Google’s ‘Digital Wellbeing’ features hit more devices, including Samsung Galaxy S10

Google’s latest effort to help users monitor and control their screen time, Digital Wellbeing, is making its way to more devices. Initially available exclusively to Pixel and Android One device owners, Digital Wellbeing’s feature set is now rolling out to Nokia 6 and Nokia 8 devices with Android Pie, as well as on the new Samsung Galaxy S10.

The site NokiaPowerUser was first to spot the addition to Nokia devices, which was picked up by XDA Developers and noted on their blog. XDA also noticed Digital Wellbeing was available in the Samsung Galaxy S10‘s device settings, which makes it the first non-Pixel or non-Android One phone to ship with Digital Wellbeing installed.

Digital Wellbeing, by way of background, is basically Google’s version of Apple’s Screen Time, and one of the key ways the company is addressing consumer concerns over device addiction.

This has been a hot topic in the tech industry in recent months, as people have become more aware of our unhealthy behaviors with regard to our use of smartphones and their apps. In fact, a number of those involved with mobile apps’ creation have since come out to say that they were complicit in building apps that exploited weaknesses in the human psyche for the sole purpose of addicting users.

One former Google exec, Tristan Harris, kicked off a whole movement focused on this problem. He also created the Center for Humane Technology, which encourages the implementation of new design principles that help put users back in control of their technology.

In the meantime, companies are rolling out features to give us control over our behaviors around existing technology.

For example, Facebook last year changed how its News Feed operates to reduce time spent on its site in favor of wellbeing. And Facebook-owned Instagram introduced a time well spent feature, by informing users “you’re all caught up” instead of offering an endless scroll. YouTube lets you schedule reminders to take a break.

We also have OS-level features like Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Digital Wellbeing for more comprehensive control and monitoring.

Specifically, Digital Wellbeing allows you to track your device addiction in several ways, including how often you check your phone, how many notifications you receive, how often you use apps, and more, and allows you to set limits on usage, and configure settings like a nightly “Wind Down” mode and Do Not Disturb settings.

Announced at Google I/O 2018, this feature set first debuted on Pixel devices last year as part of Android Pie. It later came to Android One devices last fall.

According to the standalone Digital Wellbeing app’s release notes, it exited beta on February 19. However, the note didn’t indicate it was coming to non-Pixel, non-Android One devices.

Google has not yet responded to a request for comment about the expansion of Digital Wellbeing.

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On the Path to Cryogenic Control of Quantum Processors

Posted by Joseph Bardin, Visiting Faculty Researcher and Erik Lucero, Staff Research Scientist and Hardware Lead, Google AI Quantum Team

Building a quantum computer that can solve practical problems that would otherwise be classically intractable due to the computation complexity, cost, energy consumption or time to solution, is the longstanding goal of the Google AI Quantum team. Current thresholds suggest a first generation error-corrected quantum computer will require on the order of 1 million physical qubits, which is more than four orders of magnitude more qubits than exist in Bristlecone, our 72 qubit quantum processor. Increasing the number of physical qubits needed for a fault-tolerant quantum computer while maintaining high-quality control of each qubit are intertwined and exciting technological challenges that will require inventions beyond simply copying and pasting our current control architecture. One critical challenge is reducing the number of input/output control lines per qubit by relocating the room temperature analog control electronics to the 3 kelvin stage in the cryostat, while maintaining high-quality qubit control.

As a step towards solving that challenge, this week we presented our first generation cryogenic-CMOS single-qubit controller at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Fabricated using commercial CMOS technology, our controller operates at 3 kelvin, consumes less than 2 milliwatts of power and measures just 1 mm by 1.6 mm. Functionally, it provides an instruction set for single-qubit gate operations, providing analog control of a qubit via digital lines between room temperature and 3 kelvin, all while consuming ~1000 times less power compared to our current room temperature control electronics.

Google’s first generation cryogenic-CMOS single-qubit controller (center and zoomed on the right) packaged and ready to be deployed inside our cryostat. The controller measures 1mm by 1.6mm.

How to Control 72 Qubits
In our lab in Santa Barbara, we run programs on Bristlecone by applying gigahertz frequency analog control signals to each of the qubits to manipulate the qubit state, to entangle qubits and to measure the outcomes of our computations. How well we define the shape and frequency of these control signals directly impacts the quality of our computation. To make high-quality qubit control signals, we leverage technology developed for smartphones packaged in server racks at room temperature. Individual coaxial cables deliver these signals to each qubit, which are themselves kept inside a cryostat chilled to 10 millikelvin. While this approach makes sense for a Bristlecone-scale quantum processor, which demands 2 control lines per qubit for 144 unique control signals, we realized that a more integrated approach would be required in order to scale our systems to the million qubit level.

Research Scientist Amit Vainsencher checking the wiring on Bristlecone in one of Google's flagship cryostats. Blue coaxial cables are connected from custom analog control electronics (server rack on the right) to the quantum processor.

In our current setup, the number of physical wires connected from room temperature to the qubits inside the cryostat and the finite cooling power of the cryostat represent a significant constraint. One way to alleviate this is to move the digital to analog control closer to the quantum processor. Currently, our room temperature digital-to-analog waveform generators used to control individual qubits, dissipate ~1 watt of waste heat per qubit. The cooling power of our cryostat at 3 kelvin is 0.1 watt. That means if we crammed 150 waveform generators into our cryostat (never mind the limited physical space inside the refrigerator for a moment) we would overwhelm the cooling power of our cryostat by 1500x, thereby cooking our cryostat and rendering our qubits useless. Therefore, simply installing our existing digital-to-analog control in the cryostat will not set us on the path to control millions of qubits. It is clear we need an integrated low-power qubit control solution.

A Cool Idea
In collaboration with University of Massachusetts Professor Joseph Bardin, we set out to develop custom integrated circuits (ICs) to control our qubits from within the cryostat to ultimately reduce the physical I/O connections to and from our future quantum processors. These ICs would be designed to operate in the ultracold environment, specifically 3 kelvin, and turn digital instructions into analog control pulses for qubits. A key research objective was to first design a custom IC with low power requirements, in order to prevent warming up the cryostat.

We designed our IC to dissipate no more than 2 milliwatts of power at 3 kelvin, which can be challenging as most physical CMOS models assume operation closer to 300 kelvin. After design and fabrication of the IC with the low power design constraints in mind, we verified that the cryogenic-CMOS qubit controller worked at room temperature. We then mounted it in our cryostat at 3 kelvin and connected it to a qubit (mounted at 10 millikelvin in the same cryostat). We carried out a series of experiments to establish that the cryogenic-CMOS qubit controller worked as designed, and most importantly, that we hadn't just installed a heater inside our cryostat.

Schematic of the cryogenic-CMOS qubit controller mounted on the 3 kelvin stage of our dilution refrigerator and connected to a qubit. Our standard qubit control electronics were connected in parallel to enable control and measurement of the qubit as an in-situ check experiment.

Performance at Low Temperature
Baseline experiments for our new quantum control hardware, including T1, Rabi oscillations, and single qubit gates, show similar performance compared to our standard room-temperature qubit control electronics: qubit coherence time was virtually unchanged, and high-visibility Rabi oscillations were observed by varying the amplitude of the pulses out of the cryogenic-CMOS qubit controller—a signature response of a driven qubit.

Comparison of the qubit coherence time measured using the standard and cryogenic quantum controllers.

Measured Rabi amplitude oscillations using the cryogenic controller. The green and black traces are the probability of measuring the qubits in the 1 and 0 states, respectively.

Next Steps
Although all of these results are promising, this first generation cryogenic-CMOS qubit controller is but one small step towards a truly scalable qubit control and measurement system. For instance, our controller is only able to address a single qubit, and it still requires several connections to room temperature. In addition, we still need to work hard to quantify the error rates for single qubit gates. As such, we are excited to reduce the energy required to control qubits and still maintain the delicate control required to perform high-quality qubit operations.

Acknowledgements
This work was carried out with the support of the Google Visiting Researcher Program while Prof. Bardin, an Associate Professor with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was on sabbatical with the Google AI Quantum Team. This work would not have been possible without the many contributions of members of the Google AI Quantum team, especially Evan Jeffrey for his integration of the cryo-CMOS controller into the qubit calibration software, Ted White for his on-demand qubit calibrations and Trent Huang for his tireless design rules checks.

Daily Crunch: Samsung unveils Galaxy S10 lineup

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Here’s everything announced at Samsung’s Galaxy S10/Galaxy Fold event

Samsung announced five new phones, some new earbuds, a virtual assistant and a watch.

And one of those phones is foldable. Folded, the handset sports a 4.6-inch display that only takes up about three-fourths of the front. Unfolded, it turns into a 7.3-inch tablet. Pricing starts at $1,980.

2. Lyft reportedly plans to debut on Nasdaq next month

Two reports, one from Reuters, the other from WSJ, indicate Lyft plans to list its shares on Nasdaq next month. The WSJ, citing unnamed sources, reported Lyft may make the filing public as early as next week.

3. Clutter confirms SoftBank-led $200M investment for its on-demand storage service

There’s plenty of speculation right now around apparently disgruntled investors in SoftBank’s Vision Fund, but the drum continues to beat and the checks continue to be written.

4. Highlights & transcript from Zuckerberg’s 20K-word ethics talk

Zuckerberg said it would feel wrong to charge users for extra privacy controls.

5. Companies including Nestlé, Epic and reportedly Disney suspend YouTube ads over child exploitation concerns

Days after a YouTube creator accused the platform of enabling a “soft-core pedophilia ring,” several companies have suspended advertising on the platform. Other advertisers, including Peloton and Grammarly, said they are calling on YouTube to resolve the issue.

6. Trump calls for 6G cellular technology, because why the heck not?

6G isn’t a thing. But … maybe it could be?

7. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Patreon

TechCrunch’s media consultant Eric Peckham spent dozens of hours interviewing Patreon’s management team and investors, as well as poring over data, in order to write this deep analysis of the company and the lessons learned. (Extra Crunch subscription required.)

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Google makes it easier to find prescription drug disposal sites

In an effort to combat the opioid crisis, Google will begin labeling places where people can safely dispose of their prescription drugs. Now, users can find clearly labeled drug disposal sites directly from searches for things like “drug drop off near me” or “medication disposal.”

Those locations include a network of hospitals, pharmacies and government buildings where people can drop off medication they might have left over from a surgical procedure so that it doesn’t fall into idle hands. As the company noted in its announcement, more than half of all prescription drug abuse cases begin with medication that people find through friends and family.

Google worked with Walgreens and CVS as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the new tool as part of a broader examination of what role tech can play in stemming the opioid epidemic. The idea grew out of an HHS hackathon to develop “data-driven solutions” to stem the flow of opiate abuse and dependence in the U.S. The pilot also coordinated with seven state governments to pool data on disposal sites.

The new pilot expands on a previous initiative between Google and the DEA that encouraged people to get rid of their leftover prescription drugs on two designated days a year rather than letting them linger in the medicine cabinet. Popularizing drug disposal and making it easy is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to the opiate crisis, but it’s a significant one as tech figures out what role it can play to address one of the most devastating public health crises in the U.S. today.

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Loop acquires Screenplay to build its streaming library

A new streaming startup called Loop Media is announcing its first acquisition — it’s bought a 30-year-old company called Screenplay.

While you may not have heard of Screenplay, the company has licensed a library of 200,000 music videos and movie/game/TV trailers, which it broadcasts in thousands of venues for partners like Hard Rock Cafe, Norwegian Cruise Line, Yard House, Buffalo Wild Wing and Caesars Entertainment.

This announcement comes just a week after Loop officially came out of stealth — and in fact, co-founder and CEO Jon Niermann (previously an executive at EA and Disney) said he’s always seen Screenplay’s content library as the foundation for Loop business.

It also sounds like this deepens an existing relationship, with Loop previously making a minority investment in Screenplay. The idea is to preserve and even grow Screenplay’s existing business — bringing video to out-of-home locations — while also introducing new technology into the mix, including a mobile app for short-form video.

“[Screenplay] is a company that generates millions in top-line revenue, it’s profitable,” Niermann said. “As technology has evolved and been updated, we want to come in with our team and really help them grow that.”

It’s time to pay serious attention to TikTok

There are plenty of other mobile apps featuring short videos, but Niermann said Loop can now take advantage of Screenplay’s content library, and also connect the venue experience with the app. In addition, he said Loop will is building “a very streamlined, slick app” that offers better curation than most video services, as well as “a strong social component.”

The acquisition was for an undisclosed price, combining both cash and stock. Niermann noted that “the Screenplay team remains intact,” with founder and chairman Mark Vrieling joining Loop as its chief content officer.

He added that existing Screenplay customers will not experience any interruption in their service. The plan is to launch the Loop app and an improved Screenplay screencast system in the next six months.

“[The business] is going to be a hybrid,” he said. “We wanted to continue to have the business roots, so to speak, but everybody’s mobile, everybody’s viewing everywhere. The question for us is, how do you create something that’s unique, that truly is a seamless experience?”

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wearTRBL lets you express yourself with a connected T-shirt

When I interviewed Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2016, he surprised everyone when he said he was working on a new kind of T-shirt — nobody knew for sure whether he was joking or not. But the connected T-shirt is real, and it’s called wearTRBL.

While the project started as a Parrot subsidiary, the company was spun off in July 2018. Seydoux is still credited as co-founder and Olivier Levy acts as co-founder and CEO. wearTRBL expects to launch its first product in a few months.

Parrot’s CEO is building a new kind of T-shirt

The team has been working on a flexible E Ink display that you can seamlessly embed into a T-shirt. Thanks to a mobile app and Bluetooth Low Energy, you can change the image on the display and make a statement.

You can store up to 20 images on the display and the battery should last around 4 days. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to wear your T-shirt for 4 days straight because that would be incredibly gross. But you can remove the display and put it into another T-shirt, sweatshirt or accessory.

If you’re thinking about this product with the expectations of a consumer electronics enthusiast, you’re going to be disappointed. This is a fashion product, a way to express yourself with your T-shirt and show some of your personality using what you wear.

The original idea behind this T-shirt started after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. Many people wanted to express themselves by replacing their online profile pictures with drawings. People wanted to write “Je Suis Charlie” on giant banners.

wearTRBL wants to create a community and a curated library of pictures. You’ll be able to browse a collection of designs and download it to your T-shirt. You’ll also be able to attract followers and broadcast content to other users.

The startup eventually wants to become a brand of iconic clothing items that are all compatible with the E Ink display. It’s an ambitious bet, but Seydoux wasn’t joking when he said “I’m working on a T-shirt that you’ve never seen before.”

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Google Cloud’s speech APIs gets cheaper and learn new languages

Google today announced an update to its Cloud Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech APIs that introduces a few new features that should be especially interesting to enterprise users, as well as improved language support and a price cut.

Most of these updates focus on the Speech-to-Text product, but Cloud Text-to-Speech is getting a major update with 31 new WaveNet and 24 new standard voices. The service now also supports seven new languages: Danish, Portuguese/Portugal, Russian, Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Norwegian Bokmål. These are all in beta right now and extend the list of supported languages to 21 total.

The service now also features the ability to optimize audio playback for specific devices. That sounds like a minor thing, but it allows you to tell a call center application for interactive voice responses and another application for use with a headset.

As for Cloud Speech-to-Text, this update focuses on making the service more usable in situations where developers have to support users on multiple channels — think a phone conference. For this, the company introduced multi-channel recognition as a beta last year and now, this feature is generally available.

Similarly, Google’s premium AI models for video and enhanced phones launched into beta last year with the promise of fewer transcription errors than Google’s other model which mostly focuses on short queries and voice commands. This model, too, is now generally available.

In addition to the new features, Google also decided to cut the price for using the Speech-to-Text service. The company decided to cut the prices of the standard and premium video model for transcribing videos for those who opt in to Google’s data logging program by 33 percent. By opting in, you allow Google to use your data to help train Google’s models. The company promises that only a limited number of employees will have access to the data and that it will solely use it to train and improve its products, but chances are not everybody is going to feel comfortable opting in to this, even if it means there’s a discount.

Thankfully, the regular premium video model is now also 25 percent cheaper without having to log in to Google’s data logging. Like before, the first 60 minutes are still free.

 

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Trump calls for 6G cellular technology, because why the heck not

We’ve been covering the battle for 5G between the U.S. and China for some time. The White House has made 5G technology a national security priority, and industry leaders have followed up that charge with additional investment in the fledgling technology.

What 5G exactly is though remains mostly a mystery. Is it new bandwidth? Edge computing? Decentralized cloud processing technology? Autonomous vehicles? Something else? I get pitched a dozen stories a day about the “5G revolution” and no one can tell me exactly what’s in it for me other than long presentations in hotel ballrooms about bandwidth (ironically, often without any cell reception).

So imagine my surprise this morning when Trump tweeted that U.S. companies need to work harder and faster on building out the tech behind 5G, but also in the process called for …. 6G technology.

I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible. It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on………

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2019

I want to just say that no, 6G isn’t a thing. I have only received one PR pitch for 6G in the last few months, which said: “Waveguide over copper runs at millimeter frequencies(about30 GHz to 1 THz) and is synergistic with 5G/6G wireless. A type of vectoring is applied to effective separate the many modes that can propagate within a telephone cable.” No, not a thing.

But it could be a thing. Maybe the government is secretly pioneering the next generation of the next generation of telecom technology. Or maybe, just maybe, our president, branding expert that he is, realized that if you are going to sell 5G, you might as well inflate the number to 6G and really get people’s taste buds salivating.

No comment from cleaning supplies company Seventh Generation, but if I were them, I’d be getting worried.

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Apple could be working with Goldman Sachs on a credit card

According to a new report from the WSJ, Apple and Goldman Sachs are partnering on a different kind of products for both companies — a credit card. The Mastercard-based card would be focused on Apple Pay and feature some deep integrations in iOS.

This card could launch later this year in the U.S., which would coincide with the next iPhone. An Apple credit card would be a good way to take a bigger cut on Apple Pay transactions. Instead of splitting fees between the card issuer, the card network and Apple, Apple would get a portion of the fees for the card issuer.

It could also be a way to evangelize Apple Pay. While most cards are now compatible with Apple Pay in the U.S., many people still don’t think about paying with their iPhone or Apple Watch.

This is also uncharted territory for Goldman Sachs. According to the WSJ, the new card would represent Goldman’s first card. The company could be investing as much as $200 million to build a support team and the IT infrastructure to handle payments. You could expect a cash back on some purchases.

More interestingly, Apple could also be working on an Apple Wallet overhaul for this credit card. You would be able to set up spending goals (like the rings in the Activity app), get notifications about your spending habits (like Screen Time) and track your rewards. It’s unclear if Apple plans to open up those new features to other banks.

By partnering with Apple, Goldman Sachs would get a great distribution channel. And by launching a card, Apple would prove once again that, given enough time, all companies eventually become banks.

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Microsoft bringing Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions to smartphones

Last year Microsoft introduced several mixed reality business solutions under the Dynamics 365 enterprise product umbrella. Today, the company announced it would be moving these to smartphones in the spring, starting with previews.

The company announced Remote Assist on HoloLens last year. This tool allows a technician working onsite to show a remote expert what they are seeing. The expert can then walk the less experienced employee through the repair. This is great for those companies that have equipped their workforce with HoloLens for hands-free instruction, but not every company can afford the new equipment.

Starting in the spring, Microsoft is going to help with that by introducing Remote Assist for Android phones. Just about everyone has a phone with them, and those with Android devices will be able to take advantage of Remote Assist capabilities without investing in HoloLens. The company is also updating Remote Assist to include mobile annotations, group calling, deeper integration with Dynamics 365 for Field Service along with improved accessibility features on the HoloLens app.

IPhone users shouldn’t feel left out though because the company announced a preview of Dynamics 365 Product Visualize for iPhone. This tool enables users to work with a customer to visualize what a customized product will look like as they work with them. Think about a furniture seller working with a customer in their homes to customize the color, fabrics and design in place in the room where they will place the furniture, or a car dealer offering different options such as color and wheel styles. Once a customer agrees to a configuration, the data gets saved to Dynamics 365 and shared in Microsoft Teams for greater collaboration across a group of employees working with a customer on a project.

Both of these features are part of the Dynamics 365 spring release and are going to be available in preview starting in April. They are part of a broader release that includes a variety of new artificial intelligence features such as customer service bots and a unified view of customer data across the Dynamics 365 family of products.

Microsoft is putting HoloLens to work with new Dynamics 365 applications

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Even the IAB warned adtech risks EU privacy rules

A privacy complaint targeting the behavioral advertising industry has a new piece of evidence that shows the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shedding doubt on whether it’s possible to obtain informed consent from web users for the programmatic ad industry’s real-time bidding (RTB) system to broadcast their personal data.

The adtech industry functions by harvesting web users’ data, packaging individual identifiers and browsing data in bid requests that are systematically shared with third parties in order to solicit and scale advertiser bids for the user’s attention.

However a series of RTB complaints — filed last fall by Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group; Dr Johnny Ryan of private browser Brave; and Michael Veale, a data and policy researcher at University College London — allege this causes “wide-scale and systemic breaches” of European Union data protection rules.

So far complaints have been filed with data protection agencies in Ireland, the UK and Poland, though the intent is for the action to expand across the EU given that behavioral advertising isn’t region specific.

Google and the IAB set the RTB specifications used by the online ad industry and are thus the main targets here, with complainants advocating for amendments to the specification to bring the system into compliance with the bloc’s data protection regime.

We’ve covered the complaint before, including an earlier submission showing the highly sensitive inferences that can be included in bid requests. But documents obtained by the complainants via freedom of information request and newly published this week show the IAB itself warned in 2017 that the RTB system risks falling foul of the bloc’s privacy rules, and specifically the rules around consent under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last May.

The complainants have published the latest evidence on a new campaign website.

At the very least the admission looks awkward for online ad industry body.

“incompatible with consent under GDPR “

In an email sent to senior personnel at the European Commission in June 2017 by Townsend Feehan, the CEO of IAB Europe — and now being used as evidence in the complaints — she writes that she wants to expand on concerns voiced at a roundtable session about the Commission’s ePrivacy proposals that she claims could “mean the end of the online advertising business model”.

Feehan attached an 18-page document to the email in which the IAB can be seen lobbying against the Commission’s ePrivacy proposal — claiming it will have “serious negative impacts on the digital advertising industry, on European media, and ultimately on European citizens’ access to information and other online content and services”.

The IAB goes on to push for specific amendments to the proposed text of the regulation. (As we’ve written before a major lobbying effort has blow up since GDPR was agreed to try to block updating the ePrivacy rules which operate alongside, covering marketing and electronic communications and cookies and other online tracking technologies.)

As it lobbies to water down ePrivacy rules, the IAB suggests it’s “technically impossible” for informed consent to function in a real-time bidding scenario — writing the following, in a segment entitled ‘Prior information requirement will “break” programmatic trading’:

As it is technically impossible for the user to have prior information about every data controller involved in a real-time bidding (RTB) scenario, programmatic trading, the area of fastest growth in digital advertising spend, would seem, at least prima facie, to be incompatible with consent under GDPR – and, as noted above, if a future ePrivacy Regulation makes virtually all interactions with the Internet subject solely to the consent legal basis, and consent is unavailable, then there will be no legal be no basis for such processing to take place or for media to monetise their content in this way.

The notion that it’s impossible to obtain informed consent from web users for processing their personal data prior to doing so is important because the behavioral ad industry, as it currently functions, includes personal data in bid requests that it systematically broadcasts to what can be thousands of third party companies.

Indeed, the crux of the RTB complaints are that personal data should be stripped out of these requests — and only contextual information broadcast for targeting ads, exactly because the current system is systematically breaching the rights of European web users by failing to obtain their consent for personal data to be sucked out and handed over to scores of unknown entities.

In its lobbying efforts to knock the teeth out of the ePrivacy Regulation the IAB can here be seen making a similar point — when it writes that programmatic trading “would seem, at least prima facie, to be incompatible with consent under GDPR”. (Albeit, injecting some of its own qualifiers into the sentence.)

The IAB is certainly seeking to deploy pro-privacy arguments to try to dilute Europeans’ privacy rights.

Despite it’s own claimed reservations about there being no technical fix to get consent for programmatic trading under GDPR the IAB nonetheless went on to launch a technical mechanism for managing — and, it claimed — complying with GDPR consent requirements in April 2018, when it urged the industry to use its GDPR “Consent & Transparency Framework”.

But in another piece of evidence obtained by the group of individuals behind the RTB complaints — an IAB document, dated May 2018, intended for publishers making use of this framework — the IAB also acknowledges that: “Publishers recognize there is no technical way to limit the way data is used after the data is received by a vendor for decisioning/bidding on/after delivery of an ad”.

In a section on liability, the IAB document lays out other publisher concerns that each bid request assumes “indiscriminate rights for vendors” — and that “surfacing thousands of vendors with broad rights to use data without tailoring those rights may be too many vendors/permissions”.

So again, er, awkward.

Another piece of evidence now attached to the RTB complaints shows a set of sample bid requests from the IAB and Google’s documentation for users of their systems — with annotations by the complainants showing exactly how much personal data gets packaged up and systematically shared.

This can include a person’s latitude and longitude GPS coordinates; IP address; device specific identifiers; various ID codes; inferred interests (which could include highly sensitive personal data); and the current webpage they’re looking at;

“The fourteen sample bid requests further prove that very personal data are contained in bid requests,” the complainants argue.

They have also included an estimated breakdown of seven major ad exchanges’ daily bid requests — Index Exchange, OpenX, Rubicon Project, Oath/AOL*, AppNexus, Smaato, Google DoubleClick — showing they collectively broadcast “hundreds of billions of bid requests per day”, to illustrate the scale of data being systematically broadcast by the ad industry.

“This suggests that the New Economics Foundation’s estimate in December that bid requests broadcast data about the average UK internet user 164 times a day was a conservative estimate,” they add.

The IAB has responded to the new evidence by couching the complainants’ claims as “false” and “intentionally damaging to the digital advertising industry and to European digital media”.

Regarding its 2017 document, in which it wrote that it was “technically impossible” for an Internet user to have prior information about every data controller involved in a RTB “scenario”, the IAB responds that “that was true at the time, but has changed since” — pointing to its Transparency & Consent framework (TCF) as the claimed fix for that, and further claiming it “demonstrates that real-time bidding is certainly not ‘incompatible with consent under GDPR'”.

Here are the relevant paras of IAB rebuttal on that:

The TCF provides a way to provide transparency to users about how, and by whom, their personal data is processed. It also enables users to express choices. Moreover, the TCF enables vendors engaged in programmatic advertising to know ahead of time whether their own and/or their partners’ transparency and consent status allows them to lawfully process personal data for online advertising and related purposes. IAB Europe’s submission to the European Commission in April 2017 showed that the industry needed to adapt to meet higher standards for transparency and consent under the GDPR. The TCF demonstrates how complex challenges can be overcome when industry players come together. But most importantly, the TCF demonstrates that real-time bidding is certainly not “incompatible with consent under GDPR”.

The OpenRTB protocol is a tool that can be used to determine which advertisement should be served on a given web page at a given time. Data can inform that determination. Like all technology, OpenRTB must be used in a way that complies with the law. Doing so is entirely possible and greatly facilitated by the IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework, whose whole raison d’être is to help ensure that the collection and processing of user data is done in full compliance with EU privacy and data protection rules.

The IAB goes on to couch the complaints as stemming from a “hypothetical possibility for personal data to be processed unlawfully in the course of programmatic advertising processes”.

“This hypothetical possibility arises because neither OpenRTB nor the TCF are capable of physically preventing companies using the protocol to unlawfully process personal data. But the law does not require them to,” the IAB claims.

However the crux of the RTB complaint is that programmatic advertising’s processing of personal data is not adequately secure — and they have GDPR Article 5, paragraph 1, point f to point to; which requires that personal data be “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss”.

So it will be down to data protection authorities to determine what “appropriate security of personal data” means in this context. And whether behavioral advertising is inherently hostile to data protection law (not forgetting that other forms of non-personal-data-based advertising remain available, e.g. contextual advertising).

Discussing the complaint with TechCrunch late last year, Brave’s Ryan likened the programmatic ad system to dumping truck-loads of briefcases in the middle of a busy railway station in “the full knowledge that… business partners will all scramble around and try and grab them” — arguing that such a dysfunctional and systematic breaching of people’s data is lurking at the core of the online ad industry.

The solution Ryan and the other complainants are advocating for is not pulling the plug on the online ad industry entirely — but rather an update to the RTB spec to strip out personal data so that it respects Internet users’ rights. Ads can still be targeted contextually and successfully without Internet users having to be surveilled 24/7 online, is the claim.

They also argue that this would lead to a much better situation for quality online publishers because it would make it harder for their high value audiences to be arbitraged and commodified by privacy-hostile tracking technologies which — as it stands — trail Internet users everywhere they go. Albeit they freely concede that purveyors of low quality clickbait might fair less well.

*Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media Group, aka Oath/AOL. We also don’t consider ourselves to be purveyors of low quality clickbait  

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Global smartphone growth stalled in Q4, up just 1.2% for the full year: Gartner

Gartner’s smartphone marketshare data for the just gone holiday quarter highlights the challenge for device makers going into the world’s biggest mobile trade show which kicks off in Barcelona next week: The analyst’s data shows global smartphone sales stalled in Q4 2018, with growth of just 0.1 per cent over 2017’s holiday quarter, and 408.4 million units shipped.

tl;dr: high end handset buyers decided not to bother upgrading their shiny slabs of touch-sensitive glass.

Gartner says Apple recorded its worst quarterly decline (11.8 per cent) since Q1 2016, though the iPhone maker retained its second place position with 15.8 per cent marketshare behind market leader Samsung (17.3 per cent). Last month the company warned investors to expect reduced revenue for its fiscal Q1 — and went on to report iPhone sales down 15 per cent year over year.

The South Korean mobile maker also lost share year over year (declining around 5 per cent), with Gartner noting that high end devices such as the Galaxy S9, S9+ and Note9 struggled to drive growth, even as Chinese rivals ate into its mid-tier share.

Huawei was one of the Android rivals causing a headache for Samsung. It bucked the declining share trend of major vendors to close the gap on Apple from its third placed slot — selling more than 60 million smartphones in the holiday quarter and expanding its share from 10.8 per cent in Q4 2017 to 14.8 per cent.

Gartner has dubbed 2018 “the year of Huawei”, saying it achieved the top growth of the top five global smartphone vendors and grew throughout the year.

This growth was not just in Huawei “strongholds” of China and Europe but also in Asia/Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East, via continued investment in those regions, the analyst noted. While its expanded mid-tier Honor series helped the company exploit growth opportunities in the second half of the year “especially in emerging markets”.

Huawei Honor’s smartphone with a hole-punch display is real

By contrast Apple’s double-digit decline made it the worst performer of the holiday quarter among the top five global smartphone vendors, with Gartner saying iPhone demand weakened in most regions, except North America and mature Asia/Pacific.

It said iPhone sales declined most in Greater China, where it found Apple’s market share dropped to 8.8 percent in Q4 (down from 14.6 percent in the corresponding quarter of 2017). For 2018 as a whole iPhone sales were down 2.7 percent, to just over 209 million units, it added.

“Apple has to deal not only with buyers delaying upgrades as they wait for more innovative smartphones. It also continues to face compelling high-price and midprice smartphone alternatives from Chinese vendors. Both these challenges limit Apple’s unit sales growth prospects,” said Gartner’s Anshul Gupta, senior research director, in a statement.

“Demand for entry-level and midprice smartphones remained strong across markets, but demand for high-end smartphones continued to slow in the fourth quarter of 2018. Slowing incremental innovation at the high end, coupled with price increases, deterred replacement decisions for high-end smartphones,” he added.

Further down the smartphone leaderboard, Chinese OEM, Oppo, grew its global smartphone market share in Q4 to bump Chinese upstart, Xiaomi, and bag fourth place — taking 7.7 per cent vs Xiaomi’s 6.8 per cent for the holiday quarter.

The latter had a generally flat Q4, with just a slight decline in units shipped, according to Gartner’s data — underlining Xiaomi’s motivations for teasing a dual folding smartphone.

Because, well, with eye-catching innovation stalled among the usual suspects (who’re nontheless raising high end handset prices), there’s at least an opportunity for buccaneering underdogs to smash through, grab attention and poach bored consumers.

Or that’s the theory. Consumer interest in ‘foldables’ very much remains to be tested.

In 2018 as a whole, the analyst says global sales of smartphones to end users grew by 1.2 percent year over year, with 1.6 billion units shipped.

The worst declines of the year were in North America, mature Asia/Pacific and Greater China (6.8 percent, 3.4 percent and 3.0 percent, respectively), it added.

“In mature markets, demand for smartphones largely relies on the appeal of flagship smartphones from the top three brands — Samsung, Apple and Huawei — and two of them recorded declines in 2018,” noted Gupta.

Overall, smartphone market leader Samsung took 19.0 percent marketshare in 2018, down from 20.9 per cent in 2017; second placed Apple took 13.4 per cent (down from 14.0 per cent in 2017); third placed Huawei took 13.0 per cent (up from 9.8 per cent the year before); while Xiaomi, in fourth, took a 7.9 per cent share (up from 5.8 per cent); and Oppo came in fifth with 7.6 per cent (up from 7.3 per cent).

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Global smartphone growth stalled in Q4, up just 1.2% for the full year: Gartner

Gartner’s smartphone marketshare data for the just gone holiday quarter highlights the challenge for device makers going into the world’s biggest mobile trade show which kicks off in Barcelona next week: The analyst’s data shows global smartphone sales stalled in Q4 2018, with growth of just 0.1 per cent over 2017’s holiday quarter, and 408.4 million units shipped.

tl;dr: high end handset buyers decided not to bother upgrading their shiny slabs of touch-sensitive glass.

Gartner says Apple recorded its worst quarterly decline (11.8 per cent) since Q1 2016, though the iPhone maker retained its second place position with 15.8 per cent marketshare behind market leader Samsung (17.3 per cent). Last month the company warned investors to expect reduced revenue for its fiscal Q1 — and went on to report iPhone sales down 15 per cent year over year.

The South Korean mobile maker also lost share year over year (declining around 5 per cent), with Gartner noting that high end devices such as the Galaxy S9, S9+ and Note9 struggled to drive growth, even as Chinese rivals ate into its mid-tier share.

Huawei was one of the Android rivals causing a headache for Samsung. It bucked the declining share trend of major vendors to close the gap on Apple from its third placed slot — selling more than 60 million smartphones in the holiday quarter and expanding its share from 10.8 per cent in Q4 2017 to 14.8 per cent.

Gartner has dubbed 2018 “the year of Huawei”, saying it achieved the top growth of the top five global smartphone vendors and grew throughout the year.

This growth was not just in Huawei “strongholds” of China and Europe but also in Asia/Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East, via continued investment in those regions, the analyst noted. While its expanded mid-tier Honor series helped the company exploit growth opportunities in the second half of the year “especially in emerging markets”.

Huawei Honor’s smartphone with a hole-punch display is real

By contrast Apple’s double-digit decline made it the worst performer of the holiday quarter among the top five global smartphone vendors, with Gartner saying iPhone demand weakened in most regions, except North America and mature Asia/Pacific.

It said iPhone sales declined most in Greater China, where it found Apple’s market share dropped to 8.8 percent in Q4 (down from 14.6 percent in the corresponding quarter of 2017). For 2018 as a whole iPhone sales were down 2.7 percent, to just over 209 million units, it added.

“Apple has to deal not only with buyers delaying upgrades as they wait for more innovative smartphones. It also continues to face compelling high-price and midprice smartphone alternatives from Chinese vendors. Both these challenges limit Apple’s unit sales growth prospects,” said Gartner’s Anshul Gupta, senior research director, in a statement.

“Demand for entry-level and midprice smartphones remained strong across markets, but demand for high-end smartphones continued to slow in the fourth quarter of 2018. Slowing incremental innovation at the high end, coupled with price increases, deterred replacement decisions for high-end smartphones,” he added.

Further down the smartphone leaderboard, Chinese OEM, Oppo, grew its global smartphone market share in Q4 to bump Chinese upstart, Xiaomi, and bag fourth place — taking 7.7 per cent vs Xiaomi’s 6.8 per cent for the holiday quarter.

The latter had a generally flat Q4, with just a slight decline in units shipped, according to Gartner’s data — underlining Xiaomi’s motivations for teasing a dual folding smartphone.

Because, well, with eye-catching innovation stalled among the usual suspects (who’re nontheless raising high end handset prices), there’s at least an opportunity for buccaneering underdogs to smash through, grab attention and poach bored consumers.

Or that’s the theory. Consumer interest in ‘foldables’ very much remains to be tested.

In 2018 as a whole, the analyst says global sales of smartphones to end users grew by 1.2 percent year over year, with 1.6 billion units shipped.

The worst declines of the year were in North America, mature Asia/Pacific and Greater China (6.8 percent, 3.4 percent and 3.0 percent, respectively), it added.

“In mature markets, demand for smartphones largely relies on the appeal of flagship smartphones from the top three brands — Samsung, Apple and Huawei — and two of them recorded declines in 2018,” noted Gupta.

Overall, smartphone market leader Samsung took 19.0 percent marketshare in 2018, down from 20.9 per cent in 2017; second placed Apple took 13.4 per cent (down from 14.0 per cent in 2017); third placed Huawei took 13.0 per cent (up from 9.8 per cent the year before); while Xiaomi, in fourth, took a 7.9 per cent share (up from 5.8 per cent); and Oppo came in fifth with 7.6 per cent (up from 7.3 per cent).

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PDF Converter OCR 6 Lets You Edit and Search PDF Documents on Mac — 68% off

The PDF format is generally reserved for the “final draft” of any given document. But what happens when you need to make a last-minute change? That’s when PDF Converter OCR 6 for Mac becomes really useful. This advanced app lets you edit any PDF just like a Word document, and search through the text. It can even remove annoying restrictions on existing documents. Right now, the software is only $19 at MakeUseOf Deals.

The Ultimate PDF Workflow

No matter what device is used to open the file, a PDF document will look exactly the same. Unfortunately, this control comes at a cost. Once you create a PDF, it’s almost impossible to change it.

PDF Converter OCR 6 for Mac solves this problem for good. This powerful app can scan any PDF file and make the text editable in seconds. It works with over 200 languages, and you can select exactly which pages you want to convert.

Once a document is scanned with PDF Converter OCR 6, the text becomes searchable. This is really useful if you need to track down references or quotes within lengthy documents.

PDF Converter OCR 6 also lets you merge PDF documents, set the size and quality of your file, and remove password protection from secure PDFs. What’s more, the app can batch convert up to 200 PDFs in one go.

Download now for $19

It’s normally priced at $59.99, but you can grab PDF Converter OCR 6 now for $19 on a lifetime license.

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Companies including Nestle, Epic and reportedly Disney suspend YouTube ads over child exploitation concerns

Days after a YouTube creator accused the platform of enabling a “soft-core pedophilia ring,” several companies have suspended advertising on the platform, including Nestle, Epic, and reportedly Disney and McDonald’s.

Nestle told CNBC that all of its companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, while a spokesperson for Epic, maker of the massively popular game Fortnite, said it has suspended all pre-roll advertising. Other companies that confirmed publicly they are pausing YouTube advertising include Purina, GNC, Fairlife, Canada Goose, and Vitacost. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal report that Walt Disney Co. and McDonald’s, respectively, have pulled advertising, too.

Other advertisers, including Peloton and Grammarly, said they are calling on YouTube to resolve the issue.

The latest scandal over YouTube’s content moderation problems took off on Sunday when YouTube creator Matt Watson posted a video and in-depth Reddit post describing how pedophiles are able to manipulate the platform’s recommendation algorithm to redirect a search for “bikini haul” videos, featuring adult women, to exploitative clips of children. Some otherwise innocuous videos also had inappropriate comments, including some with timestamps that captured children in compromising positions.

A YouTube spokesperson sent a statement to TechCrunch that said “Any content – including comments – that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling comments on tens of millions of videos that include minors. There’s more to be done, and we continue to work to improve and catch abuse more quickly.”

The platform has also reported comments to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and is taking further steps against child exploitation, including hiring more experts.

Watson’s report, however, highlights that YouTube continues to struggle with content that violates its own policies, even after a series of reports two years ago led to what creators dubbed the “adpocalpyse.” In an effort to appease advertisers, YouTube gave them more control over what videos their ads would appear before and also enacted more stringent policies for creators. Many YouTubers, however, have complained that the policies are unevenly enforced with little transparency, dramatically lowering their revenue but giving them little recourse to fix issues or appeal the platform’s decisions, even as objectionable content remains on the platform.

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This robotics museum in Korea will construct itself (in theory)

The planned Robot Science Museum in Seoul will have a humdinger of a first exhibition: its own robotic construction. It’s very much a publicity stunt, though a fun one — but who knows? Perhaps robots putting buildings together won’t be so uncommon in the next few years, in which case Korea will just be an early adopter.

The idea for robotic construction comes from Melike Altinisik Architects, the Turkish firm that won a competition to design the museum. Their proposal took the form of an egg-like shape covered in panels that can be lifted into place by robotic arms.

“From design, manufacturing to construction and services robots will be in charge,” wrote the firm in the announcement that they had won the competition. Now, let’s be honest: this is obviously an exaggeration. The building has clearly been designed by the talented humans at MAA, albeit with a great deal of help from computers. But it has been designed with robots in mind, and they will be integral to its creation.

The parts will all be designed digitally, and robots will “mold, assemble, weld and polish” the plates for the outside, according to World Architecture, after which of course they will also be put in place by robots. The base and surrounds will be produced by an immense 3D printer laying down concrete.

So while much of the project will unfortunately have to be done by people, it will certainly serve as a demonstration of those processes that can be accomplished by robots and computers.

Hold this beam for me, friend robot, and let us construct a house together

Construction is set to begin in 2020, with the building opening its (likely human-installed) doors in 2022 as a branch of the Seoul Metropolitan Museum. Though my instincts tell me that this kind of unprecedented combination of processes is more likely than not to produce significant delays. Here’s hoping the robots cooperate.

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Samsung Unveils Foldable Phone with Shocking Price Tag

Before Samsung’s big event today, just about anyone who’s been paying even a little attention knew that it was planning to announce its foldable smartphone.

As expected, the company revealed a device aptly named the Galaxy Fold. It pretty much matched up with all of the rumors, right down to the size of the displays.

Galaxy Fold Details

The Galaxy Fold is one part phone, one part tablet, all parts expensive. The device is scheduled to release with a staggering price of $1,980.

It comes with two separate screens—a smaller 4.6-inch AMOLED secondary display and a much larger 7.3-inch Infinity Flex AMOLED screen that will be revealed when the device is unfolded. Once you’re in the 7-inch plus size, you’re bordering on a device that’s closer to a tablet than a phone. However, the foldable design here makes this more portable than your average tablet.

The 4.6-inch screen comes with a 21:9 aspect ratio with a resolution of 840 x 1,960. The larger screen features a resolution of 1,536 x 2,152. Both have the same pixel density of 420 dpi, which should make for some extremely sharp images whether on the big or small screen.

Durability is obviously a concern with a device like this being the first of its kind. Samsung claims that the device has been tested to withstand 200,000 folds. That should equate to around five years of usage with 100 folds a day.

Interestingly, Samsung didn’t announce much about the processor only saying that it’s a “7nm 64-bit octa-core processor.” The company did announce that the device would feature 512GB of UFS 3.0 storage space.

Samsung says the device will feature 4,380mAh that has been split in half to more evenly distribute weight. Will this be enough power to run such a large screen? Only time will tell as far as that is concerned. The phone will also feature wireless charging and Wireless Powershare, which means you can use the Fold to charge another device.

The last key aspect of the device is the size—when you think about a folded device you probably imagine something quite thick. However, Samsung has managed to trim it down substantially since the prototypes. When folded in half, the Fold is 17mm thick. When open, it’s 6.9mm. For some perspective, the newly-announced S10 and S10+ come in at 7.8mm.

Here are some other key stats on the Galaxy Fold:

• Three rear-facing cameras: 16MP ultra-wide camera, F2.2, 12MP wide-angle camera, dual pixel AF, OIS, F1.5/F2.4, and 12MP telephoto camera, PDAF, OIS, F2.4, 2X optical zoom
• 10MP dual-pixel f/2.2, 8MP RGB depth camera, F1.9 front camera
• 10MP selfie cover camera, F2.2
• App Continuity for switching between screens without losing your place
• Android 9.0

When Can You Get a Galaxy Fold?

Samsung has announced that we won’t need to wait too long to get our hands on the Galaxy Fold, as the device is scheduled to hit the market on April 26th in the US. It’ll release slightly later on May 5 in Europe. Samsung announced that the device will be available in four colors—Cosmo Black, Space Silver, Martian Green, and Astro Blue.

Before you buy this phone, check out our article on features you need to have on your phone to make sure this $2000 beast stacks up!

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