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November 4, 2020
Gig economy companies including Uber and Lyft are expected to prevail in the battle over Proposition 22, a California ballot measure that could have required the companies to classify their drivers as employees.
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates spent more than $200 million campaigning for a "yes" on Prop 22, warning they could be forced to leave California or significantly raise prices if they lost. Prop 22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in California history.
"We're disappointed in tonight's outcome, especially because this campaign's success is based on lies and fear-mongering," said Gig Workers Collective, a group that pushed against Prop 22. "Companies shouldn't be able to buy elections. But we're still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight."
The ballot measure will make drivers independent contractors under California law, superseding the new AB 5 law, which was intended to give drivers the full range of benefits afforded to employees.
Emily Birnbaum
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
App store laws, Microsoft AR and Square buys Tidal
Welcome to this weekend's Source Code podcast.
Cole Burston/Bloomberg
March 7, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
March 7, 2021
This week on the Source Code podcast: First, an update on Google's user-tracking change. Then, Ben Pimentel joins the show to discuss Square buying Tidal, and what it means for the fintech and music worlds. Later, Emily Birnbaum explains the bill moving through the Arizona legislature that has Google and Apple worried about the future of app stores. And finally, Janko Roettgers discusses Microsoft Mesh, the state of AR and VR headsets, and when we're all going to be doing meetings as holograms.
For more on the topics in this episode:
<ul class="ee-ul"><li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/square-tidal-jack-dorsey-banking" target="_self">Jack Dorsey is so money: What Tidal and banking do for Square</a></li><li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/policy/apple-google-lobbyists-arizona-bill" target="_self">Apple and Google lobbyists are swarming Arizona over a bill that would reform the app store</a></li><li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/virginia-second-state-privacy-2650864098" target="_self">Virginia becomes second state with comprehensive privacy law</a></li><li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/microsoft-mesh-ar-vr-platform" target="_self">Microsoft's master plan for consumer AR: Start with the plumbing</a></li><li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/next-up/microsoft-mesh-facebook-ar-glasses?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1" target="_self">How Microsoft could beat Facebook in AR</a></li></ul><p><strong>Subscribe to the show: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protocols-source-code/id1497440658" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1mc6ODYq0nZ8hrVDuvQfeL?si=HDPznyjDSEqv5EvMZxhKxQ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS95OVNfTjJfaw==" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://pca.st/7ktyvlll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pocket Casts</a> | </strong><a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/y9S_N2_k" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>RSS</strong></a></p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Sponsored Content
The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Protocol | Policy
Google says it’s fighting election lies, but its ads fund them
A new report finds that more than 1,600 brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, have advertisements running on sites that push pro-Trump conspiracy theories. The majority of those ads are served by Google.
Google is the most dominant player in programmatic advertising, but it has a spotty record enforcing rules for publishers.
Photo: Alex Tai/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 14, 2021
Shortly after November's presidential election, a story appeared on the website of far-right personality Charlie Kirk, claiming that 10,000 dead people had returned mail-in ballots in Michigan. But after publishing, a correction appeared at the top of the story, completely debunking the misleading headline, which remains, months later, unchanged.
"We are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual," the correction, which quoted Michigan election officials, read.
<p>The note was a clear bait-and-switch on a story that boldly pushed a false conspiracy theory about the election. But just as striking as the editor's note is what sits at the top of this story, and every story on Kirk's site: a Google ad.</p><p>Since the 2016 election, endless attention has been paid to the way election misinformation can spread through targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But an equally insidious and less-discussed problem is how programmatic advertising, a field dominated by Google, has become the lifeblood of misinformation sites. With or without social platforms, these ads allow misinformation sites to exist and even thrive all on their own by providing a source of revenue, and companies like Google have a shoddy record of policing them. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>In a new <a href="https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-report-advertising-on-election-misinformation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> released Thursday by the news rating company NewsGuard, researchers found ads for more than 1,600 mainstream brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, running on <a href="https://www.newsguardtech.com/election-misinformation-tracker/" target="_blank">160 sites</a> (including Kirk's) that have openly pushed election conspiracies. Google was responsible for ads on a whopping 80 percent of those sites. Another ad exchange, The Trade Desk, was running ads on roughly half.</p><p>Among the examples NewsGuard lists: ads for Harvard University appearing on One America News Network's website, ads for AARP appearing on sites like The Gateway Pundit and ZeroHedge, and Walmart ads appearing on NOQ Report, a site that recently argued Satan uses Democrats to do his bidding, including stealing the election.</p><p>In some cases, the ads create discordant messaging between publisher and advertiser. While reporting this story, Protocol found ads for Planned Parenthood on Kirk's site, despite Kirk's frequent <a href="https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1263209491581018114?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">calls</a> for Planned Parenthood to be defunded. Thanks to these ads, Planned Parenthood is effectively funding Kirk.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://www.protocol.com/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTQ1MDA1Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNTY4MDEwOH0.qplQOYcTtVCBgeOXCbDihtGMd6uAjeg-XL39oaEr8Bw/image.png?width=980" id="f4e3c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="42c21c19889922502d0fba8fec366b71" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">A Planned Parenthood fundraising ad appears on a story containing election misinformation at the top of Charlie Kirk's website.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Screenshot: Protocol</small></p><p><br></p><p>Google has <a href="https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9335564?hl=en&visit_id=637461598271119369-2898334728&rd=1" target="_blank">policies</a> forbidding publishers who post demonstrably false election misinformation and other types of content from placing Google ads on their websites. "Claims that voter fraud was widespread or that the election was stolen are all prohibited by our policies. When we find content that violates our policies we remove its ability to monetize," a Google spokesperson said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The company demonetizes individual stories first, reserving site-wide demonetization for egregious, persistent offenders (The company recently demonetized a far-right militia site following the Capitol riot). In 2019, the company removed ads from 21 million individual pages, the Google spokesperson said. The problem: Google serves billions of ads every day. </p><p>It's not that the company is unaware it's serving ads on the sites NewsGuard noted in its report. In August, a group of philanthropists <a href="https://www.protocol.com/google-ads-charities-disinformation-sites" target="_self">wrote</a> to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai after reports showed that ads for groups like the Red Cross and Save the Children were appearing alongside COVID-19 misinformation on TheGatewayPundit and elsewhere. The philanthropists urged Google to institute a new model that "does not put [advertisers] into unwanted and damaging associations that undermine their good works and values." </p><p>Since then, the company has taken action on individual Gateway Pundit articles, but five months later, Google has yet to fully demonetize the site despite repeated violations, enabling it to continue growing and spreading misinformation. </p><p>The power programmatic advertising has in sustaining these sites is particularly relevant now as social media giants begin to more forcefully crack down on accounts, including the president's, that regularly post dangerous conspiracy theories or incitements to violence. For many of these companies, last week's riot in the U.S. Capitol was a wake-up call, showing them the disastrous real-world consequences of allowing people to believe lies about the election being stolen. But chasing the accounts that peddle those lies off of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is only part of the solution. As long as the people behind those accounts have a way to make money on their falsehoods, why would they ever stop?</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://www.protocol.com/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/image.jpg?width=980" id="2c61a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://www.protocol.com/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/image.png?width=980" id="b43ef" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Politics
Trump got all he needed from Twitter. Now, he still has all the power.
President Trump used Twitter to become the most powerful man in the world. Now, that power is his to keep.
Trump became the most powerful man in the world thanks to Twitter. Now that he's banned, he'll take that power with him.
Photo: Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash
January 11, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 8, 2021
On Friday night, Twitter announced that it was forever banning President Trump from the digital podium where he conducted his presidency and where, for more than a decade, he built an alternate reality where what he said was always the truth.
There are moral arguments for not doing business with the guy who provoked a violent mob to invade the U.S. Capitol, leaving several people dead. There have been moral arguments for years for not doing business with the guy who spent most of his early mornings and late nights filling the site with a relentless stream of pithy, all-caps conspiracy theories about everything from Barack Obama's birthplace to the 2020 election. There are also moral arguments against tech companies muzzling the president of the United States at all.
<p>Wherever you stand, there's a hard truth to Twitter's decision to stop doing business with Trump now: Trump has already gotten all he needs from Twitter. He's already used the platform — and the company — to become the most powerful man in the world, bending Twitter's carefully-crafted rules and dancing across its neatly-drawn lines, knowing that by virtue of his position, he'd never face repercussions. Now that he has, that power is still his to keep, and it will follow him wherever he winds up next. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Deplatforming a controversial or even dangerous figure doesn't always work that way. Remember Milo Yiannopoulos? The conservative provocateur was credibly threatening to launch his <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-media-company-2017-4" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">own media company</a> after being removed from Twitter and resigning from Breitbart in scandal — but when Yiannopoulos lost access to these forums, he lost his audience and effectively disappeared from public view. </p><p>But the fact that Twitter's decision is unprecedented also means that no one as powerful as the president of the United States has ever been permanently banished from any social media platform. Yes, he will soon lose the office of the presidency and the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-ban-trump-democrats-power" target="_self">levers of power</a> that office holds. But Wednesday's show of force by his adherents was evidence that there are many thousands of people willing to commit open insurrection in his name. And that's just the people who could afford a ticket to D.C. in the midst of an unemployment crisis. So it goes without saying that this time will be different. </p><p>As soon as Twitter <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">broke the news</a>, explaining that Trump's most recent tweets could be interpreted as incitements to violence in the context of this week, conservative commentators announced (on Twitter, of course) that they were <a href="https://twitter.com/marklevinshow/status/1347692115615219717?s=20" target="_blank">boycotting the site</a>, and invited their followers to seek them out on Parler, the far-right echo chamber of the moment. Shortly after, Google suspended Parler from the Play Store, saying in a statement that the company was "aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.," including threats on elected officials and plans for a militia march. Apple also <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/apple-threatens-ban-parler" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly</a> threatened a ban on Parler as well, giving the company 24 hours to develop a moderation policy.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The president also briefly breached Twitter's blockade, tweeting Friday night <a href="https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz/status/1347717828359516160?s=20" target="_blank">from the official @POTUS account</a>, which remains unaffected by the ban, to say he was looking into "building out our own platform in the near future." That tweet quickly disappeared, too. </p><p>Whether Trump takes his diatribes to Parler or Rumble or 4chan or any of the other platforms that would love his help in quadrupling their engagement, the man who was a media mogul long before he was president will find his venue. The only question is whether the mainstream media will, out of habit, morbid curiosity or concern for public safety, follow him there. If they — if we — do, the next four years will be no different from the last in terms of Trump's chokehold on the national conversation. If not, his audience might be smaller. But it won't be any less angry, any less capable of the violence that Twitter and Google and Facebook and the other tech companies that have taken action this week are afraid of. It will only be more insular, more tunnel-visioned, more removed from a world of information that Trump has said all along is fake news anyway.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
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