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April 2, 2020
Google on Thursday announced that it will soon allow political advertisers to begin running ads about coronavirus, walking back a stringent ban after facing pressure from Democrats who told Protocol it unfairly censored their speech about a pivotal election year issue.
The tech giant in a memo to advertisers on Thursday said it will allow some advertisements this week from "government entities, hospitals, medical providers and NGOs" who want to advertise about COVID-19, with guidance expected in the next few days for political advertisers specifically.
"As the COVID-19 situation evolves, we've been adjusting our enforcement to ensure that we are protecting users while prioritizing critical information," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Protocol. "We are looking at ways to support limited COVID-19-related ads from hospitals, medical providers, government entities and NGOs."
"We also realize that COVID-19 is becoming an important part of everyday conversation, including a relevant topic in political discourse and for many advertisers in different sectors, and we're planning to allow more advertisers to run ads related to COVID-19 as soon as we're able to do so safely," the spokesperson added.
Patrick Stevenson, the chief mobilization officer of the Democratic National Committee, in a message to Protocol said, "It's obviously the right move — I don't know how they thought that was a tenable position," but he expressed frustration that the company did not lay out a more specific timeline for political advertisers.
The sweeping ban was criticized by Democratic strategists, who said it limited candidates and left-leaning nonprofits from speaking out about the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus outbreak, as Protocol reported on Thursday.
"I'm glad that Google is listening to their Democratic clients and the public at large and changing their policies to provide a more level playing field," said Mark Jablonowski, the chief technology officer and managing partner of DSPolitical, a digital ad firm that works with Democratic campaigns and progressive causes.
"We look forward to hearing more details and understanding the timeline for the rollout of these policy changes," he said.
Staffers of several Democratic nonprofits and digital ad firms raised concerns directly with Google this week after they were prevented from using Google's ad tools to spread messages related to coronavirus.
Since the beginning of February, the company had only allowed ads from government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and trusted health bodies like the World Health Organization.
Google told Protocol on Wednesday that it was evaluating that policy on an ongoing basis.
The outcry to the ban was more muted among Republican strategists and campaigns, although it applied equally to Republicans and the Trump campaign as well. There has so far been a hesitancy among some operatives to engage in paid content around coronavirus at all because it is a sensitive and fast-moving situation that has created unprecedented hardships for millions of Americans.
"I think as a matter of strategy you shouldn't be using terms like 'coronavirus' and 'COVID-19' to market to voters right now," Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said Thursday.
The struggle between campaigns and Google over the coronavirus-related political ads is the latest in an ongoing controversy over how political ads are handled by big tech companies.
Jablonowski said he is "hopeful that maybe they will examine some of the other policies that have adversely impacted Democratic advertisers on the Google platforms over the past year." And Wilson, the Republican strategist, echoed his sentiments, calling the targeting limitations "problematic."
This post has been update throughout. The headline has been changed to reflect that the ad ban has not been completely reversed.
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- US internet advertising forecast to contract more than 3% this year - Protocol ›
- As 2020 election heated up, Google banned employee-led voter registration drives - Protocol ›
- Congress is unleashing the FTC on COVID-19 scammers - Protocol ›
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.
People
Google’s trying to build a more inclusive, less chaotic future of work
Javier Soltero, the VP of Workspace at Google, said time management is everything.
With everyone working in new places, Google believes time management is everything.
Image: Google
March 4, 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 4, 2021
Javier Soltero was still pretty new to the G Suite team when the pandemic hit. Pretty quickly, everything about Google's hugely popular suite of work tools seemed to change. (It's not even called G Suite anymore, but rather Workspace.) And Soltero had to both guide his team through a new way of working and help them build the tools to guide billions of Workspace users.
This week, Soltero and his team announced a number of new Workspace features designed to help people manage their time, collaborate and get stuff done more effectively. It offered new tools for frontline workers to communicate better, more hardware for hybrid meetings, lots of Assistant and Calendar features to make planning easier and a picture-in-picture mode so people could be on Meet calls without really having to pay attention.
<p>Soltero joined the Source Code podcast to talk about the new tools and how he's planning for the future of work both as a team leader and a product maker.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/c6b03386-d5b4-4fd3-97f3-648321bb9b14?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>You can hear our full conversation in this episode of the Source Code podcast. The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p><p><strong><em></em>I was talking to somebody the other day who said, "We've never had clients ask us about burnout before." They care, but it's never been sort of a top-of-mind concern: How do I make sure my employees are happy, and that work-life balance is real, and that they're taking time off? These have just never been things that are top of mind when you think about quote-unquote productivity software.</strong></p><p><strong>But the whole universe of this stuff feels different now. And it seems like both for you as somebody who runs a large team, but then also having to build that kind of ethos into products, that would feel hugely complicated, and totally unlike anything we've ever done in this space before.</strong></p><p>Look, if you're lucky enough to love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life. </p><p>Except now. </p><p>Right? Not everybody is lucky enough to work on something they're passionate about, but even to those that are, there's that new set of conflicts. You've now disassociated or disconnected work with a specific location, and that is both a blessing and a curse in its own way. And along with that, the need for time and attention management at the individual level becomes crucial. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Both of these things were true before the pandemic, they were just not universally experienced. They were viewed as a mere speed bump: "Oh, yeah, I can check my email on on the road," or "Hey, today, I'm working from home because I have a doctor's appointment." And then on the time and attention management front, no shortage of products and apps and devices and so forth are calling to us, for different reasons. That was also a known problem before, but when that's happening in the midst of all these other demands, and you're already also emotionally spent, then the energy that normally kept us fired up about our work is harder to sustain. </p><p>Lastly, there's the absence of human connection, which I've personally found maybe the hardest of all things. I've got two executives on my team who I've never actually witnessed in three-dimensional space. Yeah, I'm leading a team of people around the world who have experienced me through a two-dimensional piece of glass, right, which is terrible. So that the absence of that human connection, which is felt, again, universally by everyone, in their own way, also saps at that, and there are no good ways, at least for now, to remedy that. Saying "Well, let's spend more time on video calls" isn't the answer.</p><p><strong>It's an underrated feature of a physical workplace that I can just walk over to you and ask you something. And when that's gone, what do we do? I feel like that's the next big question.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>I saw some really creative applications of existing capabilities meant to try to address some of the problems that are at the heart of how this has affected us all. I'll give you a good example: I noticed that a group of people in my team were using their out-of-office email autoresponder to provide daily updates, to basically auto-reply to every message to set expectations with the sender about their working hours and their availability.</p><p>Then you get to the uneven application of that, and you ask, well, why? And part of the answer is a little scary, because it involves the courage that those people had to actually explicitly say, "No, I actually am not available, because I've got other responsibilities, other demands on my time." In pre-pandemic work culture, there was a question there about whether you will be perceived as a hard-charging, go-getter type of person, when you're even with the best of intentions trying to set expectations for other people. </p><p>And you get to the product opportunity around that. You say, well, this is a really crude instrument for this. So we've got this capability now to set working hours. And we introduced a bunch of enhancements around the minimal set of actions that I can take as an individual — to convey to others who want to collaborate with me and communicate with me — my availability. And it's really elegant and important in how we do it. </p><p>But what the usage of that feature represents is an aspect of a social contract that every company has, around how its workers behave with each other and how they respect each other's time. Very few, if any, companies that I've seen have taken the trouble to actually describe what that contract actually looks like. Much less to try and steer it.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>So do you feel some responsibility to try to have and share a right answer inside the product?</strong></p><p>No, not a right answer. That's where people get it wrong. I think with productivity software, it's a very difficult needle to thread. Because you have to have a point of view. "Productivity Construction Kit" is not an answer, because actually what it leads to is you putting the burden on the client, on the user and on the team to establish that, and not everybody is thoughtful enough or equipped enough to do that. </p><p>And I think when you see customers struggle with products you find that the diversity of options you have creates, well, less than an orderly, predictable exchange of information. So the threading the needle part is, you have to be opinionated enough and in the right places, but leave room for the individual user and ultimately the organization they are a part of to express their own approach to communication and collaboration and express that social contract. </p><p><strong>Google Calendar is a good example of that, right? Calendar feels like the space in which to solve a lot of these things that you're talking about. If one of the core things we need to do is get a better understanding of where we are and who's available, Calendar seems like the place to do that, right? I feel like you guys are getting, if not more opinionated, then at least more, I don't know, tools-y about what you think a calendar can be.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Yes, tools-y in the sense that we know there's an opportunity, given what I told you about the time and attention management problem being crucial. Google Calendar has this unique role in being perhaps the only global-scale, personal and work calendar management service system of record. There's a responsibility, I guess, and an opportunity for us to continue to encourage people to not only use that, but to use it more effectively both in their own individual time management and in their time management across groups of people. </p><p>The best example to offer here is recurring events. I've long joked that you should be forced to do linear algebra before you are actually allowed to create a recurring event that involves multiple people. Possibly even just yourself. The reason for that is because exactly how far ahead can you plan? </p><p>You create a recurring event with the best of intentions that says, "I want to call my parents every week at 6 p.m. on Wednesday." Now, there's a segment of people for whom that proves to be very effective. They actually are rigorous enough about surrendering the entirety of their decision-making and their time management to a calendaring surface, digital or otherwise, that having that there helps. But to the vast, vast, vast majority of people, the calendar surface risks becoming a reminder of exactly how inconsistent and undependable you are as a human being. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>And so how you approach the task is to go back to the sort of toolsy-ness of Google Calendar, because there are a million things you can add to the calendar to create the absolute perfect, most comprehensive time management thing ever. You could even employ AI to this effect and get pretty far. But it's only successful if it's actually impacting behavior and if the person is actually being able to truly manage their time. The impact that actually has is what we're interested in measuring, not just "did we give you a lot of knobs to make you feel good as some kind of GTD pro."</p><p><strong>The first insight, back when it was G Suite, was to take all of these things that were single player and make them multiplayer, right? It still looks like an 8.5-by-11 inch sheet of paper when you open a Google Doc, but you can do it with another person. And that was a fundamentally new thing. </strong></p><p><strong>But now we're getting to the point where that thing is kind of table stakes. We're not all the way there yet, but that is clearly the future where all of this is going. And the next step, it seems like, is breaking the idea that all of those should be different products at all. That Workspace should be <em>a</em> thing, not a bunch of things.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Remember the show "Mad Men"? There's a picture I found on the internet of the set — no people — and you can see old-school intercom systems, typewriters, old-school inboxes, filing cabinets, a whole range of things. What we've done is we've digitized them, almost on a one-for-one basis. To be fair, there's been more innovation than that, but at heart, they're still treated in the same fashion. <br></p><p>We've now officially and irreparably broken away from that in a way that's going to create room for people to look at this problem space differently. It's by no means a finished job for us or anybody else. We still have to work hard to earn the right to be the choice of billions of people around the world, for all these important jobs. But yeah, I think we've kind of moved past that. </p><p>I don't want to have happy hours over video. There's a bunch of stuff about life in this particular period of time that people are going to look back and say, "Oh, that really sucked. Let's not go back to that." And I'm happy to turn the page on that.</p><p><strong>I've been talking to people all year about, what are the KPIs for remote work? The KPIs for regular work have always been just, like, "ass in chair," which is not good. But these questions of what it means to know you're working hard and doing well — or even just doing well, period — seem different now. And there are all these questions about what managers want to know versus what employees want to know and want to share. So I'm curious both for you as a boss, and you as a product maker, how you think about that stuff right now.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>I don't believe that metrics about communication volume, frequency, depth of organizational graph, how information flows through the organization — that you can actually productize those insights in a way that is sufficiently unique to a company in a way that makes it actionable. </p><p>You may say, "Javier, you spent 72 hours in meetings last week." And I don't know the judgment of whether that is good or bad. It's very subjective, right? In addition to the understandable creepiness of, how is this information being used? Is my performance being assessed from the point of view of how many minutes am I spending in email or how much multitasking I'm doing during times where I'm otherwise supposed to be in a meeting? Some cultures and organizations and job responsibilities will reward them. Others would point at that and say, "Pay attention, man." </p><p>I'd rather put more emphasis, for example, on the rhythm of work. I'm from Puerto Rico, I love music. And there's a rhythm at which work takes place, it's not a universally-described thing, not by industry, not by company. There are lots of rhythms, even within my own organization, teams that for one reason or another move faster or slower, make more heavy use of real-time communication versus asynchronous communication. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>You don't just lay out the tools and say, "I don't know, pick what you need, go ahead!" You also don't just say, "Here's an adjustable wrench and a multi-headed screwdriver. Good luck!" You have to curate the set of tools that you offer. It's somewhere between an unbounded expanse, and a bike lane that says "This is the One True Way of collaborating." That's not not really for us or any other vendor to describe.</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.
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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.
Power
Google wants to help you get a life
Digital car windows, curved AR glasses, automatic presentations and other patents from Big Tech.
A new patent from Google offers a few suggestions.
Image: USPTO
February 28, 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 28, 2021
Another week has come to pass, meaning it's time again for Big Tech patents! You've hopefully been busy reading all the new Manual Series stories that have come out this week and are now looking forward to hearing what comes after what comes next. Google wants to get rid of your double-chin selfie videos and find things for you as you sit bored at home; Apple wants to bring translucent displays to car windows; and Microsoft is exploring how much you can stress out a virtual assistant.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
<h3>Alphabet</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929982&IDKey=D2992D61B62A%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D13%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Making selfies look better</strong></a></p><p>Perhaps even before our lives were dominated by video calls, you might've noticed when someone just couldn't figure out where to place their camera. Generally, anything below eye height is going to lead to some unflattering angles, but if you're also on a phone, holding your device up that long can get tiring. Google is apparently trying to solve this with AR: According to this patent, it's looking into using the depth sensors found on the front of many smartphones to re-create your face in video calls at a more flattering angle, to reduce what the pattern calls "the big nose effect." I'm here for this concept, but also Google's depiction of what it's trying to eliminate:</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/lYYEYZ52NjuL8M2BnrKVI80huN6UBNYEl1sFEScg5s5MdKrv8n2pBlI3tqXw3ooNJh8h2fWLTeTQaI4TrETMRu-E8ld49QGy3U783TOD8k8WMIR0lPZBAlCih9p3NU4U2sOEqtuI"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929885&IDKey=AFA7541891BF%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D16%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><strong>Jamming more ads into Maps</strong></a></p><p>Google Maps has become increasingly beset with ads in recent years, with promoted pins and locations on various instances of Maps. But this patent, which determines how Google goes about valuing ads in Google Maps — it, shockingly, has a lot to do with location — shows that the company might be looking at turning every part of the world into a digital version of Times Square, by displaying ads in-between the streets on a map. Hopefully it doesn't feel the need to run ads in <em>all</em> these potential slots at once, as that might make it rather difficult to navigate: </p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/JcWTDCLxLAIEnhwl__JCNqeGm5ivedVoZVx_t83zGUntlZdU2H3CeQm9L3RC7QEZ_Cbb1n8B-bq_B-UJoATR2JiehxRwlA_O9GgO2BcEsph9C2cMPihvsdIWJlG9iJfvo4hTmLG9"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929486&IDKey=8946337F7961%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D23%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><strong>Outsourcing having a life to AI</strong></a></p><p>It's tough to do things, I know. Many days, even before the pandemic, I was content to just sit on the couch all day watching TV and ordering takeout. But Google is apparently looking into outsourcing to a virtual assistant the task of making sure you actually get your butt off the sofa. The patent outlines an assistant that could suggest things to do, as well as where and when to do them, based on the user's preferences. It could also suggest things to do that your friends or other users have enjoyed doing. Some of the suggestions aren't exactly things I'd consider a hobby, though: choosing "fight off a cold" as an activity is a really odd way to want to pass the time. <img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/uHktu_DhtqRY9P68bJLJeoFceXUWTrtEeTN7xB6hiBFWxiCY5FDqrZW0zGkqlssZ481nmrNba9nGYXrsdfEk0eTsG64QXV37qaAfQ51BYGhs5DlwKuNJiA2WI5uGtQaLcOS_INsS"></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><h3>Amazon</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=27&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=amazon.ASNM.&OS=AN/amazon&RS=AN/amazon" target="_blank"><strong>Searching using loyalty programs</strong></a></p><p>When you search for things online, you're generally only shown the prices for things that everyone sees. But if you're a member of a loyalty program, you might often get discounts or other benefits that could make some products cheaper or more attractive. Amazon's patent outlines a search engine that can store which loyalty programs you're a part of, and show any deals associated with that membership that businesses might be running. This could be useful for finding deals at partners of loyalty programs that you might not be aware of, but if you're already loyal to one hotel or airline brand, you're probably going to search them first before doing a general search. </p><p><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/XSeV507IoB60vuP-AKADzUQH3OCfoDarf4Ahdgo0kNH-YxVe6qj-MRv9dfGECwElzPftQ3dJfMBeJq5fEEaqcAR6cyprVeBF99cienf2ipJGV35gR5LrTL8RVSOqAHqtqKrMX6Et"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929810&IDKey=0F7C251F2619%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D23%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Damazon.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Famazon%2526RS%3DAN%2Famazon" target="_blank"><strong>Indoor drones</strong></a></p><p>Amazon has been making waves for years about using autonomous drones for delivering orders, but to date, it hasn't gotten much traction. It seems, according to this patent, to be turning its attention at least partly to a less-regulated bit of airspace: indoors. The patent explains how autonomous drones, fitted with cameras and sensors, could be used to inspect inventory stored in the bins in the company's massive, high-ceilinged warehouses. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><h3>Apple</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10928697&IDKey=B939F26801A6%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D51%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522apple%252Binc%252522.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522" target="_blank"><strong>Smart tinted windows</strong></a></p><p>This feels like a concept you'd see in sci-fi films set in a future where people have time to kill in the back of a self-driving car. Instead of staring at their phones, the sunroof and windows tint black, and news programs or views of scenic landscapes would replace whatever dystopian cityscape the car is driving through. It seems that Apple is looking into turning this into a reality, by creating see-through glass panes embedded with LEDs and other light sources that could change the color of the glass and allow information to be displayed on it. Pair that with the AR maps it was working on from <a href="https://www.protocol.com/alphabet-eat-balloons" target="_self">last week</a>, and you could have a whole new way of looking at driving on your hands. </p><h3>Facebook</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=29&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=facebook.ASNM.&OS=AN/facebook&RS=AN/facebook" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Curved-lens AR glasses</strong></a></p><p>This feels a little bit like the walking-around version to Apple's patent above. Most AR headsets use cameras to portray information on flat surfaces in front of your eyes. If you're like me and wear giant glasses that make you look like an owl, that might be fine, as your entire field of view is covered by lenses, but this patent explores adding AR to the periphery as well. The glasses in the patent have lenses that curve around the side of the frames so that they can overlay information on your peripheral view, which could make the experience of augmenting reality feel a little less jarring. That said, you would have to go out in public wearing something that looks like this: </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/YQudRSE9rpgmW6sFYiOU7-fK_tijuGQMxUhPKBq9cQWjmapgqPuV-K2FKAb-C_mlGqBmzOeFisYN3K2JLXqjzmvJzsHuEwfPo-_-CiIodnZg-alfFF1wsw74xVkb5nNaTx-pU71_"></p><h3>Microsoft</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=36&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=microsoft.ASNM.&OS=AN/microsoft&RS=AN/microsoft" target="_blank"><strong>Automatic presentation controls</strong></a></p><p>If you've ever watched a presentation from a major tech company and wondered how they nailed the timing on slide changes so well … it's probably because they've rehearsed it a thousand times and have someone whose job it is just to press forward on the slide at the right time. But if you don't have that luxury at your disposal, you might find the ideas in this patent helpful. Microsoft is exploring presentation software that would be able to listen for cues in your speech to detect that you've gotten to the end of one slide, and move you automatically on to the next. It also suggests doing a training run, where the user runs through their presentation, manually clicking where they want to change slides, and the system would record that and do it automatically when they go to present. I'm not sure about having to have something listen to me at all times to get this to work, but it'd make presentations a lot less awkward than the "please can you click to the next slide, no, not the last slide, the next one" that often happens. </p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10931607&IDKey=7B2CDAAF4E95%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D19%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Getting angry at virtual assistants to get results</strong></a></p><p>Stressing other people out when you're in charge is a very easy, albeit not very amenable, way to get stuff done. If you're having a conversation with someone and they stress to you, "I <em>need</em> you to get this back to me by end of day," and you know that they are ultimately the person who could end your employment, you're very likely going to get it back to them soon, unless you don't want to work there anymore. It's a lot harder to convey emotion and stress like that to a digital assistant, but this patent is exploring being able to understand human intonation and emotion in requests, such as a user stressing that they need to get a meeting scheduled with someone by the end of the week, which the AI would interpret as it being an urgent meeting when looking for time to schedule. Hopefully when the robot uprising comes, they'll not be too annoyed at us taking them for granted as digital PAs. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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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.
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://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" 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://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" 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.
People
Citizen’s plan to keep people safe (and beat COVID-19) with an app
Citizen CEO Andrew Frame talks privacy, safety, coronavirus and the future of the neighborhood watch.
Citizen added COVID-19 tracking to its app over the summer — but its bigger plans got derailed.
Photo: Citizen
February 24, 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.
February 24, 2021
Citizen is an app built on the idea that transparency is a good thing. It's the place users — more than 7 million of them, in 28 cities with many more to come soon — can find out when there's a crime, a protest or an incident of any kind nearby. (Just yesterday, it alerted me, along with 17,900 residents of Washington, D.C., that it was about to get very windy. It did indeed get windy.) Users can stream or upload video of what's going on, locals can chat about the latest incidents and everyone's a little safer at the end of the day knowing what's happening in their city.
At least, that's how CEO Andrew Frame sees it. Critics of Citizen say the app is creating hordes of voyeurs, incentivizing people to run into dangerous situations just to grab a video, and encouraging racial profiling and other problematic behaviors all under the guise of whatever "safety" means. They say the app promotes paranoia, alerting users to things that they don't actually need to know about. (That the app was originally called "Vigilante" doesn't help its case.)
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</div></p><p>Above all, Citizen raises questions: When does safety trump privacy? What are people willing to give up or risk in order to keep themselves and their loved ones safe? What does "safety" even mean in an increasingly digital world?</p><p>Frame joined the <a href="https://www.podpage.com/sourcecode/" target="_blank">Source Code podcast</a> to discuss all that and more. He talked about the app's history, what it means to promote safety above all else, how his company tried — and failed — to fight COVID-19 long before other tech companies got involved and what it means to be a good Citizen citizen.</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/1cb18adc-4514-4097-b9a5-3c9a5c2e5408?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>Citizen has had sort of a windy history, so maybe go all the way back to the beginning of the product and the company. What was the thing you were trying to build when you started out building it?</strong></p><p>I wanted to build something that was consumer [facing], because that's where my passion lies. And I feel like that's the only thing I'm sort of good at. It had to be mobile first, network-effect driven, with a very noble mission so that once the network effect activates, hopefully, it becomes the gift that keeps on giving. </p><p>As soon as I identified wanting to build a safety product, the question was, how do you get to market with a product that keeps people safe? There was a moment where I was sitting outside, and I was just thinking about, what is the Trojan horse to build a safety system? And it just dawned on me: I think all of us remember playing with police scanners, and listening to police. It's this incredible data stream that is filled with people in need of help. And it was just this closed system that had open access for listening. When a fire hits a building, nobody knows except the fire department. Why don't the 1,000 people inside of the building know that their building is on fire? The information is right there, transmitted right through the walls of that building. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>And so it just instantly hit me: Let's open this system, create a trusted shared safety system where police and civilians and everybody has access to the same information. There are so many great byproducts of creating this open, shared system, one of which is you get the people out of the burning building. You get the kidnapped kid back because you got the whole neighborhood engaged. You eliminate police brutality, because now you've built what I call "conditional transparency." It's not a radical transparency. It's a conditional transparency, meaning the transparency hits once a kid is missing. It doesn't mean there's overhead planes surveilling, there's no surveillance state in this. It's simply transparency when it is urgently needed. And that was kind of the genesis of this thing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>I'm getting ahead of myself here, but you kind of already got into what over the years has been complicated in how people think about Citizen. The reason to not tell the people in the building that there's a fire is that you don't want to cause a panic, right? And the reason to not tell people in the neighborhood is that you don't want them running toward the fire, because some people will run toward a fire.</strong> </p><p><strong>All the pushback I've ever seen about Citizen has basically been about that fundamental question. Is it productive to have all of this information given to everyone all the time? At some point, do you just have to decide that, on balance, you believe it is?</strong></p><p>You know, there would be no innovation if people were just fixated on worst-case scenarios. On any product, we can think about worst-case scenarios. And of course, there are valid reasons. But it's not going to stop you from building something great. </p><p>Just take Uber, right? I was taught not to hitchhike, that'd be a very dangerous thing. And if we were all in a room thinking about what happens when you just allow people to hitchhike with their neighbors, and build it as a global platform? People would say, "Oh, my gosh, that's the worst idea of all time."</p><p><strong>A lot of people did say that about Uber!</strong> </p><p>Yeah. So you know, it's just so easy to just fixate on the worst-case scenario. This is no longer an idea. This is something that is prevalent across 28 cities, we have ZIP codes, where 60[%], 70[%], 80% of the entire ZIP code are active Citizen users. We don't have those stories. Believe me, I was also terrified of this. At the beginning, it gave me and the team a huge amount of anxiety, because we also thought about the worst-case scenario. But we also thought about the best-case scenario, which is why we built this and why we're scaling. And it far exceeds the unfounded fear of some of these worst-case scenarios.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>I feel like COVID has become kind of a bigger part of Citizen than I would have expected. Rewinding to the early days of the pandemic, was it obvious to you that Citizen needed to be part of this, needed to help be the solution here?</strong></p><p>At first, everybody in the company wanted to pitch COVID ideas. It wasn't until we realized just the architectural model of contact tracing — a very simple idea of just enabling Bluetooth and allowing everybody's Bluetooth radio to say hello to each other as you come in close physical contact — that it was like, OK, wait a sec, we already have distribution. We had 30% of New York City on the app back in March. </p><p>We just went, "Oh, my goodness, we have the safety platform, all we have to do is ask these 30% of New Yorkers to turn on Bluetooth." Suddenly, we have the largest and most dense contact-tracing system in any big city in the world, in ground zero, which was New York at the time. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Unfortunately, we never got the approval to launch it. </p><p><strong>What happened?</strong> </p><p>It's a complicated story. Apple and Google had their own plans. We came forward with this architecture, and we needed help. We needed allies. We needed Apple, we needed Google, we needed the government. </p><p>We created a product that integrated at-home testing and contact tracing. Because we knew those were the two tactics on how to manage this here in the U.S. Our ask was basically, a) obviously we need to get it in the App Store; b) we wanted the government to pay for all that at-home testing for the U.S. Labcorp was working on their at-home test kit. And basically, you could just ship a test kit to anybody that asks for it within 24 hours, saliva sample, they send it back, and the result is delivered in the app. So it'll say, "You're negative for COVID." </p><p>Keep in mind, this is back in March that we had this. We built prototypes and everything inside the company, we were taking tests and getting the results in the app. Now, if you are positive, it would automatically inform all of the people that your Bluetooth recently saw that "you have had a potential exposure to COVID." Those people would then be offered a free test that would show up the next day. You can imagine if we partnered with Amazon on the logistics side, where Amazon is trucking these. It's like OK, tech, come together and let's go, like, what can we do about COVID? There was zero government support. None whatsoever. We needed them to pay for the tests. It'd be great if Amazon did the logistics. But we called it the "testing-tracing flywheel." And this is, again, back in March, people had never even heard of contact tracing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>We didn't get the support. We didn't get the alliances, we were on our own on this one. And the government, there was a Contact Tracing Task Force, we were selected as the app to provide contact tracing to America, before [the task force] was suddenly just disbanded and dissolved and just went away one day.</p><p><strong>My question was going to be, wouldn't this be a useful time to do things like partner with local governments, but you're saying you did, and then it fell apart?</strong></p><p>Well, there was no official partnership. But we were told that this was by far the best system for America. And there were just a bunch of meetings that didn't really go anywhere. And then suddenly, you know, they put a bunch of great technology entrepreneurs on the task force, who we knew! We knew all these people, and it was great. Sometimes government needs entrepreneurs to step up and solve problems. And in this case, it seemed like something was going to happen, but then it was just instantly disbanded with no plan. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><strong>Looking back now with almost a year of hindsight, was there anything else you could have done? Should you have just pushed through and said, "We'll figure something else out, screw all the rest of you?"</strong></p><p>No, we couldn't, we didn't have approval from the app stores. Right now, innovation is no longer open. You have to go through the app stores, and they will decide if your innovation can reach the world. This is not how it was, pre-mobile. With the internet, you can build anything you want. And you have an open, uncensored, unfiltered internet. And with app stores, you don't. You must get through the process.</p><p><strong>This is actually sort of a perfect example of the kind of tension we were talking about earlier. You have an obvious societal good. No one is going to argue that curbing the spread of COVID-19 is not a good thing. We're all on the same page about that. But then, and this is what I think we spent maybe six months too long debating, you have all of the privacy implications of that. What does it mean that there's now a system that knows that not only do I have COVID, but who gave it to me and where they got it from? Were those the kinds of debates that you were having, even back in March? Was that the holdup?</strong></p><p>That actually annoyed me, because I just don't think that COVID was this mass privacy thing. All of the data was protected, nobody would know. But most likely, just through the social interaction, like people, every person that has COVID has told me. It's not like, "Oh, my gosh, this person has COVID. Nobody can know." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>And we didn't expose the name. We did expose the location. There was a big fight even with the app stores, because we thought that the location was super relevant. Why? Because it protects more people. If you went to a superspreader dinner, it should say, here's the time and place you got COVID. We can say Friday night, 8 p.m., here's the location. We're not going to tell you who, but you're like, "Oh, that was the birthday party." What's the next step? Tell everybody at the birthday party that there was an exposure there, because not everybody has the contact tracer. </p><p>This was about beating COVID. I just think that there was this red herring around privacy that stopped everything. Privacy became the fundamental discussion, when it's like, OK, we won on the privacy side, but how are we doing as a nation now? Printing trillions of dollars, small businesses all going out of business. What mattered more: this privacy thing that seems to be extremely unfounded and a red herring, or beating COVID?</p><p><strong>That's the big existential question around all of this, right? And it goes back to what you were saying before about best- and worst-case scenarios. There's just always going to be a tension between privacy and safety, right? Even as we talk about things like encryption, there's always going to be that tension. And at some point, all you can do is pick a side and be clear about which side you've picked.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>Yeah. I mean, you've got to use judgment. And this is really where mission comes in. What is this privacy preservation that we're even talking about? I mean, the amount of tracking going on by Big Tech is thousands of times more privacy-invading than the COVID thing we were talking about. </p><p>The fact that we just got so sucked up talking about privacy preservation being the only issue, when in the meantime, COVID is spreading rapidly and just destroying families and small businesses and American restaurants that'll never come back. I think that the focus was on the wrong area.</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.
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