On Tech: This business loves (and hates) tech

Small businesses are always asking: Is the tech they now rely on helping or hurting them?

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story June 26, 2020 This business loves (and hates) tech Simone Noronha By Shira Ovide Lisa Serradilla loved taking her Pilates studios virtual over Zoom. But the same technology forces that let her stay in business during the pandemic also burdened her with more costs and complexity. Serradilla’s experience is a window into the complicated ways our increasingly digital lives are affecting business owners large and (especially) small. Technology is creating more opportunities for them, but it’s also making it tougher to make money and keep people loyal. Three months ago, Serradilla was forced to close Pilatium, her Pilates studio in New York City, because of the coronavirus. She was surprised that all it took to go virtual was a low-cost subscription to Zoom and a tweak to her website to let people pay for online video sessions. But she’s also feeling even more besieged now by various digital services and their never-ending fees. Credit card companies and online payment providers nibble away chunks of each sale. She has a custom-made website, but many other fitness studios fork over monthly fees for software like Mindbody that let people book classes online. Serradilla said she’s feeding technology providers at every turn — from fees for digital cash registers to a $1.50 monthly Mastercard association fee. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT “It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but you just start to look at how expensive it starts to be in little dribs and drabs,” Serradilla said. Running a small business was never easy, and Serradilla got in touch recently to recommend we look at the emerging burdens that technology brings for businesses like hers. I took her up on the suggestion. Serradilla was most irked about ClassPass, a membership program for which people pay to drop in on fitness classes of all sorts. This is exactly the kind of fraught relationship with online middlemen that I wrote about earlier this week. A ClassPass spokesperson said the company helps businesses fill unsold class spots. Serradilla — and she is far from alone on this — said that it’s more complicated. For an in-person class, ClassPass would typically pay her $12 to perhaps $20 while a regular Pilates client might pay $30. She’s glad when ClassPass fills empty spots, but it’s not easy to control the number of slots going to ClassPass members. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT She acknowledges that ClassPass might be more useful for other gyms that rely less on regular clients than she does. Serradilla, who worked in the tech industry for years, knows there’s no turning back on our increasingly online personal and commercial activity. The existential question for her and other businesses is whether the technology they rely on is helping or hurting them. And the answer is both. Advertisers ‘boycott’ Facebook to demand change I’ve been watching the growing Facebook “boycott” by advertisers with an eyebrow raised in doubt. Companies including Verizon, Patagonia, Unilever and others have said they would (temporarily) stop paying for messages on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram to force the company to do more about dangerous or hateful content that flourishes there. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT A boycott is an easy way to score points against a company that is not popular right now. Those advertisers will be back spending on Facebook, most likely. But a similar experience several years ago with YouTube showed that pressure from the companies that pay internet giants’ bills can force meaningful change. In 2017, news organizations started writing regularly about violent, racist and creepy YouTube videos running with automatically generated advertisements from some of the world’s biggest companies. Stung by their unwitting support of harmful videos, companies including Procter & Gamble and AT&T vowed to stop buying YouTube ads. And Google, which owns YouTube, responded. The company developed technology to automatically identify offensive videos and block advertising on them. Google hired more people to weed out videos that broke its rules. It turned off ads entirely for smaller video makers to reduce financial motivations to post outrageous things. The changes didn’t wipe YouTube free of conspiracies and dangerous ideas. But the high profile revolt from some advertisers pushed protection measures that made YouTube a little less horrible for all of us. I would bet Facebook will be forced to change, too, although it doesn’t sound that way at the moment. In an email to advertisers cited by The Wall Street Journal, a Facebook executive said the company wouldn’t make policy changes because of financial pressure. “We set our policies based on principles rather than business interests,” she wrote. This is your reminder that advertisements generate 98 percent of Facebook’s yearly sales. Companies definitely do make policy changes because of revenue pressure. YouTube proved it. Before we go … Not just careless but “predatory”: Kara Swisher, a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times, said the investing app Robinhood must build in more guardrails to protect inexperienced people from making disastrous mistakes. Recently, a young man took his own life after he appeared to believe he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars from complex financial transactions in the app. We need a little stupid fun: Jingles about cheese. Pitches for a “clever pointing device called a mouse.” Captain Kirk describing the “wonder computer of the 1980s.” Vintage TV commercials spliced and compiled into YouTube videos “present an anachronistic vision of what the ideal world looked like at a specific moment in time,” Eve Peyser writes for The Times. Climate change is fixed, everyone! I wrote yesterday that Amazon’s projects to tackle climate change might be a way to avoid looking at how the company has changed our shopping behavior in an environmentally destructive way. May I present: a new sports stadium in Seattle will be called “Climate Pledge Arena” — named after Amazon’s blueprint to reduce its carbon emissions. Job done. Hugs to this I’m so sorry, but this TikTok video extolling an Excel spreadsheet function is exactly my jam. (Warning: The lyrics include some words that aren’t safe for kids’ ears.) We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com. Get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday; please sign up here. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for On Tech with Shira Ovide from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

On Tech: When the police think software is magic

The arrest of a man for a crime he didn't commit shows the dangers of facial recognition technology.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story June 25, 2020 When the police think software is magic Brian Matthew Hart By Shira Ovide A lot of technology is pretty dumb, but we think it’s smart. My colleague Kashmir Hill showed the human toll of this mistake. Her article detailed how Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, a black man in Michigan, was accused of shoplifting on the basis of flawed police work that relied on faulty facial recognition technology. The software showed Williams’s driver’s license photo among possible matches with the man in the surveillance images, leading to Williams’s arrest in a crime he didn’t commit. (In response to Kash’s article, prosecutors apologized for what happened to Williams and said he could have his case expunged.) Kash talked to me about how this happened, and what the arrest showed about the limits and accuracy of facial recognition technology. Shira: What a mess up. How did this happen? Kash: The police are supposed to use facial recognition identification only as an investigative lead. But instead, people treat facial recognition as a kind of magic. And that’s why you get a case where someone was arrested based on flawed software combined with inadequate police work. But humans, not just computers, misidentify people in criminal cases. Absolutely. Witness testimony is also very troubling. That has been a selling point for many facial recognition technologies. Is the problem that the facial recognition technology is inaccurate? That’s one problem. A federal study of facial recognition algorithms found them to be biased and to wrongly identify people of color at higher rates than white people. The study included the two algorithms used in the image search that led to Williams’s arrest. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Sometimes the algorithm is good and sometimes it’s bad, and there’s not always a great way to tell the difference. And there’s usually no requirement for vetting the technology from policymakers, the government or law enforcement. What’s the broader problem? Companies that sell facial recognition software say it doesn’t give a perfect “match.” It gives a score of how likely the facial images in databases match the one you search. The technology companies say none of this is probable cause for arrest. (At least, that’s how they talk about it with a reporter for The New York Times.) But on the ground, officers see an image of a suspect next to a photo of the likeliest match, and it seems like the correct answer. I have seen facial recognition work well with some high-quality close-up images. But usually, police officers have grainy videos or a sketch, and computers don’t work well in those cases. It feels as if we know computers are flawed, but we still believe the answers they spit out? I wrote about the owner of a Kansas farm who was harassed by law enforcement and random visitors because of a glitch in software that maps people’s locations from their internet addresses. People incorrectly thought the mapping software was flawless. Facial recognition has the same problem. People don’t drill down into the technology, and they don’t read the fine print about the inaccuracies. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Hey, big tech: What about big structural change? Tech companies shouldn’t say they want to help fight entrenched global problems like climate change and racial injustice without taking a hard look at how their products make things worse. That was the point that Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, made about Facebook, Google and other internet companies that have proclaimed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement and announced donations, changes to their work force and other supportive measures in recent weeks. These are good steps. But as Kevin wrote and discussed on “The Daily” podcast, the companies haven’t tackled the ways that their internet hangouts have been created to reward exaggerated viewpoints that undermine movements like Black Lives Matter. They also haven’t addressed how their rewarding of boundary-pushing online behavior has contributed to racial division. Kevin said the tech companies’ actions were like fast-food chains getting together to fight obesity “by donating to a vegan food co-op, rather than by lowering their calorie counts.” Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT I have similar feelings about Amazon’s creation of a $2 billion fund to back technologies that seek to combat climate change. Previously, Amazon had announced pledges to reduce its own carbon emissions by, for example, shifting its package-delivery fleet to electric vehicles. Again, great. But. It’s not clear that Amazon’s efforts can fully offset the carbon emissions of delivering packages fast, or shipping bottles of laundry detergent across the country, or letting people try to return stuff without thinking twice. In short, Amazon’s carbon pledges might be nibbling around the edges of a problem to avoid considering how the company has shaped our shopping behaviors in an environmentally harmful way. Big structural changes are incredibly hard — for the companies and us. I’m not saying big tech companies necessarily have an obligation to fight racism or environmental destruction. But the companies say that’s what they want to do. They might not be able to make a big difference without fundamentally changing how they operate. Before we go … Great! Now do more: Google said it would start automatically deleting logs of people’s web and app activity and data on our location after 18 months, my colleague Dai Wakabayashi reported. This change applies only to new accounts, but it’s a healthy step to put some limits on the stockpiles of information Google has about us. Here’s one more idea: Collect less data on us in the first place. The trustbusters are working hard on Google: Attorney General William Barr is unusually involved in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Google abuses its power, my colleagues David McCabe and Cecilia Kang write. (Here is my explanation of what’s happening with Google.) Barr’s interest shows the government is taking seriously its look into the power of big tech companies, but it also risks criticism that the investigation has more political than legal motivations. Tilting at windmills, but … President Trump’s campaign is considering drawing more supporters to its own smartphone app or other alternatives to big internet hangouts like Facebook and Twitter, The Wall Street Journal reported. There’s no chance Mr. Trump or his campaign can ditch big internet sites, but they are worried about social media policies that have limited some of their inflammatory posts. They share the fears of many people and organizations, including news outlets, that wish they relied less on the large internet hangouts to get noticed. Hugs to this It’s eerie, sweet and funny to see this Barcelona musical performance in a concert hall with houseplants filling the seats. (The plants will be donated to health care workers.) We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com. Get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday; please sign up here. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for On Tech with Shira Ovide from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018