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The COVID-19 Contact Tracing Privacy Bind

Charlotte Henry ·

There has been a lot of talk about how contact tracing apps could help keep people safe from COVID-19 as countries try to move out of lockdown. There’s a really useful piece on Bloomberg News outlining the issues between various proposed models, including that being developed by Apple and Google.

Apple and Google even renamed their framework Exposure Notification, signaling that it doesn’t do true contact tracing, the process of tracking a virus from person to person. Instead, it lets individual smartphones keep track of which other handsets they’ve come close to by using Bluetooth wireless signals. If a person notifies the network they have tested positive for Covid-19, everyone they could have infected is issued a warning, if they’ve opted in. The system does this matching anonymously on each device, rather than in a central database that governments could use to track the disease more broadly — a feature the companies say is more secure and helps quell user concerns about who sees their sensitive health data.

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Twitter CEO Says Employees Can Work From Home Indefinitely

Andrew Orr ·

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that employees can continue to work from home indefinitely, even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

“We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We’ll continue to be, and we’ll continue to put the safety of our people and communities first.”

I hope more companies do this. Depending on the job, it may be harder to do for some people than others, but it also seems like a great way to help with housing crises like those in California.

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Your Financial Transaction Data is the Holy Grail for Advertisers

Andrew Orr ·

Over the past decade, our financial transaction data has become one of the most sought-after data sets. Credit card processors like American Express, Mastercard, and Visa are at the center of it.

All of this is happening under a veil of secrecy. Credit card companies may acknowledge that they make money from analyzing transactions, but they are vague about what data they actually share […] Even Apple, which prohibits Goldman Sachs from using its card data for marketing purposes, couldn’t get the same concessions out of Mastercard, its card network.

Here’s a link to the study mentioned in the article, where MIT researchers successfully de-anonymized financial data that these companies claim had privacy protections.

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How Did Zoom Beat Skype?

Charlotte Henry ·

Zoom has become, it is fair to say, synonymous with video conferencing in this work from home era. Wired looked at how it beat Skype to become so dominant.

Not that people are using either as much as Zoom, which benefited both from being free to download and more reliable than its competitors. (Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder, has been working on web conferencing software since he arrived in the US in 1997 from China to work for WebEx). An April 2020 survey of 1,110 US companies by Creative Strategies showed that 27 per cent of businesses primarily used Zoom for video calls and meetings, compared to 18 per cent that used Teams, and 15 per cent that used Skype. Many companies had quietly moved over from Skype to Zoom in the intervening years as Skype added more and more features that didn’t fit the core functionality of the service: producing decent quality video calls. And so when coronavirus hit, what in the first half of 2017 would have been a call to download Skype to keep in touch instead became a demand to download Zoom.