PRIVACY

Is Your Webcam On?

Do you have a micromanager for a boss or teacher? Turns out there’s an app for them. As offices and schools have gone remote during the pandemic, they’ve signed up for a bevy of new software products, including remote monitoring and surveillance apps. 

The very online manager 

During the pandemic, thousands of companies have deployed monitoring software that records employees’ internet activity and active work hours, WaPo reports. These tools already existed—if you work at a large corporation, you may have encountered software that logs your mouse movement. 

But now, managers have deployed this software for wayyyy more teams. And they may have turned up the creepy knob, using tools that snap photos or video from your computer’s webcam or records audio from your mic. 

• For one software system, 15 seconds of not clicking or typing could be enough to shift your status from “active” to “idle.” 

Until recently, Zoom had an “attention tracking” feature, which alerted call hosts if participants had switched out of Zoom for more than 30 seconds. The company removed the feature on April 2 due to backlash from some users.

An all-seeing virtual proctor 

Along with companies, schools and universities have signed up en masse for remote monitoring software. Some providers are using tools that log students’ keystrokes while they take a test or while class is in session. 

One former virtual exam proctor told The Verge, “We closely watch the face of the student to see if there is something suspicious, like suspicious eye movements, or if the student is trying to mumble something to somebody else outside the room.”

• If there isn’t a company trying to automate that process with AI, I’d be surprised. 

Zoom out: Most of these software tools are technologically unsophisticated. But given widespread adoption during the pandemic (and likely after), we can expect vendors to roll out more automated and complex tracking features.

AV

Intel Likes To Moovit, Moovit

Intel is in talks to acquire Israeli mobility data startup Moovit for around $1 billion, the Israeli business daily Globes reported yesterday. This comes at a time when there’s not much mobility anywhere. 

Moovit is the developer of a trip planning app that uses crowdsourced, real-time user data and company/city transit APIs. It’s similar to Waze, an Israeli company Google acquired in 2013; Waze cofounder Uri Levin serves as Moovit’s chairman.  

Why is Intel interested? Intel is something of a self-driving dark horse. The company acquired Mobileye, an Israeli autonomous vehicle startup, for $15.3 billion in 2017. 

• In January, Mobileye said it was supplying self-driving software, chips, and hardware to 70% of the road-ready cars with advanced automated driving features. 

Intel is collecting and analyzing most of that driving data. Buying Moovit woud unlock a new set of data—trip logs and urban mobility patterns—that could help round out its self-driving stack. After all, autonomous vehicles have more utility if they can plug in city-level transit data.

SPONSORED BY NOTION

Just Call Us Bjørn the Overburdened

So...something’s happened. We are officially obsessed with vikings. Maybe it’s the pillaging, maybe it’s the hats with horns. Point is, it’s becoming difficult to juggle our viking research with our, ahem, actual jobs. 

But by the Grace of Odin’s Beard, we found Notion. It’s the all-in-one workspace that allows individuals and teams to create content and get organized—from docs and notes to project management.

For us, Notion has made it so we can stop jumping through dozens of apps, tabs, and notifications to keep our life (viking research) and work (copywriting) running smoothly.

Teams can use Notion to collaborate, track projects (like the 3-D viking village we’re building), and get creative all in one spot. 

Learn more and start getting organized with Notion here. 

POLICY

What’s Google’s Ex-Boss Up To?

Eric Schmidt took the reins at Google in 2001 and stepped down in 2017. Since then, he’s become the de facto liaison between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, the NYT reports. 

A blunt assessment: “You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Schmidt told a four-star general in 2016. He started looking for military operations where Byzantine systems still ruled supreme and cutting-edge algorithms could be imported from the Valley. 

• Schmidt chairs the Defense Innovation Board, which provides emerging tech guidance to the Pentagon. 
• His work has raised questions about conflicts of interest. 

As you might expect, this work is more controversial than ad targeting. Many tech employees don’t support defense projects. In 2018, thousands of Googlers protested their company’s work on Project Maven, a DoD program applying object recognition AI to drone imagery. Google eventually pulled out of the project. 

Bottom line: The tech-defense relationship is complicated, but it’s not just Schmidt on a solo crusade. Microsoft and Amazon also have sizable cloud contracts with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Only 37% of Withings smartwatch wearers have gained more than a pound during quarantine, according to the company. U.S. users decreased their daily steps by an average of 7% during self-isolation, compared to 12% globally. Yoga, indoor cycling, and running are up 42%, 34%, and 19% respectively, on a global basis. 

Quote: “I went out to California, and Tim Cook very patiently spent hours trying to move me up to the level of the average two-year-old…and didn’t quite make it”—Warren Buffett told Yahoo Finance about trying to learn how to use an iPhone.  

Read: The coronavirus and our future, from fantastic sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson in The New Yorker. 

SPONSORED BY COINDESK

The Halving is coming—that’s a huge event in cryptocurrency, not a horror movie about a diabolical arithmetic teacher. CoinDesk tells us that the Bitcoin Halving means the amount of supply entering the system will suddenly shrink, potentially driving up the price. But crypto operates in mysterious ways; if you want to know all the details, predictions, and analyses on the Halving and the wider world of decentralized currency, check out CoinDesk’s free virtual conference, Consensus: Distributed from May 11-15.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Fortnite hosted a Diplo concert in its new no-guns, no-battle “Party Royale” mode.
• GM’s Cruise has redeployed part of its autonomous vehicle fleet to deliver food in SF.
• China has 904 million internet users, according to government data. 
• The Apple Watch can detect myocardial ischemia in addition to atrial fibrillation, according to an article in the European Heart Journal. The former condition can reduce blood flow to the heart. 
• Uber will require drivers and riders to wear face coverings in the U.S. 

WHAT’S BREWING THIS WEEK

Tuesday: Cinco de Mayo; National Teacher Day; earnings (T-Mobile, GM, Pinterest, EA, Activision); IBM Think Digital conference

Thursday: National Nurses Day; earnings (Uber, Cloudflare, Roku, Dropbox, Nintendo)

OOPS

Last Friday, I tried being tricky in Going Phishing with two fake stories, but then forgot to mention they were both made up. As a hundred or so readers noted, Lamar Jackson is the QB for the Baltimore Ravens, not the New York Jets (though there is a Lamar Jackson on the Jets, too). 

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For teachers: Bakpax uses AI to read student handwriting and grade assignments quickly. 

For data viz fanatics: Searching COVID-19 provides accessible visualizations of Google Trends search data over the past few months. 

For theorists of change: Ex journalist and current VC Om Malik writes that inevitable tech transformation has accelerated.