It’s April 3. Ramadan continues, Passover begins Wednesday, Easter is Sunday. Our best to everyone celebrating significant holidays this week.

Today’s expanded Spotlight is 1,021 words — about 4 minutes to read.

Spotlight On … Retail Food Tech

Retail food technology continues to change in 2023. Grocery stores are automating checkouts and using AI to personalize shopping. More local and organic food is available through online delivery services. Robotic food preparation and contactless payments are transforming restaurants.

Retail Food Tech … at Supermarkets

Enhanced inventory and checkout options include price scanners that recognize fresh produce automatically, weigh it, and price it. Stocks on store shelves will be monitored using Google AI image recognition. That improves availability, cycle time, and increases profitability.

… in Restaurants

Amazon touchless technology will allow Panera Bread to offer optional custom experiences, including ordering and paying without a cashier. Customers are greeted by name and menu items are suggested based on their previous orders.

McDonald’s is implementing artificial intelligence in some drive-thrus. The software is more reliable at upselling and can handle higher volumes more efficiently. The company also boosts profitability by reducing its workforce. Startup costs and customer reaction are understandably concerns for franchisees.

… ordering delivery

A massive purge of virtual brands is underway on Uber Eats to winnow down restaurant options. These brands are an offshoot of the ghost kitchen concept where the same food is sold by the same kitchen under different brand names. There are now over 40,000 virtual storefronts on Uber Eats, and 5,000 will be removed soon. The company pointed out abuses that included a NY deli selling the same food under 14 brand names and a Colorado sports bar doing the same using 12 brands.

… anywhere biometric data is collected

A New York consumer has filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging the company collected biometric data at its convenience stores for a year before complying with disclosure laws. In response to the lawsuit, Amazon says it does not use facial recognition inside its Go stores and that the storage of palm print data provided by customers is disclosed when they opt-in.

Amazon Go has 29 retail stores in the United States, 10 of them in New York.

 3 More Stories to Know

1) Shopping app Pinduoduo is a substantial cybersecurity risk and should not be used on your Android phones, according to experts. Google Play has already banned the app because the owner can take over parts of a user’s phone. The software can also reportedly protect itself from being uninstalled. Pinduoduo is owned by the same company that owns Chinese shopping app Temu, which is one of the most downloaded shopping apps in the U.S.

2)  BuzzFeed surprised industry observers when it announced that it would use AI software to author quizzes on its site. The company has taken another step and has published dozens of AI-written travel guides it attributes to Buzzy the Robot.3) ChatGPT 4.0 improved its grade on an economics exam to an A, according to George Mason University professor Bryan Caplan. ChatGPT 3.5 only earned a D when Caplan first administered the exam three months ago.

 Waiting in the Wings

• Protecting yourself from location data
• What you can really do with those chatbots
• How algorithms are automatically denying medical claims

Put your email address in the form at this link and you’ll get a free copy of Spotlight each Monday morning to start your week in the know.

If you’re already a free subscriber, would you please forward this to a friend who could use a little Spotlight in their Monday mornings? It would really help us out, and you know they’ll love it too.

Trends & Spends

Did That Really Happen? — WHO Did Not Say Kids & Teens Don’t Need COVID-19 Vaccine

After the World Health Organization announced new vaccine guidance last week, disinformation flooded online and wrongly claimed that the agency no longer recommended healthy children and teens receive COVID-19 vaccines. What the agency said was that in places where the option was to have a vaccine for rotavirus or measles, that those vaccine should be given first. The agency also said that countries should prioritize COVID-19 vaccines to at-risk patients. More than 1,500 Americans have died from COVID-19 in the last seven days.

 Following Up —  Philly Goes After Short-Term Rentals

We wrote about Airbnb three weeks ago and told you that multiple cities were unhappy with lost tax revenues and housing shortages created by the company’s hosts. A Philadelphia councilman has said that there is virtually no followup on the hotel licensing that some Airbnb hosts in the city must have or about complaints filed against those properties. The city is now cracking down on both issues.

Protip — File Taxes for Free

After years of contentious squabbles between the IRS and Intuit TurboTax, that program is no longer part of the IRS Free File Program. Federal taxes are due this month, and ProPublica has a guided walkthrough for people who earn no more than $73,000 to file their taxes online for free.

Screening Room — Northwell Health’s Ferocious Tiger

Science Fiction World — Mammoth Meatball

Lab-grown meat is already a thing, but an Australian company went full Jurassic Park. They spliced in a genetic sequence for a wooly mammoth to make a meatball while creating some buzzy headlines, and look, it worked. The product isn’t for human consumption because our immune systems haven’t been exposed to those proteins for thousands of years.

Coffee Break —  Hurl An Asteroid At Bakersfield

Hurl multiple kinds and sizes of space debris at any location you choose. Play with Asteroid Launcher to choose the type of asteroid, its size and speed, and get the full effect of who and what you wiped out.

Good Monday Morning

It’s March 27th. Sport fans are watching the start of baseball season on Thursday and the NCAA Final Four on Saturday.

Today’s expanded Spotlight is 1,328 words — about 7 minutes to read.

Spotlight On … Law Enforcement Technology

In our fifth annual report on police technology, we examine how U.S. law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated police surveillance tools.

Last year, we wrote about the insidious tracking by toll booths, vehicles, cellphones, and location data brokers. In prior years, we addressed facial recognition misuse by police and the use of unproven algorithms to identify individuals the software predicts are “likely to break the law.”

Most of those programs are still in effect. For example, facial recognition abuse has led to police arresting people and jailing them for as long as a week even when they were nowhere near a crime scene.

Doorbells and dash cameras are generating more police surveillance. There are also new ways police use cellphone records and data, and some very specific DNA tools without the judicial protections most people expect.

Doorbell and Consumer Cameras

American homes have an estimated 12 million doorbell cameras. Tesla and BMW vehicles can record from four cameras simultaneously in addition to the millions of vehicles that have installed third-party dashcams. America’s homes and cars are covered by a vast, often unregulated, camera network.

Police often have access to these millions of cameras without a warrant. San Francisco, an early pioneer of facial recognition protection, approved a one-year pilot program for monitoring those cameras’ footage. The network of cameras can be used for large public events, even if no crime has occurred.

During a controversial program in Florida, police installed Ring cameras on domestic victims’ doors in exchange for authorization to review the footage. Cameras deter crimes according to police, but some victims rights groups disagree.

According to Google and Amazon, police usually need a warrant or subpoena to access camera footage. They admit, however, that police have emergency processes in place with their companies to release footage without homeowners’ consent.

A company called Flock Safety, which works directly with police and homeowners associations, installs license plate readers, which are a startling use of cameras by law enforcement. These associations have been able to install the readers on their common grounds and allow data to be uploaded to police–without the local government’s knowledge or consent. In Lake County, Florida, nearly 100 cameras were installed overnight without government knowledge or permits.

Officials acknowledge that the surveillance devices can be used for everything from stolen vehicles to immigration enforcement. Activists are concerned that other behaviors will be targeted.

Cellphones

The Jan. 6 insurrection was famously tracked by cellphone data through the Capitol. Apple and Google’s ability to constantly track your phone’s location has made location data a treasure trove of information about your behavior.

Police have software called “Fog Reveal” that they can use to identify individual phones and match those devices to commercially available data without needing Google or Apple’s cooperation. This is important because police can use commercially available data without a warrant. This month, FBI director Christopher Wray acknowledged the agency had purchased location data.

Law enforcement uses another software package called GrayKey. Even though Apple began encrypting phone data nearly 10 years ago, GrayKey can hack Android and iOS devices. Local law enforcement as well as the State Department and Drug Enforcement Administration are customers or prospects for the device, according to Motherboard.

DNA Databases

Using commercially available DNA results to find criminals has long intrigued law enforcement, and we’ve written extensively about how partial matches have led to arrests in long-dormant or high-profile cases.

A new service called DNA Justice collects the same results generated by companies such as Ancestry, 23 and Me, and My Heritage, so that police have access to a completely opt-in database. The service is brand-new and measures its database in hundreds of records rather than millions. Users who donate their DNA records will be notified if their record is used to help solve a case, which is something commercial labs do not currently offer.

Not Just the U.S.

Law enforcement officials are making the most of available technology in countries throughout the world. During Punjab authorities’ search for antigovernmental activists last month, police blocked mobile phone service and filtered websites to 27 million people in India.

Paris is installing AI-powered cameras to protect crowds expected to flood the city during the Olympics next year. The cameras will look for suspicious behavior, and critics are concerned that their installation will remain long after The Games end.

That’s not a far-fetched concern given the increasing rate of law enforcement using technology to proactively surveil individuals.

 3 More Stories to Know

1) Since adding GPT-4 to its search results, Microsoft Bing traffic has grown 16% and passed 100 million active users for the first time.

2) Musicians Ne-Yo, Akon, and Lil’ Yachty, actress Lindsay Lohan, and influencer Jake Paul were among the celebrities fined by the SEC last week for failing to properly disclose their relationship to cryptocurrency issues that they promoted. 

3) North Korean hackers are targeting government officials, journalists, and academics a variety of ways, including a Chrome-based (or Edge, Brave, etc.) extension that remains hidden. Bleeping Computer has details on how to detect that program.

Waiting in the Wings

• Protecting yourself from location data
• What you can really do with those chatbots
• How algorithms are automatically denying medical claims

Put your email address in the form at this link and you’ll get a free copy of Spotlight each Monday morning to start your week in the know.

If you’re already a free subscriber, would you please forward this to a friend who could use a little Spotlight in their Monday mornings? It would really help us out, and you know they’ll love it too.

Trends & Spends

Did That Really Happen? — TSA Rules Peanut Butter Is Liquid

The great social media debate over the state of peanut butter began when a podcaster tweeted that the TSA had confiscated a jar of peanut butter at an airport security checkpoint because he couldn’t fly with more than 3.4 ounces of a liquid.  Yes, it’s legit, and TSA posted their definition of a liquid. 

Following Up —  Google Chatbot Sides with Justice Dept. in Antitrust Case

Jane Manchun Wong, who we regularly quote, got the Google Bard chatbot to post a response siding with the Justice Department against Google in its digital advertising antitrust case. Not surprisingly, Google Bard wouldn’t comment about the same issue several days later. Read the exchange.

Protip — Enable 10-bit Color on Your Android Camera

A very cool walkthrough from Tom’s Guide shows you how to increase the bit depth on your camera from the default 8-bit to 10-bit. That increases the “tonal range” from 16.7 million shades of color to 1.07 billion, which is a lot more.

Screening Room — Northwell Health’s Ferocious Tiger

Science Fiction World — UK Backs Rolls-Royce Nukes 

After funding a study last year, the UK Space Agency announced last week that it will sponsor a Rolls-Royce project to build a nuclear reactor on the moon. That is the most science-fiction sentence I’ve ever written here.

Coffee Break —  Radio Time Machine

Want to hear a song from Angola’s radio in 1930 or one of dozens of countries from any decade since 1900?  The radio time machine allows you to select a decade and then tune to a country. It’s great fun.

Sign of the Times

Good Monday Morning

It’s March 20th. The Fed Open Market Committee meets Wednesday. Since their March 17, 2022 meeting, they’ve increased the fed funds rate 8 times, from a very low 0.25% to the current 4.75%.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,030 words — about 4 minutes to read.

Spotlight On … a TikTok Ban

The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the company. Americans’ data may be accessible to Chinese officials, so politicians worry that the app may be used for propaganda and censorship or in service of a nebulous “national security” reason. Talk of a TikTok ban is increasing again.

TikTok creators take the threat of a ban seriously. Many have recommended alternative social media channels to their followers over the last week as the political heat increases.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday. He will reportedly tell committee members that 150 million Americans over 13 now have TikTok accounts. Data collection and moderation practices are expected to be discussed in the hearing. He will likely also discuss Oracle’s recent billion dollar hosting deal. Tech execs including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have previously testified before the same committee.

Approximately half of all states already ban TikTok on state-owned devices. Indiana AG Todd Rokita will lead a lawsuit over the app’s privacy and mature content policies, he announced.

Among federal officials, FBI Director Christopher Wray called the app dangerous. News also broke last week that the Justice Department is investigating the app’s surveillance of American journalists as it tries to learn how they obtained leaked data.

Where People Visit Often … like really a lot

A TikTok ban would be highly unpopular with young voters.

• Two-thirds of TikTok users in the U.S. are under 30.
• TikTok usage among Gen Z exceeds Instagram usage.
• 40% of TikTok users don’t use Facebook and 63% don’t use Twitter.

Pew Research reported last year that 10% of U.S. adults regularly get news from TikTok, up from 3% just two years ago. The average TikTok user spends a startling 95 minutes per day on the app, three times Facebook’s average.

Our Take On A TikTok Ban

We tell clients TikTok is a broadcast channel, not social media. Commenting and sharing are available, but TikTok’s engagement rates are 15% and dropping as users watch the videos sorted by an incredibly effective algorithm. Secondly, Netflix — that other big video viewing app — is TikTok’s biggest brand account.

Politicians will have to make a compelling argument to ban such a ubiquitous product enjoyed by so many voters between 18-30. The app has not been sold, despite Microsoft, Walmart, and Oracle’s past interest in an acquisition. And so far there’s no smoking gun worth antagonizing half of voters under 30 as the 2024 presidential campaign begins in earnest.

3 More Stories to Know

1) A California appeals court said gig workers at Uber, Lyft, and similar companies can continue working as independent contractors. California officials have been seeking to reclassify drivers as employees, a move that industry says will increase prices.

2) Having secured his accounts on Twitter and Facebook, former President Donald Trump had access to his YouTube account restored last Friday. In 2020, the Trump campaign spent $89 million on Facebook and $56 million on Google properties. For now, the restored accounts will allow his campaign to advertise there again.3) In a powerful show of how bots work, Rolling Stone broke news that Twitter users who used the N-word or other terms were tweeted at by a bot offering cheap guns for sale.

 Waiting in the Wings

• Our 3rd annual look at law enforcement technology
• Protecting yourself from location data
• What you can really do with those chatbots

Put your email address in the form at this link and you’ll get a free copy of Spotlight each Monday morning to start your week in the know.

Trends & Spends

Did That Really Happen? — Viral “PYREX” Post Is Untrue

This is usually where Politifact, the Associated Press, and media outlets address conspiracy theories, but the latest consumer story is worthy of your time. It seems that users on multiple networks have spread the story that “PYREX” cookware is better than “pyrex” branded cookware. Lifehacker debunks the claim complete with their wonderful snarkiness.

 Following Up — Another Bad Facial Recognition Arrest

We’ve written before about police misusing facial recognition software and obtaining arrest warrants for people who have never been in their jurisdiction. Now there’s word from Maryland that a man was arrested last year for assaulting a bus driver and stealing a phone on the basis of a facial recognition match. 

The man police mistakenly arrested is twenty years older and seven inches taller than the criminal.

Protip — TikTok Account Reset

Maybe you lingered too long over clips from a show or recipes and now TikTok serves up too much similar content for your liking. Here’s how to use the new reset button to see new content. 

Screening Room — Northwell Health’s Ferocious Tiger

Science Fiction World — Marines Hide Under Box To Fool Robot

Robo-shaped dogs and cyborgs that can fire guns are scary sights, but a recent book describes how eight different Marines were able to fool a robot sentry by hiding under a cardboard box or somersaulting toward the robot using techniques the author called “straight out of a Looney Tunes episode.”

Coffee Break —  25 Tweets That Changed Things

This beautiful NYT interactive (no paywall for this piece) highlights good and bad tweets that helped shape our times: the pandemic, war, storms, birtherism, and more.

Sign of the Times