 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Steve Iderola, Jeffrey Zilx, and Tony Glass. Coming up on DTNS, how to keep medical and other private info private, Sarah has an inside perspective on Airbnb's party ban, and Lamar and I describe our just walk out experience at Whole Foods Market. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 28th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Man, from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Also from Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. And I'm Roger Chang. This show is pretty soon. We're very Los Angeles heavy today, so we apologize to our East Coast folks. We will get out to Utah tomorrow though, I promise. Indeed we will. All California show today. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Mac rumors notes that the MaxTech and CreatedTech channels found that the drive read and write speeds of the M2 version of the 13 inch MacBook Pro are as much as 50% slower than the M1 version of the same laptop. Both channels open the laptop up found at the M2 MacBook Pro uses a single 256 gig NAND flash chip. The M1 MacBook Pro uses two 128 gigabyte flash chips. SSD controllers control something called interleaving when handling multiple physical chips and fewer chips can limit peak performance. Both channels found the slow speeds on the model with 256 gigs of storage and M2 model with 512 gigs had similar read and write speeds to that M1 model. Yeah. So it's the two flash chips because you don't have two flash chips, it slows down the read write. Makes sense. Okay. That's actually not that big of a deal. The game developer Niantic announced a new title called NBA All World. Like other Niantic titles, it's location based with augmented reality like elements. Advertisers can play one-on-one basketball games with real world locations providing power ups and customization options. The game will come out on iOS and Android during the next season of the NBA. HTC announced the Desire 22 Pro at 399 British pound mid-range Android phone with a 120 Hertz 1080p display shipping on August 1st. It offers a built-in digital wallet for managing crypto assets and comes with a free NFT. That's nice. HTC also says it's the perfect companion to its announced Vive Flow VR headset, but we're not totally clear at this point what specific integration there is there. If you buy this, email us feedback at dailytechnews.com. Waymo Via is the trucking arm of Waymo and Waymo Via and JB Hunt Transport Services announced another test of Class 8 autonomous trucks. So they're Class 8 trucks that are autonomous to deliver home goods from Wayfair along Interstate 45 between facilities in Houston and Dallas, Texas. That's where those are. The test will take place at a six-week period in July and August this year. Each truck will have a human safety driver on board as well as a software engineer. Google launched its Google Earth engine back in 2010, providing access to academic researchers and nonprofits. It's now expanded this into a commercial offering for private and government organizations will be continued to be available at no cost for nonprofits, research and educational uses. All right. Let's talk about the fact that Airbnb doesn't want me to party, Sarah. Airbnb would love for you to party, Tom, just not at a house that is part of the Airbnb system. OK, so back in 2020, and this was, you know, in the beginning times of our current COVID life that we live, Airbnb issued a temporary temporary at the time ban of parties at rental houses in order to help reduce the spread of COVID. It's now made this ban on all disruptive parties and events permanent, especially those with open invites. That means, you know, maybe there's a house party that's posted on social media and a lot of people know about it and a lot of people are going to show up type thing. Airbnb said it suspended accounts on 6,600 guests for violating the party ban back in 2021. You might say, wow, that's a lot of parties. And it is, but out of some 150 million users, not that many, at least not that many that were deemed to be an issue. At the same time, the company also lifted a 16 person occupancy limit that it introduced back in 2020 as well. So you can have more people at your house if your house can handle it, but you can't have a party. Yeah, the 16 person occupancy limit doesn't mean like three bedroom houses now have to accept 20 people. It means if you have like a big, big house that could accommodate 30 people up until now, you couldn't book, let people book more than 16. Now you can. The party thing I was joking because I went to a party. It may have been Verbo, but I think it was Airbnb in Malibu. It was like 25 people and they weren't blasting the music, but they did have a speaker outside and somebody called the cops and the cops very nicely came by and were like, hey, we get this all the time, just turn the music down. You know, if we don't have to come back, it won't be a big deal. And nobody got in trouble. Nobody got banned from Airbnb. What this is about is massive parties, right? Sarah, like, like you're talking about people abusing the privilege. Yeah, exactly. So as a property manager for an Airbnb where I live, I am keenly aware of the rules and, you know, I moved in here and started doing this gig part time just before COVID hit. So a lot of things that seemed like, OK, we'll have to, you know, take case by case. If people want to have a wedding here on the property type thing, you know, it turned into, oh, no, we can't do any of that. Can't be done. I mean, unless you had like three people at your wedding and we get a lot of requests from folks to do things that they don't want to. They don't want to make seem our events, but they're very clearly events. And there have been a couple, not that many, but a couple of instances where people brought amplified music. And all of a sudden I'm like, what are you got? You guys, you can't do that. I'm the one who gets in trouble. I mean, I'm, you know, I've got a little license, you know, as the property manager. This is this is not OK. And you should have known that ahead of time. As far as just sort of the wild party stuff, I get why Airbnb is like, I mean, look at the numbers of all of all of our users and so many people who have continued to use this platform, even though life has changed a little bit over the last couple of years, pretty small amount of them were having wild parties. Let's just say no more parties. And that way, you know, nobody gets refunded from the company. If they do something wrong, there's, you know, fewer disputes that the company has to deal with because that does happen a lot. You know, if a guest and I have like some sort of an issue between the two of us and I get Airbnb involved, then somebody over there has to figure out who was right and who was wrong. Go ahead. I can't imagine. Sorry to interrupt you. I can't imagine that they really care on a surface level, like like people spending their money, whatever. I think the part of it is it's an insurance issue or can be an insurance issue and more probably just a PR disaster. If something goes majorly wrong, like, you know, like, you know, people dying. Yeah, which happened back in 2019 or into California. Right. You know, like that's what started the first more vague ban. And they've just gotten more specific since then. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's it's it's funny because, you know, we mentioned that 16 people maximum at at the house that I run. There's actually two houses. I mean, it's a pretty big property, but you still can't fit 16 people comfortably in beds. If you if you had 16 people in there, somebody's on the floor or couch or, you know, sleeping bag or on a lawn chair outside or whatever. So we say, you know, here's our cap. This is this is what will make you the most comfortable. And we get a lot of people saying, well, you know, we've got some kids. They don't really care. Do you care? And at that point, it has to be a bit of a judgment call of, OK, well, if it's if it's truly more than 16 people at all times, I mean, even if you had a caterer or somebody here, you know, if you were having like a very small soiree that wasn't wild and nobody's getting hurt or anything, we still can't technically do it because if a neighbor calls the cops on us, guess who gets in trouble? That would be yours truly. Well, and I feel like that's a great example of why you set the rule harsher than you mean so that yeah, because people are always going to push the edge and they're always going to cheat a little bit. And like, you know, like, oh, we're not supposed to have any loud disruptive parties or events. But what if we just have a few friends over? It's like, you want to keep it in that realm. That that's why exactly really what Airbnb is saying is we don't want masses of people disrupting things and it varies by from place to place. When I went to that birthday party, it was a place where the cops are very clearly like, people do this all the time. It's not a problem. There's just somebody down the road that always calls it in, you know. So just turn turn your your boombox basically down. It wasn't like we had a big PA system or anything. And and and I think it's different in Palm Springs. We rented a place in Palm Springs once where there were clear things of like, you cannot play the radio outside like this, that you will get called and you will be responsible. Like it was very like strict in that neighborhood. So it it it changes from place to place. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this really has to do with neighbors. If you know, if if there are 30 people on this property and nobody's doing anything wrong, but the music is really loud. One of my neighbors is going to text to me and be like, Sarah, are you around like what's happening here? I mean, maybe not for like an hour or two. But if it went late into the night, yeah, I mean, it's disruptive. And the company is like, we just don't want to be associated with a bunch of disruptive people. So we're just going to go ahead and say no parties. They know there are going to be parties. They're going to be parties. But if you've got a company wide policy, then you at least get some of those folks to go, hmm, maybe we shouldn't go through them because it's just going to be a hassle or yeah, or keep it smaller. And yeah, just just, you know, or stay home, go elsewhere. Yeah. Well, recently, people in the United States have become concerned with protecting their medical data. And several of you have asked us to cover the risks regarding technology, how to protect your privacy. There are multiple examples where the government might attempt to access your data without your permission. So these are tips apply to anyone who wants to legally protect their own privacy from government surveillance. The Verge has a guide up on how to protect your medical data in particular, which is worth a read. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. Since so many people asked us about medical data, let's go ahead and start there. In the US, if you're not familiar with HIPAA, that's the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, doesn't protect against all non consensual disclosures of your medical information, does for much of it, but not all of it. Medical personnel may disclose personal medical information if they think a crime has been committed or if they believe criminal activity is happening at the site of a medical emergency, for example, and all health organizations also must give access to health records in response to a court order. One exception is Connecticut, state of Connecticut, where a law blocks other states from subpoena subpoenaing reproductive health-related information. And also what's interesting is that HIPAA does not apply to organizations not offering actual medical care. Here's an example, pregnancy counseling organizations that do not offer medical care may collect data not protected from disclosure. Apps that store your health information may not fall under HIPAA's rules, depending on which information they collect. So exercise apps, smartwatch, fitness apps, period trackers and more. So while these kind of apps have not figured in many cases, they almost apply or comply with valid court orders to turn over such information. So now, Tom, let's talk about more about broad information collection. Yeah, yeah. So beyond just medical information, a lot of people worry about ad tracking, you know, tracking your IP address or pixel tracking cookies. The Verge points out these are not really known to be used in law enforcement investigations, despite the HIPAA Brown to add tracking. It isn't nearly as personal as you might think. And while personal information could be decoded from it, that takes work. Law enforcement has easier ways of getting more useful data. However, blocking cookies and using privacy protective browsers like Firefox or Brave can reduce that small risk even further. A more common target for investigators would be your search history. And the most common way to find search history is on your unlocked phone. However, search engines also must comply with valid court orders to report search histories they might have stored in the cloud. In either case, your search history can't be handed over if it's not there. So if you wanted to protect it, you could sign out of a search engine. That stops them from associated with your account or use a search engine that doesn't store any of your history like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search. Now, another way to protect your privacy is when you buy something online. If you are purchasing legal items, legal, that you want to keep private, including medical supplies or medicines that you might want to consider using a gift card so the purchase doesn't show up in your credit card records or associated with your personal info in a point of sale app like Square. That was really interesting. And yeah, I know, you know, for a lot of people if you're listening to this for the first time, most of our audience is pretty well aware of privacy. But you might be like, OK, what about phone calls and text messages? Also applicable here may also be accessible to investigators. Cell phone network providers may be compelled to provide which numbers you've called or you've texted. And a court can order a search warrant for the contents of text messages and saved voicemails using encrypted apps like Signal would preserve your privacy in a situation like that. Yeah, and same goes for your location data. Mobile devices can collect location data based on things like which cell towers or Wi-Fi access points you connect to. Obviously, some apps will get try to get access to that as well as your GPS data. You can avoid the last the apps by denying an app permission to like your location, but location data from apps and cell phone use or even your web browsing, which could have IP addresses that might be used to narrow down your location is often obtained and sold in bulk by data brokers if you're not blocking it. The data is anonymized, but de anonymization can be done. It takes effort again. So it's more common for intelligence agencies like Department of Homeland Security type agencies to do that sort of thing. It's not real common for state or local police to go after that. But cell phone providers can be asked to provide location through what's called a geofence warrant. That is something that local and state police often do not even often, but can do that asks for info on all devices that pass through a certain area linked to a crime. And that way they can try to narrow down and find their suspect. Those are controversial warrants, however, and they're not extremely common yet. So what do you do here? Well, the easiest way to avoid collection of location data, that's an important part, is to leave a phone at home or completely turn it off. Now, iPhones have a low power mode when off to help locate the phone if lost, can only be accessed by the account holder of the phone. And historical data is not stored. That's important to know if a phone must be left on, you could disable location data collection in the settings for either iOS or Android. We'll have all this information in our show notes, DailyTechNewShow.com. I also put it together in an article on my sub stack at techtime.substack.com. If you want to access it that way or share it around that way. And like Sarah said, we know a lot of these are things where you're like, yeah, I know about this, but just a good rundown and reminder of like, here are all the things you can do, here are all the things to consider. And maybe, maybe keep you from freaking out about certain things which are less likely to be used than others. Yeah, I don't know that. Go ahead, Lamar. Okay, I thought one of the key ones is, if you're worried about location data, just simply just turning that knob off, that option off. That here is a lot of the ales, a lot of the things you might be worried about just by changing that setting. And so when, if you're, let's say panicking, but if you're concerned about it, that's one huge one to turn off, I think it turns out GPS. And then you can also, what airplane mode? Is that also turn off like your location as far as really just kills the cell connection? It'll leave Wi-Fi on and it'll leave Bluetooth on. Bluetooth can be used for beacon tracking and stuff like that. So yeah, killing location data is probably your bigger deal. And honestly, if you're really worried about it, just turn your phone off is the only sure for the way. Yeah, but again, that's going to take away functionality. If you need maps or navigation. So there are instances where you might just want to make sure that you've got a phone that doesn't have anything else on it, maybe isn't even a burner phone that's not associated with your ID as closely or something like that. A lot of folks who are doing coverage of things in controversial areas at a friend who was covering the Egyptian uprising years ago was doing things like that, where you get a burner phone and you put an encrypted messaging app that worked, worked peer to peer. So that it wasn't even going out over the internet. There's all kinds of really sophisticated things you can do like that. Hey, folks, if you haven't thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, well, here it is. Email us feedback and daily tech news show dot com. Amazon wants to sell its cashier lists. Just walk out technology to more stores. It has it in smaller stores like Hudson stores, Sainsbury's Convenience stores, some locations in resort world Las Vegas, few sports arenas. Amazon Go uses it for those convenience store size location. That's kind of the template for that. But they want to get bigger stores on board. So they've been rolling it out in their own Whole Foods locations. Amazon Whole Foods launched its first store with Just Walk Out in Washington, D.C.'s Glover Park back in February. And at the time said it expected costs to operate the store would drop 75 percent just just on handling returns and and and and inventory management and and things like that. The second one of them opened in LA Sherman Oaks neighborhood in March. So since we're so Los Angeles centric on this episode, we were able to head over there and check it out Lamar. And it was it was kind of fun. It was it was I remember we went last year, you and I to an Amazon fresh store and that was an interesting experience because they use as a cart to scan things. This time when we went in here, we have to have the app open on our on our phone and we scan our app to get in. You got in OK. I had a little problem because I had to connect my regular credit card to the the app versus the Amazon store card, which can be used online for Whole Foods, but for some reason in store, cannot be used. So that was that was the best part is that your Amazon card was like, oh, yeah, you can't use that. We don't take that here. Yeah, exactly. But you got in after that. Is it so it was a it was a setup problem. You can also choose to use a credit card that is associated with your account, although apparently not the Amazon card in Lamar's case. You can just use that if you don't want to use the app. You can also do Amazon one, which is their palm scanning. You could set that up. A lot of people may be freaked out by that, but you can do that. Or you can just choose to pay at a register. You could say like, I don't want to do any of that. And they'll let you in and then you have to pay at a register, which is actually more like self-checkout. There's an employee attendant there, but it's more like the traditional self-checkout you have. Also, you're told to bag as you go because the one that you mentioned about Amazon Fresh, you have a cart and you scan and it scans the food as you put it in the cart. The whole food store that we went to was like the whole store was the cart and it could tell where you were and what stuff you picked up and put in your cart. So you didn't have to scan. You didn't have to worry about, you know, did it scan properly as you put it in the cart. And in fact, the cart often would mess up for me. Whereas this, I was just grabbing stuff and put it in. They told you to bag as you go because of that. I didn't do that though. I waited till the end and bagged everything else, which was really dumb. Like, I don't know why I didn't do that. Like I didn't trust the system, I guess. I mean, so you weren't, you weren't trying to be defiant. No, we're acting more like how you would at a regular grocery store. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was actually funny. I did it mostly. You gave me more credit than I needed there. I did it, did a sum, but I was still like, it felt like a normal grocery store, but I knew cameras are all around me. So it's like, are they really going to get this? Are they going to scan this correctly? Especially when I put a couple of things back. Yeah. You know, I think you did the same too. Oh yeah. No, I did the same thing on purpose. I was like, I immediately went to the loose oranges and just like grabbed oranges. Now they're charging you per orange. They're not charging you by weight. So that's a difference here. They're not charging anything by weight in this store. So I filled it, you know, put oranges in a bag, put apples in a bag. The bananas, they didn't want you to go individually. They had them all in bundles of six and they were priced as bundles of six. I was tempted to try to rip one out, but they did have them taped up. So I was like, well, it's very clear that they don't want me to do that. So I'm not going to like fully break the rules. But I was definitely like picking stuff up on the shelf, putting it in my cart, then pulling it out and put it back on the shelf. I was walking away from my cart all the time and grabbing things just to see if it could really track me. And that's normal behavior. I do that all the time in a normal grocery store. So I really was trying to do like all the behaviors that I would normally do. Yeah, I thought it was funny. So you were at the hot food bar. We came around there and you got, I believe, some yams. So like the container says, hey, it's 1099 for this container. And you put two in there and I'm like, Tom, fill it up. It's the same price. Phil, the worst of that, LaVar, I put one in there and then you pointed out like it's not by weight, it's by the box. And I'm like, well, I guess I should have at least two, but I really don't want any more than that. Yeah, you can put anything in there. Yeah, it's my container, container based. Well, and imagine the Amazon and being like, if Tom just wants the one, yeah, I'm fine, it's still 1099, but if he gets four in there, 1099. So yeah, that's, I guess that's one way that, you know, I might be taken aback by, oh, this is a different shopping experience than what I'm used to because I'm used to, you know, stuff by weight. I mean, not everything in produce is by weight, but a lot of it is. For alcohol, there was a lady, a very nice lady just kind of hanging out. That was her job is to check your ID before you walked into the part of the store that had the alcohol and then you show your ID. And then then it all worked just like the rest of the store, but you did have to pull out your driver's license to get into the alcohol part. And then I was surprised, Lamar, that when we walked out, we had to scan again. Yeah, we had to scan with our phone or if you use the palm. But yeah, so it's not, it's not just easy as like, OK, I'm back, what's up by still have to validate that you are leaving so they can mark your time, yeah, which I don't think at Amazon Go, you have to do it. I think it just scan and then you just walk. You didn't get to just walk out of the Whole Foods. Yeah, you had to scan again. I don't know the promise that though. So it's called just walk out right there in the name. I'm sorry. Oh, it is. Oh, OK. Well, they lied. Well, I don't know if Whole Foods calls it that. You're right. But that is the name of the technology. Anyway, we were sitting around waiting for our receipts. That was the other weird part is you walked out and there was no beep. There was no confirmation. Like you scanned your app. That was it. It didn't tell you anything. And it took four hours for my receipt to come. Yeah. And I got mine and one. My theory was they actually had somebody looking at the footage. Like, I don't think this is the smartest as they I'm playing here. But I was like, I wonder if there's someone there validating that you really did get the stuff because for it to take an hour that they had to do manual at the same time. Yours took an hour. Mine took four hours. I did get a lot of stuff, but yeah. I don't know. I don't know. There's there. I was curious about that. Everything was accurate, though. Yeah, everything was accurate. I did end up grabbing some stale cookies when I got home. I realized they were stale. So I went online, did the did the refund. Hey, I want my money back. No hassle. They didn't say bring it back to the store. Anything they say, keep them. And so I got my money back instantly. So that was the fast part. You know, I just thought I just thought in whole. This was a this was a really good experience. Yeah, I definitely want to try it again and and just experience the convenience of it, because it was a little bit like, oh, I'm trying different things out this time. Next time I just want to like, OK, just let me let me get the things I would normally get. You do still have to pay Whole Foods prices as well. It was. And it just and to be fair, like it was a nice size store, but it was definitely modified amount of stuff for like like a Whole Foods. We went to before a newer one in our area is much larger. Yeah, yeah, but this was more modified, but but it had to be for this kind of service to work. Dine in. I did go to the butcher and I got some chicken wings, right? You could still do stuff like that. And I know you got a slice of pizza, but they boxed it up. It wasn't like in some Whole Foods, you can actually eat in the store. You couldn't do that here. See, Tom's trying to be nice. I should I got to let's just be real. I got two slices of pizza ate them in front of him. He's trying to be nice. Why have my eyes? I was fine. I mean, he'll just eat one slice of pizza. Come on. There you go. You like it. You get the second one. Yeah. Anyway, that was our just walk out situation. So if you got questions, we'd be happy to answer them. Feedback and Daily Tech news show dot com. Thank you for the on the ground word from Lamar and Tom. That they could be like it could be like a series. Yeah, a whole show. Yeah, I love Lamar and Tom go to but I don't know the next pizza place and talk about barbecue. Yeah, just walk out. This is not just sir, please, you need to pay for that food. This is not a Whole Foods. Well, if you if you like food and you like eating food on vacation, you might say, you know, I want my next vacation to be one of those things. But I also have to work remotely. And if that is your case, Chris Christensen has the perfect website for you. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you're a digital nomad or just have dreams of working and living someplace else, more interesting for a time because you've already managed to or hope to manage to be able to work remotely. Selena dot com, S-E-L-I-N-A dot com is an interesting site, even if you're just using it to dream about travel, because it's a site that is selling you both a co-working space as well as a place to stay anywhere from a private room to a dorm room, as well as activities that you could do with people who are at that place. It's an interesting site. It's colorful and attractive and makes me want to go some place interesting predominantly US and Latin America for now. Selena dot com. And this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Yeah. Good stuff, Chris. I like the exotic locations that they've featured on that site like Chicago. That's very exotic. Depending on your neighborhood. I'm from Chicago. It might be very exotic, depending on where you're coming from. It's a good point. It's a good point. Yeah. It's a good, lovely town. Love it. Wendy's it. Thanks to you, Chris Christensen. Thanks to everybody who sends us feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. And also a big thanks to you, Lamar Wilson, not only for taking one for the team and getting a slice of pizza or two at an Amazon Go store over the weekend, but also being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest work. You can find me at lamar.tv. I do entertaining unboxings, other fun videos and doesn't matter where you follow me, I do the same video everywhere. So check me out there. Thanks. Sounds good. We also have a brand new boss to thank. Always makes us happy to thank a brand new boss today. It's Carter. Carter just started back in us on Patreon. Welcome, Carter. Thank you. And thank you. Ah, Carter, you made my day. Thank you so much. Who will make our day tomorrow? I can't wait to find it. I know, I know. It could be you. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We roll right into it when DTNS wraps up available at patreon.com slash DTNS. But just a reminder, we do this show live. We're on demand, but we're also live. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, that's 200 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. With Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.