Facebook cracking under the pressure?
Is Facebook starting to crack under pressure?. It’s been a busy week for smart glasses and Apple is snitching on everyone with its new privacy features.
I decided to take a break last week due to a hectic work schedule (yes, I do have a full time job) and somehow the news ferry decided to get busy at the same time. I hope everyone — and this probably applies only to my fellow Singaporeans — enjoyed the long weekend. In case you were wondering, we had our general election last Friday and our polling day is a national holiday.
The ruling party delivered their worst performance at the polls in the nations history and the first real cracks appearing in the party machinery built over the last 50+ years by Lee Kuan Yew. (i’ll tackle this in a separate longform). But these fissures in what seemed to be an impenetrable wall leads me to our story of the week.
(terrible segue, I know. But if ya don’t practice ya don’t get better)
Cracks are starting to appear in Facebook’s Great Wall of inaction.
Facebook is apparently considering imposing a temporary political ad blackout prior to this November’s U.S presidential election. This would function similar to pre-election ad silences in nations like the U.K and Singapore, lasting a couple of days, but applied only to the Facebook platform and only to ads.
Such a ban would potentially help the company reduce inflammatory ads and also limit the effects of disinformation and hate speech in the lead-up to the election.
How did we get here: This major potential shift can be largely attributed to the #StopHateForProfit movement that has seen over a 1000 large brands temporarily pull advertising off the Facebook platform, citing issues with the way the company has been dealing with hate and disinformation.
The #StopHateForProfit movement catalysed during the protests that were provoked by the death of George Floyd. The organisation aims to hit Facebook where it hurts, its advertising business. Close to 98% of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising.
The full list of participating brands include Ford, The North Face, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever.
In recent weeks, under the harsh spotlight from the media, users, protesters, politicians and advertisers, Reddit, Twitch and Snapchat have also taken pre-emptive action.
Reddit tweaked its content policy to add an explicit rule banning hate. This let it to banning several hundred subreddits including the notorious ‘The_Donald’ and the extreme left’s ‘Chapo Trap House’.
Snap stopped promoting President Trump’s account on its Discover page.
Twitch totally banned the President’s account from its platform.
Why is Facebook only taking action now? Since it’s early days, the company has always only had one decision maker that mattered. Mark Zuckerberg. Even when it went public , it did so with dual class share structure. Class A shares for everyday investors where one share entitled them to one vote. Class B shares for Zuckerberg and a small group of insiders. Every class B share entitled the holder to 10 votes. The Facebook CEO himself owns about 70% of all class B shares. Hence, he has control of 58% of the total voting power whenever proposals are made that require a shareholder vote. His opinion is, at the end of the day, the only one that matters.
Despite all the recent political, shareholder and user pressure, the company has only inched forward its policies on identity based hate, misinformation and voter suppresion. The Facebook CEO has resisted change even in the face of the user-led #deletefacebook campaign. It had practically no impact on the company or its revenue. In fact, the company continued gaining users. Even shareholder moves to dilute his power by proposing a move to a single class of shares did not work out. That shareholder proposition had 83% of outside shareholders onboard. But since Mark holds majority voting power, it went no where.
By attacking Facebook’s wallet directly, the organisers of the #StopHateForProfit movement have definitely got Zuckerberg’s attention. He and his executives have had multiple meetings with the leaders of the movement as he tries to placate them. The company has also rolled out minor changes like allowing users to decide if they want to see political/issue ads. So far, the leaders of #StopHateForProfit have voiced their dissatisfaction with the measures being proposed by Facebook and claim the company is “delivering the same old talking points without meeting our demands”.
Will it be different this time? It remains be seen if this movement will have any impact on Facebook’s policies or business. While a 1000 large organisations may sound like a lot, one has to remember that the majority of the $70b advertising revenue that Facebook generated in 2019 came from small businesses. The top 100 advertisers (by spending) on Facebook only account for less than 20% of that. These small businesses rely on Facebook for a large portion of their leads and customers, making a boycott not an option.
The question also remains if these large brands can afford to stay away from the platform for long. Many of these brands have also only committed to temporarily taking their ads of Facebook and some of them have redirected their ad spend to Instagram (also owned by Facebook).
Who’s ready for smart glasses?
It’s been a busy week in the world of smart glasses.
Google acquired North, a company building augmented reality glasses. The search giant claims the startup’s “technical expertise” will help the company in its “hardware efforts and ambient computing future”.
North’s Focals 1.0 smart glasses will be wound down and existing users will soon be unable to use them. While North’s devices targetted a consumer market, Google has continuously been advancing its Google Glass product in the enterprise space and to developers.
Apple Glass in progress? Rumblings in the Apple rumour mill also revealed that the iPhone maker and its contract manufacturer, Foxconn, have arrived at a key milestone in the development of the mythical Apple Glass.
Apple has multiple phases in the development of new products, starting with periods of prototyping in California and China, during which it makes dozens and hundreds of units, respectively, of the products and their parts. As of May, the lenses had entered a stage known as engineering validation test, or EVT, during which Apple typically makes thousands of units, said the person familiar with the matter. During that period, Apple has locked down the design and begins testing its suitability for mass production.
- The Information
This likely indicates a product launch of late 2021 or 2022.
Why this matters: Since the ubiquity of the iPhone, the tech world has been been obsessed with figuring out the next breakout product from Apple, its next big computing platform post-iPhone. These reports seem to clearly indicate Apple is all in on smart glasses. Especially considering components are arriving at the stage of being prepared for mass production.
The company will be facing stiff competition from its rivals at Google who have launched and been improving on their offering (albeit a failed one in the consumer space, but so far a success in enterprise) since 2013.
The big question: Where is all that computing gonna happen?
Considering the processing power that such a device would require if given a heavy feature set, it would most likely have to be wirelessly tethered to a nearby hub (aka your phone). A second approach would be for the Apple to constrain the devices capabilities and feature set so the companies can still ensure the device has a consumer looking form factor.
Apple is a snitch
Everyone’s getting called out — 53 apps so far to be exact. And Apple is to blame.
A lesser known feature in iOS14 that did not get any airtime during the WWDC keynote was the fact that Apple would notify users with a banner anytime an app read their clipboard.
Why this matters? The clipboard is a treasure trove of private data. Any time you copy something on your device, it is temporarily cached in the clipboard. Hence, someone monitoring your clipboard could possibly read sensitive data that is copied be it cryptocurrency addresses, passwords, or email messages.
On Apple devices, a Universal Clipboard is used. This means that you can copy content such as text, images, photos, and videos on one Apple device, then paste the content on another Apple device. But if 3rd party apps are monitoring your clipboard, they could also potentially look at private data from your other Apple devices.
A number of well known apps have been caught snooping the clipboard for no reason. Some of the apps do not even have a text field and hence have no legitimate reason to read the clipboard for text. These apps include TikTok, LinkedIn, Weibo, The New York Times and Hotels.com. See here for the full list of apps.
TikTok has been grabbing the headlines due to its Chinese origins and also has known security and privacy issues. The company had actually been reported earlier by researchers for similar behaviour but blamed it on a Google SDK and promised to resolve it. Looking at the latest evidence, it seems that TikTok did not stop this invasive behaviour as promised.
LinkedIn also tried to make amends quickly by apologising and immediately releasing a patch. However, this week, a lawsuit was filed against the company for collecting personal information from iPhone and iPad users. It is unknown if the court will accept the user’s appeal against LinkedIn.
This also follows on from Apple’s decision in 2018 to adopt Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari and another feature in iOS14 where apps will need to get a users permission before tracking them across apps. Users also make decisions whether to allow the IDFA (identifier for advertisers) on a per app basis and not universally. Advertisers have complained that both decisions have and will cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars.
Fun stuff
🎧 Get a custom workout playlist on Spotify by answering a couple of questions
🐦 Is Twitter working on a subscription platform?
🔋 Who’s excited for Tesla’s Battery Day!
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