The Week USA - 06.02.2020

(Nancy Kaufman) #1
Presidential candidates are blowing up
our phones, said Emily Glazer and Sarah
Krouse in The Wall Street Journal, and
the onslaught is only beginning. Demo-
crats vying for the White House “have
already sent at least tens of millions of
texts” to reach voters, scraping “voter
registration files, event attendee lists, or
survey respondent records” for phone
numbers. Their campaigns now work
with “political texting firms” that have
built massive networks for “peer-to-peer
texting,” meaning that the messages may
be prewritten but a “human manually
hits Send” to avoid falling afoul of rules
on auto-texting. New “relational organizing” apps are also tak-
ing the traditional phone and text tree to a whole new level, said
Gilad Edelman in Wired. The best-known is an app from the
Tuesday Co. that uploads supporters’ phone contacts, matches
them against voter lists, and tells volunteers “which contacts to
reach out to, when, and on what subject.”

Social media, too, is being flooded with political advertising much
pricier and more elaborate than the efforts of 2016, said Queenie
Wong at CNET.com. Dem o crat Mike Bloom berg’s In sta gram
influencer– driven meme campaign discloses only in easy-to-miss fine
print that the campaign paid for the posts. It exploits the fact that
Face book, which owns In sta gram, won’t police sponsored content,

which “it doesn’t consider ads.” Hulu,
Roku, and other streaming services are
also “revealing loop holes in federal election
laws,” said Tony Romm in The Wash ing-
ton Post. Tel e vi sion networks have long
been required to disclose political-ad pur-
chases, giving voters and the press a win-
dow into how political money is spent.
Not so for streaming services, where “po-
litical ads have become so prolific” that
users are publicly complaining.

The data collection “juggernaut” every one
is trying to match is President Trump’s,
said David Smith in The Guardian.com.
Trump now boasts a “targeted advertising operation immensely
more sophisticated than four years ago.” Brad Parscale, the ar-
chitect of Trump’s online effort then, is now his campaign man-
ager. He says the 2020 campaign is all about data collection. “If
we touch you digitally,” Parscale says, “we want to know who
you are and how you think.” Trump’s also betting big on online
video, said Taylor Hatmaker at TechCrunch.com. His campaign
has already “called dibs on some of the most prized advertising
space online,” signing an exclusive deal to advertise on the top
of YouTube’s homepage “in the days leading up to the 2020 U.S.
election.” Though Trump targeted “hyperspecific” sets of voters
“to great success in 2016,” this time around he’s also making sure
to lock up “the splashiest spot online” long before Election Day.

Elections: Political ads burn up every screen


Alamy, Petra Ford/The New York Times/Redux

Apple may let you ditch Safari
Apple may let iPhone and iPad users change
their default web browser or mail app, said
Mark Gurman in Bloomberg.com. Apple
has not allowed any replacements of its pre-
installed apps since it launched the App Store
in 2008. “If a user clicks a web link sent to
them on an iPhone, it will automatically open
in Safari,” rather than in Google’s Chrome
or Mozilla Firefox. Similarly, email links
will open only in Apple’s own app. This has
“made it difficult for some developers to com-
pete” and raised concerns among lawmakers,
who questioned Apple about the practice dur-
ing a House antitrust hearing last year. Com-
petitors have complained that Apple uses its
defaults to block their products; the Siri voice
assistant, for instance, will work only with
Apple’s own music service, leading Spotify to
lodge a complaint with European regulators.

Planning the Silicon Valley divorce
Anticipating future windfalls, young tech
workers are increasingly turning to prenups,
said Kelsey McKinney in Protocol.com.
They’re “using them to prevent potential post-
marital problems that their predecessors never
had to consider.” Only-in–Silicon Valley re-
quests include that “in the event of a breakup,

each party be removed from the other’s Face-
book and Insta gram pages,” and the blanket
demand that “no one is allowed to tweet”
after a split. Other contractual obligations
can be more complicated. Whereas traditional
parties might want to protect inheritances
or family trusts, tech entrepreneurs are look-
ing out for future earnings, which might be
caught up in “stock options, the potential
value of a pre-IPO company, or the long-tail
upside of a hedge fund.”

Fallout from Twitter’s Saudi spy scandal
Two Saudi spies working inside Twitter
have “exposed tech companies’ vulner-
ability to attempted foreign infiltration,”
said Alex Kantrowitz in BuzzFeed.com. The
Saudi government first approached Ahmad
Abouammo, a member of Twitter’s global
media team, with an “innocuous” request
to verify the account of a Saudi news per-
sonality. That first contact opened the door
for Bader al-Asaker, an official working for
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to pay
Abouammo more than $300,000 over two
years. Abou ammo recruited a site reliability
engineer, Ali Alzabarah, who pulled data on
more than 6,000 users, including their IP ad-
dresses and location-tracking data.

Bytes: What’s new in tech


A “bracelet of
silence” can
prevent Alexa,
Siri, or Google
from eaves-
dropping, said
Kashmir Hill
in The New
York Times.
Computer
scientists at
the Uni ver sity
of Chi ca go
have devel-
oped a new type of wristwear fit
for a spy novel: It emits ultrasonic
signals “imperceptible to most
ears”—other  than dogs’—but the
high-frequency sound can jam
Amazon’s “Echo, or any other
microphones in the vicinity.” With
more consumers worried that their
conversations around connected
devices “could end up on a tech
company’s servers,” this new “anti-
smartwatch” could come in handy.
The cyberpunk-styled gadget is just
the latest attempt at “privacy armor.”
In 2016, an eyewear maker devel-
oped reflective glasses that blur the
wearer’s face on security cameras.

Innovation of the week


20 NEWS Technology


Data from rallies is key to Trump’s campaign.
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