Monthly Archives: February 2022

Even in his teens, Marijn van Vliet tinkered with computers and built websites for friends and family. After studying International Relations, he became professionally involved in the digitalization of society. From 2014 he worked for the Lower House party of D66 (Dutch liberal party) to bring about good digital laws and regulations. In 2021 he started as an independent political consultant and initiator of a partnership for digital rights organizations.

Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify this week because the company is spreading fake news about corona via Joe Rogans podcast. Spotify responded by creating a special COVID-19-Hub to direct people to accurate sources of information. By doing this, Spotify is following the irresponsible example of its Big Tech friends. After all, the damage has already been done and such a hub gives the company only the semblance of social responsibility without really having to take responsibility.

Meanwhile, we see more and more often and in ever more concrete terms the excesses of Big Techs irresponsibility. Although that particular torch-bearing extremist was by no means the first conspiracy theorist to threaten politicians, he was the straw that broke the camels back. The response from the government in the Hague is, unfortunately, very feeble. A committee has been set up that is supposed to investigate the effects of radicalization and polarization and formulate recommendations on how to better defend democracy against extremism, radicalization and polarization. As understandable as this Hague approach may be, the commission is diverting attention from the steps that need to be taken now to force social media the catalysts of polarization and radicalization to be accountable.

That radicalization and polarization can have disastrous effects on democracy should come as no surprise anymore. The storming of the US Capitol barely a year ago was the ultimate example of what can happen when power-hungry politicians take advantage of polarization and radicalization that is fuelled by social media. Twitter and Facebook may have thrown Trump off their platforms, but the fostering of extreme ideas is still going on under the radar.

Politicians in the Netherlands are also taking advantage of the social climate that Silicon Valley has created. With the low point being a political party that openly expresses conspiracy theories in the Dutch House of Representatives. Unfortunately, that is only the tip of the iceberg. Politicians who know how to make the most out of #ophef (#outcry) are soaring in the polls, while nuanced opinions are falling further and further by the wayside. Thanks to social media, and the talk show hosts who tailor their invitation policy accordingly, strong opinions count far more than achieving actual results. At the same time, more people are losing faith in politics when those results fail to materialize.

Thanks to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, we know that the algorithms of Facebook (Meta) are configured to favor extreme content. After all, that generates higher levels of engagement, which means people linger longer, see more ads and Facebook makes more money. Incidentally, the same holds true for Youtube, according to research by the Mozilla Foundation. The recommendations algorithm stimulates the spread of fake news and extreme content, leading to polarization and radicalization. Apparently Spotify now also goes for money over social responsibility.

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This discussion is not new. In fact, The European Commission already announced at the end of 2020 two laws to address exactly this problem: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. This legislation tackles the disproportionate market power of Big Tech and enforces transparency about how their algorithms work and the effects they have on our democracy. Meanwhile, both laws are at an advanced stage and should be adopted sometime over the next six months after consultation between the European Parliament and the European Council.

Also interesting: The influence of Facebook on freedom of information

This does mean, however, that the government needs to work NOW to ensure that both laws contain effective safeguards to counter polarisation and radicalisation. The House of Representatives should not lose itself in creating new committees and investigations, but instead provide a robust mandate to the Secretary of State for Digitalization (who, of course, should not call herself a minister for no reason abroad). That is the only way to force Big Tech into shouldering their responsibility and to help Neil Young find a better alternative for his music than that other tech giant, i.e., Amazon.

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The time for committees and investigations is over - take on Big Tech - Innovation Origins

A woman holds smartphone with Facebook logo in front of a displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration picture taken October 28, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Register

NEW YORK, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Uh oh. Big Tech was cut in two on Wednesday, divided between companies that have great data and those that don't, after Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc (FB.O) posted disastrous quarterly results, blaming privacy safeguards from Apple (AAPL.O) that made it tougher for advertisers.

A day earlier, Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) posted a startlingly strong quarter, thanks to bumper sales of advertising that uses its Google's search data to target ads. read more

"It's two-tiered," said Gene Munster of investment firm Loup Ventures, who called Apple's devices and Google's search service foundations of the internet. "Facebook continues to see that impact of what it means to be built on top of Apple," he said, noting that Apple's privacy changes have had a bigger impact on Facebook than he expected.

Register

Meta's revenue and forecast misses sent the social media company's shares down 20% in after-hours trade on Wednesday, upending a sector-wide positive outlook on the results from Apple and Alphabet. read more

The after-hours slump in Meta shares vaporized $200 billion worth of its market value, and peers Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), Snap Inc (SNAP.N) and Pinterest Inc (PINS.N) saw $15 billion in lost value.

"People may have enjoyed a false sense of security following Alphabet's/Google's very healthy and strong Q4 results," said Scott Kessler of Third Bridge. Apple's change to its operations system in the middle of last year, said, would hit much of the mobile advertising world in 2022.

Apple allowed users to block some tracking of their internet use, which has made it harder for brands to target and measure their ads on Facebook and Instagram, which is also owned by Meta. Meta CFO David Wehner said on a conference call with analysts that the impact from Apple's privacy changes could be "in the order of $10 billion" for 2022.

While Meta said macroeconomic issues like supply-chain disruptions and inflation contributed to the earnings miss, factors which could have far-reaching effects, analysts and investors focused their punishment on social media.

"It really depends on the company within tech right now," said analyst Ryan Reith of IDC, referring to high competition across services, hardware and advertising. "When you have such strong growth in a handful of tech sectors many will win and many will lose, and there will be continued volatility within."

Meta CFO Wehner suggested that Apple's relationship with Google was also an issue for Facebook. "Given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to continue."

Meta is investing heavily in the metaverse, which merges the real world and virtual world for work and play, and the tech giant pointed to competition as a challenge for it in the last quarter.

Meta's results came after two weeks of positive outlooks from Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft (MSFT.O), and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O), which instilled investor confidence in sector growth prospects.

"I dont think it turns around the current relief rally we are seeing in the tech space," said analyst Robert Pavlik of Dakota Wealth Management, after Meta's results. But there could be an impact on some advertising-supported companies, he said.

Register

Reporting by Danielle Kaye and Nivedita Balu; editing by Peter Henderson and Leslie Adler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Meta's miss creates Big Tech divide: who's got the data - Reuters

Big Tech should reimburse victims of online scams advertised on their platforms, Texas prepares its power grid for winter weather, and is there really a huge demand for metaverse features?

Thats all the tech news thats trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. Its Thursday, February 3, and Im your host, Tom Li.

Big Tech companies whose platforms host advertisements for scams should reimburse victims, said British lawmakers. This notion is all part of a wider effort to tackle the growing epidemic of online scams. Banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves but there is no sufficient regulation for social media platforms or websites where victims are first lured in. Last week, a report from the FTC revealed that more than 95,000 U.S. consumers had been duped by scams posted on social media.

Big Tech companies around the world are hopping into the metaverse, trying to stay competitive against each other, but is there even a huge demand for meta-related features? An article from Wired claims that the race is on to sell an amorphous concept that no one really wants them to build. Over the past few months virtually every tech company has incorporated the metaverse into their business in some way. Facebook, which rebranded to Meta, is working on a supercomputer to power its metaverse while also planning to implement NFT features to its social platforms. Twitter has also made similar moves and YouTube is in talks to also join in. However, the metaverse as a concept is fuzzy in general, the report says. While tech companies have disclosed that the metaverse is coming, no one really knows what it means or what it looks like.

As Texas preps for a batch of winter weather, questions arise wondering if the states power grid is ready to brave the storm. One year ago, Texas suffered a power outage to its independent power grid amidst one of the coldest Arctic freezes in decades. This week, it was announced that an Arctic front is moving towards Texas, bringing several days of cold weather. Two weeks ago, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), released its final winterization report to assess the states readiness for this winter. The councils interim chief executive said Texas electric grid is more prepared for winter operations than ever before. However, there are still some uncertainties. During a press conference, the state admitted some residents may lose power this week or weekend but it would not be due to grid issues rather ice on power lines.

Now for something a bit different. Over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the name P4x was hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. To get back at North Korea, P4x decided to take matters into their own hands, a Wired article reports. The hacker found several unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems which allowed them to launch denial-of-service attacks on the routers and servers that the country uses for internet connection. According to the report, these hacking methods had immediate effects on the countrys system. Records from Pingdom show that at several points during P4xs hacking, almost every North Korean website was down.

Thats all the tech news thats trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, if you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, Im Tom Li.

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Hashtag Trending Feb. 3 - Big tech should pay back online scam victims; Is there a demand for the metaverse? Texas preps its power grid - IT World...

Big Tech has long felt free to help itself to the good ideas of smaller companies. It's bad enough that these giants fiercely contest the efforts of inventors to receive fair compensation -- a courtroom mismatch between small startup firms with a good idea but little money on one side versus behemoths valued into the trillion-plus dollars on the other.

Now, however, Big Tech is taking the process one step further by launching a subterranean counterattack on the little guys -- claiming to be the real victim here.

For years now, Big Tech has been promoting the myth of "patent trolls." This army of creatures of courtroom legend supposedly files bogus patent infringement lawsuits by the truckload in order to grab "please go away" cash settlements from the tech giants. Now, the latter have added the new wrinkle of claiming that the United States is facing a crisis of "bad patents" -- in other words, that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been failing on a mass scale by issuing patents that are too vague, too conventional, or so poorly written that it's impossible to know what invention or technology the patent encompasses.

Time and time again, when tech giants get called out for stealing intellectual property, they've made the same argument: they can't have committed theft because the smaller firms' patents were invalid in the first place.

"The claims of the Patent-in-Suit are invalid and unenforceable," pronounced Google in a recent lawsuit with smaller firm VideoShare LLC over video-streaming technology. Google huffed that VideoShare's patent was too abstract and "lacked novelty." Fortunately, the jury saw through the ruse, and the court ordered Google to pay $26 million for its infringement.

Likewise, when startup cybersecurity firm Centripetal accused Cisco of patent infringement, Cisco retaliated by trying to invalidate Centripetal's patents through a review process within the USPTO. In the end, though, a federal court in 2020 sided with Centripetal, ordering Cisco to pay nearly $2 billion in damages for infringement.

Now comes the High Tech Inventors Alliance -- an advocacy group formed to promote a "balanced patent system" by Google, Amazon, Cisco, and the like -- to allege that over a quarter of all patents granted in the United States are invalid.

If true, that would be shocking -- a damning indictment of the USPTO and its work. But a "balanced patent system" in this case means one in which Big Tech can help itself with impunity to the discoveries represented by 25 percent of all patents -- because if they are indeed invalid, there's nothing to infringe upon.

In fact, this claim is every bit as bogus and self-serving as the proposition that Big Tech is beset by patent trolls. As it turns out, the figure derives from a single, decade-old study that examined just 980 patents issued from 2000 to 2010. To put that in perspective, the PTO granted about 2 million patents in that period.

The truth is that, after many years of consistent and effective efforts to improve examination practices and tools at the USPTO, poor quality applications rarely get through the system. And 25% of U.S. patents certainly are not bad." Indeed, the United States is quite judicious in issuing patents. A 2019 study from the World Intellectual Property Organization found that USPTO grants patents in fewer than 35% of applications processed, one of the smallest percentages of leading patent offices worldwide.

In addition, the number of patent lawsuits and legal disputes in the United States has remained steady for decades. If a "patent crisis" did in fact exist, there would likely be far more than just two disputes per 1,000 patents issued -- a rate that has not budged in this country for nearly a century.

Ironically, our largest and most aggressive competitors dont think the U.S. is awash with bad patents. Indeed, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative continues to estimate that China is responsible for between $200-$600 billion in theft of American IP every year.

If Big Tech succeeds in its continued efforts to weaken intellectual property protection, the consequences will be dire, encouraging foreign theft and jeopardizing America's global economic standing.

Our policymakers shouldn't fall for Big Tech's "patent crisis" hoax. There's too much at stake.

Chris Israel is the executive director of the U.S. Alliance of Startups and Inventors for Jobs and a formerU.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.

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Why Big Tech Wants You To Think There's A Patent Crisis - International Business Times

Rapid action is needed to update how cross-border financial services are scrutinised and consumers protected as the sector becomes digitalised with "Big Tech" playing an increased role, European Union regulators said on Monday.

People are turning to social media and using smartphones to buy and sell shares, move money around bank accounts and make payments, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving regulators playing catch-up.

"Digital finance has unlocked new synergies between financial and non-financial activities that potentially introduce systemic risk into the market for financial services," a joint report from the EU's banking, insurance and markets watchdogs said.

Cloud computing, or banks and other financial firms using outsourced providers for services, is booming, the report said.

It is sometimes unclear how to categorise some digital financial services under existing rules, creating uncertainty over data privacy, anti-money laundering safeguards, and how much capital they should be holding, the report said.

It called on the bloc's executive European Commission, which has opened a public consultation on digital finance, to take a "holistic" view of supervising financial services.

New "supervision structures" may be needed to capture transactions spread across "mixed activity" groups or MAGs, such as Amazon, Google, Meta's Facebook, Apple, and other Big Tech firms offering financial and non-financial services.

The crash of German payments company Wirecard demonstrated that complex arrangements within a group providing both financial and non-financial services create specific challenges for supervisors, the report said.

"The growing digitalisation and datafication of financial services necessitate closer cooperation between financial and relevant non-financial authorities," the report said.

The report said that regulatory action may be warranted given that some posting on social media are effectively advertisements.

"In securities markets in particular, the growth of digital trading platforms has coincided with new trends, such as social trading', or investment advice shared over social mediawhich brings new opportunities but risks as well."

Thomson Reuters 2022

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Digital Finance: EU Watchdogs Call for Rapid Action to Catch Up Big Tech - Gadgets 360

Big Techs role in facilitating a host of digital harms in recent years has become painfully clear: political polarization, consumer manipulation, discrimination-by-algorithm, worker insecurity, to name just a few.

The European Union has taken on a leading role in safeguarding citizens from these harms, first and foremost with the implementation of privacy standards and data protection law. Indeed, privacy has taken on a dominant position in the marketplace of public values in the digital age.

There are good reasons for this. Privacy is undoubtedly a core value of democratic societies, to be championed and cherished. It is the breathing room we need to engage in the process of self-development. But at this stage in our digital evolution, our heightened sensitivity to privacy, our fixation on data protection, may act as an obstacle to a digital Europe fit for all.

In fact, our focus on privacy may be unwittingly enabling, rather than hindering, the continued expansion of Big Tech into new sectors. This is what weve found in an ongoing European Commission-funded research project I am leading at Radboud University in the Netherlands, which is investigating the risks raised by the increased involvement of Big Tech in health and medicine.

Since at least 2014, all major tech corporations, including Alphabet (Googles parent company), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM have moved into health and medicine. They have done so either by setting up partnerships with public research institutions on medical projects or by developing health-related applications themselves, including software for carrying out remote clinical studies, wearables for medical research, devices for home medical surveillance, artificial intelligence (AI) systems for diagnostics and prediction, or funding schemes for biomedical research.

These companies were also quick to offer digital support in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, most famously with the Google-Apple application programming interface (API) for digital contact tracing, on which most contact tracing apps in Europe, as well as other parts of the world, run.

To anyone who had been paying attention to this Googlisation of health, privacy and data protection issues were, from the get-go, potential red flags. Indeed, it is not difficult to conjure up horror scenarios of these companies getting hold of our personal health data and feeding it into a metaverse of increasingly more precise data profiles that could be used to target, surveil and manipulate us.

In response, data protection watchdogs were unleashed (with more or less success), and digital security experts began designing state-of-the-art privacy-by-design data exchange techniques specifically for collaborations between Big Tech and hospitals.

These efforts may be good deterrents. To date, there have been relatively few privacy scandals around Big Techs involvement in health and medicine. And privacy now seems to be a shared concern of companies too regardless of what their motives might be.

Google and Apples COVID-19 digital contact tracing protocol, for example, conforms to the stringent privacy-protecting criteria defined by leading privacy and security experts. First and foremost amongst these, it only works with decentralised data storage systems that keep our data on our individual phones rather than sending them to a central repository, thereby pre-empting any surveillance creep. It is precisely for this reason that many privacy experts, the European Data Protection Supervisor and most European states applauded and adopted the initiative when it was launched in April 2020.

But privacy is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the risks that the increased involvement of Big Tech in health and medicine raise. And the near exclusive focus on privacy has prevented much broader questions from being asked.

For example, will these companies become the new gatekeepers of the very valuable datasets they are helping to compile? These may be open access in the future, but there is no such guarantee.

Another crucial question is what role these companies will play in asking research questions and setting research agendas in health and medicine? Sergey Brin, previously the president of Google, has been open about the fact that a rare form of Parkinsons disease runs in his family and that this is why Google has invested in Parkinsons research. In the future, will Silicon Valley tycoons get a say in which global diseases receive attention and which wont?

And what kind of clash of expertise will we witness between medical experts and these tech companies, and whose expertise will prevail? The Google-Apple contact tracing API is a case in point. Some public health experts were unhappy with the API: decentralised storage is good for privacy, but not for the type of oversight of infections you want in a pandemic.

Ultimately, we need to ask how the health and medical sector will be reshaped by the growing presence of these actors. But also, and perhaps most importantly, as these companies move into virtually all sectors of society, from education and city planning to news provision, transport and even space exploration, we need to ask how society, as an aggregation of sectors, is being transformed.

These are questions that are concerned with health and medicine as a public good, who is involved in the development and distribution of this public good, and new configurations of power in a society that is increasingly digitised. These are questions that remain even if privacy and data protection are properly addressed.

This has to do with the fact that Big Techs business models are evolving. In health and medicine at least, the initiatives and partnerships that companies are launching are not about capturing as much data as possible and using it to target us with advertisements. To be successful, many of these initiatives do not require using data in ways that are privacy unfriendly. Actually, some of them do not require the use of data at all.

Take Apples ResearchKit software for example, which allows researchers to use iPhones as a means of collecting data for clinical studies. Apple does not need to see, control, analyse or in any way handle the data collected in order for the ResearchKit and the iPhone to become a new tool for remote clinical studies. No privacy issues at stake here.

Similarly, Verilys involvement in Parkinsons research seeks to develop new digital biomarkers for Parkinsons disease. These efforts will be successful if these biomarkers are accurate, in which case they may become integral to future Parkinsons research. There is no need to share data with third parties to achieve this, and so here, too, privacy is a non-issue.

In both these examples, what the companies seek to do is to become indispensable players in the future of biomedicine, and to accomplish this they do not need to breach any privacy or data protection rules.

In this context, conceptual approaches which focus almost exclusively on data privacy, such as surveillance capitalism and data colonialism, just as regulatory frameworks such as the EUs GDPR and privacy-by-design techniques, are insufficient, if not counterproductive. They risk only scratching the surface, and worse, facilitating the entrance of Big Tech via privacy friendly solutions into ever more sectors of society. The over-emphasis on privacy in our discussions and regulation of Big Tech draws our critical attention away from bigger questions about agenda setting, infrastructural power and new dependencies on a handful of companies across sectors of society,

What we need are approaches that reach beyond privacy risks and data protection. To do this, and drawing on political theorist Michael Walzers seminal work Spheres of Justice, my group at Radboud University has developed a conceptual framework that understands Big Techs push into ever more sectors as sphere transgressions.

Walzer argues that a just society is one where advantages or inequalities that exist in one sphere, such as having more money (market sphere), should not be translated into advantages in other spheres, such as access to better education (sphere of education).

Yet, what we are witnessing with the growing influence of Big Tech across sectors of society is the conversion of advantages these companies have acquired in the sphere of digital production (expertise in the development of digital infrastructure), into advantages in all spheres that undergo digitalisation be this health, education, public administration, transportation, etc. Such sphere transgressions are illegitimate, insofar as these companies do not have domain expertise proportional to their new level of influence in these different spheres, and because they are not accountable in a way that public sector actors are.

This framework moves beyond a narrow focus on privacy, to identify the risks of sphere transgressions on two levels. First, at the sectoral level, it enables us to ask how Big Tech is contributing to a reshaping of individual sectors. How do the values, norms and expertise that these companies bring with them, which typically promote technological efficiency and standardization, crowd out the traditional values and expertise that underpin a sector such as health or education values such as care and access based on need, or public health expertise which prefers centralised over decentralised oversight in a pandemic?

Second, it enables us to ask how Big Tech is reshaping society, as an aggregation of spheres. In what new ways are we becoming dependent on tech companies for the provision of public goods, and what kind of decision-making power does this confer them across society?

At Radboud, we have translated this framework into an open-data digital tool Sphere Transgressions Watch which allows users to track the presence of Big Tech in different sectors over time, and to contribute data on instances of sphere transgressions themselves. Our hope is that this tool will both raise awareness about this phenomenon among policy makers, the media and civil society, and that it will be used by other scholars to ask their own research questions. We hope that it will contribute to developing more robust governance frameworks for the digital age that move beyond a narrow focus on privacy and data protection.

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Beyond privacy: there are wider issues at stake over Big Tech in medicine - Open Democracy