09 September 2020

Voice assistants don’t work for kids: The problem with speech recognition in the classroom


Before the pandemic, more than 40% of new internet users were children. Estimates now suggest that children’s screen time has surged by 60% or more with children 12 and under spending upward of five hours per day on screens (with all of the associated benefits and perils).

Although it’s easy to marvel at the technological prowess of digital natives, educators (and parents) are painfully aware that young “remote learners” often struggle to navigate the keyboards, menus and interfaces required to make good on the promise of education technology.

Against that backdrop, voice-enabled digital assistants hold out hope of a more frictionless interaction with technology. But while kids are fond of asking Alexa or Siri to beatbox, tell jokes or make animal sounds, parents and teachers know that these systems have trouble comprehending their youngest users once they deviate from predictable requests.

The challenge stems from the fact that the speech recognition software that powers popular voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google was never designed for use with children, whose voices, language and behavior are far more complex than that of adults.

It is not just that kid’s voices are squeakier, their vocal tracts are thinner and shorter, their vocal folds smaller and their larynx has not yet fully developed. This results in very different speech patterns than that of an older child or an adult.

From the graphic below it is easy to see that simply changing the pitch of adult voices used to train speech recognition fails to reproduce the complexity of information required to comprehend a child’s speech. Children’s language structures and patterns vary greatly. They make leaps in syntax, pronunciation and grammar that need to be taken into account by the natural language processing component of speech recognition systems. That complexity is compounded by interspeaker variability among children at a wide range of different developmental stages that need not be accounted for with adult speech.

vocal pitch changes with age

Changing the pitch of adult voices used to train speech recognition fails to reproduce the complexity of information required to comprehend a child’s speech. Image Credits: SoapBox Labs

A child’s speech behavior is not just more variable than adults, it is wildly erratic. Children over-enunciate words, elongate certain syllables, punctuate each word as they think aloud or skip some words entirely. Their speech patterns are not beholden to common cadences familiar to systems built for adult users. As adults, we have learned how to best interact with these devices, how to elicit the best response. We straighten ourselves up, we formulate the request in our heads, modify it based on learned behavior and we speak our requests out loud, inhale a deep breath … “Alexa … ” Kids simply blurt out their unthought out requests as if Siri or Alexa were human, and more often than not get an erroneous or canned response.

In an educational setting, these challenges are exacerbated by the fact that speech recognition must grapple with not just ambient noise and the unpredictability of the classroom, but changes in a child’s speech throughout the year, and the multiplicity of accents and dialects in a typical elementary school. Physical, language and behavioral differences between kids and adults also increase dramatically the younger the child. That means that young learners, who stand to benefit most from speech recognition, are the most difficult for developers to build for.

To account for and understand the highly varied quirks of children’s language requires speech recognition systems built to intentionally learn from the ways kids speak. Children’s speech cannot be treated simply as just another accent or dialect for speech recognition to accommodate; it’s fundamentally and practically different, and it changes as children grow and develop physically as well as in language skills.

Unlike most consumer contexts, accuracy has profound implications for children. A system that tells a kid they are wrong when they are right (false negative) damages their confidence; that tells them they are right when they are wrong (false positive) risks socioemotional (and psychometric) harm. In an entertainment setting, in apps, gaming, robotics and smart toys, these false negatives or positives lead to frustrating experiences. In schools, errors, misunderstanding or canned responses can have far more profound educational — and equity — implications.

Well-documented bias in speech recognition can, for example, have pernicious effects with children. It is not acceptable for a product to work with poorer accuracy — delivering false positives and negatives — for kids of a certain demographic or socioeconomic background. A growing body of research suggests that voice can be an extremely valuable interface for kids but we cannot allow or ignore the potential for it to magnify already endemic biases and inequities in our schools.

Speech recognition has the potential to be a powerful tool for kids at home and in the classroom. It can fill critical gaps in supporting children through the stages of literacy and language learning, helping kids better understand — and be understood by — the world around them. It can pave the way for a new era of  “invisible” observational measures that work reliably, even in a remote setting. But most of today’s speech recognition tools are ill-suited to this goal. The technologies found in Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants have a job to do — to understand adults who speak clearly and predictably — and, for the most part, they do that job well. If speech recognition is to work for kids, it has to be modeled for, and respond to, their unique voices, language and behaviors.


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Postmates becomes the official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL


The National Football League is naming Postmates as its very first on-demand food delivery partner.

In this context, a partnership means a multiyear sponsorship, which also makes Postmates a sponsor of the Super Bowl. And as the season kicks off with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Houston Texans, Postmates is teaming up with the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes (through his foundation 15 and the Mahomies) and the Texans’ Deshaun Watson, with each quarterback arranging for meal delivery to frontline health workers in their opponent’s home town.

This seems like a particularly appropriate year for a food delivery partnership, since most fans will be watching games from home, rather than at a stadium or their local sports bar, as the NFL’s vice president of business development Nana-Yaw Asamoah noted in a statement.

“Fans will be watching NFL football this season from their couch more than ever before, so teaming up with Postmates as the first official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL was a perfect combination,” Asamoah said. “We’re excited for Postmates to bring an NFL experience directly to our fans’ doorsteps throughout the season and around the year.”

Postmates previously partnered with individual Major League Baseball teams, including the Dodgers and the Yankees. The food delivery company is also being acquired by Uber, in a deal that’s expected to close next year.

 


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As the smartphone market declines, 5G models are set to see continued growth in 2020


Things have gone from bad to worse for a stumbling smartphone market in 2020. Already plateauing and decline figures have taken a big hit from COVID-19. The pandemic has hampered sales of non-essential items, particularly those best enjoyed outside of the home. According to new figures from Canalys, smartphone shipments are set to experience a 10.7% decline for the year.

There are a couple of silver linings worth noting. For starters, 5G adoption continues to growth. The firm projects that some 280 million units will be shipped in 2020, with the Greater China market making up a majority at 62% of the total figure, thanks in part to lower cost devices like the Realme V3, which retails for less than $150 U.S. — a remarkable price for a product with next-gen wireless.

Image Credits: Canalys

North America is in second place, with around 15% of shipments, while EMEA and Asia Pacific (sans Greater China) are projected to each make up around 11%. A 5G-enabled iPhone 12 should help speed up adoption as well, when it’s launched in the next month or so.

“Smartphone vendors have relentlessly pushed new product launches, as well as online marketing and sales during the post-lockdown period, generating strong consumer interest for the latest gadgets,” analyst  Ben Stanton says in a release. “Gradual reopening of offline stores, improving logistics and production have provided necessary uplift for most markets to move into a more stabilized second half of 2020.”

5G was expected to have a rebounding effect for the industry — though the pandemic quickly hampered those plans. Likely it has gone a ways toward helping prohibit a further slide in sales. And numbers are still expected to rebound somewhat in the 2021, at 9.9% year over year. That’s not quite enough to return things to pre-2020 levels, but would no doubt be a welcome sign for an industry that has shown signs of decline for some time now.


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U.S. holiday shopping season on mobile expected to be largest to date, topping 1B hours on Android


The coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the holiday shopping season is already underway. Amazon has delayed its annual sales event, Prime Day, from July to October 2020, while top e-commerce retailers, including Walmart, Target and Amazon, are becoming more powerful than ever. According to a new report from App Annie, mobile shopping apps are poised to see their biggest shopping season to date. The mobile data and analytics firm is estimating that U.S. consumers will spend over 1 billion hours on Android devices alone during the fourth quarter, a 50% increase from the same time last year.

This forecast represents a jump ahead for mobile commerce that wasn’t expected until four to six years from now, but the pandemic has pushed that timetable forward.

Image Credits: App Annie

The firm also predicts that the pace of online shopping will look different than in years past.

While, typically, holiday shopping would be concentrated in the weeks around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s expected that the shopping season this year will be longer and more drawn out. To some extent, this could be attributed to Prime Day’s delay, but the economic pressures of the pandemic are also taking their toll.

Heading in the third quarter, unemployment rates in the U.S. were still higher than during the Great Financial Crisis and more than two times higher than pre-COVID rates. App Annie says this will manifest in lower disposable incomes and greater price sensitivity, which will in turn lead consumers to seek out deals and promotions for longer periods of time throughout the lead up to the 2020 holidays.

Prime Day’s delay may also impact the shopping activity that takes place during the normally busy November shopping days, given that the sales event will take place this year much closer to Black Friday and Cyber Monday than ever before.

App Annie also noted that Amazon’s app continues to rank No. 1 by monthly active users among U.S. Shopping apps, and sees strong cross-app usage with other top Shopping apps.

Image Credits: App Annie

 

For comparison’s sake, weekly sessions in Shopping apps had grown by 25% during peak weeks during Q4 2019. They were also up 15% in the U.K.

This growth trend will continue as the changes brought on by the pandemic have been built upon existing consumer behavior, which have now been dialed up. Those changes are here to stay, App Annie claims.

Image Credits: App Annie

Related to mobile shopping’s growth, and the over 1 billion hours spent shopping in Q4 on Android, App Annie also predicts other categories of apps will benefit. PayPal, for example, reported its best quarter ever with total payment volume increasing 29% year over year.

Online grocery services are also booming, particularly in markets with rising COVID-19 cases like the U.S. and Brazil. Higher usage of mobile grocery shopping apps is expected to continue through Thanksgiving in the U.S., as consumers use app for checking inventory, self-checkout, delivery, and buy online/pickup in store. Similarly, meal delivery services like UberEats, DoorDash, and Grubhub are also expected to remain valuable and widely used in Q4.

Image Credits: App Annie

Outside the U.S., App Annie forecasts that Singles Day 2020 will bring in over 310 billion CNY (over $45 billion in U.S. dollars) to make it the biggest shopping day ever. This will top last year’s record of $38 billion in sales, and follows Q3 2020’s 4.8% year-over-year retail sales growth in China.


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Snapchat’s new Lens celebrates tomorrow’s NFL kickoff


Snap and the NFL recently announced a multi-year extension to their content partnership. Now, with the season starting tomorrow, they’re revealing more details about what kinds of content fans can expect to find on Snapchat.

For tomorrow night’s kickoff, they’ve created a special augmented reality Lens that takes fans from the Kansas City Chiefs’ locker room (the Chiefs are hosting the Houston Texans) through the tunnel and into Arrowhead Stadium, where they’ll be greeted by Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Houston’s Deshaun Watson.

The Lens will be available nationally, and as regular games begin, it will transform into an entrance into a more generic NFL stadium.

After that, the NFL will be creating a highlight show that updates each game day, plus three weekly shows — “Rankings” (which offers historic NFL facts designed to encourage fan debates), “Mic’d Up” (a behind-the-scenes look at what coaches and players say during the games) and “Predictions.” The NFL will also continue producing “Real Talk with the NFL,” a show that highlights the league’s social justice initiatives.

Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social and influence marketing, told me that all of this content is created by the league’s social lab in partnership with Snap. And while the NFL continues to see high ratings on traditional linear TV, he said Snapchat plays “a really critical role for us.”

“It’s always about: How do we engage new audiences, younger audiences, and do it in ways that are very authentic to the platforms?” Trombetta said. “We don’t look to do things that are just content dumps.”

NFL Kickoff Portal Lens

Image Credits: Snap

Snapchat says that viewership of NFL content increased 80% during the 2019-20 season, and that 90% of viewers were under the age of 35.

Of course, it’s going to be a strange season. Like other professional sports organizations, the NFL has to test its players for COVID-19, and different teams are taking different approaches towards allowing fans in the stadiums — many games will be taking place without fans at all.

“The [NFL] organization is leaning on us more than they ever had,” Trombetta said. “We didn’t ignore the fact of what’s happening, anyone would be crazy to think we could totally shut that off. There has to be an acknowledgement of it, while also finding new ways, very seamless ways for fans to engage and celebrate rituals around games that they’ve established over years and decades.”


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What it takes to make change | Jacqueline Novogratz

What it takes to make change | Jacqueline Novogratz

What can you do to build a better world? Sharing stories from her pioneering career dedicated to tackling poverty, Jacqueline Novogratz offers three principles to spark and sustain a moral revolution. Learn how you can commit (or recommit) to creating big, positive change in your lifetime -- and give back more to the world than you take from it. "It is in the darkest times that we have the chance to find our deepest beauty," Novogratz says.

https://ift.tt/35xWypZ

Click this link to view the TED Talk

Snapchat’s new Lens celebrates tomorrow’s NFL kickoff


Snap and the NFL recently announced a multi-year extension to their content partnership. Now, with the season starting tomorrow, they’re revealing more details about what kinds of content fans can expect to find on Snapchat.

For tomorrow night’s kickoff, they’ve created a special augmented reality Lens that takes fans from the Kansas Chiefs’ locker room (the Chiefs are hosting the Houston Texans) through the tunnel and into Arrowhead stadium, where they’ll be greeted by Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Houston’s Deshaun Watson.

The Lens will be available nationally, and as regular games begin, it will transform into an entrance into a more generic NFL stadium.

After that, the NFL will be creating a highlight show that updates each game day, plus three weekly shows — “Rankings” (which offers historic NFL facts designed to encourage fan debates), “Mic’d Up” (a behind-the-scenes look at what coaches and players say during the games) and and “Predictions.” The NFL will also continue producing “Real Talk with the NFL,” a show that highlights the league’s social justice initiatives.

Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of social and influence marketing, told me that all of this content is created by the league’s social lab in partnership with Snap. And while the NFL continues to see high ratings on traditional linear TV, he said Snapchat plays “a really critical role for us.”

“It’s always about: How do we engage new audiences, younger audiences, and do it in ways that are very authentic to the platforms,” Trombetta said. “We don’t look to do things that are just content dumps.”

NFL Kickoff Portal Lens

Image Credits: Snap

Snapchat says that viewership of NFL content increased 80% during the 2019-20 season, and that 90% of viewers were under the age of 35.

Of course, it’s going to be a strange season. Like other professional sports organizations, the NFL has to test its players for COVID-19, and different teams are taking different approaches towards allowing fans in the stadiums — many games will be taking place without fans at all.

“The [NFL] organization is leaning on us more than they ever had,” Trombetta said. “We didn’t ignore the fact of what’s happening, anyone would be crazy to think we could totally shut that off. There has to be an acknowledgement of it, while also finding new ways, very seamless ways for fans to engage and celebrate rituals around games that they’ve established over years and decades.”


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Rick Moranis breaks acting hiatus for 30 seconds to launch Mint’s $30 a month unlimited plan


If you know one thing about Mint Mobile, it’s probably the fact that it’s owned by Pizza Place guy turned Pikachu voice, Ryan Reynolds. The actor’s been building a nice investment portfolio for himself, beginning with a piece of the Aviation American Gin company in 2018 and an ownership stake in Mint last year.

The company is a mobile virtual network operator, specializing in cheap prepaid phone plans built on top of T-Mobile network. Today it launched a new unlimited talk and text plan for the U.S. for $30. The plan includes either  35GB of 5G or LTE data,  depending on the strength of the signal in your area.

The pricing gets more complicated from there — the $30 a month is an introductory offer for three months, using the annual per month pricing. If you’re satisfied after the first three months, you can renew for another three months at $40 a month, six months at $35 a month or go in for the full year to stay at $30 a month.

To mark the occasion, Reynolds is starring in a trio of TV spots, featuring Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson, Paul Revere descendant/Captain/fishing guide Avery Revere and fellow Canadian actor, Rick Moranis. The SCTV alum has notably eschewed Hollywood for a couple of decades now, in spite of a number of high profile reunions of franchises like Ghostbusters. In a fun and goofy little spot, set in a field for some reason.

“Like many, I’ve missed seeing Rick in movies for the past decade, so I pretty much begged him to reemerge for Mint,” Reynolds says of the spot. “There’s really no good reason for it expect this year has been weird and I thought we could all use more Rick Moranis.” Fair enough.

Moranis is set to return to films after a 23-year hiatus with the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids reboot, Shrunk.


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Advertising on Instagram: Secret Setting Up Targeted Stories?


Stories on Instagram are a truly unique marketing tool. First of all, it brings a lot more personality in your brand – you can give your subscribers a chance to get a glimpse into what stays behind the curtain and products. Secondly, Instagram stories are about much more fun, light-headed content. Since stories are there […]

The post Advertising on Instagram: Secret Setting Up Targeted Stories? appeared first on ALL TECH BUZZ.


Different Ways for How to Convert PDF to Word for Free


While converting word documents to pdf or while saving them directly into pdf formats, this has always been an extremely easy practice, but we cannot say the same for the pdf to word conversion. Now if you want to convert a pdf file to word then don’t worry, we can help you in this conversion […]

The post Different Ways for How to Convert PDF to Word for Free appeared first on ALL TECH BUZZ.


Daily Crunch: Apple files countersuit against Epic


Apple strikes back at Epic Games, Android 11 is here and Microsoft announces a new stripped-down Xbox. This is your Daily Crunch for September 8, 2020.

The big story: Apple files countersuit against Epic

Apple has made the latest move in a legal battle against Epic Games, filing a lawsuit claiming that the company behind Fortnite is in breach of contract.

“Although Epic portrays itself as a modern corporate Robin Hood, in reality it is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that simply wants to pay nothing for the tremendous value it derives from the App Store,” Apple wrote in its suit.

This follows Epic’s attempt in August to avoid Apple’s 30% App Store fee, which led to Apple removing Fortnite and eventually Epic from the App Store. (Accounts tied to Epic’s Unreal game engine have not been removed.) Epic then launched a lawsuit and a PR campaign against Apple, arguing that the company is abusing its market power.

The tech giants

Android 11 has arrived — Android 11 isn’t a radical departure, but there are a number of interesting new user-facing updates that mostly center around messaging, privacy and giving you better control over all of your smart devices.

Microsoft confirms compact, $299 Xbox Series S arriving on November 10 — The Series S is essentially a stripped-down version of the upcoming Series X, without true 4K rendering and with a lot less processing power.

Apple’s next event is September 15 — The event will almost certainly feature the new Apple Watch.

Startups, funding and venture capital

General Motors takes $2 billion stake in electric truck startup Nikola — Through the deal, GM gets 11% ownership in startup Nikola, and will, in turn, produce Nikola’s wild fuel cell pickup truck by the end of 2022.

Silver Lake leads $500 million investment round in Indian online learning giant Byju’s — The round values the Indian online learning platform at $10.8 billion.

Progress snags software automation platform Chef for $220M — Progress, a Boston-area developer tool company, is boosting its offerings in a big way.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to respond to a data breach — How a company responds to a data breach can make or break its reputation.

9 proptech investors talk co-living, home offices and other pandemic trends — TechCrunch surveyed nine firms that are writing checks today, and this second installment focuses on the opportunities and risks for startups.

JFrog’s IPO strong initial price range values it ahead of the larger Sumo Logic — The IPO wave continues to crest as a number of well-known technology companies line up to float their equity on American exchanges.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

‘Mulan’ drove Disney+ app downloads up 68% week-over-week, but didn’t beat ‘Hamilton’ — According to early data, the launch helped grow Disney+ mobile installs by 68%, compared with one week prior.

Original Content podcast: ‘Teenage Bounty Hunters’ is more interested in relationships than bounty hunting — Despite the show’s silly name, we ended up surprisingly invested in the characters.

Drew Houston will talk about building a startup and digital transformation during COVID at TechCrunch Disrupt — This is next week!

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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.


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Twitter begins adding headlines and descriptions to some of its ‘trends’


Twitter is working to make its real-time Trending section less confusing. Last week, the company announced it would begin pinning to the trend’s page a representative tweet that gives more insight about a trend and promised more changes would soon be underway. Today, the company says it will begin writing headlines and descriptions for some of the trends, too, so you’ll better understand why something is showing up in the Explore tab or when you tap into a trend itself.

Combined, these changes could have made Twitter’s Trending section feel more like a newsreader experience, had they been properly and fully rolled out across the Trends product.

For example, instead of only seeing that the rapper “Travis Scott” is trending at No. 1, as he is as of the time writing, Twitter now explains by way of a headline and short summary that he’s trending because his menu collaboration with McDonald’s has just launched. That’s helpful — especially because a celebrity’s name often trends when they’ve passed away or said something outrageous.

Unfortunately, Twitter’s ability to properly annotate its trends is still lacking, despite its recent updates.

There are a number of trends that will still offer no explanation — in particular, those that are led with a hashtag, like today’s #IJustDontBelieve, where users are tweeting about what they don’t believe by filling in the rest of the tweet with their own opinions. The long hashtag #BTS2ndNo1ONHot100, which is driven by fans of the KPop group, BTS, is also left unannotated. For newcomers unfamiliar with how BTS fans heavily use Twitter or the popularity of Twitter’s fill-the-blank memes, these sorts of trends could be confusing.

In other cases where a trend is unannotated, Twitter lets a news headline do the work of adding context.

Often, several of the top trends will be focused on news items of the day. But instead of a summary and headline provided by Twitter, you’ll find a representative news headline link listed alongside the trend instead.

Image Credits: Twitter screenshot by TechCrunch

“Proud Boys,” for example, is the No. 17 trend in the U.S. as of the time of writing. But Twitter only links to an article on the site Daily Beast that references a violent clash between the far-right Proud Boys and protestors. It doesn’t tackle trying to explain why this particular article, detailing one of now many incidents of violence across the U.S., is trending. Users, presumably, are meant to infer that the article itself is getting a lot of attention. But in reality, Twitter users are tweeting a variety of content under the “Proud Boys” trend, including their own videos of violent attacks and standoffs.

In this way, Twitter is doing a disservice by pointing only to a single news article when people aren’t necessarily talking about the article itself — they’re sharing direct footage of what they witnessed or their opinions about the increasing violence in general.

Twitter, meanwhile, has put its curation team to work to summarize less important news, like a trend about Harry Styles’ new look.

Currently, Twitter’s Trending section in the U.S. features a list of 29 trends, but only around a half dozen have a headline or description written by Twitter, at the moment. 

Twitter had said when announcing the changes last week that the descriptions written by its curation team aim to provide straightforward, clearly sourced context around why something is trending on “some” tweets.

What’s not been clear, however, is how Twitter has been picking and choosing which trends to annotate.

Twitter, in theory, could have provided a lot more context around its trends, if it had invested more heavily in the product. There are third-party Twitter API partners that can generate data, like when a trend is breaking, the velocity and number of tweets it’s seeing, the social sentiment around the trend, the location tweets are being generated from and much more. But this sort of data isn’t available directly on Twitter.

Asked why only some of its trends have Twitter-provided explanations, a Twitter spokesperson explained that Twitter will annotate only those trends it believes needs the extra information.

“If a trend is particularly confusing and a lot of people are talking about it, it may get a pinned Tweet or a description,” the spokesperson says. That means Twitter is making editorial decisions to provide less context at times when it’s needed the most.

If, for example, a majority of tweets about a protest were either in support of or in horror of said event, Twitter’s ability to contextualize that trend with data would be incredibly useful. But it’s not taking on those sorts of difficult challenges, it seems.

The spokesperson added that Twitter hopes to add more context to more trends over time.


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TikTok is trying to remove a disturbing video showing up on people’s For You pages


A graphic video of a man committing suicide spread across TikTok early this week, and the company is still working to remove it. Originating on Facebook Live, the clip was uploaded onto TikTok over the weekend and began to take root in users’ algorithmic recommendations.

While the video first made the jump from Facebook in full, some TikTok users have now spliced it into unrelated videos so that other people view the clip without intending to when it pops up on the “For You” page. On TikTok, the For You page serves as the front page of the app, feeding users a stream of content tailored just for them.

“On Sunday night, clips of a suicide that had originally been livestreamed on Facebook circulated on other platforms, including TikTok,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. “Our systems, together with our moderation teams, have been detecting and removing these clips for violating our policies against content that displays, praises, glorifies, or promotes suicide.”

TikTok will ban any account that makes multiple attempts to upload the clip. The company expressed appreciation for community members taking action to report it and spread the word and reminded users that mental health hotlines are available within the app and the company’s safety hub. The situation is a particularly disturbing strain of trolling, as surprising users of all ages with an extremely graphic video could result in very real mental health consequences for anyone who ends up viewing it.

Graphic scenes of violence, sometimes broadcast live, have plagued social networks over the years and no solution has proven effective at keeping those videos from an audience. After a gunman broadcast a mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque last year, Facebook disallowed previous platform rule breakers from using Facebook Live. That rule change was not enough to stop the user from live streaming his own death last month.

TikTok’s community moved to police itself as the video circulated, issuing warnings to followers to stay vigilant for the clip, which begins by showing a man with long hair and a beard on the phone seated at a desk. To play it safe, it’s not a bad idea to take a break from watching anything from users you don’t know until TikTok manages to thoroughly remove the disturbing clip from the platform.

If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. International resources are available here.


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How to respond to a data breach


I cover a lot of data breaches. From inadvertent exposures to data-exfiltrating hacks, I’ve seen it all. But not every data breach is the same. How a company responds to a data breach — whether it was their fault — can make or break its reputation.

I’ve seen some of the worst responses: legal threats, denials and pretending there isn’t a problem at all. In fact, some companies claim they take security “seriously” when they clearly don’t, while other companies see it merely as an exercise in crisis communications.

But once in a while, a company’s response almost makes up for the daily deluge of hypocrisy, obfuscation and downright lies.

Last week, Assist Wireless, a U.S. cell carrier that provides free government-subsidized cell phones and plans to low-income households, had a security lapse that exposed tens of thousands of customer IDs — driver’s licenses, passports and Social Security cards — used to verify a person’s income and eligibility.

A misconfigured plugin for resizing images on the carrier’s website was blamed for the inadvertent data leak of customer IDs to the open web. Security researcher John Wethington found the exposed data through a simple Google search. He reported the bug to TechCrunch so we could alert the company.

Make no mistake, the bug was bad and the exposure of customer data was far from ideal. But the company’s response to the incident was one of the best I’ve seen in years.

Take notes, because this is how to handle a data breach.

Their response was quick. Assist immediately responded to acknowledge the receipt of my initial email. That’s already a positive sign, knowing that the company was looking into the issue.


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Google’s new ‘Verified Calls’ feature will tell you why a business is calling you


Google today is introducing a new feature for Android phones that will help legitimate businesses reach their customers by phone by having their brand name and reason for calling properly identified. The feature, known as “Verified Calls,” will display the caller’s name, their logo, a reason why they’re calling and a verification symbol that will indicate the call has been verified by Google.

The feature arrives at a time when spam calls are on the rise. U.S. consumers received 61.4 billion spam calls in 2019, according to a recent report from RoboKiller, representing a 28% increase from the prior year. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission also says that unwanted calls are its top consumer complaint.

Google’s new system gives legitimate businesses a way to share their information with consumers, along with their reason for calling on the incoming call screen. This, however, only works with those participating businesses who have chosen to sign up with one of Google’s partners in order to have their calls verified.

According to Google’s website for the service, businesses can get started with Verified Calls by working with a partner such as Neustar, JustCall, Telecall, Zenvia, Prestus, Aspect, Five9, Vonage, Bandwidth, IMImobile, Kaleyra, Quiubas Mobile or Datora.

Image Credits: Google

Once set up, a business will send Google’s Verified Calls server its number, the customer’s phone number and the call reason, like “scheduling your internet installation,” or “your food delivery,” for example. Google then sends this information to the Android device’s Google Phone app. The device compares the incoming call information with the information Google received from the business and, if there’s a match, the Phone app displays the call as “Verified.” Google says the customer phone number and call reason is deleted within minutes of verification to protect consumer privacy.

The feature is enabled by default in the Google Phone app for Android devices, which comes pre-loaded on many Android phones and will be available for download for more Android devices later this week. At launch, it will work on select Android Pie and higher devices, including many flagship Samsung and LG devices.

Google says it pilot tested the new feature for a few months before going live and found that verification did increase the chances of someone answering a call. It did not share the specific results.

Image Credits: Google

However, Google’s existing Verified SMS system for text messages has been adopted by a number of brands, including 1-800-Flowers, Banco Bradesco, Kayak, Payback and SoFi, for example. Google claims a study in the U.S. and Brazil found that Verified SMS increased customer trust in brands, and improved metrics like likelihood to purchase, brand satisfaction and likelihood to recommend.

Verified Calls is launching first in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Spain and India, with more countries to follow.

Google already offers a way for consumers to fight incoming spam with its Google Assistant feature, Call Screen. This feature allows the Google Assistant to answer the call on the user’s behalf, then ask them who’s calling and why. A transcript is sent to the phone’s owner, who can then choose to send a suggested response, pick up or hang up.

But Call Screen works automatically in English in the U.S., and can be used manually in Canada, according to Google’s Help documentation. Verified Calls, meanwhile, is offered in more countries worldwide and leverages industry partnerships to work, instead of AI, making it a broader solution.


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