can use built-in cameras to recognize objects in an environment through AI, similar to how Google Lens can recognize objects and text with phone cameras. The glasses will not, however, be able to take photos or videos. Google's limiting those features on its field-tested glasses, focusing entirely on how the glasses can train their AI for recognizing the world better.The glasses, based on glimpses Google has shown in videos and photos, look nearly normal. But, unlike Meta's publicly-available and normal-looking Ray-Ban Stories glasses, which are designed mainly for taking photographs and listening to music, Google's glasses are focused on utility and assistive uses right now: the specific early test cases Google lists at the moment are translation, transcription, visual search, and navigation that will work with heads-up overlays similar to how Google Maps uses heads-up AR directions on phones.Google's AR glasses prototype testers are prohibited from using the glasses "in schools, government buildings, healthcare locations, places of worship, social service locations, areas meant for children (e.g., schools and playgrounds), emergency response locations, rallies or protests, and other similar places," or while driving or playing sports. Google hasn't revealed where in the US, specifically, these glasses will be tested.According to Google, "an LED indicator will turn on if image data will be saved for analysis and debugging. If a bystander desires, they can ask the tester to delete the image data and it will be removed from all logs." The glasses don't take photos or videos, but use image data for its assistive AI. Google promises that "the image data is deleted, except if the image data will be used for analysis and debugging. In that case, the image data is first scrubbed for sensitive content, including faces and license plates. Then it is stored on a secure server, with limited access by a small number of Googlers for analysis and debugging. After 30 days, it is deleted." Field-testing for future smart glasses is an increasing trend, it seems. Meta started testing prototype depth-sensing camera arrays on a pair of glasses called Project Aria two years ago, focusing on how smart sensor-filled glasses could be used responsibly in public places. Google already had its own large-scale smart glasses test nearly a decade ago when it launched Google Glass, a device which sparked many of the first conversations about public camera use and privacy with AR headsets and glasses. Google's new project looks to be on a far smaller and more focused scale right now, and the glasses still aren't targeted to become any commercially-available product yet. | Tech Giants |
Apple CEO Tim Cook poses for a portrait next to a line of new MacBook Airs as he enters the Steve Jobs Theater during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California on June 6, 2022 .Chris Tuite | AFP | Getty ImagesApple CEO Tim Cook recently gave the closest thing to a confirmation that Apple's building a headset.Cook was asked in a recent interview with China Daily USA what he thinks the key factors are for augmented reality, or AR, to succeed in the consumer market."I am incredibly excited about AR as you might know. And the critical thing to any technology, including AR, is putting humanity at the center of it," he said, echoing comments he's made in the past about how important AR is to the company.He then described Apple's work in the space so far, which has been focused on AR apps on the iPhone and iPad, before adding, "But I think we're still in the very early innings of how this technology will evolve. I couldn't be more excited about the opportunities we've seen in this space, and sort of stay tuned and you'll see what we have to offer."AR or "mixed reality" describes technology that superimposes computer-generated images over views of the real world, contrasted with virtual reality, or VR, which completely immerses the viewer in a computer-generated world.It's one of the clearest examples yet of Cook acknowledging that Apple has something bigger in the works. While the current apps can be useful for things such as mapping a room or seeing if a new piece of furniture might fit, it seems more likely that Apple has been building the library and tools for developers to build apps for something like a headset.Bloomberg said in May that Apple recently showed its AR/VR headset to the Apple board and that the company plans to announce it as early as the end of this year, although it could slip into next year. The same report said Apple plans to sell the headset in 2023.Apple would be playing catch-up with a number of other big tech companies, particularly Meta, which changed its name from Facebook last year to signify its revamped focus on immersing users in virtual worlds known as the "metaverse," and Microsoft, which first introduced its Hololens AR glasses in 2016. | Tech Giants |
The Europe Union's top court ruled on Tuesday that member states' antitrust authorities are entitled to check whether tech companies comply with data protection rules.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) heard the case after the German antitrust agency ordered Facebook owner Meta to stop collecting users' data without consent.
In its 2019 finding, the agency also said that Facebook played a "dominant" role on the social network market and would thus be subject to "special antitrust obligations."
The agency found that agreeing to Facebook's terms of use to create an account, which include a provision on data collection, did not amount to free consent due to the network's dominant market role.
Meta had challenged the finding, arguing that the German anti-cartel watchdog had overstepped its authority. The agency then sought advice from the ECJ.
Tuesday's ruling could imperil the position of other tech giants such as Google, which employ similar data collection mechanisms.
What was said about the ruling?
"A national competition authority can find, in the context of the examination of an abuse of a dominant position, that the GDPR has been infringed," ECJ judges said, referring to the EU's data protection regulations.
However, the court said that regulators must "take into consideration any decision or investigation by the competent supervisory authority pursuant to that regulation."
A Meta spokesperson said that the firm was evaluating the decision and would have "more to say in good course."
"The judgment will have far-reaching effects on the business models used in the data economy," Andreas Mundt, head of Germany's antitrust agency, tweeted.
"The judgment sends a strong signal for competition law enforcement in the digital economy, a field where data are decisive for market power," Mundt continued. "When large internet companies use the very personal data of consumers, this usage can also be deemed abusive under competition law."
"This will mean that Meta has to seek proper consent and cannot use its dominant position to force people to agree to things they don't want," Max Schrems of the NOYB privacy activism NGO said.
sdi/jcg (Reuters, dpa, AFP) | Tech Giants |
A logo of Tencent is seen at its booth at the 2020 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China September 4, 2020. REUTERS/Tingshu WangRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comHONG KONG, Aug 16 (Reuters) - China's Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) plans to sell all or a bulk of its $24 billion stake in food delivery firm Meituan (3690.HK) to placate domestic regulators and monetise an eight-year-old investment, four sources with knowledge of the matter said.Tencent, which owns 17% of Meituan, has been engaging with financial advisers in recent months to work out how to execute a potentially large sale of its Meituan stake, said three of the sources.Technology giant Tencent, the owner of China's No. 1 messaging app WeChat, first invested in Meituan's rival Dianping in 2014, which then merged with Meituan a year later to form the current company.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comBased on Meituan's market capitalisation as of Monday, Tencent's 17% stake is worth $24.3 billion.Tencent is seeking to kick off the sale within this year if market conditions are favourable, said two of the sources.The planned sale comes against the backdrop of a sweeping regulatory crackdown in China since late 2020 on technology heavyweights that took aim at their empire building via stake acquisitions and domestic concentration of market power.The regulatory crackdown came after years of a laissez-faire approach that drove growth and dealmaking at breakneck speed.Tencent has been reducing holdings partly to appease the Chinese regulators and partly to book hefty profits on those bets, said three of the sources. The value of its shareholdings in listed companies excluding its subsidiaries dropped to just $89 billion as of end-March from $201 billion in the same period last year, according to its quarterly reports."The regulators are apparently not happy that tech giants like Tencent have invested in and even become a big backer of various tech firms that run businesses closely related to people's livelihoods in the country," said one of the sources.Shares of Hong Kong-listed Meituan fell more than 10% following the Reuters report while Tencent dropped more than 2% in Tuesday afternoon trade.Tencent declined to comment. Meituan did not respond to a request for comment.All the sources declined to be named due to confidentiality constraints.Tencent announced in December the divestment of around 86% of its stake in JD.com Inc (9618.HK), worth $16.4 billion, weakening its ties to China's second-biggest e-commerce firm. read more One month later, it raised $3 billion by selling a 2.6% stake in Singapore-based gaming and e-commerce company SEA Ltd (SE.N), which was seen as a move to monetise its investment while adjusting business strategy. read more Tencent has not pinned the sale of JD.com and SEA stakes on the regulatory crackdown.The potential sale of the Meituan holding will likely be executed via a block trade in the public market which typically takes a day or two from marketing to completion, according to two of the sources.It would be a fast and smooth way for Tencent to offload the shares, they added, compared to negotiating with a private buyer.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Julie Zhu and Kane Wu; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Muralikumar AnantharamanOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Tech Giants |
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