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Apple is set to announce new iPhone models today. The company is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live.
Rumor has it that there will be four versions of the iPhone 12, including a “mini” phone with a 5.4-inch display, an iPhone 12, 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max. The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro could share the same 6.1-inch display, while the iPhone 12 Pro Max could feature a 6.7-inch display.
You can expect some models with 5G networking capabilities. While the company will likely spend time explaining why 5G is faster than 4G, remember that many carriers have yet to roll out their 5G networks beyond some testing cities.
But that’s not all. Apple could also unveil a wireless charging pad. This time, it’s not going to be named AirPower. The company could bring back the name MagSafe for the accessory.
On the audio front, many people believe that Apple has been working on over-ear headphones. It would fit well in the AirPods lineup. Apple could also use this opportunity to launch a smaller, cheaper HomePod.
You can watch the live stream directly on this page, as Apple is streaming its conference on YouTube.
If you have an Apple TV, you can download the Apple Events app in the App Store. It lets you stream today’s event and rewatch old ones. The app icon was updated a few days ago for the event.
And if you don’t have an Apple TV and don’t want to use YouTube, the company also lets you live stream the event from the Apple Events section on its website. This video feed now works in all major browsers — Safari, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Helicopter parenting turned into surveillance with the debut of family-tracking apps like Life360. While the app can alleviate parental fears when setting younger kids loose in the neighborhood, Life360’s teenage users have hated the app’s location-tracking features so much that avoiding and dissing the app quickly became a TikTok meme. Life360 could have ignored the criticism — after all, teens aren’t the app’s paying subscribers; it’s the parents. But Life360 CEO Chris Hulls took a different approach. He created a TikTok account and started a dialogue with the app’s younger users. As a result of these conversations, the company has now launched a new privacy-respecting feature: “Bubbles.”
Bubbles work by allowing any Life360 Circle member to share a circle representing their generalized location instead of their exact whereabouts. To set a bubble, the user can adjust the radius on the map anywhere from 1 to 25 miles in diameter, for a given period of time of 1 to 6 hours. After this temporary bubble is created, Life360’s other existing safety and messaging features will remain enabled. But parents won’t be able to see precisely where their teen is located, other than somewhere in the bubble.
Image Credits: Life360
For example, a teen could tell their parents they were hanging out with some friends in a given part of town after school, then set a bubble accordingly. But without popping that bubble, the parents wouldn’t know if their teenager was at a friend’s house, out driving around, at a park, out shopping, and so on. The expectation is that parents and teens should communicate with one another, not rely on cyberstalking. Plus, parents need to respect that teens deserve to have more freedom to make choices, even if they will sometimes break the rules and then have to suffer the consequences.
A location bubble isn’t un-poppable, however. The bubble will burst if a car crash or other emergency is detected, the company says. A parent can also choose to override the setting and pop the bubble for any reason — like if they don’t hear from the teen for a long period of time or suspect the teen may be unsafe. This could encourage a teen to increase their direct communication with a parent in order to reassure them that they are safe, rather than risk their parent turning tracking back on.
But parents are actively discouraged from popping the bubbles out of fear. Before the bubble is burst, the app will ask the user if they’re sure they want to do so, reminding them also that the member will be notified about the bubble being burst. This gives parents a moment to pause and reconsider whether it’s really enough of an emergency to break their teen’s trust and privacy.
Image Credits: Life360
The feature isn’t necessarily going to solve the problems for teens who want to sneak out or just be un-tracked entirely, which is where many of the complaints have stemmed from in recent years. Instead, it’s meant to represent a compromise in the battle between adult surveillance of kids’ every move and teenagers’ needs to have more personal freedom.
Hulls says the idea for the new feature was inspired by conversations he had with teens on TikTok about Life360’s issues.
“Teens are a core part of the family unit — and our user base — and we value their input,” said Hulls. “After months of communicating with both parents and teens, I am proud to launch a feature that was designed with the whole family in mind, continuing our mission of redefining how safety is delivered to families,” he added.
Before joining TikTok, the Life360 mobile app had been subject to a downrating campaign where teen users rated the app with just one star in hopes of getting it kicked off the App Store. (Apps are not automatically removed for low ratings, but that hasn’t stopped teens from trying this tactic with anything they don’t like, from Google Classroom’s app to the Trump 2020 app, at times.)
In his TikTok debut, Hulls appeared as Darth Vader, then took off the mask to reveal, in his own words, “just your standard, awkward tech CEO.” In the months since, his account has posted and reacted to Life360 memes, answered questions and asked for — and even paid for — helpful user feedback. One of the ideas resulting from the collaboration was “ghost mode,” which is now being referred to at launch as “Bubbles” — a name generated by a TikTok contest to brand the feature.
In addition to sourcing ideas on TikTok, Hulls used the platform to rehabilitate the Life360 brand among teens, explaining how he created the app after Hurricane Katrina to help families reconnect after big emergencies, for example (true). His videos also suggested that he was now on teens’ side and that building “ghost mode” was going to piss off parents or even lose him his job (highly debatable).
In a related effort, the company posted a YouTube parody video to explain the app’s benefits to parents and teens. The video, suggested to teen users through a notification, hit over a million views in 24 hours.
Many teens, ultimately, came around. “i’m crying he seems so nice,” said one commenter. “ngl it’s the parents not the app,” admitted another.
In other words, the strategy worked. Hulls’ “life360ceo” TikTok account has since gained over 231,000 followers and its videos have been “liked” 6.5 million times. Teens have also turned their righteous anger back to where it may actually belong — at their cyberstalking parents, not the tech enabling the location-tracking.
Bubbles is now part of the most recent version of the Life360 app, a free download on iOS and Android. The company offers an optional upgrade to premium plans for families in need of extra features, like location history, crash detection and roadside assistance, among other things.
Family trackers are a large and growing business. As of June 2020, Life360 had 25 million monthly active users located in more than 195 countries. The company’s annualized monthly revenue was forecasted at $77.9 million, a 26% increase year-over-year.
To celebrate the launch of Bubbles, this past Saturday, Life360 launched a branded Hashtag Challenge on TikTok, #ghostmode, for a $10,000 prize. As of today, the hashtag already has 1.4 billion views.
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Alphabet (you know… Google) has taken the wraps off the latest “moonshot” from its X labs: A robotic buggy that cruises over crops, inspecting each plant individually and, perhaps, generating the kind of “big data” that agriculture needs to keep up with the demands of a hungry world.
Mineral is the name of the project, and there’s no hidden meaning there. The team just thinks minerals are really important to agriculture.
Announced with little fanfare in a blog post and site, Mineral is still very much in the experimental phase. It was born when the team saw that efforts to digitize agriculture had not found as much success as expected at a time when sustainable food production is growing in importance every year.
“These new streams of data are either overwhelming or don’t measure up to the complexity of agriculture, so they defer back to things like tradition, instinct or habit,” writes Mineral head Elliott Grant. What’s needed is something both more comprehensive and more accessible.
Much as Google originally began with the idea of indexing the entire web and organizing that information, Grant and the team imagined what might be possible if every plant in a field were to be measured and adjusted for individually.
Image Credits: Mineral
The way to do this, they decided, was the “Plant buggy,” a machine that can intelligently and indefatigably navigate fields and do those tedious and repetitive inspections without pause. With reliable data at a plant-to-plant scale, growers can initiate solutions at that scale as well — a dollop of fertilizer here, a spritz of a very specific insecticide there.
They’re not to first to think so. FarmWise raised quite a bit of money last year to expand from autonomous weed-pulling to a full-featured plant intelligence platform.
As with previous X projects at the outset, there’s a lot of talk about what could happen in the future, and how they got where they are, but rather little when it comes to “our robo-buggy lowered waste on a hundred acres of soy by 10 percent” and such like concrete information. No doubt we’ll hear more as the project digs in.
There are plenty of reasons to doubt that the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust report will mark a turning point in the digital economy. In the end, it lacked true bipartisan support. Yet we can still marvel at the extent of left-right agreement over its central finding: The big tech companies wield troublingly great power over American society.
The bigger worry is whether the solutions on the table cut to the heart of the problem. One wonders whether empowered antitrust agencies can solve the problem before them — and whether they can keep the public behind them. For the proposition that many Facebooks would be better than one simply doesn’t resonate.
There are good reasons why not. Despite all their harms, we know that whatever benefits these platforms provide are largely a result of their titanic scale. We are as uneasy with the platforms’ exercises of their vast power over suppliers and users, as we are with their forbearance; yet it is precisely because of their enormous scale that we use their services. So if regulators broke up the networks, consumers would simply flock toward whatever platforms had the most scale, pushing the industry toward reconsolidation.
Does this mean that the platforms do not have too much power, that they are not harming society? No. It simply means they are infrastructure. In other words, we don’t need these technology platforms to be more fragmented, we need them to belong to us. We need democratic, rather than strictly market processes, to determine how they wield their power.
When you notice that an institution is infrastructure, the usual reaction is to suggest nationalization or regulation. But today, we have good reasons to suspect our political system is not up to this task. Even if an ideal government could competently tackle a problem as complex as managing the 21st century’s digital infrastructure, ours probably cannot.
This appears to leave us in a lose-lose situation and explains the current mood of resignation. But there is another option that we seem to have forgotten about. Labor organization has long afforded control to a broad array of otherwise-powerless stakeholders over the operation of powerful business enterprises. Why is this not on the table?
A growing army of academics, technologists, and commentators are warming to the proposition that “data is labor.” In short, this is the idea that the vast data streams we all produce through our contact with the digital world are a legitimate sort of work-product — over which we ought to have much more meaningful rights than the laws now afford. Collective bargaining plays a central role in this picture. Because the reason that the markets are now failing (to the benefit of the Silicon Valley giants) is that we are all trying to negotiate only for ourselves, when in fact the very nature of data is that it always touches and implicates the interests of many people.
This may seem like a complicated or intractable problem, but leading thinkers are already working on legal and technical solutions.
So in some sense, the scale of the tech giants may indeed not be such a bad thing — the problem, instead, is the power that scale gives them. But what if Facebook had to do business with large coalitions representing ordinary peoples’ data interests — presumably paying large sums, or admitting these representatives into its governance — in order to get the right to exploit its users’ data? That would put power back where it belongs, without undermining the inherent benefits of large platforms. It just might be a future we can believe in.
So what is the way forward? The answer to this question is enabling collective bargaining through data unions. Data unions would become the necessary counterpart to big tech’s information acquiring transitions. By requiring the big tech companies to deal with data unions authorized to negotiate on behalf of their memberships, both of the problems that have allowed these giant tech companies to amass the power to corrupt society are solved.
Labor unions did not gain true traction until the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Perhaps, rather than burning our political capital on breaking up the tech giants through a slow and potentially Sisyphean process, we should focus on creating a 21st century version of this groundbreaking legislation — legislation to protect the data rights of all citizens and provide a responsible legal framework for data unions to represent public interests from the bottom up.
Facebook this morning announced a significant change in how it approaches Holocaust denial content on its social network. For years, the company has been criticized for not taking down this extremely offensive form of content in favor of allowing free speech and distancing itself from taking on the responsibilities of a traditional publisher. Today, it’s reversing that position, saying it will now update its hate-speech policy to “prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust.”
The company said it made the decision amid a growing number of online hate speech attacks and is a part of Facebook’s newer efforts to fight the spread of hate speech across its platform.
“We have banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations and updated our policies to address militia groups and QAnon,” explained Facebook in an announcement, authored by Monika Bickert, VP of Content Policy. “We also routinely ban other individuals and organizations globally, and we took down 22.5 million pieces of hate speech from our platform in the second quarter of this year. Following a year of consultation with external experts, we recently banned anti-Semitic stereotypes about the collective power of Jews that often depicts them running the world or its major institutions,” the company said.
Facebook also shared some disturbing statistics representative of how its inaction on this front has impacted the world. It said that according to a recent survey of U.S. adults, ages 18-39, nearly a quarter said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or that they weren’t sure.
The company noted, too, that institutions focused on Holocaust research and remembrance, such as Yad Vashem, have stressed that Holocaust education is a key component in combating anti-Semitism.
As many may recall, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once used Holocaust denial as an example of where he thought Facebook shouldn’t intervene with regard to what’s posted to its platform. In a 2018 Recode interview and related follow-up, he suggested that Holocaust denial was a wrong idea that he personally found “deeply offensive,” but said Facebook shouldn’t take that content down because “there are things that different people get wrong.”
The issue and its controversy, however, was not a new one to Facebook. Holocaust-denial content has been a longstanding problem for the company — and one where many employees disagreed with Facebook’s stated position on the matter. Even back in 2009, Facebook had favored the protection of free speech, arguing that it outweighed the negative consequences.
In the years since, Facebook was found to not only allow Holocaust denial on its platform, but to actively promote it. In a 2020 investigation by U.K.-based counter-extremist organisation Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Facebook search results would bring up suggestions for denial pages on Facebook. These would also recommend links to publishers who sold revisionist and denial literature, among other things.
This summer, ADL and other civil rights organizations, like the NAACP and Color of Change, ran a month-long boycott of Facebook advertising in an effort to get Facebook to step up and do something about hate speech on its platform. The effort gained over 1,000 advertisers and put pressure on the company to make changes.
Facebook then moved to ban across Facebook and Instagram (for the first time) anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people running the world, and began to ban QAnon, which has some anti-Semitic elements. But it stopped short of taking action on Holocaust denial.
In a public Facebook post, Zuckerberg added:
I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust. My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech. Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.
Facebook says its new decision on this matter does not mean users see an immediate clearing of this sort of content from the platform.
“Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight. There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement,” Facebook noted.
Another twist in a multi-year complaint saga related to the legality of Facebook’s data transfers: European privacy campaigner Max Schrems has today been granted a judicial review of the Irish regulator’s handling of his complaint.
He’s expecting the hearing to take place before the end of the year — and is hoping the action will, at long last, lead to a suspension of Facebook’s EU-US data transfers.
Schrems says his aim is to “kick start a ‘paused’ complaints procedure'” after Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) chose to open a new case procedure last month — simultaneously pausing its handling of his original complaint, which dates back some seven years at this point.
The vintage complaint had a major injection of attention following a ruling by Europe’s top court this summer, which struck down a flagship EU-US data transfer arrangement (called Privacy Shield) — and cast doubt on the legality of alternative transfer mechanisms for taking EU citizens’ data to the U.S. for processing when processors are subject to U.S. surveillance law, as Facebook is.
Yet there’s still no decision on Schrems’ original complaint. Hence, he’s returned to court.
“The DPC has already pledged to the Court in 2015 that it will swiftly decide. It seems like we need a clear judgment to force the DPC to do its job,” said Schrems in a statement today on the judicial review being granted.
#SchremsII: Irish High Court just granted leave to have a Juridical Review against the @DPCIreland — to kick start the "paused" complaints procedure that should stop Facebook's EU-US data transfer (and clarifly crucial procedural issues)…
https://t.co/yMIyhonBaS
— Max Schrems
(@maxschrems) October 12, 2020
Facebook has already successfully applied for a judicial review of a preliminary order sent by the DPC last month to suspend its data transfers to the U.S. The tech giant was granted a stay on that preliminary order, so its data transfers continue unabated and uninterrupted — even as the regulatory process is mired in yet more legal wrangling.
The stay also bought Facebook more time to lobby EU lawmakers to “fix” the legal uncertainty now firmly attached to EU-U.S. data transfers — with VP Nick Clegg popping up on a live-streamed debate last month to predict economic doom for the region’s small businesses if Facebook gets forced to suspend transfers. (Clegg further claimed Facebook’s business of “personalized advertising” would be vital to Europe’s coronavirus economic recovery, without pointing out other, less invasive/rights-hostile forms of ad-targeting are available…)
It’s not hard to see why Schrems is so unhappy that his 2013 complaint has been turned into an endless game of regulatory whack-a-mole that leaves Facebook free to continue its data-mining business as usual.
In a press release put out by his privacy-focused not-for-profit, noyb, Schrems writes: “Today’s Judicial Review by noyb is in many ways the counterpart to Facebook’s Judicial Review: While Facebook wants to block the second procedure by the DPC, noyb wants to move the original complaints procedure towards a decision.”
“The DPC has opened a second case, just get rid of the complainant from the first case. Now this second case was stalled by a lawsuit from Facebook within weeks. This was complete procedural mismanagement by the Irish regulator. We are now trying to kick start the original procedure from 2013 to finally get a decision by the DPC after seven years and five court judgements that all confirmed our position,” he adds in the statement.
Schrems/noyb is also making a more pointed allegation against the regulator, saying it saw documents last week that suggest Facebook has been using alternative data transfer mechanisms to take EU users’ data to the U.S. — and accusing the regulator of knowing about this since 2016, yet failing to pass the information on to it.
“The documents we received suggest that seven years of procedures and both references to the European Court of Justice were largely irrelevant for the case before the DPC,” writes Schrems, accusing the regulator of hiding documents from the Courts and his lawyers “despite our right to be provided with all the files of a case”. “We are therefore asking the High Court to clarify that all documents must be put on the table that all parties are properly heard and a quick decision is then made,” he adds.
We reached out to the DPC with questions but the regulator declined to answer specific points at this stage. “As you can see Mr Schrems’ application to the Court this morning was made ex parte, meaning that any comments/arguments put forward were unchallenged. We will outline our position when we make our own submission to the Court,” deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, told us.
Ireland’s regulator is no stranger to accusations of dragging its feet on enforcing the bloc’s data protection regime against major tech firms and platforms, many of whom have chosen to site their regional base in the country — meaning their data handling typically comes under the supervision of the DPC. (Which in turn means it has a huge backlog of complex, cross-border cases to investigate and issue decisions on.)
More than two years after the GDPR came into application, the DPC has only submitted one draft decision on cross-border cases (related to a Twitter security breach) — which is still pending agreement from the EU’s other data supervisors.
Scores more cases remain open on its desk.
In June, a Commission two-year review of GDPR flagged a lack of uniformly vigorous enforcement — with lawmakers acknowledging: “The best answer [to criticism of GDPR’s failure to regulate big tech] will be a decision from the Irish data protection authority about important cases.”
Separately, Irish parliamentarian Malcolm Byrne raised questions in the senate recently over another long-standing complaint that’s sitting on the DPC’s desk — related to Google and the real-time bidding process that’s involved in programmatic advertising — also still an open investigation.
For starters, iPhones, of course. That one was easy. The company skipped out on new mobile devices during its recent Apple Watch event, owing to COVID-19-related delays. And, of course, the fact that the events are all pre-taped and virtual now means companies can more easily split them up in ways that were harder to justify when people were expected to fly in from all over the world.
That doesn’t mean we won’t be getting more than just a phone (or, more like multiple phones). While Apple’s been more inclined to host more, smaller events, there’s a decent chance this is going to be the last major event the company hosts before the holidays. That means it’s going to want to get a lot of bang for its buck this time out.
The iPhone 12 is expected to be the centerpiece, of course. The headline feature will almost certainly be 5G. Apple’s been a little behind the curve on that front versus its Android competitors (Samsung, for instance, has several devices with next-gen wireless), though another knock-on effect from the pandemic has been a slower than expected adoption of the tech. So in some ways, Apple’s really right on time here. In the U.S., the company is said to offer both the mmWave and sub-6Ghz 5G technologies. Availability may vary depending on the needs of a given market.
Rumors point to a bunch of different models. After all, gone are the days a company like Apple could just offer up a big premium device and be done with it. Sales for high-end devices were already drying up well before the virus came along to bring smartphone sales to a screeching halt there for a bit. People were already tired of paying in excess of $1,000 for new phones when the ones they already had still did the job perfectly fine.
There are supposedly four sizes arriving. There will be higher-end devices at 6.1 and 6.7 inches, and more budget-minded devices at 6.1 and 5.4 inches. It’s a pretty broad price range, from $699 for the “mini” to $1,099 and up for the Pro Max (sandwiched between are the $799 iPhone 12 and $999 Pro). Along with its recently expanded Watch line, Apple’s all about choice this time out.
Reportedly, however, the company will be bringing OLED tech to all of the models, marking a pretty big change from the days of LCD-sporting budget models. The new models are expected to get a welcome redesign, reportedly returning to something more in line with the iPhone 5. The rounded edges are expected to be dropped in favor of a flatter design, akin to what you get on the iPad Pro.
Other interesting potential additions include the return of the company’s dearly departed MagSafe life for a pair of wireless charging pads that will hopefully finally lay to rest any memory of the failed AirPower experiment. Available for one or two devices, the new pads will reportedly leverage magnets built into the phones to snap them in place.
Music has always been a cornerstone for the company, and it’s long overdue for some updates to audio products. This time out, we may finally get the long-awaited AirPods Studio, an over-ear addition to its line of headphones. The models are set to come in two variations, the largest variation being build materials. A smaller version of its smart speaker could be on the way, as well. The HomePod has long been cost-prohibitive for many, so a mini version could finally make it a bit more accessible.
Another long-rumored addition — AirTags — could finally arrive, as well. Apple’s product-tracking Tile competitor has been in the cards for some time now, but has repeatedly been delayed. That may still be the case — and same goes for a refresh to Apple TV. With the company’s subscription service about to celebrate its year anniversary, it could really use some updated hardware. New Macs with Apple-built chips could be on the table, as well, though the company is reportedly planning one more 2020 event for that big launch.
The event kicks off tomorrow at 10AM PT/1PM ET. We’ll be watching along with you, bringing you the news as it breaks.
Google’s Nest unit today launched its newest thermostat. At $129, the Nest Thermostat is the company’s most affordable one yet, but it’s also the first to feature a new swipe and tap interface on its side, as well as Google’s Soli radar technology to sense room occupancy and when you are near the device.
Soli, it is worth noting, is not being used for enabling gesture controls. Instead, because the design team wanted a solid mirror finish on the front, Nest decided to use it purely for motion sensing.
The new thermostat, which is made from 49 percent recycled plastic, will come in four colors, Snow, Charcoal, Sand and Fog. The company is also launching a $14.99 trim kit to help you hide any imperfections in your pain when you install the new thermostat.
Image Credits: Nest
“It has this inviting form with this intuitive swipe up and down control, which lets you interact with this product really naturally, instead of pressing these tiny little buttons that most traditional thermostats have,” Nest product lead Ruchi Desai told me.
It’s worth noting that this new version is mostly meant for users in smaller apartments or condos, as it doesn’t support Nest’s remote sensors. To get support for those, you’ll need a Nest Thermostat E (which can occasionally be found for around $139) or the fully-fledged Nest Learning Thermostat.
Talking about learning, among the feature the team is highlighting with this release is the thermostat’s ability to help you schedule your custom temperature settings for different times of the day — and different days. Nest calls this Quick Schedule.
“Unlike the Nest Learning Thermostat, which has the auto-schedule [feature], this one actually offers the ability to create temperature presets, which gives you the ability to set up a schedule based on your lifestyle, based on your preferences,” Desai said. “It will also give you the flexibility of holding temperatures, which means it’ll override the schedule that you have in times when you need the control and flexibility.”
Image Credits: Nest
That sounds a lot like what you’d find in most of today’s smart thermostats from the likes of Ecobee and other Nest competitors, but it’s a first for Nest.
With its Savings Finder feature, the thermostat can also look for small optimizations and suggest minor tweaks that can result in additional energy savings.
Thanks to the new built-in Soli radar chip, the device can automatically lower the temperature when you’re not home. It’s a shame the team isn’t using the chip for any gesture controls, something Google did with its Pixel 4 phone, but the team tells me that it decided not to do this because it didn’t fit the user profile.
“I think that was a very conscious decision we made while designing this product, because for this product we really have the user in mind and we really wanted to focus on the features that were really important to this user. And these are brand new to smart home, they really wanted app control — it seems so basic to us but it’s a massive upgrade for them, right. And all these energy-saving features that come with the thermostat were something that they valued a lot. So we wanted to focus on the features that these users valued for this product,” Desai explained.
Maybe we’ll see Nest do more with this technology in the next iterations of its more expensive thermostats. For now, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, though in all fairness, Soli in the Pixel 4 mostly felt like a gimmick and at least the Nest team is putting it to practical use here.
Image Credits: Nest
Like before, Nest promises that it will only take about half an hour or so to install the new thermostat. The app walks you through the individual steps, which should make the process pretty straightforward, assuming your heating and cooling system follows modern standards.
To control the thermostat remotely, you’ll use the Google Home app, where you’ll also find all of the smart features to help you save more energy.
The new thermostat is now available in the U.S. (for $129.99) and Canada (for $179.99 CAD). In Canada, the trim kit will retail for $19.99 CAD). As the team noted, between various utility rebates and rewards, a lot of users may be able to get theirs for only a few dollars, depending on where they live.
Image Credits: Nest
Over the past weekend, I reinstalled Windows 10 on my ThinkPad laptop. This time around, instead of using a Microsoft account to sign in, I created a local user account and started using it. After installing Windows 10, while installing device drivers, I noticed the Cortana window (sign in window) was open. Since I was […]
The post Fix: Cannot Close Cortana Window In Windows 10 appeared first on Into Windows. Content from IntoWindows website.
There’s no doubt that modern social networks have let us down. Filled with hate speech and abuse, moderation and anti-abuse tools were an afterthought they’re now trying to cram in. Meanwhile, personalization engines deliver us only what will keep us engaged, even if it’s not the truth. Today, a number of new social networks are trying to flip the old model on its head — whether that’s attempting to use audio for more personal connections, like Clubhouse, eliminate clout chasing, like Twelv, or, in the case of new social network Telepath, by designing a platform guided by rules that focus on enforcing kindness, countering abuse, and disabling the spread of fake news.
Many of these early efforts are already facing challenges.
Private social network Clubhouse has repeatedly demonstrated that allowing free-flowing communication in the form of audio conversations is an area that’s notoriously difficult to moderate. The app, though still unavailable to the broader public, courted controversy in September when it allowed anti-Semitic content to be discussed in one of its chat rooms. In the past, it had also allowed users to harass an NYT reporter openly.
Meanwhile, Twelv, a sort of Instagram alternative, ditches the “Like” button concept and all the other features now overloading Instagram, which had once been just a photo-sharing network. But, unfortunately, this also means there’s no easy way to find and follow interesting users or trends on Twelv — you have to push friends to join the app with you or know someone’s username to look them up, otherwise it shows you no content. The result is a social network without the “social.”
Telepath, meanwhile, is a more interesting development.
It’s pursuing an even loftier goal in social networking — creating a hate speech-free platform where fake news can’t be distributed.
No social network to date has been able to accomplish what Telegraph claims it will be able to do in terms of content moderation. Its ambitions are optimistic and, as the network remains in private beta, they’re also untested at scale.
Though positioned as a different kind of social network, Telepath isn’t actually focused on developing a new sharing format that could encourage participation — the way TikTok popularized the 15-second video clip, for example, or how Snapchat turned the world onto “Stories.”
Instead, Telepath, at first glance, looks very much like just another feed to scroll through. (And given the amount of linked Twitter content in Telepath posts, it’s almost serving as a backchannel for the rival platform.)
The startup itself was founded by former Quora employees, including former Quora Business & Community head, Marc Bodnick, now Telepath Executive Chairman; and former Quora Product Lead, Richard Henry, now Telepath CEO. They’re aided by former Quora Global Writer Relations Lead, Tatiana Estévez, now Telepath Head of Community and Safety; and Ro Applewhaite, previously research staff for Pete Buttigieg for America, now Telepath Head of Outreach.
It’s backed by a couple million in seed funding, led by First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman). Other backers include Unusual Ventures (Andy Johns), Slow Ventures (Sam Lessin), and unnamed angels. Bodnick and his wife, Michelle Sandberg, also invested.
Image Credits: Telepath
When talking about Telepath, it’s clear the founders are nostalgic for the early days of the web — before all the people joined, that is. In smaller, online communities in years past, people connected and made internet friends who would become real-world friends. That’s a moment in time they hope to recapture.
“I’ve benefited a lot by meeting people through the internet, forming relationships and having conversations — that sort of thing,” says Henry. “But the internet just isn’t fun in the ways that it used to be fun.”
He suggests that the anonymity offered by networks like Reddit and Twitter make it more difficult for people to make real-world connections. Telepath, with its focus on conversations, aims to change that.
“If we facilitate a really fun, kind, and empathetic conversation environment, then lots of good things can happen. And it might be that you potentially find someone you want to work with, or you end up getting a job, or you meet new friends, or you end up meeting offline,” Henry says.
To get started on Telepath, you join the network with your mobile phone number and name, find and follow other users, similar to Twitter, then join interest-based communities as you would on Reddit. When you launch the app, you’re meant to browse a home feed where conversation topics from your communities and interesting replies are highlighted — orange for those replies from people you follow and gray for those that Telepath has determined are worth being elevated to the home screen.
As you read through the posts and visit the communities, you can “Thumbs Up” content you like, downvote what you don’t, reply, mute, block, and use @usernames to flag someone.
Image Credits: Telepath, screenshot via TechCrunch
Another interesting design choice: everything on Telepath disappears after 30 days. No one will get to dig through your misinformed posts from a decade ago to shame you in the present, it seems.
What’s most different about Telepath, however, is not the design or format. It’s what’s taking place behind the scenes, as detailed by Telepath’s rules.
Users who join Telepath must agree to “be kind,” which is rule number one. They must also not attack one another based on identity or harass others. They must use a real name (or their preferred name, if transgender), and not post violent content or porn. “Fake news” is banned, as determined by a publisher’s attempts at disseminating misinformation on a regular basis.
Telepath has even tried to formalize rules around how polite conversations should function online with rules like “don’t circle the drain” — meaning don’t keep trying to have the last word in a contentious debate or circumvent a locked thread; and “stay on topic,” which means don’t bombard a pro-x network with an anti-x agenda (and vice versa.)
Image Credits: Telepath
To enforce its rules, Telepath begins by requiring users to sign up with a mobile phone number, which is verified as a “real” number associated with a SIM card, and not a virtual one — like the kind you could grab through a “burner” app.
In order to the create its “kind environment,” Telepath says it will sacrifice growth and hire moderators who work in-house as long-term, trusted employees.
“All the major social networks essentially grew in an unbounded way,” explains Henry. “They had 100 million-plus active users, then were like, ‘okay, now how do we moderate this enormous thing?’,” he continues. “We’re in a lucky position because we get to moderate from day one. We get to set the norms.”
“Day one” was a long time in the making, however. The team rebuilt the product four times over a couple of years. Now, they say they’ve developed internal tools that provide moderators with visibility into the system.
According to moderator head Estévez, these include a reporting system, real-time content streams organized in to buckets (e.g. a bucket for “only new users”), as well as various searchable ways to get context around a report or a particular problematic user.
“Really good tools — including real-time streams of content, classifiers for problematic behavior, searchable context, and making it hard for banned users to return — mean that each moderator we hire will be quite scalable. We think that there are network effects around positive behavior,” she says.
Image Credits: Telepath
“It’s our intention to scale up fast and high accuracy moderation decision-making, which means that we’re going to be investing a lot of engineering effort in getting these tools right,” she adds.
The founders have decided not to use any third-party systems to aid in moderation at this time, they told TechCrunch.
“We looked at a bunch of off-the-shelf [moderation systems], and we’re basically building everything that we need from scratch,” says Henry. “We just need more control over being able to tweak how these systems work in order to get the outcome that we want.”
The investment in human moderation over automation will also require additional capital to scale. And Telepath’s decision to not run ads means it will eventually need to consider alternative business models to sustain itself. The company, for now, is interested in subscriptions, but hasn’t made decisions on this front yet.
Though Telepath has only 4,000-plus users in its private beta, the two-person moderation team is already tasked with moderating posts from across the thousands of pieces of content shared on a daily basis. (The company doesn’t disclose how many violations it takes action against per day, on average.)
When a user breaks the rules, moderators may first warn them about the violation and may require them to take down or edit a specific post. No one is punished for making a mistake or being unaware of the rules — they’re first given a chance to fix it.
But if a user breaks the rules repeatedly or in a way that seems intentional, such as engaging in a harassment campaign around another user, they are banned entirely. Because of the phone number verification system, they also can’t easily return — unless they go out and purchase a new phone, that is.
These moderation actions don’t necessarily have to follow strict guidelines, like a “three strikes rule,” for example. Instead, the way the rules may be enforced are determined on a case-by-case basis. Where Telepath leans towards stricter enforcement is around intentional and flagrant violations, or those where there’s a pattern of bad behavior. (As with Reply Guys and sealioning behavior.)
In addition, unlike on Facebook and Twitter — platforms that sometimes seem to be caught off guard by viral trends in need of moderation — Telepath intends for nothing to go viral on its platform without having been seen by a human moderator, the company says.
Telepath is also working to develop a reputation score for users and trust scores for publishers.
In the case of the former, the goal is help the company determine how likely the user is to break Telepath’s rules. This isn’t developed yet, but would be something used behind the scenes, not put on display for all to see.
For publishers, the trust score will be how factually correct they are what percentage of the time.
Image Credits: Thomas Faull (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
“For example, if the most popular article in terms of views from the publisher is just completely factually incorrect or intentionally misleading…that should have a bigger penalty on the trust score,” explains Henry. “The problem is that the incumbent platforms have rules against disinformation, but the problem is that they don’t enforce them out of this desire to appear balanced.”
Bodnick adds this challenge is not as insurmountable as it seems.
“Our view is that, actually, a handful of outlets are responsible for most of the disinformation…I don’t think our intent is to build out some modern-day truth system that will figure out if The Washington Post is slightly more accurate than The New York Times. I think the main goal will be to identify repeat disinformation publishers — determine that they are perpetual publishers of disinformation, and then crush their distribution,” says Bodnick.
This plan, however, involves setting rules on Telepath that fly in the face of what many today consider “free speech.” In fact, Telepath’s position is that free speech-favoring social networks are a failed system.
“The problem, in our view, is that when you take this free-speech centered approach that sort of says: ‘I don’t care how many disinformation posts Breitbart has published in the last — three years, three months, three weeks — we’re going to treat every new post as if it could be equally likely to be truthful as any other post in the system,'” says Bodnick. “That is inefficient.”
“That’s how we will scale this disinformation rule — by determining which relatively small group of publishers — I’m guessing it’s hundreds, low hundreds — are responsible for publishing lots of disinformation. And then take their distribution down,” he says.
This opinion on free speech is shared by the team.
“We’re trying to build a community, which means that we have to make certain tradeoffs,” adds Estévez. “In the rules we refer to Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance — to maintain a tolerant society, you have to be intolerant of intolerance. We have no interest in giving a platform to certain kinds of speech,” she notes.
This is the exact opposite approach that conservative social media sites are taking, like Parler and Gab. There, the companies believe in free speech to the point that they’ve left up content posted by an alleged Russian disinformation campaign, saying that no one filed a report about the threat, and law enforcement hadn’t reached out. These MAGA-friendly social networks are also filled with conspiracies, un-fact checked reports, and, frankly, a lot of vitriol.
The expectation is that if you go on their platforms, you’re in charge of muting and blocking trolls or the content you don’t like. But by their nature, those who join these platforms will generally find themselves among like-minded users.
Twitter, meanwhile, tries to straddle the middle ground. And in doing so, has alienated a number of users who think it doesn’t go far enough in counteracting abuse. Users report harassment and threats, then wait for days for their report to be reviewed only to be told the tweet in question didn’t break Twitter’s terms.
Telepath sits on the other end of the spectrum, aggressively moderating content, blocking and banning users if needed, and punishing publications that don’t fact check or those that peddle misinformation.
And yet, despite all this extra effort, Telepath doesn’t always feature only thoughtful and kind-hearted conversations.
That’s because it has carved out an exception in its kindness rule that allows users to criticize public figures, and because it doesn’t appear to be taking action on what could be problematic, if not violating, conversations.
Image Credits: Telepath
A user’s experience in these “gray” areas may vary by community.
Telepath’s communities today focus on hobbies and interests, and can range from the innocuous — like Books or Branding or Netflix or Cooking, for example — to the potentially fraught, like Race in America. In the latter, there have been discussions about the capitalization of “Black” where it was suggested that maybe this wasn’t a useful idea. In another, sympathy is expressed for a person who was falsely pretending to be a person of color.
In a post about affordable housing, someone openly wondered if a woman who said she didn’t want to live near poor people was actually racist. Another commenter then noted that gang members can bring down property values.
A QAnon community, meanwhile, discusses the movement and its ridiculous followers from afar — which is apparently permitted — though supporting it in earnest would not be.
There are also nearly 20 groups about things that “suck,” as in GOPSucks or CNNSucks or QuibiSucks.
Anti-Trump content, meanwhile, can be found on a network called “DumbHitler.”
Meanwhile, online publishers who routinely post discredited information are banned from Telepath, but YouTube is not. So if feel you need to share a link to a video of Rudy Giuliani accusing Biden of dementia, you can do so — so long as you don’t call it the truth.
And you can post opinions about some terrible people in which you describe them as terrible, thanks to the public figure carve-out.
Cheater and deadbeat dad? Go ahead and call them a “disgusting human being.” VP Pence was referred to by a commenter as “SmugFace mcWhitey” and Ronny Jackson is described as “such a piece of sh**.”
Explains Estévez, that’s because Telepath’s “be kind” rule is not intended to protect public figures from criticism.
“It is important to note that toxicity on the internet around politics isn’t because people are using bad words, but because people are using bad faith arguments. They are spreading misinformation. They are gaslighting marginalised groups about their experiences. These are the real issues we’re addressing,” she says.
She also notes that online “civility” is often used to silence people from marginalized groups.
“We don’t want Telepath’s focus on kindness to be turned against those who criticize powerful people,” she adds.
In practice, the way this plays out on Telepath today is that it’s become a private, closed door network where users can bash Trump, his supporters and right-wing politicians in peace from Twitter trolls. And it’s a place where a majority agrees with those opinions, too.
It has, then, seemingly built the Twitter that many on the left have wanted, the way that conservative social media, like Gab and Parler, built what the right had wanted. But in the end, it’s not clear if this is the solution for the problems of modern social media or merely an escape. It also remains to be seen whether a mainstream user base will follow.
Telepath remains in a closed beta of indefinite length. You need an invite to join.
