In Senate hearing, tech giants push lawmakers for federal privacy rules

Another day, another hearing of tech giants in Congress.

Wednesday’s hearing at the Senate Commerce Committee with Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter, alongside AT&T and Charter, marked the latest in a string of hearings in the past few months into all things tech: but mostly controversies embroiling the companies, from election meddling to transparency.

This time, privacy was at the top of the agenda. The problem, lawmakers say, is that consumers have little of it. The hearing said that the U.S. was lagging behind Europe’s new GDPR privacy rules and California’s recently passed privacy law, which goes into effect in 2020, and lawmakers were edging toward introducing their own federal privacy law.

Here are the key takeaways.

Tech giants want new federal legislation, if not just to upend California’s privacy law

For once, the tech giants seemed to agree with one another.

AT&T, Apple, Charter and Google used their time in the Senate to call on lawmakers to introduce new federal privacy legislation. Tech companies spent the past year pushing back against the new state regulations, but have conceded that new privacy rules are inevitable.

Now the companies realize that it’s better to sit at the table to influence a federal privacy law than stand outside in the cold.

In pushing for a new federal law, representatives from each company confirmed that they support the preemption of California’s new rules — something that critics oppose.

AT&T’s chief lawyer Len Cali said that a patchwork of state laws would be unworkable. Apple, too, agreed to support a privacy law, but noted as a company that doesn’t hoard user data for advertising — like Facebook and Google — that any federal law would need to put a premium on protecting the consumer rather than helping companies make money.

But Amazon’s chief lawyer Andrew DeVore said that complying with privacy rules has “required us to divert significant resources to administrative tasks and away from invention.”

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) asked the representatives why lawmakers shouldn’t adopt the same standards seen in Europe and California at a federal level, but none of the companies could answer.

“That question lingers here,” said Thune. “The opposition that you’ve expressed to these rules is one that can nonetheless accommodate the kind of rules that we’ve seen in GDPR and California.”

Google made “mistakes” on privacy, but evades China search questioning

Google took a rare moment to admit it hasn’t always taken the right approach to privacy — though, it wouldn’t point to any specific incident.

“We acknowledge that we have made mistakes in the past, from which we have learned, and improved our robust privacy program,” Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, said in his opening statement.

But that, lawmakers said, contrasted with recent reports of the company’s return to China — almost a decade after it pulled out of the country after allegations of Chinese efforts to hack into the search giant’s systems and ethical conflicts with China’s censorship policies.

Google reportedly began working on “Dragonfly,” a China-focused search engine that would block certain keywords to fall in line with China’s censorship rules. The effort has been widely decried by human rights groups, and led to a high-profile resignation.

Prior to the Senate hearing, a former Google engineer sent a letter to the committee asking lawmakers to pressure Enright to respond.

Google to date has refused to confirm or comment on the reports, but Enright said that “there is a Project Dragonfly.”

“We are not close to launching a search product in China,” he said, in response to one lawmaker. Later, he said that he didn’t think the company “could or would launch a product” without including its privacy and security policies.

Startups might struggle under GDPR-ported rules, companies claim

Startups and small businesses with slimmer resources than the tech giants could be a major casualty if GDPR-like rules were ported into federal law.

Enright said that ensuring compliance under GDPR was complicated and costly, but wouldn’t put a figure on how much Google had spent on complying with GDPR when asked by one lawmaker. Enright suggested that it was likely in the millions of dollars.

But even larger companies like Charter, which are wholly U.S.-based and have no European presence, said they wouldn’t know how they would be affected if GDPR principles were ported over stateside.

Charter’s policy chief Rachel Welch said that the U.S. should “put its own stamp” and not just roll over GDPR principles.

Apple added that self-employed developers and software house startups could suffer under new federal privacy rules. The company has some 20 million developers that rely on its app store to sell their software. “Small companies don’t have teams of lawyers to draft things,” said Apple’s Bud Tribble, and asked that any new federal rules should consider startups “to help make things clear and so that businesses have one set of rules than many sets of rules to follow.”

It’s a line parroted by tech giants before and without much evidence to back it up. Although some companies have shuttered operations in Europe, other startups hit the deadline and continue to thrive.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) called for greater representation from startups to help understand the cost breakdowns to understand it better.

Thune said that the committee won’t “rush through” legislation, and will ask privacy advocates for their input in a coming hearing.

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See the new iPhone’s ‘focus pixels’ up close

The new iPhones have excellent cameras, to be sure. But it’s always good to verify Apple’s breathless onstage claims with first-hand reports. We have our own review of the phones and their photography systems, but teardowns provide the invaluable service of letting you see the biggest changes with your own eyes — augmented, of course, by a high-powered microscope.

We’ve already seen iFixit’s solid-as-always disassembly of the phone, but TechInsights gets a lot closer to the device’s components — including the improved camera of the iPhone XS and XS Max.

Although the optics of the new camera are as far as we can tell unchanged since the X, the sensor is a new one and is worth looking closely at.

Microphotography of the sensor die show that Apple’s claims are borne out and then some. The sensor size has increased from 32.8mm² to 40.6mm² — a huge difference despite the small units. Every tiny bit counts at this scale. (For comparison, the Galaxy S9 is 45mm², and the soon-to-be-replaced Pixel 2 is 25mm².)

The pixels themselves also, as advertised, grew from 1.22 microns (micrometers) across to 1.4 microns — which should help with image quality across the board. But there’s an interesting, subtler development that has continually but quietly changed ever since its introduction: the “focus pixels.”

That’s Apple’s brand name for phase detection autofocus (PDAF) points, found in plenty of other devices. The basic idea is that you mask off half a sub-pixel every once in a while (which I guess makes it a sub-sub-pixel), and by observing how light enters these half-covered detectors you can tell whether something is in focus or not.

Of course, you need a bunch of them to sense the image patterns with high fidelity, but you have to strike a balance: losing half a pixel may not sound like much, but if you do it a million times, that’s half a megapixel effectively down the drain. Wondering why all the PDAF points are green? Many camera sensors use an “RGBG” sub-pixel pattern, meaning there are two green sub-pixels for each red and blue one — it’s complicated why. But there are twice as many green sub-pixels and therefore the green channel is more robust to losing a bit of information.Apple introduced PDAF in the iPhone 6, but as you can see in TechInsights’ great diagram, the points are pretty scarce. There’s one for maybe every 64 sub-pixels, and not only that, they’re all masked off in the same orientation: either the left or right half gone.

The 6S and 7 Pluses saw the number double to one PDAF point per 32 sub-pixels. And in the 8 Plus, the number is improved to one per 20 — but there’s another addition: now the phase detection masks are on the tops and bottoms of the sub-pixels as well. As you can imagine, doing phase detection in multiple directions is a more sophisticated proposal, but it could also significantly improve the accuracy of the process. Autofocus systems all have their weaknesses, and this may have addressed one Apple regretted in earlier iterations.

Which brings us to the XS (and Max, of course), in which the PDAF points are now one per 16 sub-pixels, having increased the frequency of the vertical phase detection points so that they’re equal in number to the horizontal one. Clearly the experiment paid off and any consequent light loss has been mitigated or accounted for.

I’m curious how the sub-pixel patterns of Samsung, Huawei and Google phones compare, and I’m looking into it. But I wanted to highlight this interesting little evolution. It’s an interesting example of the kind of changes that are hard to understand when explained in simple number form — we’ve doubled this, or there are a million more of that — but which make sense when you see them in physical form.

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The new era in mobile

Joe Apprendi Contributor

Joe Apprendi is a general partner at Revel Partners.

More posts by this contributor

• Big data’s humble beginnings

A future dominated by autonomous vehicles (AVs) is, for many experts, a foregone conclusion. Declarations that the automobile will become the next living room are almost as common — but, they are imprecise. In our inevitable driverless future, the more apt comparison is to the mobile device. As with smartphones, operating systems will go a long way toward determining what autonomous vehicles are and what they could be. For mobile app companies trying to seize on the coming AV opportunity, their future depends on how the OS landscape shapes up.

By most measures, the mobile app economy is still growing, yet the time people spend using their apps is actually starting to dip. A recent study reported that overall app session activity grew only 6 percent in 2017, down from the 11 percent growth it reported in 2016. This trend suggests users are reaching a saturation point in terms of how much time they can devote to apps. The AV industry could reverse that. But just how mobile apps will penetrate this market and who will hold the keys in this new era of mobility is still very much in doubt.

When it comes to a driverless future, multiple factors are now converging. Over the last few years, while app usage showed signs of stagnation, the push for driverless vehicles has only intensified. More cities are live-testing driverless software than ever, and investments in autonomous vehicle technology and software by tech giants like Google and Uber (measured in the billions) are starting to mature. And, after some reluctance, automakers have now embraced this idea of a driverless future. Expectations from all sides point to a “passenger economy” of mobility-as-a-service, which, by some estimates, may be worth as much as $7 trillion by 2050.

For mobile app companies this suggests several interesting questions: Will smart cars, like smartphones before them, be forced to go “exclusive” with a single OS of record (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon/AGL), or will they be able to offer multiple OS/platforms of record based on app maturity or functionality? Or, will automakers simply step in to create their own closed loop operating systems, fragmenting the market completely?

Automakers and tech companies clearly recognize the importance of “connected mobility.”

Complicating the picture even further is the potential significance of an OS’s ability to support multiple Digital Assistants of Record (independent of the OS), as we see with Google Assistant now working on iOS. Obviously, voice NLP/U will be even more critical for smart car applications as compared to smart speakers and phones. Even in those established arenas the battle for OS dominance is only just beginning. Opening a new front in driverless vehicles could have a fascinating impact. Either way, the implications for mobile app companies are significant.

Looking at the driverless landscape today there are several indications as to which direction the OSes in AVs will ultimately go. For example, after some initial inroads developing their own fleet of autonomous vehicles, Google has now focused almost all its efforts on autonomous driving software while striking numerous partnership deals with traditional automakers. Some automakers, however, are moving forward developing their own OSes. Volkswagen, for instance, announced that vw.OS will be introduced in VW brand electric cars from 2020 onward, with an eye toward autonomous driving functions. (VW also plans to launch a fleet of autonomous cars in 2019 to rival Uber.) Tesla, a leader in AV, is building its own unified hardware-software stack. Companies like Udacity, however, are building an “open-source” self-driving car tech. Mobileye and Baidu have a partnership in place to provide software for automobile manufacturers.

Clearly, most smartphone apps would benefit from native integration, but there are several categories beyond music, voice and navigation that require significant hardware investment to natively integrate. Will automakers be interested in the Tesla model? If not, how will smart cars and apps (independent of OS/voice assistant) partner up? Given the hardware requirements necessary to enable native app functionality and optimal user experience, how will this force smart car manufacturers to work more seamlessly with platforms like AGL to ensure competitive advantage and differentiation? And, will this commoditize the OS dominance we see in smartphones today?

It’s clearly still early days and — at least in the near term — multiple OS solutions will likely be employed until preferred solutions rise to the top. Regardless, automakers and tech companies clearly recognize the importance of “connected mobility.” Connectivity and vehicular mobility will very likely replace traditional auto values like speed, comfort and power. The combination of Wi-Fi hotspot and autonomous vehicles (let alone consumer/business choice of on-demand vehicles) will propel instant conversion/personalization of smart car environments to passenger preferences. And, while questions remain around the how and the who in this new era in mobile, it’s not hard to see the why.

Americans already spend an average of 293 hours per year inside a car, and the average commute time has jumped around 20 percent since 1980. In a recent survey (conducted by Ipsos/GenPop) researchers found that in a driverless future people would spend roughly a third of the time communicating with friends and family or for business and online shopping. By 2030, it’s estimated the autonomous cars “will free up a mind-blowing 1.9 trillion minutes for passengers.” Another analysis suggested that even with just 10 percent adoption, driverless cars could account for $250 billion in driver productivity alone.

Productivity in this sense extends well beyond personal entertainment and commerce and into the realm of business productivity. Use of integrated display (screen and heads-up) and voice will enable business multi-tasking from video conferencing, search, messaging, scheduling, travel booking, e-commerce and navigation. First-mover advantage goes to the mobile app companies that first bundle into a single compelling package information density, content access and mobility. An app company that can claim 10 to 15 percent of this market will be a significant player.

For now, investors are throwing lots of money at possible winners in the autonomous automotive race, who, in turn, are beginning to define the shape of the mobile app landscape in a driverless future. In fact, what we’re seeing now looks a lot like the early days of smartphones with companies like Tesla, for example, applying an Apple-esque strategy for smart car versus smartphone. Will these OS/app marketplaces be dominated by a Tesla — or Google (for that matter) — and command a 30 percent revenue share from apps, or will auto manufacturers with proprietary platforms capitalize on this opportunity? Questions like these — while at the same time wondering just who the winners and losers in AV will be — mean investment and entrepreneurship in the mobile app sector is an extremely lucrative but risky gamble.

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Qualcomm doubles down on claims that Apple stole chip secrets for Intel

If you happen to crack open that fancy little iPhone XS casing on your new phone, you’ll notice that there’s a dwindling amount of Qualcomm chips in there and that they’re increasingly being replaced by Intel hardware.

The swap is representative of the cooling state of affairs between the two as the companies’ legal teams battle over Apple’s refusal to pay royalties that Qualcomm claims it is owed. Today, Qualcomm doubled down on its claims that Apple was stealing chip secrets from Qualcomm tech and feeding it to Intel engineers.

CNBC reports:

Qualcomm has unveiled explosive charges against Apple for stealing “vast swaths” of its confidential information and trade secrets for the purpose of improving the performance of chip sets provided by Qualcomm competitor Intel, according to a filing with the Superior Court of California.

The allegations are contained in a complaint that Qualcomm hopes the court will amend to its existing lawsuit against Apple for breaching the so called master software agreement that Apple signed when it became a customer of Qualcomm’s earlier this decade.

The newly filed documents amend an earlier suit by the company, claiming that Intel engineers working with Apple have been using Qualcomm source code.

Qualcomm sues Apple, alleging it shared chip code with Intel

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Security researcher claims macOS Mojave privacy bug on launch day

A security researcher has claimed a new vulnerability in the latest version of macOS — just hours before the software is due to be released.

Patrick Wardle, chief researcher officer at Digita Security, tweeted a video Monday of an apparent privacy feature bypass that’s designed to prevent apps from improperly accessing a user’s personal data.

For years, Macs have forced apps to ask for permission before accessing your contacts and calendar after some iOS apps were caught uploading private data. Apple said at its annual developer conference this year that it would expand the feature to include apps asking for permission to access the camera, microphone, email and backups.

Wardle told TechCrunch that his findings are “not a universal bypass” of the feature, but that the bug could allow a malicious app to grab certain protected data, such as a user’s contacts, when a user is logged in.

Mojave's 'dark mode' is gorgeous
…but its promises about improved privacy protections? kinda #FakeNews

0day bypass:https://t.co/rRf8t7C7Zf

btw if anybody has a link to 's macOS bug bounty program I'd to report this & other 0days -donating any payouts to charity

— patrick wardle (@patrickwardle) September 24, 2018

The video shows the operating system initially rejecting access to his stored contacts, but later copying his entire address book to the desktop after running an unprivileged script simulating a malicious app.

Wardle isn’t releasing specifics of the bug yet, he said, because he doesn’t want to put users at risk, but dropped the video out of frustration at the company’s lack of bug bounty, which he said disincentives security researchers from reporting bugs to the company.

“Other operating system vendors have acknowledged that any software is going to have vulnerabilities,” but that Apple is “sticking its head in the sand.”

Apple was one of the last major companies to roll out a bug bounty program — giving security researchers money in exchange for responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities. Apple began offering cash bounties of up to $200,000 for the most severe iOS bugs. But the company has neglected to port the program over to macOS, for reasons unknown.

“Unfortunately until there’s a reason for Apple to change its approach to security, it’s not going to,” he said. “Generally, companies don’t change something until they realize it’s broken.”

We reached out to Apple for comment and will update if we hear back.

It’s the second time Wardle released details of a serious vulnerability in macOS on launch day — the most recent case was almost exactly a year ago at the launch of macOS High Sierra.

Wardle is expected to talk more of the technical details of the Mojave bug at the Objective-by-the-Sea conference in November, he said.

Apple will release macOS Mojave later on Monday.

The best security and privacy features in iOS 12 and macOS Mojave

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It sounds like Apple’s original content is going to be really, really bad

Last year, an investor projected that Apple would be spending up to $4.2 billion on original content by 2022, but if the reports coming out now about what that content will look like are correct, the company may want its money back.

A new Wall Street Journal article highlights some of the tensions that Apple faces as it looks to create a streaming media service in the age of Handmaid’s Tale, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Game of Thrones, and even The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

To set the table, The Journal walked readers through some of the issues Tim Cook apparently had with Vital Signs, a title the company had acquired loosely based on the biography of rap legend (and former head of the billion dollar Apple acquisition, Beats) Dr. Dre.

Reportedly, after Cook saw scenes including a mansion orgy, white lines, and drawn guns the Apple chief put the kibosh on the whole production saying it was too violent and not something that Apple can air.

For Apple’s content business, gratuitous profanity, sex or violence are all verboten as the company tries to thread the needle between being a widely beloved producer of high quality consumer goods and purveyor of paid entertainment to a public that’s increasingly enthralled with blood and gore at its circuses.

In other words, Apple’s mores seem a little misplaced.

There’s a problem for Apple as it tries to stitch together a studio while limiting itself to the entertainment equivalent of cream of wheat. Plenty of other other technology companies are gunning for that number one slot and studios are fighting for their very survival.

Money may talk in Hollywood, but creative control, ensuring an audience for a show, and the continued viability of programming also have their place. Creators may find that they’re far more comfortable wrapped in a quilt that has more varied programming where their shows may be buoyed by the success of other, darker programming that appeals to a broader audience.

If Apple’s aversion to potentially scandalous storylines is as extreme as The Wall Street Journal article makes it seem — requesting the removal of crucifixes from a set to avoid offending religious sensibilities in an M. Night Shyamalan drama; parting ways with show-runners because of the “dark tone” they were taking in a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories and the big budget vehicle for Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon; spiking the Dr. Dre show entirely — it may not even be able to field series as enjoyable as reported Cook favorite Friday Night Lights (which featured teenage sex, underage drinking, abortion, and extreme religiosity alongside the familial and football foibles of Eric and Tammy Taylor).

Apple’s ambitions to be the go to spot for family friendly fare also risks being thwarted by the only studio that’s managed to fend off the tech giants encroaching on the entertainment world — Disney. The mighty mouse house has plans for its own streaming service (and already has a place for more mature content to reside). A bundled package that includes discounts could be an unbeatable option for would-be subscribers — and makes up for the fact that Disney’s own streaming service won’t have R-rated films.

Disney may offer a discounted bundle of Hulu, ESPN+ and its new streaming service

With competition so fierce it doesn’t make much sense for Apple to box its own content service into a corner just as it’s struggling to get its footing the ring.

All that said, having a roughly $200 billion pile of cash sitting in the corner definitely gives Apple’s streaming contender a fighting chance. The question is whether an audience will stick around to watch what’s likely to be a bloodless fight.

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iPhone XS Max is reportedly dramatically outselling the XS

According to some early numbers from Apple analyst extraordinaire, Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone Max XS is currently running laps around its smaller counterpart. In a note posted by MacRumors, Kuo suggested that the 6.5-inch handset sold three to four time as well as the XS during its inaugural weekend.

“We have determined that the demand for XS Max is better than expected (3–4 times that of XS),” says Kuo. “The gold and space-grey colors are significantly more popular than the silver. 256GB is the most popular, and 512GB is subject to a serious shortage because only Samsung can currently ship NAND Flash well. We are positive that XS Max shipments will grow steadily in 4Q18 thanks to demand from Asia market and the gift season.”

The higher demand shouldn’t be altogether surprising. After all, the XS doesn’t mark an earth shattering upgrade over its predecessor. The Max, on the other hand, is a pretty sizable jump in display size for the company that was once suggested that consumers simple don’t want a larger phone. 

And while the two models are quite similar from the standpoint of specs, the bigger display will only run an extra $100. If you’re already in for $1,000, what’s another $100 between friends, right?

The note also states that Apple Watch Series 4 demand is better than anticipated, while the iPhone XR is expected to be a good seller for the company. No surprise on that last one, really. The XR represents an attainable upgrade for those users unwilling or unable to pull the trigger for a $1,000 phone with last year’s handset.

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