Source: Vlad Podvorny
A huge question for the coronavirus privacy push

Good morning! This Monday, coronavirus leads to privacy bills, masks present a challenge for facial recognition, and I don't care what Disney tweeted last week, your #Maythe4th tweets aren't property of the House of Mouse.
(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Source Code every day.)
From Protocol: Investors are pouring money into quantum computing, but Sequoia's Bill Coughran plans to wait before committing to the software side:
Representative Pramila Jayapal said she tried to work with Amazon privately on her concerns about the company, but now is going public:
The highest-flying startups could be the ones set to fall the farthest, Keith Rabois warned:
Eric Schmidt is trying to push the Pentagon to move as fast as Silicon Valley, and it's a struggle:
Passing a broad, national data-privacy bill has proven essentially impossible. But with a pandemic comes certain political openings, and one group of senators is determined to make the most of it.
The CCDPA seems to have a decent shot, especially if it's rolled into the next aid bill.
But the big question mark is enforcement. Sure, Apple and Google have promised to shut down their remarkably powerful Bluetooth-tracking systems when this is all over, but who's going to make sure?
Similar debates are happening all over the world, too:
There's still no consensus for contact tracing, either for tech or for data security. But if we're ever going to get a universally agreed-upon approach, I'd bet on the one from Google and Apple.
Meantime, there's also this piece from the Brookings Institute, which makes a compelling argument for why the whole idea of contact tracing won't get us anywhere.
All this brings me back to that pesky problem with contact tracing: It only works if everybody uses it. Or at least almost everybody: The U.K. government is aiming to get 80% of smartphone users, which amounts to 56% of the country's population or about 37 million people, participating in contact tracing. As I wrote last week, U.S. polls suggest that getting to that number would be a challenge.
How successful are existing virus-related apps that are out there? They're not doing great:
One way companies are trying to make things easier is by building web apps, so users can click a link instead of downloading an app. And when Google and Apple build the infrastructure straight into their phones, it could lower the barrier to entry, at least for those who want in. We'll have to wait and see if that's enough.
The Workforce of Tomorrow Requires Better Tools Today
The role for government centers on deriving better data sets, enabling better credential interoperability, and creating better reskilling incentives.
Speaking of barriers to entry: Perhaps the most annoying side effect of wearing a mask every day is that my Face ID doesn't work anymore. Luckily Apple's working on it, but it turns out mask-face-recognition is a pretty interesting and important challenge for a lot of people.
As we go back to touchless offices, try to stop handing over our credit cards and in general learn to keep our grubby mitts to ourselves, there are going to be plenty of new places where facial recognition could work. Whether it can see through the cool cloth mask I bought on Etsy will be a telling sign of just how helpful technology will be in helping us return to normal.
Two Protocol events this Thursday! At noon PDT / 3 p.m. EDT, we'll have our latest Virtual Meetup, with Biz Carson and some of the best VCs in tech talking about what's happening now — and where we go next. Sign up here.
Then, at 5:30 p.m. PDT / 8:30 p.m. EDT, we're co-hosting an event with sf.citi and sea.citi, all about how tech has responded to the pandemic. We'll be chatting with executives from Twitter, Slack, Postmates, and many other companies. Sign up here.
We're in week three of Coronavirus Earnings Season: Pinterest, Uber, Lyft, Shopify, Roku, Nintendo, Cloudflare, Dropbox and more all report this week. Keep track of them on our earnings guide.
IBM's Think Digital conference starts tomorrow — it'll be an early chance for new CEO Arvind Krishna to talk about the future of the company.
The best thing on Twitter the last couple of weekends was the memes. OK, that's always true, but these were particularly good memes — they were made by a neural network called This Meme Does Not Exist, trained on 48 popular meme templates and a huge library of human-made memes. (The technical details are pretty interesting, too.) The resulting greatest-hits AI Meme Stream is an incredible mix of unintentional comedy and hysterical nonsense. Pro tip: The Galaxy Brain template is a gold mine.
The Workforce of Tomorrow Requires Better Tools Today
The role for government centers on deriving better data sets, enabling better credential interoperability, and creating better reskilling incentives.
Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to me, david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.