Daily Archives: July 8, 2020

Have you ever clicked on a link after googling something, only to find that Google didnt take you to the actual webpage but to some weird Google-fied version of it? Instead of the web address being the source of the article, it still says google in the address bar on your phone? Thats whats known as Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and now Google has announced that AMP has graduated from the OpenJS Foundation Incubation Program. The OpenJS Foundation is a merged effort between major projects in the JavaScript ecosystem, such as NodeJS and jQuery, whose stated mission is to support the healthy growth of the JavaScript and web ecosystem. But instead of a standard starting with the web community, a giant company is coming to the community after theyve already built a large part of the mobile web and are asking for a rubber stamp. Web community discussion should be the first step of making web standards, and not just a last-minute hurdle for Google to clear.

This Google-backed, stripped down HTML framework was created with the promises of creating faster web pages for a better user experience. Cutting out slower loading content, like those developed with JavaScript. At a high level, AMP works by fast loading stripped down versions of full web pages for mobile viewing.

The Google AMP project was announced in late 2015 with the promise of providing publishers a faster way of serving and distributing content to their users. This also was marketed as a more adaptable approach than Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles. AMP pages began making an appearance by 2016. But right away, many observed that AMP encroached on the principles of the open web. The web was built on open standards, developed through consensus, that small and large actors alike can use. Which, in this case, entails keeping open web standards in the forefront and discouraging proprietary, closed standards.

Instead of utilizing standard HTML markup tags, a developer would use AMP tags. For example, heres what an embedded image looks like in classic HTML, versus what it looks like using AMP:

HTML Image Tag:

AMP Image Tag:

Since launch page speeds have proven to be faster when using AMP, the technologys promises arent necessarily bad from a speed perspective alone. Of course, there are ways of improving performance other than using AMP, such as minimizing files, building lighter code, CDNs (content delivery networks), and caching. There are also other Google-backed frameworks like PWAs (progressive web applications) and service workers.

AMP has been around for four years now, and the criticisms still carry into today with AMPs latest progressions around a very important part of the web, the URL.

When you visit a site, maybe your favorite news site, you would normally see the original domain along with an associated path to the page you are on:

https://www.example.com/some-web-page

This, along with its SSL certificate would clarify that you are seeing web content served from this site at this URL with a good amount of trust. This is what would be considered a canonical URL.

An AMP URL, however, can look like this:

https://www.example.com/platform/amp/some-web-page

Using canonical URLs, users can more easily verify that the site theyre on is the one theyre trying to visit. But AMP URLs muddied the waters, and made users have to adapt new ways to verify the origins of original content.

One step further is their structure for pre-rendered pages from cached content. This URL would not be in view of the user, but rather the content (text, images, etc.) served onto the cached page would be coming from the URL below.

https://www-example-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.example.com/amp/doc.html

The final URL, the one in view or the URL bar, of a cached AMP page would look something like this:

https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp.doc.html

This cache model does not follow the web origin concept and creates a new framework and structure to adhere to. The promise is better performances and experience for users. Yet, the approach is implementation first and web standards later. Since Google has become such an ingrained part of the modern web for so many, any technology they deploy would immediately have a large share of users and adopters. This is also paired with other arguments other product teams within Google have made to reshape the URL as we know it. This fundamentally changed the way the mobile web is served for many users.

Another, more recent development is the support for Signed HTTP Exchanges, or SXG, a subset of the Web Packages standard that allows further decoupling of distribution of web content from its origins with cryptographically signed HTTP exchanges (a web page). This is supposed to address the problem, introduced by AMP, that the URL a user sees does not correspond to the page theyre trying to visit. SXG allows the canonical URL (instead of the AMP URL) to be shown in the browser when you arrive, closing the loop back to the original publisher. The positive here is that a web standard was used, but the negative here is the speed of adoption without general consensus from other major stakeholders. Currently, SXG is only supported in Chrome and Chromium based browsers.

News publishers were among the first to adopt AMP. Google even partnered with a major CMS (content management system), WordPress, to further promote AMP. Publishers use CMS services to upload, edit, and host content, and WordPress holds about 60% of the market share as the CMS of choice. Publishers also compete on other Google products, such as Google Search. So perhaps some publishers adopted AMP because they thought it would improve SEO (search engine optimization) on one of the webs most used search engines. However, this argument has been disputed by Google, and they maintain that performance is prioritized no matter what is used to get that page result to that performance measure. Since the Google Search algorithm is mainly in secret, we can only trust these statements at their word. Tangentially, the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile has recently dropped AMP as a requirement.

The AMP project was more closed off in terms of control in the beginning of its launch despite the fact it promoted itself as an open source project. Publishers ended up reporting higher speeds, but this was left up to a time will tell set of metrics. In conclusion, the statement you dont need AMP to rank higher is often competing with just use AMP and you will rank higher. Which can be tempting to publishers trying to reach the performance bar to get their content prioritized.

We should focus less about whether or not AMP is a good tool for performance, and more about how this framework was molded by Googles initial ownership. The cache layer is owned by Google, and even though its not required, most common implementations use this cache feature. Concerns around analytics have been addressed and they have also done the courtesy of allowing other major ad vendors into the AMP model concerning ad content. This is a mere concession though, since Google Analytics has such a large market share of the measured web.

If Google was simply a web performance company that would still be too much centralization of the webs decisions. But they are not just a one-function company, they are a giant conglomerate that already controls the largest mobile OS, web browser, and search engine in the world. Running the project through the OpenJS Foundation is a more welcome approach. The new governance structure consists of working groups, an advisory committee, and a technical steering committee of people inside and outside of Google. This should bring more voices to the table and structure AMP into a better process for future decisions. This move will allegedly de-couple Google AMP Cache, which hosts pages, from AMP runtime, which is the JavaScript source to process AMP components on a page.

However, this is all well after AMP has been integrated into major news sites, e-commerce, and even nonprofits. So this new model is not an even-ground, democratic approach. No matter the intentions, good or bad, those who work with powerful entities need to check their power at the door if they want a more equitable and usable web. Not acknowledging the power one wields, only enforces a false sense of democracy that didnt exist.

Furthermore, the web standards process itself is far from perfect. Standards organizations are heavily dominated by members of corporate companies and the connections one may have to them offer immense social capital. Less-represented people dont have the social capital to join or be a member. Its a long way until a more equitable process occurs for these types of organizations; paired with the lack of diversity these kinds of groups tend to have, the costs of membership, and time commitments. These particular issues are not Googles fault, but Google has an immense amount of power when it comes to joining these groups. When joining standards organizations, Its not a matter of earning their way up, but deciding if they should loosen their reigns.

At this point in time with the AMP project, Google cant retroactively release the control it had in AMPs adoption. And we cant go back to a pre-AMP web to start over. The discussions about whether the AMP project should be removed, or discouraged for a different framework, have long passed. Whether or not users can opt-out of AMP has been decided in many corners of the web. All we can do now is learn from the process, and try to make sure AMP is developed in the best interests of users and publishers going forward. However, the open web shouldnt be weathered by multiple lessons learned on power and control from big tech companies that obtusely need to re-learn accountability with each new endeavor.

Link:

Google's AMP, the Canonical Web, and the Importance of Web Standards - EFF

Fraudsters can create and post adverts for fake businesses on Google within hours, according to a Which? investigation.

The UK consumer organisation also said it was worryingly easy to create a fake business page on Facebook.

News of its findings comes weeks after the Advertising Standards Authority announced it was launching a UK scam ad alert system in partnership with platforms including Facebook and Google, to help tackle bogus ads.

Which? created two linked fake companies a water brand named Remedii that can help you lose weight [and] improve your mood, and an online service offering pseudo health and hydration advice called Natural Hydration.

The consumer body said Google only required users to have a Gmail account to create adverts and that, while it did review those that were submitted, it did not verify whether the business existed or was legitimate, nor ask for proof of ID.

In less than an hour, the ads Which? created for both fake businesses were approved by Google. They racked up nearly 100,000 impressions in a month. The fake ad for Natural Hydration appeared above the official NHS Scotland pages when users searched for hydration advice.

Which? said that although Facebook had restrictions relating to adverts that could cause harm, it had still uncovered problems. Using a personal Facebook account that required only an email address or mobile number to set up, Which? created a business page for Natural Hydration and produced a range of posts with pseudo health advice to promote it. Which? paid Facebook to promote the page, which notched up 500 likes in a week.

A Google spokesperson said protecting consumers and credible businesses was its top priority. They said: We have strict advertising policies in place to protect consumers and prohibit ads that intentionally mislead users or fail to deliver on the promoted product or service.

When we become aware of ads that violate our policies, we take action. We are also constantly evaluating our policies and enforcement systems to continue to improve, and have recently introduced a new programme to verify each advertisers identity in order for them to serve ads on our platforms.

Google said it removed 2.7bn ads from its platforms in 2019.

Facebook told Which? the Facebook page that was set up did not violate its community standards. It said: We remove harmful misinformation that could contribute to physical harm, such as false health claims, and have strict policies against deceptive advertising and scams.

A Facebook spokesperson said it had various processes in place to deal with scams but none of the ads contained any harmful content and no attempts were made to sell any products via the Facebook page. This meant the page did not test these processes.

See the original post:

Scammers can create fake business ads on Google 'within hours' - The Guardian

A few months back, Google announced plans to reopen some U.S. offices after the July Fourth holiday. But the best-laid plans, and all of that. Things have obviously not been going great in terms of the United States battle with COVID-19, and Google once again finds itself proceeding on the side of caution.

As was first reported by Bloomberg, Google has since confirmed with TechCrunch that it will be pushing back reopening at least until September 7, after the Labor Day holiday in the States. Along with other tech giants like Facebook, Google has noted that it will continue to offer employees the option of working from home through the remainder of the year.

Its a smart choice, as many no doubt still feel uncomfortable returning to an office situation not to mention questions around the public transit that many use to get there. Twitter, meanwhile, made waves in May by announcing that employees would be allowed to work remotely indefinitely.

Yesterday, the United States reported more than 47,000 new COVID-19 cases, marking the biggest single-day spike since the beginning of the pandemic.

Arizona, Florida and Texas have all become epicenters as many other states have seen their own increases in recent weeks. Reopening plans have been put on hold or rolled back in many locales, amid increased concern over the viruss continued spread. It seems likely that other big tech companies will delay their own reopening plans. In most cases, shifting back to the office simply isnt worth the risk.

Read more:

Google confirms US offices will remain closed until at least September, as COVID-19 spikes - TechCrunch

BERLIN, July 7, 2020 /CNW/ --OpenSynergy, today announced its yearlong collaboration with Google and Qualcomm on a reference platform with a virtualized Android Automotive OS instance running on top of OpenSynergy's COQOS Hypervisor SDK and Qualcomm's Snapdragon SA8155 automotive System on Chip (SoC).

Google has announced collaborations with several vehicle manufacturers to power in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems with Android Automotive OS, Google's open-source Android platform.

The automotive sector is moving towards consolidating increasingly complex and heterogeneous hardware subsystems such as the Instrument Cluster, Infotainment, Head up display etc. onto a single System on Chip (SoC) with mixed-criticality (safety-critical and non-critical) requirements. This enables tighter software integration between the subsystems, and allows for costand weight savings. Hence, Google is working on virtualization of Android Automotive OS by leveraging and extending VIRTIO, an established virtualization standard maintained by the OASIS consortium, which Google is a member of. Virtualization allows multiple operating systems ("guests") with mixed-criticality requirements to share the same hardware ("host") managed by host software ("hypervisor"). Android Automotive OS will be supported as a guest virtual machine on automotive industry standard based hypervisors.

Last year Google, OpenSynergy and Qualcomm decided to collaborate on the implementation of this reference platform. Goal of this platform, which is planned to be released soon,is to show how Android Automotive OS can be safely and securely integrated on a powerful System on Chip (SoC) using open standards based virtual platform.

The VIRTIO standard

VIRTIO, a device-sharing standard popular in the cloud domain, provides the transport layer and device models for essential computing devices such as Block, Network, Console, GPU, Input, etc. The DMA-like nature of the devices allows high-performance implementations as an alternative to hardware assisted I/O virtualization models while still providing ease of implementation and safety.

OpenSynergy joined the OASIS consortium in 2019 to pioneer the expansion of VIRTIO in the automotive domain. At the same time the company contributed with several VIRTIO devices to the Linux kernel. Thanks to the expertise gathered in the open source domain, OpenSynergy currently provides the most mature open-standard-driven virtual platform in the automotive industry.

Regis Adjamah, CEO of OpenSynergy: "Embracing VIRTIO was a major milestone for our automotive-grade COQOS Hypervisor SDK. It is good news for all our customers currently in the process of upgrading their IVI programs. We are complementing our lean, OS- agnostic, type 1 hypervisor with the open-standard device sharing technology VIRTIO. We aggressively pursue the adoption of open standards by investing in open source. We believe the time has come for the automotive industry to abandon proprietary solutions, to embrace open standards and compete on the quality of their implementation."

By showing how Android Automotive OS can be deployed and ported without further modification on different SoCs and different hypervisors, the reference platform will help VIRTIO to expand its scope to the automotive domain. VIRTIO provides maximum flexibility to OEMs and Tier 1 partners, enabling them to easily switch between SoCs, hypervisors and host/guest operating systems, to best match their needs.

Google and Android are trademarks of Google LLC.

About OpenSynergy

OpenSynergy provides embedded software products for the next generation of vehicles. Our hypervisor and communication products pave the way for an integrated driving experience.

The virtualization platform COQOS Hypervisor SDK supports the convergence of software-based vehicle functions with different requirements on safety and security.It is designed for multi-display cockpit controllers, smart antennae or powerful domain controllers using a mix of AUTOSAR technology and open solutions, such as Linux and Android.

OpenSynergy is active member of several standardization bodies relevant in the Automotive industry, such as OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), AUTOSAR, GENIVI Alliance and Linux Foundation (Automotive Grade Linux).

Our engineering services complement the products.

Read on http://www.opensynergy.com.

Contact: OpenSynergy GmbH Sabine MutumbaDirector of Marketing Rotherstr. 20 D-10245 Berlin Tel.: +49 (0)30.60 98 540-41 Email: [emailprotected]

SOURCE OpenSynergy GmbH

Home

More:

OpenSynergy Collaborates With Google and Qualcomm on Virtualizing Android Automotive OS - Canada NewsWire

Latest

The latest PR news from PRovoke Media, previously known as the Holmes Report.

Opinion and commentary from PRovoke, previously known as the Holmes Report.

The PRovoke podcast lifts the lid on key PR industry stories and trends. P/k/a as the Holmes Report's Echo Chamber.

Latest video interviews and campaigns from PRovoke, previously known as the Holmes Report.

Focus

PRovoke's coverage of the Covid-19 crisis, focusing on corporate communication, public affairs & PR industry fallout.

Coverage of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

PRovoke's annual analysis of the top reputation crises to rock the corporate sector.

PRovoke's annual forecast of trends that will impact the PR world in the year ahead.

Creative work, trends and views from the global public relations industry.

Dedicated to exploring the new frontiers of PR as it dives deeper into social media, content and analytics.

Our coverage of key technology PR trends and challenges from around the world of digital communications.

From brand marketing to conscious consumerism, coverage of key marketing and PR trends worldwide.

Coverage of global corporate reputation and communications news and trends, from the leading online corporate PR news website PRovoke. Subscribe today!

PRovoke's coverage, analysis and news around the rapidly-shifting area of employee engagement and internal communications.

Sports PR news, diversity & inclusion trends, views and analysis from PRovoke. Subscribe today for the very latest in the world of sports communications.

Rankings & Data

PRovoke's annual selections for PR Agencies of the Year, across all of the world's major markets.

The world's 100 most powerful corporate communicators.

PRovoke profiles marketing and communications innovators from across North America, EMEA and Asia-Pac.

In-depth annual research into the PR industry's efforts to raise creative standards.

The key global benchmark of PR agency rankings, industry size and global trends.

Events & Awards

The world's biggest PR awards programme, dedicated to benchmarking the best PR work from across the globe.

The biggest PR conference of the year, a high-level forum designed to address the critical issues that matter most.

A global network of conferences that explore the innovation and disruption that is redefining public relations.

Unrivalled insight into the world's best PR agencies, across specialist and geographic categories.

Our Next 20 initiative brings together in-house comms leaders with PR firms to examine the future of communications.

PRovoke elevates the PR industry at Cannes in 2020, in conjunction with ICCO.

Continued here:

Podcast: LaToya Drake On The Google News Initiative And Inclusive Storytelling - PRovoke Media

Google has discontinued its excellent, midrange Pixel 3A and Pixel 3A XL phones, and so its getting tougher to find one now, especially if youre looking for a specific size and color. This wasnt an unexpected move, but the timing isnt ideal since the long-rumored Pixel 4A isnt on shelves yet to replace it. And if you waiting for an XL version of the new phone, Google allegedly isnt making one.

By discontinuing the Pixel 3A ahead of the unconfirmed Pixel 4As launch, Google has avoided the need to discount the 3A any further than its last sale price, which saw prices drop by $100 in the case of the 3A, bringing the price to $299, and a more significant $160 price cut on the 3A XL, down to $319. Unfortunately, current prices arent as low as they once were, and its not helped by the fact that sellers usually surge prices on discontinued items.

Even though the Pixel 3A is probably about to be succeeded by a better phone, there are still some good reasons to invest if you can get a deal. It has a great camera, especially considering what the competition at this price range is, or rather isnt, capable of. Pictures that this phone can take rival that of the Pixel 3 flagship phone from 2018. The Pixel 3A and Pixel 3A XL can also work with every US carrier.

Weve pulled together a few reliable storefronts that are still selling it new, as well as some good deals on refurbished options.

The rest is here:

Where to buy the discontinued Google Pixel 3A and 3A XL - The Verge

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, speaks at the 2019 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on November 19, 2019.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

CEOs from four tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have all agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

The committee later confirmed that the hearing will be held on July 27.

Apple CEO Tim Cook had appeared to be the last to confirm his attendance at the hearing, according to a recent report from Politico. According to the report, Facebook and Google both agreed to make their top executives available if the other companies did the same. Amazon said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that CEO Jeff Bezos would be willing to testify, according to a copy obtained by CNBC last month.

Recode co-founder Kara Swisher first reported the news in a tweet that the CEOs agreed to testify.

The hearing would mark the first time all four executives testified together in front of Congress, though it's not yet clear if the event would take place in person or virtually given the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Though Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook are all veterans of congressional testimony, Amazon's Jeff Bezos has never before appeared before Congress.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment and deferred to the committee. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment and referred to the letter the company sent to the committee confirming Bezos' testimony. Google declined to comment, and representatives from Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

The House Judiciary Committee announced its antitrust investigation into the four tech companies in June 2019. Testimony from the CEOs would mark one of the final steps before completing the probe, which is expected to produce new legislative proposals to reform and regulate the digital market. In a January interview, Cicilline told CNBC it's "clear" to him that the digital marketplace is "not functioning properly, that there's not robust competition there." He said effective legislation would need to reinvigorate competition and enable a new class of start-ups to grow.

While the House probe will not result in enforcement actions against the company, investigations by federal and state regulators could. The Justice Department is reportedly nearing a potential lawsuit against Google over alleged anticompetitive practices while the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Facebook. Apple and Amazon have also attracted antitrust scrutiny from enforcers both in the U.S. and abroad.

The House antitrust probe has represented a rare bipartisan effort in the Judiciary Committee. But as the panel nears the legislative phase, some Republican members have threatened to fracture that united front. Several members wrote to Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. in February thatthey "will not participate in an investigation with pre-conceived conclusions that America's large tech companies are inherently bad, cannot be allowed to exist in society, and must be broken up."

The charge came aftera video of Nadler at a fundraising event surfaced online where he could be heard talking about "changing the distribution of power" and "breaking up all the large companies."Politicoreported that Nadler did not call specifically to break up the tech companies, and was speaking generally about changes needed to tackle the issue of concentrated market power.

Though their incentives may differ, there still appears to be an appetite from both sides of Congress to tamp down tech's wide-reaching power. Republican complaints of tech platforms alleged bias against conservatives have been emboldened by President Donald Trump's recent executive order seeking to strip tech companies of liability protection for their moderation protocols. And Democrats have called on the companies to more strictly enforce hate speech violations in light of recent protests for racial justice.

But the question remains of how to regulate the industry and whether antitrust is the appropriate tool to do so. Members of Congress have introduced bills aiming to restrict tech's powers in other ways, by limiting the amount of data they're able to collect and store and limiting their ability to target potential voters with ads.

-CNBC's Annie Palmer and Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Correction: This article has been updated to indicate that the CEOs will testify before the House Judiciary Committee. An earlier version of this story misstated which committee would receive the testimony.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

WATCH:How US antitrust law works, and what it means for Big Tech

Read more:

Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook CEOs agree to testify before House committee - CNBC

Googles SmartReply, the four-year-old, A.I.-based technology that helps suggest responses to messages in Gmail, Androids Messages, Play Developer Consoleand elsewhere, is now being made available to YouTube Creators. Google announced today the launch of an updated version of SmartReply built for YouTube, which will allow creators to more easily and quickly interact with their fans in the comments.

The feature is being rolled out to YouTube Studio, the online dashboard creators use to manage their YouTube presence, check their stats, grow their channels and engage fans. From YouTube Studios comments section, creators can filter, view and respond to comments from across their channels.

For creators with a large YouTube following, responding to comments can be a time-consuming process. Thats where SmartReply aims to help.

Image Credits: Google

Instead of manually typing out all their responses, creators will be able to instead click one of the suggested replies to respond to comments their viewers post. For example, if a fan says something about wanting to see whats coming next, the SmartReply feature may suggest a response like Thank you! or More to come!

Unlike the SmartReply feature built for email, where the technology has to process words and short phrases, the version of SmartReply designed for YouTube has to also be able to handle a more diverse set of content like emoji, ASCII art or language switching, the company notes. YouTube commenters also often post using abbreviated words, slang and inconsistent use of punctuation. This made it more challenging to implement the system on YouTube.

Image Credits: Google

Google detailed how it overcame these and other technical challenges in a post on its Google AI Blog, published today.

In addition, Google said it wanted a system where SmartReply only made suggestions when its highly likely the creator would want to reply to the comment and when the feature is able to suggest a sensible response. This required training the system to identify which comments should trigger the feature.

At launch, SmartReply is being made available for both English and Spanish comments and its the first cross-lingual and character byte-based version of the technology, Google says.

Because of the approach SmartReply is now using, the company believes it will be able to make the feature available to many more languages in the future.

Continue reading here:

Google brings its AI-powered SmartReply feature to YouTube - TechCrunch

It was a terrifying bank robbery: Demanding cash in a handwritten note, a man waved a gun, threatened to kill a tellers family, ordered employees and customers onto the floor and escaped with $195,000.

Surveillance video gave authorities a lead, showing a man holding a cellphone outside the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, on May 20, 2019. So like a growing number of law enforcement agencies, they got a court-approved geofence search warrant, seeking the location history of any devices in the area at the time.

Google is served with the vast majority of these warrants because it stores information from millions of devices in a massive database known as Sensorvault. If your Android phone or iPhone has Location History enabled, this is where your data is tracked and stored.

A Google spokesman declined to say how many geofence warrants the company has received, but Googles legal brief in the bank robbery says requests jumped 1,500% from 2017 to 2018, and another 500% last year.

Police credit these warrants with helping identify suspects in a fatal shooting in North Carolina, home invasions in Minnesota and a murder in Georgia, among other crimes. Defense attorneys say they unconstitutionally ensnare innocent people and violate the privacy of anyone whose cellphone happens to be in the vicinity.

Now geofence warrants are getting their first significant court challenge. Lawyers for Okello Chatrie want a federal judge in Richmond to suppress the warrant that led to his arrest for the bank heist.

Similar court challenges are being waged against facial-recognition software, persistent aerial surveillance and Stingray cellphone trackers, among other technology, and civil rights advocates are even more concerned now that people are protesting against racial injustice.

If you are someone who went out on the streets to express your rage, your sadness and your hope that there is a better way to do policing and are then subject to a warrant, I think that would go against everything we are telling people they have the right to do, said New York state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a lead sponsor of a bill to ban geofence warrants.

The legislation was prompted in part by a New York Times report that prosecutors sought Googles cell phone records around the spot where the Proud Boys, a far-right group, brawled with anti-fascist protesters in 2018. Several Proud Boys were later convicted of assault.

In Chatries case, bank cameras showed the robber came and went from an area where a church worker saw a suspicious person in a blue Buick. Chatries Location History matched these movements. Prosecutors say Chatrie confessed after officers found a gun and nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller.

Chatries lawyers say all the evidence should be suppressed because it flowed from the geofence warrant in violation of the 4th Amendments protection against unreasonable searches.

It is the digital equivalent of searching every home in the neighborhood of a reported burglary, or searching the bags of every person walking along Broadway because of a theft in Times Square, Chatries lawyers wrote.

Typically, Google initially turns over anonymized data; police then seek identifying information on a smaller group of suspect devices.

We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement, said Richard Salgado, Googles director of law enforcement and information security.

Privacy advocates say such broad warrants inherently sweep up innocent people.

In this June 11, 2020, photo provided by Samuel Jones, his friend Zachary McCoy pauses on his bicycle in Gainesville, Fla. Local authorities considered McCoy a suspect in a house burglary because his Google location data showed he was near the house three times on the day the burglary occurred. McCoy said he rides his bike by the house regularly for exercise. Authorities were using geofence search warrants that allow law enforcement to gather data from Google on cellphone users and other devices near the scene of a crime. (Samuel Jones via AP)

Zachary McCoy, a Florida restaurant worker, had the wherewithal to fight back when Google emailed saying Gainesville police were seeking information related to his Google account. Plugging the case number into a police website, he saw a 97-year-old womans home had been burglarized.

I was kind of terrified that for some reason I was going to prison even though I hadnt actually committed a crime, he said.

McCoy had to enable Googles location services to track his bike rides on RunKeeper. The exercise-tracking app showed him near the womans house three times around the time of the burglary as he did laps around the neighborhood.

McCoy borrowed $7,000 from his parents to hire a lawyer, who persuaded police to withdraw the warrant.

Geofence data ensnared a man who seemed to be at the site of a 2018 killing in Avondale, Arizona. Jorge Molina spent six days in jail before his lawyer provided police with evidence exonerating him. His mothers ex-boyfriend was later arrested in the killing. It turns out Molina had given the man his old cellphone, which was still logged in to his Google account.

Police are basically treating this like its DNA or fingerprint evidence, but its not, said Jack Litwak, Molinas attorney. Jorge was nowhere near there and then he was accused of the worst crime you can be accused of committing.

Prosecutors say they tailor geofence warrants as narrowly as possible.

There is a process by which the 4th Amendment is followed and where peoples privacy concerns and considerations are at least weighed against the public safety interest and the strong governmental investigation interest, said Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, North Carolina.

Prosecutors consider Google a witness to the robbery in Chatries case, and argue he had no reasonable expectation of privacy since he voluntarily opted in to Googles Location History.

Privacy advocates say many cellphone users dont understand how much their movements are being tracked, nor how to opt out. A 2018 Associated Press investigation found that many Google applications store data even when owners used a privacy setting it said would prevent that.

Google later added new privacy controls that allow users to put an expiration date on their data and recently said it will automatically delete location history for new users after 18 months.

The question of how we would want to govern this novel and extremely comprehensive capability is really something thats up in the air, said Jennifer Stisa Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. We just now as a society are just starting to deal with technology like this.

Read the original post:

Google as 'a witness to the robbery:' Geofence warrants facing legal challenges - WRAL Tech Wire

In April, Apple and Google announced a partnership. They would take research into how to undertake Bluetooth-powered Covid-19 contact tracing in a privacy-preserving manner, with no central database, and make it available as a toolkit inside their operating systems for public health authoritysanctioned apps. Before they did this, all such apps had effectively been doomed to fail. At least on iPhones, they were crippled by the same baked-in Bluetooth restrictions that stop normal apps secretly tracking you.

The firms contact-tracing toolkit has been both praised and condemned. Its decentralised approach, with no sensitive central database of who-saw-who, has been supported by hundreds of privacy, security and human rights scholars. The concerns are understandable. The history of passports which were introduced as a seemingly temporary measure during the first world war, but were retained in response to fears about spreading the Spanish flu shows that pandemics can significantly influence our social infrastructure. And so they should be designed to minimise future misuse.

Through a software update, Apple and Google loosened privacy restrictions enough to allow public health authorities to run decentralised contact-tracing apps, but did not engineer new functionality to let apps send the unique Bluetooth identities of phones they encountered to a central server. Data had to remain secretly on phones: which was not a problem for decentralised systems, but left centralised apps such as those favoured by France and the tech wing of NHS England, NHSX continuing to struggle to use Bluetooth.

Reasons for preferring centralised systems differed. NHSX wanted individuals to trigger self-isolation alerts based on self-reported symptoms, and said it needed centralised fraud analysis to weed out the inevitable hypochondriacs and trolls. The French minister for the digital sector, Cdric O, said that self-reporting was a no-no, and instead wanted to use centralisation to try to lower the risk of a particular snooping attack from a tech-savvy neighbour. (This is a risk that can never be fully removed from any Bluetooth contact-tracing system.)

Tensions grew as it became clear that the firms did not intend to engineer a further global change to their operating systems to specifically accommodate these countries. In the French parliament, O stated that it was no coincidence that the UK and France were going against the grain, given that they were the only two European states with their own nuclear deterrent. However, it is worth noting that no country, nuclear-armed or not, even attempted to use the first tool of a sovereign nation against the firms the ability to make binding laws. Instead, they continued the bizarre path, seen in recent years from politicians around the world, of treating these firms like sovereign nations, hoping that they recognised each others legitimacy and that their officials could come to some agreement.

They did not, and the saga of the demise of NHSXs centralised app in a mid-June U-turn is well-documented. NHSX piloted an app relying on fragile workarounds to avoid the privacy restrictions built into operating systems, despite warnings from many outside the project myself included that it was likely to encounter problems. In June, the government admitted that its workarounds left its system unacceptably poor at detecting either iPhones or Androids at all.

What can we learn from NHSXs encounter with these tech giants? One key lesson requires distinguishing the problem of privacy from that of platform power. It is possible to be strongly in favour of a decentralised approach, as I am (as a co-developer of the open-source DP-3T system that Apple and Google adapted), while being seriously concerned about the centralised control of computing infrastructure these firms have amassed.

Its commonly said that in the digital world, data is power. This simple view might apply to a company collecting data through an app or a website, such as a supermarket, but doesnt faithfully capture the source of power of the firms controlling the hardware and software platforms these apps and websites run on. Using privacy technologies, such as federated or edge computing, Apple and Google can understand and intervene in the world, while truthfully saying they never saw anybodys personal data.

Data is just a means to an end, and new, cryptographic tools are emerging that let those firms same potentially problematic ends be reached without privacy-invasive means. These tools give those controlling and co-ordinating millions or even billions of computers the monopolistic power to analyse or shape communities or countries, or even to change individual behaviour, such as to privately target ads based on their most sensitive data without any single individuals data leaving their phone. Its not just ad targeting: privacy technologies could spotlight the roads where a protest is planned, the areas or industries likely to harbour undocumented migrants, or the spots in an oppressive country most likely to be illegal LGBT clubs not personal data, but data with serious consequences nonetheless.

This approach is effectively what underpins the Apple-Google contact-tracing system. Its great for individual privacy, but the kind of infrastructural power it enables should give us sleepless nights. Countries that expect to deal a mortal wound to tech giants by stopping them building data mountains are bulls charging at a red rag. In all the global crises, pandemics and social upheavals that may yet come, those in control of the computers, not those with the largest datasets, have the best visibility and the best and perhaps the scariest ability to change the world.

Law should be puncturing and distributing this power, and giving it to individuals, communities and, with appropriate and improved human-rights protections, to governments. To do so, we need new digital rights. Data protection and privacy laws are easily dodged or circumvented by technical assurances of confidentiality: we need something more ambitious to escape the giants walled gardens.

A right to repair would stop planned obsolescence in phones, or firms buying up competitors just to cut them off from the cloud they need to run. A right to interoperate would force systems from different providers, including online platforms, to talk to each other in real time, allowing people to leave a social network without leaving their friends. These interventions need strong accompanying oversight to maintain security and privacy, and stop unwanted side-effects or government abuse, such as the outlawing of end-to-end encryption to oppress dissidents and whistle-blowers. It all starts from realising that deflating digital power isnt just about governing data: its the walls of the underlying systems we have to tear down.

Read more from the original source:

Privacy is not the problem with the Apple-Google contact-tracing toolkit - The Guardian