Monthly Archives: February 2022

Google today announced a new version of Workspace, the companys productivity service that you probably still refer to as G Suite. With the new and free Google Workspace Essentials plan, Google wants to bring more business users onto the platform by offering them the basic Workspace productivity tools with the exception of Gmail.

Until now, in order to use Workspace with a non-Google email address, you had to sign up for the $6/month/user Business Starter account after a 14-day trial. That paid plan is not going away, but all you now need to do is sign up with your work email and youre good to go. No credit card needed.

The new free plan is essentially the existing entry-level Business Starter plan, but with a reduced storage quota of 15 GB (down from 30). Otherwise, though, you can use Google Meet with up to 100 users for up to 60 minutes in each call, get access to Spaces for work collaboration and Chat for gossiping about their co-workers.All of the standard tools like Sheets, Slides and Docs are also included, of course.

Since you already have an email address from work, though, theres no Gmail included in this edition, which makes sense, given that it would be tough to send out emails with your work address from there, leading to all kinds of confusion.

Image Credits: Google

There is a little complication here, though. There is a cap of 25 users per Essentials Starter team account. But multiple team accounts can be created within the same company. So basically, somebody from your team needs to start an account and can then invite other team members if youre working in a larger company.

With this move, Google is opening up a whole new world for shadow IT and Google says as much in its announcement when it writes: With Essentials Starter, were making it easy for employees to choose their own productivity tools and bring modern collaboration to work. If IT doesnt make the choice, employees will make it for them.

This also opens up all kinds of questions about data governance and security.

Google Workspace Essentials Starter was designed for people to easily start using Google Workspace at work by themselves or with their team, a Google spokesperson told me when I asked about this. While it does include some lightweight admin controlssuch as the ability to invite users to their team granular IT controls and features like more advanced security are only available with paid Google Workspace plans.

Chances are, this will get any large enterprise that doesnt have a paid Workspace account yet to quickly sign up for one in order to block its employees from setting up their own.

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Google Workspace goes all in on shadow IT - TechCrunch

Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai.

REUTERS

While Facebook is in the midst of its biggest stock drop ever and is trading at an 18-month low, Google remains near a record and has easily outperformed all of its Big Tech peers over the past year.

The difference is Apple.

Google and Facebook are the two dominant online ad companies in the U.S. and have been for years. While the companies do very different things and have faced their own unique issues, the five-year stock charts look pretty similar.

Until you hit late 2021.

Facebook vs. Google since beginning of 2017

That's when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's longtime struggle to control his own destiny started hitting his company's financials.

Facebook's apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.

Google also relies on ad targeting to connect marketers with users on many of its properties, but search advertising is a unique asset users tend to "self-target" as they're typing in a search query that explains exactly what they're interested in at that moment.

When it comes to targeting, Google has Android, the world's most popular operating system, giving it control over its own policies. And while Google still needs iOS distribution, it has a cozier relationship with Apple. Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine on Apple's Safari browser.

Add it all up, and Facebook just told Wall Street that Apple's new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature is expected to cost the social media company $10 billion in revenue this year. That's a big reason why Facebook fell well short of its revenue forecast for the first quarter and why the stock plummeted 25% on Thursday, its biggest ever drop, to the its lowest since August 2020.

Google, meanwhile, reported blowout fourth-quarter results earlier this week on the back of a 33% jump in ad revenue, compared to 20% for Facebook. Analysts expect Google parent Alphabet to hit growth of 23% in the first quarter, while Facebook is projecting expansion of just 3% to 11%.

Dave Wehner, the CFO of Facebook parent Meta, said on Wednesday's conference call with analysts that, when it comes to Apple treating search more favorably than other apps because of the Google deal, "the incentive clearly is for this policy discrepancy to continue."

Analysts see the correlation. Advertisers that can no longer get the level of targeting they want on Facebook are spending more on Google.

"Did Apple iOS changes trigger a market share shift from Facebook to Google?" MKM Partners' Rohit Kulkarni wrote in a report on Thursday. "Yes, we believe so." MKM has a buy rating on both tocks.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's operating chief and a former senior executive at Google, said Apple's changes are most harmful to small and medium-sized businesses, which are most reliant on personalization and targeting in their advertising.

"So we're definitely seeing that this has more of an impact forSMBs," she said.

Zuckerberg has been worried about this possibility for a long time. Without owning the device or operating system, Facebook can't fully chart its own path, and is always subject to the whims of other companies. About a decade ago, Facebook designed its own phone, but it was a disaster.

Here's what Facebook said in the risk factors of its IPO prospectus in 2012, which was still the early days of mobile for the company.

"We are dependent on the interoperability of Facebook with popular mobile operating systems that we do not control, such as Android and iOS, and any changes in such systems that degrade our products' functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products could adversely affect Facebook usage on mobile devices."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen fencing in the "Metaverse" with an Olympic gold medal fencer during a live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference to announce the rebrand of Facebook as Meta, in this screen grab taken from a video released October 28, 2021.

Facebook | via Reuters

In 2014, Facebook acquired a nascent virtual reality headset company called Oculus for $2 billion, giving the company a shot at making the next generation of hardware and integrating its own software.

That acquisition is the foundation for the future that Zuckerberg so much desires. Late last year, he changed Facebook's name to Meta Platforms. In Thursday's earnings report, the company said its Reality Labs group, home to the virtual reality development, lost more than $10 billion in 2021.

Investors are rightly worried. Facebook's core business is losing users, and Apple is flexing in a way that's causing panic.

For Zuckerberg, the answer to his real world problems may be the virtual world. As much as anything, he wants to break free of Apple and Google, so his company gets to be the one making the rules.

CNBC's Kif Leswing and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

WATCH: I'm not a buyer on Facebook

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Facebook and Google stocks have diverged, and the reason is Apple - CNBC

Google has announced that Gmails new layout, which changes how Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces are integrated, will be available to try starting in February; become default by April; and become the only option by the end of Q2 2022. The view makes it so Googles other messaging tools, which are part of (but not necessarily limited to) its business-focused Workspace suite, are no longer just little windows floating alongside your emails, but get their own screens in Gmail that are accessible with large buttons on the left-hand side.

Google calls this the integrated view, and itll soon be familiar if you (or your employer) are a Workspace customer, or if you use Chat and Meet personally. Starting February 8th, Google says youll be able to start testing the layout for yourself. By April, anyone who hasnt opted in (Google shows that therell be a prompt at some point, encouraging you to do so), will be switched over to the new layout, but will be able to switch back in settings. That option will go away by the end of the second quarter, according to Google, when the new layout becomes the standard experience for Gmail.

The new view could be polarizing while managing chats and meetings can be a bit confusing in the current Gmail layout, it all happens on one screen, which is pleasing if you love data density. But for those looking to focus on one thing at a time, the new interface looks like itll give you easy access to other tools without having them always on the screen. There will, however, be ways to access your Chats from the email screen a Google support page describing the new layout mentions that new notifications will show up as a bubble in the left corner of the screen, and that youll be able to create a mini pop-up window within the interface that you can use to reply.

The company says that there will also be notification bubbles to let you know if other tools need your attention, which could be less distracting than, say, having a list of all your Chats living to the left or right of your emails.

Google has shown that it wants to deeply integrate all its work-related products together, and this layout gives us a taste of what that could look like, with tools like Spaces letting you jump into a spreadsheet without leaving Gmail. While it does seem like youre mostly already able to, as Google puts it when describing the new view, easily switch between your inbox, important conversations, and join meetings without having to switch between tabs or open a new window, its probably fair to argue that it all feels a little tacked-on. Googles screenshots of the new layout do make it seem like the new interface will be more put-together.

The services will also be more integrated Gmails search, for instance, will also turn up Chat messages in the coming months, according to the company (similar to how Hangouts messages also used to be searchable from within Gmail).

Google says that this new layout will be coming to anyone who uses Google Chat. According to Google spokesperson Amanda Lam, the focus of the new integrated view is for users who use multiple apps. By the end of the year, this means users would get this experience if they opt-in to Google Chat or Google Meet.

Update February 3rd, 2:55PM ET: Updated with information that Google has now decided that the layout will be available to anyone who uses Chat and Meet, instead of limiting it to a specific type of customer as was originally announced.

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Gmails new integrated layout will take over inboxes soon - The Verge

Did you know that Google Maps has a nifty little trick that lets you adjust zoom with just one finger? Because I sure as hell didnt until yesterday, when a tweet from Sketchfab CEO Alban Denoyel alerted me to its existence via a years-old YouTube video from 2013. The shortcut is simple: just double-tap the maps interface, but instead of lifting your finger after the second tap (the shortcut for zooming in), you leave it touching the screen. Then a swipe up zooms out, and a swipe down zooms in. Neat right?

With this knowledge you can say goodbye to awkwardly holding the phone and trying to use two fingers to reposition the map to check your directions when your other hand is busy holding a dog leash, coffee cup, shopping bag, or whatever. Personally Im looking forward to using it the next time Im on a bike and need to whip out my phone to quickly check directions. No more taking both hands off the handlebars for this guy. No sir.

I havent done an exhaustive search, but it looks like this feature is pretty commonplace across mapping apps. It works on Google Maps on both Android and iOS, and also works in other iOS mapping apps like Apple Maps and CityMapper. Have fun!

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Today I learned a handy trick to zoom in and out of Google Maps - The Verge

Two members of Googles Ethical AI group have announced their departures from the company, according to a report from Bloomberg. Senior researcher Alex Hanna, and software engineer Dylan Baker, will join Timnit Gebrus nonprofit research institute, Distributed AI Research (DAIR).

In a post announcing her resignation on Medium, Hanna criticizes the toxic work environment at Google, and draws attention to a lack of representation of Black women at the company.

Prior to Timnits hiring, Google Research management had never recruited a Black woman as a research scientist, Hanna states. In one town hall around Googlegeist (Googles annual workplace climate survey), a high-level executive remarked that there had been such low numbers of Black women in the Google Research organization that they couldnt even present a point estimate of these employees dissatisfaction with the organization, lest management risk deanonymizing the results.

Gebru, the former co-lead of Googles AI Ethical research group, was fired by the company in 2020 after co-authoring a research paper that called attention to the potential risks of large-scale language models, a concept similar to the one Google Search employs. The search giant fired another AI ethics researcher, Margaret Mitchell, for her involvement in Gebrus paper shortly thereafter.

While the companys diversity report from last year showed an overall increase in the number of Black employees it hired, there was still an increase in the number of women of color that left the company at the time of the reports release, Black women made up 1.8 percent of Googles workforce. And in December, Californias Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) launched an investigation over Googles treatment of Black female workers.

We appreciate Alex and Dylans contributions our research on responsible AI is incredibly important, and were continuing to expand our work in this area in keeping with our AI Principles, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said in a statement emailed to The Verge. Were also committed to building a company where people of different views, backgrounds and experiences can do their best work and show up for one another.

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Two members of Google's Ethical AI group leave to join Timnit Gebru's nonprofit - The Verge

Google explains how it keeps user-created reviews on Google Maps free of fraud and abuse in a new blog post and accompanying video. Like many platforms dealing with moderation at scale, Google says it uses a mix of automated machine learning systems as well as human operators.

The details come amidst growing scrutiny of user reviews on sites like Google Maps and Yelp, where businesses have been hit with bad reviews for implementing COVID-related health and safety measures (including mask and vaccine requirements) often beyond their control. Other reviews have criticized businesses for supposedly leading them to contract COVID-19 or for not keeping to usual business hours during a global pandemic.

Earlier today, Yelp reported that it removed over 15,500 reviews between April and December last year for violating its COVID-19 content guidelines, a 161 percent increase over the same period in 2020. In total, Yelp says it removed over 70,200 reviews across nearly 1,300 pages in 2021, with many resulting from so-called review bombing incidents where coordinated reviews are submitted from users who havent actually patronized a business.

Google explains that every review posted on Google Maps is checked by its machine learning system, which has been trained on the companys content policies to weed out abusive or misleading reviews. This system is trained to check both the contents of individual reviews, but itll also look for wider patterns like sudden spikes in one- or five-star reviews both from the account itself, as well as other reviews on the business.

Google says that human moderation comes into play for content thats been flagged by end users and businesses themselves. Offending reviews can be removed, and in more severe cases, user accounts can be suspended and litigation pursued. Weve found that we need both the nuanced understanding that humans offer and the scale that machines provide to help us moderate contributed content, Googles product lead for user-generated content, Ian Leader, writes.

Its an interesting look at the steps Google takes to keep Maps reviews usable. You can read more in the full blog post.

Excerpt from:

Google Maps review moderation detailed as Yelp reports thousands of violations - The Verge

Cookies are one of the many questionable pacts we have made online, where privacy is exchanged for convenience without being entirely sure about the consequences. As with so many arrangements involving our data, this deal is being rewritten under the gaze of regulators.

Last week Google issued an update on how it is replacing cookies on its Chrome browser, which is important because two-thirds of web browsing around the world is on Chrome.

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Put simply, a cookie is a text file that is dropped into your browser by a website when you visit it. In the UK and EU, you are asked to consent to multiple cookies when you click on a site (and yes its worth checking just how many cookies you agree to take on when you give your consent).

The new head of the UKs data watchdog, John Edwards, told BBC Radio 4s Today programme last week on international data privacy day that he is no fan of the consent-clicking process. Thats not a very effective way of rebalancing the power relationship between consumers and companies that profit from consumers data, he said.

Cookie monsters

Cookies identify individual users so the website can record all kinds of things about your activity. Some of this info is helpful, like whether you have logged in to the site before, so you dont have to constantly enter your user name and password every time you visit in the future. This sort of thing is known as a first party cookie.

However, there are types of this technology known as third party cookies that facilitate the storing of information (like your browsing history and your location) by commercial partners often marketing or advertising businesses that might make you slightly more uncomfortable. If you check the cookie consent box on any website, you will be surprised at the number of advertising and marketing-related cookies. Third party cookies, through agreements with multiple publishers and websites, are able to create a profile of individual users and serve targeted adverts to you while you browse across multiple websites. Like other news publishers, the Guardian asks readers if it can use cookies, for purposes such as measuring how often readers visit and use our site, and showing readers personalised ads.

In what appears to be a win for privacy advocates and a blow to publishers, advertisers and the intermediaries that facilitate personalised ads across the web, third party cookies are being phased out across the board. This is in part due to pressure from regulators and pro-privacy laws like GDPR. Apple and Mozilla have blocked third party cookies on their Safari and Firefox browsers and Google is doing the same on Chrome by 2023.

Leaving the FLoC behind

Google is replacing third party cookies with a set of technologies called a privacy sandbox and last week it announced it was changing one of the key proposals. The initial plan was to bundle people into groups (cohorts) with similar interests based on their browsing habits and allow advertisers to serve ads to those groups. This was called FLoC, for Federated Learning of Cohorts.

After feedback from the industry, which included warnings that individuals could still be identified as they browsed across the web under the FLoC system, Google is now proposing a different system. It is called Topics, in which the Chrome browser notes your top interests for that week based on your browsing history and registers them in the browser (like a cookie would) under broad categories like fitness or travel, which are limited in number. Advertisers and publishers are able to access this data via a browser API, which is a feed of information that they can tap into.

Then when users visit a site that has signed up to the system, three of the users topics of interest are shared with the site and its advertisers, allowing the site to serve ads that reflect the users interest in, for instance, rock music or cars.

Google said the topics will not include sensitive categories such as gender or race and the system will allow users to see the topics, remove any they dont like or disable the feature completely. The topics are deleted every three weeks.

In the UK the Competition and Markets Authority and the Information Commissioners Office are looking at the proposals, from a competition and privacy perspective (ie are there disadvantages for Googles rivals in provision of online adverts and will users data be abused). Rivals are also concerned that Google, which has said other parts of its business like YouTube will adhere to these changes, still has a basic advantage through the sheer amount of existing data it has on users. Vinay Goel, the Google product director in charge of the sandbox project, says: We have developed these new proposals in the open, seeking feedback at every step to ensure that they work for everyone, without preferential treatment or advantage to Googles advertising products or to Googles own sites.

According to the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for peoples digital rights, Googles new proposals signal an end to the data gold rush under third party cookies. Conducting behavioural profiling in the browser could constitute an alternative to the existing data-free-for-all model, where your browsing activities are broadcasted to thousands of unknown intermediaries, says Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at ORG.

However, the ORG remains concerned over several issues including the lack of a default opt-in stance, which would see a browser omitted from the scheme unless they chose to be included. This is still behavioural profiling, says the ORG.

Goel adds: We started the Privacy Sandbox initiative to improve web privacy for users, and Topics will allow for users to have greater control over relevant ads without sharing sensitive details such as gender or race.

Nobodys happy so everybody wins

It is a big change for the digital advertising industry. Farhad Divecha, managing director of UK digital marketing agency Accuracast, wonders if the shift will satisfy anyone. Privacy advocates are going to feel that this is still not quite enough, because theres reasons why this is still tracking behaviour. And on the flip side, advertisers are going to say youre taking away stuff from me. And youre taking away my ability to target specifically whom I want to be reaching.

Paul Banister, chief strategy officer at US digital ad management firm Cafe Media, says the momentum nonetheless is with privacy. I think the pendulum has swung pretty far towards privacy here. But he adds: because its easier to understand the topics system, hopefully it will be more something that users feel good about. And if users are happier with the outcome that is better for advertisers, because it makes people more supportive of what their data is being used for.

This could be just the beginning as internet users become more aware of that trade off between privacy and convenience, and regulators continue to challenge the marketing industry upon which much of big tech profits rely, the pendulum could swing further.

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TechScape: Google is changing how it tracks us online but who benefits? - The Guardian