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April 30, 2020
- Q1 revenue: $808 million (+3% YoY, -20% QoQ, vs. $776 million expected)
- Q1 earnings: $8.4 million loss (compared to earnings of $190.8 million in 2019 Q1, earnings of $119 million last quarter)
- Q2 guidance: Twitter didn't offer guidance on the second quarter, due to uncertainty related to COVID-19.
The big number: Twitter reported an average of 166 million monetizable daily active users over the quarter, a record 24% growth from the same period last year. This increase in user engagement tracks alongside the growth that social media platforms have seen broadly during the first quarter.
People are talking: "We had a strong start to the quarter, that was impacted by widespread economic disruption related to COVID-19 in March, leading to a significant decrease in global advertising spend," Ned Segal, Twitter's CFO, said on Thursday's earnings call.
Opportunities: CEO Jack Dorsey said the company plans to focus on its revenue-generating products, particularly Mobile App Promotion, a series of tools that allow advertisers to promote mobile apps on Twitter. "We've now made this our number one priority," Dorsey said on the call.
Twitter is also focused on making timelines more relevant for users by letting them easily follow topics and custom lists of accounts. The goal, Dorsey said, is to make Twitter more accessible to people in ways that also inform Twitter's paid ad offerings. "In the past, people have had to find and follow all the accounts related to a particular topic or an interest. We should be doing that work for them," Dorsey said, referring to these new tools.
Threats: Like every ad-reliant business, Twitter is feeling the pinch from COVID-19 and the steep decline in advertising spending during the first quarter of 2020. Earnings took a nosedive in the quarter, dropping more than 100% over the same period the last year, although analysts didn't seem particularly worried — no one brought it up on the call. "We're continuing to grow our engineering product design research and trust and safety teams, while largely holding headcount at current levels in other functions," Segal said.
The power struggle: Earlier this year, Twitter struck a deal with activist investor Elliott Management, which had been calling for Dorsey's resignation: The company pledged to grow its user base by 20% this year. That's forcing Twitter to consider ways to expand beyond its base of power users. Twitter has always been a platform for public conversations. Now, it's beginning to borrow from other social platforms with products that allow users to speak to smaller audiences.
On Thursday's earnings call, Dorsey pointed to Fleets as an example of this. The new product, which Twitter is still rolling out, essentially mimics the Stories features on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. "This is an opportunity for people to share something that disappears in 24 hours. There's no likes, there's no retweets. There's no replies," Dorsey said. "The reason we built this is because it helps people who don't necessarily have something to say to the world, but do have something to say to a group of friends or followers and don't necessarily want that content, that Tweet, to be around forever."
Issie Lapowsky
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.
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.
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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.
Twitter’s future is newsletters and podcasts, not tweets
With Revue and a slew of other new products, Twitter is trying hard to move past texting.
We started with 140 characters. What now?
Image: Liv Iko/Protocol
January 26, 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.
January 26, 2021
Twitter was once a home for 140-character missives about your lunch. Now, it's something like the real-time nerve center of the internet. But as for what Twitter wants to be going forward? It's slightly more complicated.
In just the last few months, Twitter has rolled out Fleets, a Stories-like feature; started testing an audio-only experience called Spaces; and acquired the podcast app Breaker and the video chat app Squad. And on Tuesday, Twitter announced it was acquiring Revue, a newsletter platform. The whole 140-characters thing (which is now 280 characters, by the way) is certainly not Twitter's organizing principle anymore. So what is?
<p>Twitter was always just about speed. The initial 140-character limit that became associated with the platform was a technical limitation — required to fit everything into a text message, then the quickest way to reach people — not a statement about brevity being the soul of anything. Many of the moves Twitter has made over the years have been in service of making Twitter even faster: faster to show users good stuff with algorithms, faster to publish with Fleets, faster to spread information with RTs and quote tweets. Even when Twitter decides not to do something, the reasons usually come back to speed. Take the much-desired edit button: One reason Jack Dorsey has given <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-wont-get-edit-tweet-button/" target="_blank">for not including one</a> is that it "means we'd have to delay sending that tweet out … we'll probably never do it."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Rather than think of Twitter as a social network or a 140-character writing tool, it's helpful to think of Twitter the way Dorsey does. "At its core Twitter is public messaging," he <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248" target="_blank">said in 2016</a>. "A simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can see instantly." </p><p>That tweet came in part in response to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering-10000-character-limit-for-tweets" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a Recode story</a> that claimed Twitter was considering expanding its text limit to 10,000 characters. Dorsey didn't quite acknowledge the plan, but he didn't shoot the report down, either. He also explained why longer-form text might be a powerful part of Twitter. "We've spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it," he tweeted (in a Notes app screenshot, of course). "Instead, what if that text … was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That's more utility and power." </p><p>Increasingly, Twitter is also thinking about what Twitter looks like outside of its own apps. With Project Bluesky, the company is investigating turning Twitter into a protocol rather than a platform, so the Twitter that users know today would be just one way to tap into the social graph and content flowing through it. And with Revue, Twitter is heading into users' email inboxes. Revue appears to be a good fit at Twitter, actually: Its platform has always focused on curation, making it easy for newsletter writers to grab a bunch of links, add commentary and send it to subscribers. Which sounds an awful lot like Twitter — only longer.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The Revue acquisition, and some of Twitter's other recent moves, also make clear where the company is headed as a business. It's leaning into working with creators, trying to help people build audiences and make money on the platform so that they'll keep spending time there. Twitter is way behind on this front. Twitter is, for most creators, a marketing vehicle, a public way to send fans to the Instagram/Twitch/TikTok/Substacks that make them actual money. </p><p>By acquiring a newsletter provider, Twitter brings at least one part of that in-house. "Revue will accelerate our work to help people stay informed about their interests while giving all types of writers a way to monetize their audience," Twitter's Kayvon Beykpour and Mike Park wrote in <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/making-twitter-a-better-home-for-writers.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the blog post</a> announcing the acquisition. The same could soon be true for Breaker with podcasts, and Spaces with audio events. If 280-character Twitter can continue to be a powerful marketing engine, but all that marketing can drive toward Twitter's other, higher-fidelity messaging tools, Twitter stands to be a useful home for lots of creators. And, of course, if creators stay, so do users.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>When Dorsey said last year that Twitter was thinking about what <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/23/tech/twitter-subscription-earnings/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a subscription model for Twitter</a> might look like, these are almost certainly the products he was thinking about. "$9.99 a month for the really good tweets" is a tricky line to walk for an ad-based business, and it's not in line with the way Dorsey has always thought about Twitter. (After all, is there anything slower than a paywall?) But paid newsletters, paid podcasts, ticketed Spaces events and all manner of other similar products could add new revenue streams. Twitter could also be trying to make money from creators themselves, too: It has at least <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-is-considering-these-premium-features-in-a-subscription-model/376287/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">run surveys</a> asking how users would feel about paying to upload longer videos, get better analytics, or add custom badges to their profile. </p><p>There's no guarantee any of this will work. Twitter's history with integrating new products is spotty, and many creators are still wary of the company after it was so quick to kill Vine. But this is what Twitter wants to be: the internet's universal communication tool, with all the new features that requires.</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.
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.
Doxxing insurrectionists: Capitol riot divides online extremism researchers
The uprising has sparked a tense debate about the right way to stitch together the digital scraps of someone's life to publicly accuse them of committing a crime.
Rioters scale the U.S. Capitol walls during the insurrection.
Photo: Blink O'faneye/Flickr
January 16, 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 16, 2021
Joan Donovan has a panic button in her office, just in case one of the online extremists she spends her days fighting tries to fight back.
"This is not baby shit," Donovan, who is research director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said. "You do not fuck around with these people in public."
<p>Which is why Donovan has been so worried about what she's seen happening online in the days since a violent mob overtook the U.S. Capitol. Scores of amateur sleuths are combing through terabytes of footage and openly trading tips on Twitter in hopes of piecing together the rioters' identities and bringing them to justice. To Donovan, these Twitter detectives aren't just running the risk of misidentifying innocent people; they may also unknowingly be putting themselves at risk by publicly pursuing potentially dangerous people.</p><p>Even more worrisome to Donovan: the role some prominent researchers are playing in organizing the hunt. So this week, she went on Twitter and shared some blunt words of warning. "This is one of the most dangerous uses of social media by a researcher," Donovan <a href="https://twitter.com/BostonJoan/status/1349358629846183936?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote</a>. "Research ethics now. We must hold each other to account."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Her remarks were directed at another academic, John Scott-Railton of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, who has gained a following for his crowdsourced investigations of the riot, which most notably led to the successful identification of an Air Force veteran who was photographed in full tactical gear on the floor of the Senate. Two days after The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow used Scott-Railton's tip to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-air-force-combat-veteran-breached-the-senate" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">confirm</a> the veteran's identity and published a story with his findings, the suspect was arrested in Texas. </p><p>Scott-Railton shares Donovan's concerns — and admires her work — but says those concerns have led him to a different conclusion. He argues that in the wake of any public event caught on camera, be it a confrontation on a bike trail or the Boston Marathon bombing, there are bound to be crowds of extremely online people using digital techniques to assign blame. His goal is to harness that energy in productive ways and model appropriate behavior. </p><p>"I think the conversation has to be one that involves being very intentional in thinking about harm reduction and in trying to do one's best to always model the behavior you want to see from others," he said, noting that he has repeatedly urged his followers not to name potential suspects on Twitter and, instead, to funnel any specific names to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Besides, with the inauguration around the corner and the vast majority of the Capitol rioters still on the loose, Scott-Railton argues it's critically important to use the power of crowdsourcing to stop those people from committing any more violence. "There may be people who intend to do violent things around the inauguration," he said. "We urgently need to understand who they are."</p><p>The Capitol riot was a boundary-busting event in almost every way, and its impact on the digital privacy debate was no different. The insurrectionists' acts were so galling, so frightening, that suddenly, even those who might oppose digital surveillance and forensics techniques in other contexts, like, say, identifying peaceful protesters at a Black Lives Matter rally, feel justified in deploying those tools against the rioters. The shifting goalposts have sparked a tense debate among researchers of online extremism about the right way to stitch together the digital scraps of someone's life to publicly accuse them of committing a crime — or whether there is a right way at all.</p><p>Shortly after the riot, Vivian Schiller, executive director of the Aspen Institute's digital department, <a href="https://twitter.com/vivian/status/1347556058487787521?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">asked</a> her followers a question on Twitter and stressed that it was not rhetorical: "Is there such a thing as 'ethical doxxing'?" </p><p>"Not really," replied Kate Klonick, an assistant professor of law at St. John's University, who studies online content moderation. </p><p>Others disagreed vehemently. "Yes, absolutely," wrote Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of civic media at MIT. "I would argue that in fact we have an ethical responsibility to expose people who are literal nazis and ensure there are consequences for their actions. Of course, this requires extreme care to verify so that innocents are not wrongfully accused."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Scott-Railton tends to see things that way, as does Aric Toler, a researcher with the group Bellingcat, which has been archiving vast troves of footage of the riot to help with identification. "The crowdsourcing element is obviously powerful and can go both ways, but I think it's overall more positive than not," Toler said. </p><p>The Capitol riot was virtually unprecedented in terms of the amount of digital exhaust it gave off. That's partly to do with the fact that the uprising was largely organized on social media, partly to do with the fact that some of the rioters were there <a href="https://www.protocol.com/trump-coup-social-networks" target="_self">explicitly to broadcast their actions</a> on social media and partly to do with the fact that Parler, the go-to social platform of the far-right, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/parler-hack-data-public-posts-images-video/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">had a bug</a> that enabled a hacker to <a href="https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-users-location-dat-1846032466" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">scrape and archive</a> every public post and GPS coordinate before deletion.</p><p>Now, before anyone can get named and blamed, there's a virtual ton of information to sift through first. Toler sees much of the crowdsourcing work going on as a responsible way to divvy up the labor. "A lot of the work is just around sifting through ungodly amounts of photos and videos," Toler said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Of course, a lot of it isn't. Already, a retired Chicago firefighter was <a href="https://patch.com/illinois/chicago/trolls-wrongly-accused-retired-firefighter-capitol-riot-murder" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrongly accused </a>of being involved in the riot, after Twitter detectives digitally enhanced a blurry photo of a man throwing a fire extinguisher at a cop and accused him of being "Extinguisher Man." In fact, he was back in Chicago, he said, celebrating his wife's birthday. "This story has fucked my life up," the man told a local news outlet.</p><p>Both Scott-Railton and Bellingcat had been seeking footage of that suspect on Twitter before he was misidentified. Though neither of them encouraged their followers to name names, and in some cases even actively discouraged it, the effort went sideways anyway. </p><p>That's to be expected, Donovan argues. Once you animate a crowd around a particular purpose, it's impossible to control what they'll do next, which she says is all the more reason for researchers to avoid such public investigations in the first place. "I have this overarching thesis that the internet turns us all into cops," Donovan said. "These are technologies of surveillance, and so use of them by the public to turn crowds into cops seems to me to be a very dangerous impulse."</p><p>That's to say nothing of the danger amateur investigators put themselves in, Donovan said. For all of the digital records the rioters have left behind, she stresses that the people looking into them often have their own digital trail that leaves them vulnerable to retaliation. "Say you identify some neo-Nazi militia member and think you're doing a good job, but you have your kid's birthday photos up on a Flickr account, which has the geotag of the apartment complex that you live in," Donovan said. "People don't understand how much is being revealed about them as they participate in these public campaigns."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>It's not that only trained researchers or law enforcement should be able to do this work. Donovan argues there's a way to carry out crowdsourced investigations in private channels, where participants are educated about the risks they're taking and how to protect themselves. Anything less, she argues, is malpractice. "If you don't educate people before you call them into action," Donovan said, "you put them at risk."</p><p>Scott-Railton has tailored his approach somewhat in response to feedback from Donovan and others. For one thing, he's begun <a href="https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1349914986278252553?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">deleting</a> old threads investigating people who have already been arrested to avoid leaving any misleading leads out in the open. He's also since deleted the tweet that Donovan first called him out on, in which he was seeking footage of people wearing earpieces at the riot. Donovan pointed out that such a directive could risk outing members of the media, who also regularly wear earpieces.</p><p>Perhaps, most importantly, on Thursday night, he <a href="https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1349919058922250240?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> an official notice to his now more than 100,000 followers. He told them that he was now moving to a "form-based intake model" for tips, in collaboration with Bellingcat, writing, "I feel this approach better balances the *many* reasonable concerns about a participatory & crowdsourced model done on Twitter."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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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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