Topic: Policy
Facebook Solicits User Feedback on How to Tackle Issues Like Censorship and Terrorism (Jun 15, 2017)
A while back, Facebook said it would be soliciting user feedback on its policies for moderation and censorship around thorny issues like terrorism and freedom of speech, and it’s now putting a program in place to begin doing this in earnest. It has listed some of those thorny questions on its website and also launched its first debate, on terrorism, separately. On paper, getting user feedback on these issues seems a great way to absolve itself from the role of arbiter or gatekeeper of what’s allowed on Facebook – it’s also said in the past that it wants to be sensitive to local cultural norms around these things rather than having a single global policy, which seems sensible. But the most likely outcome is a range of views expressed and real division around some of these issues, which means Facebook will still have to come down on one side or the other, and will now do so explicitly going against the stated views of many of its users. This is definitely a double-edged sword. In addition, as we’ve seen from the recent FCC comment process around net neutrality, such large-scale public feedback projects are easily hijacked by groups, so Facebook will have to work hard to sift the wheat from the chaff here. On balance, I think this is a positive step, but I worry that it will be really tough for Facebook to execute on its vision here without dealing with some real challenges in implementation.
via TechCrunch
NYC Taxi Regulator Mulling Forcing Uber to Add Tipping Option in its App (Apr 17, 2017)
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Australian regulator sues Apple alleging iPhone ‘bricking’ – Reuters (Apr 6, 2017)
This piece is sadly short on details and on comment from Apple, so we have to read between the lines a little bit to see what’s happening here. My guess is that this lawsuit from the Australian competition commission concerns Apple’s practice of disabling phones which have had their screens tampered with when that process involves the Touch ID sensor and its associated secure enclave. Apple does this in order to preserve the security of that system, but to an end user or repair shop it just looks like Apple is trying to keep the repair business to itself. Some US states have been pushing right-to-repair laws to deal with this kind of situation, and Apple has been pushing back, arguing that there are security issues at stake. The problem is that Apple often charges a lot more for either AppleCare or the repair itself than third parties, so the optics are bad even if the reasoning is sound. I suspect Apple is going to be dealing with a lot more of this kind of thing, and this Australian case will be an important test of how effectively Apple is able to fight its corner.
via Reuters
Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving – The Economist (Apr 5, 2017)
This isn’t a particularly new idea, and in fact it’s one that ride sharing companies have used for some time now in trying to convince regulators to allow them to operate. But it’s always good to see real data behind an idea, and in this case it seems to back it up pretty well, at least in New York City. The data isn’t consistent across the boroughs, but there’s certainly a clear trend suggesting the introduction of Uber in the City did indeed reduce drink driving, which is obviously a good thing. That’s a nice counterpoint to all the negative news stories recently about Uber in particular and ride sharing in general (including the one I just shared about driver vetting).
via The Economist
8,000 Uber, Lyft, ride-hailing drivers fail new background checks in Massachusetts – The Boston Globe (Apr 5, 2017)
Massachusetts put in place a new law requiring drivers for ride sharing services to acquire a license, which in turn requires passing an extensive background check. Of the 71,000 existing drivers who applied, a little over 11% failed these background checks, in many cases because of issues with driver’s licenses, at least some of which should have been caught by Uber and Lyft. Those companies, in turn, countered that they either don’t have access to longer criminal histories or that they have deliberately ignored older offenses as a way to help people with troubled pasts move on. Though there’s some truth to the former point, the latter is at least partly spin. Sex offenders, of whom 51 were rejected by Massachusetts, have to register, and presumably blocking them from becoming drivers would be both easy and desirable, no matter how long ago the offenses. The Massachusetts law is stricter than in other states and as such helps highlight how the background checks the companies themselves conduct can miss potentially serious issues in drivers’ histories.
via Boston Globe
How Donald Trump crippled U.S. technology and science policy – Recode (Apr 1, 2017)
This is a great summary of a critical element in the disconnect between the Trump administration and the tech industry. Through Trump has Peter Thiel in a liaison role and recently appointed Matt Lira to an advisory role around innovation, he has left largely unfilled the traditional home of science and technology policy-making within the White House, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The article argues that this, in turn, has made it very difficult for the tech industry to make its voice heard inside the White House on issues such as the executive orders on immigration, which was the first major point of friction between the two. The contrast between the Obama and Trump administrations here couldn’t be more clear, and the big question is whether the current situation will change in time or whether this disconnect will continue.
via Recode
Tech community “dumbfounded” by Mnuchin’s dismissal of AI impact on jobs – Axios (Mar 24, 2017)
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in an interview that he felt AI taking Americans’ jobs was 50-100 years away, and it wasn’t a concern in the present. Predictably, a whole raft of tech folk who work on AI and are very much aware of jobs being lost to AI today reacted rather poorly to that statement. At best, this feels like yet another government official who doesn’t have a good grasp on technology, something that’s been a worry with the current administration since before it took office. But at worst, this means the government is far less likely to take any meaningful action on helping protect American jobs that might be lost to AI or to retraining workers so that they can find new ones if their old ones go away. Whether you believe either of those things are the government’s job or not is largely a matter of your philosophy on the proper role of government, but at the very least you’d want the government to have a realistic sense of what kind of impact AI will have on jobs and when, in order to make an informed decision.
via Axios
Senate Republicans voted today to kill federal privacy rules – Recode (Mar 23, 2017)
I’ll refer readers back to last week’s comment on this topic, even though the news has moved on a little. That item was about telcos lobbying for a change in laws regarding user data, whereas today’s news is about the Senate pushing through a bill that would enact the change, but the issues are the same. At root, the telcos have argued that they shouldn’t be regulated more tightly than the internet companies that already gather and sell lots of data on users, and that therefore regulations introduced last year should be overturned. Of course, both web companies and other entities like data brokers already gather, aggregate, and sell masses of user data, so there’s some merit to the argument that telcos shouldn’t be the only ones singled out here. ISPs have also argued that they’ve voluntarily agreed to codes of conduct which would bind them in similar ways without this regulation. Regardless, the optics of a move such as this bill are terrible both for the ISPs and for the (mostly Republican) senators who have backed it.
via Recode
California DMV: Humans soon no longer required in self-driving cars – San Francisco Chronicle (Mar 10, 2017)
Michigan’s autonomous driving laws already allow testing of cars without drivers, and given that these two states are home to much of the testing going on, California clearly feels it needs to keep up. Those Michigan laws assume that carmakers are going to comply with all applicable regulations, and therefore require that any testing is done by or in partnership with those carmakers, while the proposed California law has no such restrictions (logical given the biggest local testers are tech companies and now legacy automakers). In both cases, the states are deferring somewhat to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set the overall rules and to some extent approve cars for autonomous driving without a driver. This Chronicle piece quotes a spokesperson from Consumer Watchdog, which has been particularly harsh (perhaps deservedly so) on Uber/Otto, but also seems to be one of the main organizations demanding tougher regulation of autonomous driving in general in California. What’s interesting is that there are so few voices on the other side of this rapid push towards autonomous driving.
ZTE to Pay $892 Million to U.S., Plead Guilty in Iran Sanctions Probe – WSJ (Mar 8, 2017)
This case has been going on for a long time, and is another example of the tensions between US and Chinese tech companies, in the wireless space in particular. Though this case has nothing to do with the concerns about back doors in wireless networks I mentioned in the context of Huawei yesterday, it highlights another concern: that Chinese tech companies have often been willing to sell technology to some of the world’s repressive regimes, and have often had to cover their tracks in order to do so. ZTE got caught doing this in Iran a few years back and the US has taken action over breach of sanctions, as ZTE was incorporating US components. The worst case scenario here was that ZTE would be banned from exporting any US technology to use in its own products, which would have included Qualcomm chips apart from other things and would likely have been devastating. It avoided that outcome, but still has to pay a fine equivalent to its last two years of profits, which is pretty bad by itself. None of this is likely to make US wireless carriers more likely to place Chinese smartphones on their premium shelf space.
via WSJ
Waze and other traffic dodging apps prompt cities to game the algorithms – USA Today (Mar 6, 2017)
My “Tech Disrupts Transportation” narrative feels particularly appropriate for this story, which really highlights the degree to which technology can radically change the way transportation operates in a city. In this case, it’s car traffic in busy cities and towns, and the way in which navigation apps have begun sending traffic through quiet residential streets and other short cuts to avoid that traffic. On the one hand, you could argue – as Google does – that the apps are doing exactly what they’re designed to do, which is to find the most efficient route at any given point in time. On the other, you can argue that they do so without taking into account the impact on the streets down which those cars will drive – the algorithms don’t seem to be programmed to avoid quiet residential streets or to make another sort of value judgments. City planners naturally don’t like this – their job is to send subtle and not so subtle signals with road layouts and traffic management schemes in order to get people to drive in a certain way, and the apps entirely ignore that. This kind of clash between technology and government officials isn’t new or unique – it’s the kind of thing that will continue to happen over and over again, and the answer usually isn’t fighting the technology but either working with it or adapting to it.
via USA Today
Self-driving Nissan car takes to Europe’s streets for first time – Reuters (Feb 28, 2017)
This piece is a good reminder of three things: not all testing of autonomous vehicles is being done in California (or even the US), not all testing is being done by tech companies and startups, and countries, states, and cities are competing to be friendly to this testing. Old established carmakers are a long way down this road too – something that was borne out to me by conversations I had with a lot of them at the Detroit Auto Show in January – and they’re testing in their home markets as well as others. And cities like London are competing to be attractive to this testing, because it brings economic activity as well as a reputation for being friendly to technology in general. I learned to drive in central London, and wouldn’t really wish that on anyone, human or machine, but it sounds like the testing is mostly taking place in some of the less busy parts of the city, which makes a lot of sense.
via Reuters
Apple and Google condemn Trump’s decision to revoke transgender bathroom guidelines – Recode (Feb 23, 2017)
This issue feels like it’s attracting a lot less attention than the immigration executive orders from a few weeks back, but that doesn’t mean that tech companies aren’t weighing in all the same. This article has comments from Apple, Google, and Salesforce opposing the administration’s actions, but John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed has been tweeting commentary from a number of other companies today including Facebook, IBM, and Dell. Unlike the immigration bill, where at least part of the rationale for opposing the administration was business related, this argument is being made entirely in moral terms, echoing some of the opposition to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” last year. That’s interesting territory for big public companies to wade into – something we discussed on the Beyond Devices Podcast two weeks ago.
via Recode
Mark Zuckerberg Pens a Personal and Facebook Manifesto (Feb 16, 2017)
Mark Zuckerberg has posted a combination personal and Facebook manifesto to the site, and has also been speaking to a variety of reporters about it over the last day or so. The manifesto is long and covers a ton of ground, some of it about the state of the world but much of it at least indirectly and often quite directly about Facebook and its role in such a world. In some ways, this builds on comments Zuckerberg made at the F8 developer conference last year, and it mostly stays at a similar high level, talking about grand ideas and issues at the 30,000 foot level rather than naming particular politicians or being more specific. To the extent that Zuckerberg is talking about how to use Facebook as a force for good in the world, this is admirable at least to a point. He clearly now both recognizes and is willing to admit to a greater extent than previously the role Facebook has played in some of the negative trends (and I believe this piece contains his first proactive use of the phrase “fake news”), and wants to help fix them, though much of his commentary on what’s going wrong spreads the blame more broadly. I’m also a little concerned that, although many of the problems Facebook creates stem from the service’s massive and increasing power over our lives, the solutions he proposes mostly seem to be about increasing Facebook’s power rather than finding ways to limit it. To some extent, that’s natural given who he is, but it suggests an ongoing unwillingness to recognize the increasing mediation of our world by big forces like Facebook and Google and the negative impact that can have. Still, it’s good to see more open communication on issues like this from a major tech leader – I’d love to see more of this kind of thing (as I wrote last summer in this piece).
via Facebook
GM, Toyota say U.S. rules limiting self-driving cars need to be eased – Reuters (Feb 13, 2017)
I linked to a news item a while back about a Massachusetts bill which was intended to find ways to tax autonomous and electric vehicles, and in doing so talked about the competition that’s emerged between states and municipalities over autonomous driving – some have been welcoming, while some seem determined only to see trials of the technology as a tax revenue opportunity. But the patchwork of regulations and policies across the US is also a major barrier to the launch of production autonomous vehicles, because any vehicle sold in the US needs to be able to drive across state lines. As such, major carmakers are today asking the federal government to do what it can to create a harmonized rather than fragmented regulatory approach across the US. It’s interesting that it’s the major legacy manufacturers rather than newcomers like Tesla, Uber, or Waymo making this request, but they would certainly all benefit if the government listened.
via Reuters
Trump’s Next Move on Immigration to Hit Closer to Home for Tech – Bloomberg (Jan 30, 2017)
The executive orders on immigration blew up over the weekend, with most major tech companies finding their voices in opposing some of the policies of the new administration. But this article argues that the next set of changes to immigration policy might actually hit big tech companies even harder, putting the administration back on a collision course with the industry. As noted in my comment from Saturday, the responses from tech companies have ranged from moral condemnations to mere declarations that the policies would be disruptive to their businesses – any change to work visas would sit in that second bucket for many big companies, and they’d be likely to push back.
via Bloomberg
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg Chime in on Trump Policies (Jan 27, 2017)
In the last day or so, both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have chimed in on different Trump administration policies in Facebook posts. Sandberg had been criticized for being so silent on some of the administration’s policies regarding women, given that she’s been such an advocate for women, and has now chimed in on abortion policy in overseas aid. Zuckerberg voiced opinions about immigration policy, specifically the restrictions on immigration which are apparently about to go into effect. I won’t comment on the specific policies in detail here, other than to say that like many people I’m disheartened by the speed with which immigration policy is changing in ways that will have devastating effects on many immigrants, whether refugees or people here on a green card. The point from the perspective of this site is that these are some of the first public statements from executives at major tech companies to critique specific policies of the Trump administration, while most tech companies seem to be treading very carefully at the moment, presumably for fear of becoming targets of angry tweets or threats. I wonder if we’ll see that change in subtle ways in the coming weeks and months, with Facebook potentially leading the way. Importantly, none of the comments from Zuckerberg or Sandberg are vitriolic, but instead are very measured (Zuckerberg’s in particular are quite balanced on several different issues within the broad umbrella of immigration policy). There’s clearly room for constructive engagement here.
via Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook)
Microsoft victory in overseas email seizure case is upheld – Reuters (Jan 24, 2017)
This was one of those rare cases where many of the big tech companies banded together to support one of their number on an issue of concern to all of them. The case concerns data held by Microsoft in a data center in Ireland but requested by US authorities investigating a crime (there’s a good summary of the case here). Microsoft and its pals have argued that this data should not be subject to US law enforcement requests because it resides outside the US, even though Microsoft is a US-headquartered company. Were the government’s argument to be upheld, data held anywhere by a US-based company could be obtained by the authorities in the US, regardless of whether the user has any ties to the US, which could dramatically impact tech companies’ ability to operate in overseas jurisdictions. That’s precisely why Microsoft has had the support of Apple, Amazon, and others, because the effects of upholding the government’s arguments here would be significant. This is a victory not just for Microsoft but the sector as a whole, and I would hope that the Supreme Court either refuses to hear the case or upholds the current verdict.
via Reuters
Alibaba promises Trump it’ll create a million U.S. jobs, but don’t believe it – MarketWatch (Jan 11, 2017)
This is a great bit of analysis on the latest job creation claim from an industrial leader after meeting Donald Trump. In this case, Jennifer Booton points out that Alibaba is talking about indirect job creation in the US through a Chinese-based entity, not employing people in the US directly. But it’s another sign of both he need major tech firms seem to feel to engage with the incoming administration, and their understanding that they can ingratiate themselves with it by talking about job creation. I suspect we’ll see a lot more shaky claims about job creation made by big tech companies in the coming months and years.
via Alibaba promises Trump it’ll create a million U.S. jobs, but don’t believe it – MarketWatch
Uber asked a lot of Pittsburgh for its self-driving cars, and offered back very little — Quartz (Dec 29, 2016)
As I’ve said previously, Uber has a pretty complex relationship with the municipalities where it operates, often flouting taxi regulations and more recently also self-driving ones. In the case of Pittsburgh, Uber has at least worked with the city, but it now appears that it has been something of a one-way relationship. Ironically, the dynamic here is reminiscent of that between Google Fiber and cities, in which the latter have bent over backwards to help Google, whereas in autonomous driving Google (now Waymo) has been more cooperative, while Uber borrows its Fiber playbook.
via Uber asked a lot of Pittsburgh for its self-driving cars, and offered back very little — Quartz