Google

Jay Peters, The Verge:

Marc Levoy, the researcher who used software to turn Google’s Pixel camera into a powerhouse, has joined Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today.

Levoy headed up the team that developed the impressive computational photography technology used in Google’s Pixel smartphones, including features like Night Sight, Portrait Mode, and HDR+.

This seems a big loss for Google.

John Gruber, in a State of Google Pixel Daring Fireball post:

My basic theory is that Google, institutionally, is bored with Android — and if Google has lost interest in Android generally it’s going to lose interest in Pixels specifically.

Not a big leap to the possibility that Marc Levoy was feeling a bit bored/limited with the future in Google’s computational photography efforts.

Google’s loss is Adobe’s gain. And, if a cool new camera app comes to iOS, Apple’s gain as well.

Google blog:

Today, we are announcing a licensing program to pay publishers for high-quality content for a new news experience launching later this year. This program will help participating publishers monetize their content through an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories, stay informed and be exposed to a world of different issues and interests. We will start with publishers in a number of countries around the globe, with more to come soon.

With the news of The New York Times bowing out of Apple News+, this feels like Google easing in. Question is, will Google’s model be even somewhat lucrative for news organizations?

As is, news and journalism has been crushed by the race to the bottom that torpedoed the value of factual reporting and allowed the rise of fairy tale journalism.

Where available, Google will also offer to pay for free access for users to read paywalled articles on a publisher’s site. This will let paywalled publishers grow their audiences and open an opportunity for people to read content they might not ordinarily see.

Here’s hoping this is a turn in the right direction.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

More than 45,000 people have signed up for Utah’s contact tracing app, Healthy Together, since it was released in late April, the app’s developers told CNBC. That represents about 2% of the state’s population, but could still be helpful to the state’s health department as they attempt to track and notify people who might have been exposed.

And:

Healthy Together was built by Twenty, a social media start-up that previously built an app that helps young people meet up in person. After the pandemic started, the state of Utah reached out to the company, the founders said. With their staff of about 50 employees, they repurposed their social media-oriented technology for contact tracing in three weeks.

Privacy? No. Here’s how it works:

“Jeff and Sarah are two individuals in this example who don’t know each other but they both have the app on their phones. And so the both phones are emitting Bluetooth and GPS signals,” Allgood said. “Through that data we can identify whether or not two people have spent some time together.”

Here’s the costs involved:

Utah’s governor’s office spent $2.75 million for the app and other improvements, and will pay $300,000 per month in maintenance fees, according to public records cited by Utahpolicy.com, a website focusing on local politics.

One issue I struggle with, no matter the approach, is adoption. If few people (2% of the population, in Utah’s case) sign up for the app (fair to assume even fewer actually use the app?), can it still be effective?

And with all that juicy data out there, how long until that data finds its way into other hands, hands without the public good at heart?

The user also has a choice to share their location data with the public health department if they test positive, and any Bluetooth or GPS data is deleted after 30 days, Twenty said.

Good to know.

Two posts by Justin O’Beirne:

• This is the Apple Maps evolution
• And this is the Google Maps evolution

Interesting to watch both designs evolve, becoming lighter, more delicate, yet packing more info, especially at the more zoomed in levels.

Reuters:

Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google on Monday said they would ban the use of location tracking in apps that use a new contact tracing system the two are building to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

And:

The Apple-Google decision to not allow GPS data collection with their contact tracing system will require public health authorities that want to access GPS location to rely on what Apple and Google have described as unstable, battery-draining workarounds.

And:

Software company Twenty, which developed the state of Utah’s Healthy Together contact tracing app with both GPS and Bluetooth, said on Monday the app “operates effectively” without the new Apple-Google tool.

“If their approach can be more effective than our current solution, we’ll eagerly incorporate their features into our existing application, provided it meets the specifications of current and prospective public health partners,” Twenty said.

At some point in time, I’d expect Apple and Google to build their contact tracing exposure notification solution into the OS, in addition to providing access to third party apps via an API.

I’d expect that the concerns of adoption (getting the system to be actually used by the public) and battery drain are cornerstones of the teams doing the testing of the system.

And not sharing location tracking data? Seems a logical, and necessary, restriction.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

In conjunction with this, Apple and Google representatives say that they are also releasing the first seeds of the exposure notification API to public health authority developers. The goal, the companies say, is to collect feedback from those developers on how to improve the API ahead of its release in mid-May.

Here’s the setting that enables exposure notification:

https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1255549160981487622

And here’s what you’ll see when an app asks your permission to share your exposure data:

https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1255579037893898248

My concern is that not enough people will choose to participate in this process, at least in the early stages.

From this Bloomberg article, by Mark Gurman:

The first phase of the system will let health agencies build apps that allow a person who tests positive for Covid-19 to input their diagnosis. The system will then use Bluetooth technology to learn who the person has come into contact with and then notify those people of a possible exposure.

And:

A second phase of the project, to be released in the coming months, will have deeper integration with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems to rely less on apps. Still, the first version of the program will require a software update for iPhones and a download from the Google Play store for Android phones.

Long term play. In the beginning, it’s all about creating a foundation, a system for privacy-respecting data collection. Deep iOS/Android OS integration will raise usage levels enough to make the data collected truly useful.

Maybe this won’t help so much in the short term, but when the second wave hits, this might be a game saver.

Leo Kelion, BBC News:

The UK’s coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance.

And:

The NHS says it has a way to make the software work “sufficiently well” on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen.

And:

It has opted for a “centralised model” to achieve this – meaning that the matching process, which works out which phones to send alerts to – happens on a computer server.

This contrasts with Apple and Google’s “decentralised” approach – where the matches take place on users’ handsets.

With this basic premise in mind, go read Ben Lovejoy’s piece, titled It’s no exaggeration to say UK rejection of Apple API will cost lives. Smart take.

Reuters:

In Europe, most countries have chosen short-range Bluetooth “handshakes” between mobile devices as the best way of registering a potential contact, even though it does not provide location data.

But they have disagreed about whether to log such contacts on individual devices or on a central server – which would be more directly useful to existing contact tracing teams that work phones and knock on doors to warn those who may be at risk.

Related note (via this MacRumors post):

Apple and Google are now referring to “contact tracing” as “exposure notification,” which the companies believe better describes the functionality of their upcoming API. The system is intended to notify a person of potential exposure, augmenting broader contact tracing efforts that public health authorities are undertaking.

See also the embedded Exposure Notification FAQ from the Apple/Google team. Can’t help but wonder if the name change from contact tracing to exposure notification was an attempt to ease EU concerns about privacy.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Tim Cook held talks with European Commissioner Thierry Breton yesterday regarding the upcoming contact tracing frameworks, that Apple and Google are jointly collaborating on. The companies announced a privacy-preserving API that allows devices to be notified when another user’s device who reports positive for COVID-19 was in close proximity, based on Bluetooth, without sharing the identities of said user.

And:

In a press conference following the call, iGeneration reports that Breton said Cook told him that the first version of the contact tracing API will be available on April 28.

And:

In a phase two followup said to arrive in the months ahead, Apple and Google will build parts of this system directly into the OS. This means an app download won’t be needed to get contact tracing proximity alerts.

No matter when this rolls out, it will have value in the long haul, a vital tool to help prevent the wandering in the dark we’re experiencing now.

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. responded to Democratic Senators who sent a letter to Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook with questions related to the privacy of the iPhone maker’s Covid-19 screening tools.

From the letter Apple sent in response:

Consistent with Apple’s strong dedication to user privacy, the COVID-19 app and website were built to protect the privacy and security of users’ data. As you note, use of the tools do not require a sign-in or association with a user’s Apple ID, and users’ individual responses are not sent to Apple or any government organization. Access to important information and guidance regarding individual health or the health of a loved one should not require individuals to compromise their privacy rights. Rather, it is in times like these, that our commitment to protecting those rights is most important. Our COVID-19 app and website were designed with that in mind. We appreciate the opportunity to provide the Senators with more information about the COVID-19 app and website.

The letter goes into a fair amount of detail, solid answers to solid questions. Worth taking the time to read.

I found question 2, and the response, to be especially interesting:

Are the Apple screening site and app governed under the terms of the HIPAA? If not, please explain why.

In a nutshell, the response:

Neither the site nor app are covered by HIPAA. Notwithstanding, we have applied strong privacy and security protections to the app and the website, including designing both tools to meet some of the technical safeguard requirements of HIPAA, such as access controls and transmission security.

And for Google folks, The Verge has a well written post that includes some detail on Google’s approach.

As a reminder, here’s a link to a comic about COVID-19 contact tracing that helped me wrap my head around the basic concepts.

Maps is one of the very few products I use, equally, in both the Google and Apple ecosystems. Apple doesn’t have a counter to Google search. I use Gmail, not Mail. But I use Google and Apple Maps interchangeably.

I definitely prefer Apple Maps, purely for the ecosystem support, and especially for those turn-by-turn Apple Watch taps that I don’t get with Google Maps.

But I am not a fan of Yelp, and I find Google Maps’ crowd-sourced restaurant reviews more accurate than what I experience with Apple Maps’ Yelp tie-in.

So a Google Maps update is nice news. Follow the headline link to scan through the new features. A welcome redesign, some nice new ideas.

Take a minute to open up a new browser window and enter the address:

doc.new

If you are a user of Google docs, you’ll create a new document. You can also use:

sheet.new

That’ll create a new spreadsheet.

If this is new to you (it’s been this way for about a year), no surprise, it’s not well publicized.

With that as the baseline, read the linked article to see all of new “.new” coming. The two biggest are “word.new” to create a new Word document, and “playlist.new” to create a new Spotify playlist.

Interesting that Apple is not a player here.

Russell Brandom, The Verge:

On October 13th, 2018, two men walked into a Great Midwest Bank in a suburban strip mall outside Milwaukee. They were the first two customers when the bank opened, barely recognizable behind sunglasses and heavy beards — but it soon became clear what they were after. One man jumped onto the teller counter and pulled out a handgun, throwing down a garbage bag for the tellers to fill with money. They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself.

In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank’s security cameras, but it produced no leads. Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers’ phones.

Great read. And not just in a “true crime” way. There’s a major privacy issue at stake, all laid out in the article.

I came away wondering if future data analysis will show a trend of criminals avoiding Android, right alongside civil liberties proponents.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

Google Assistant is about to gain a new reminder feature that allows you to get someone else to do your bidding.

Called Assignable Reminders, the feature lets you set reminders for other people, so long as they are in your Google Contacts or opted in to your Family Group.

I can see the value here. As long as I have to approve a reminder before it gets added to my list.

Tricky to make this work without adding friction. I don’t want zero friction, where my friends and family can add reminders without my knowing. But I also don’t want to have to do a lot of work to prevent and/or manage outside reminders.

The good side is that I can just disable this if I don’t like it. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple adopts this idea.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

CarPlay fascinates me because it’s a relatively rare example of a successful Apple software product that isn’t tightly integrated with the company’s hardware. Of course, CarPlay runs from an iPhone, but it also relies on automaker media systems to deliver its experience to users in their cars. This lack of integration shows in cars with slower media systems; however, even when automakers’ hardware provides a subpar experience, CarPlay’s simplified but familiar interface and access to content already on users’ iPhones is superior. So much so in fact that Apple says CarPlay has managed to capture 90% of the new car market in the US and 75% worldwide.

Those are astonishing numbers. Compare them to Android’s far larger market share in smartphone representation. My gut is that this is due, in part, to the relatively high cost of buying a car. With smartphones, you have a massive low end, with some phones given away. Android dominates the low end.

But there are no car giveaways, the base cost is high enough to level the playing field for Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto.

All this aside, the rest of the article is an excellent resource, especially if you are in the market for a new car. CarPlay has certainly come a long way.

Natalia Drozdiak, Bloomberg:

Starting next year, Google will prompt users to make a choice between Google and three other rival options as their default search provider. Google invited search providers to bid as part of an auction on the new choice screen, which will appear when a user sets up a new Android smartphone or tablet in Europe for the first time.

This is all about avoiding big EU antitrust fines. To get a sense of what the “choose your search provider” interface looks like, check out the pic in the Google blog post announcing the change.

Not clear if this change will be limited to the EU. Also not clear if this will impact Apple. Google pays for that default search provider spot. Will Apple be forced to open that spot up to similar competition?