 Coming up on DTNs, is there anything TikTok can't do from real estate to dating? We talk TikTok with CNET's Aaron Carson, plus what Apple's new ad tracking system means for you. And how bad is the Google contact tracing fleet? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 27th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Joining us, staff reporter at CNET, Aaron Carson. Welcome back, Aaron. Thanks for having me. Thank you for having us talk through Roger's defeat of a rat in his extermination efforts on Good Day Internet. If you wanna know about the details of the Zoom Memorial we're planning, become a member and get Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon announced several new Fire HD 10 models all shipping on May 26th. The Fire HD 10 has a thinner design, three gigs of RAM, and a brighter 1080p screen for 150 bucks. The Fire HD 10 plus has four gigs of RAM, a soft touch finish, a wireless charging dock made by Anchor for Amazon, and sells for $180. Both tablets also come in productivity bundles that starts at $220 for things like a keyboard case and a one year subscription to Microsoft 365. The Fire Kids Pro tablet is available in seven inch versions for $100, an eight inch version for $140, and a 10 inch version for $200. All come with protective cases, built in kickstands, an open but filtered browser, parental approval based app downloads, and a year of Amazon's Kids Plus service. Great for the whole family, I guess. Ford announced Tuesday it's creating a new facility called Ion Park, I-O-N, Ion Park, that it calls its new global battery center of excellence. It'll be in Southeast Michigan. Ion Park will focus on battery technology, as you might have guessed, development for manufacturing, mining and recycling, have 150 employees once it's fully operational, which they expect in late 2022. It will operate in conjunction with Ford's new battery benchmarking and test laboratory, which is over in Allen Park, Michigan, that opened in 2020 to test new battery cell types. ARM announced the new versus V1 and new versus N2 platforms. The V1 is meant for high performance computing, machine learning and data centers. The N2 is the first design based on the ARM V9 architecture and meant for general computing with high performance per watt ratio. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent will use ARM based hardware for their cloud services, and Marvell will use the new versus V2 for its Oction networking solutions. Let's go back to some productivity devices. Dell announced the Latitude 7320 Detachable. It's a Windows laptop with a detachable keyboard and a kickstand. Everybody's got kickstands these days, running on Intel's 11th gen processors up to a core i7. Dell claims the included stylus can charge to 100% in 30 seconds and it lasts 90 minutes. So every 90 minutes, put it down for 30 seconds, you're good to go. Dell Latitude 7320 Detachable is available now, starting at $1,549. Intel and Microsoft announced a new method of protecting Windows machines from being hijacked by malware for cryptocurrency mining. Machines with Intel's hardware shield and threat detection technology enabled can use Microsoft Defender Endpoint to use the algorithm to analyze code. It can detect mining in a hypervisor, VM or hidden OS process, and neutralize or quarantine it. All right, today is the big day. Apple introducing the thing that makes all of advertising angry, iOS 14.5. It also lets you unlock your iPhone if you've got a mask on with your watch, but the big thing is Apple's app tracking transparency feature. This is the one Facebook took full page ads out against and has caused Google to create a new way of tracking people in large groups instead of individually that they call flocks. Remember that, FLOC. Apple announced app tracking transparency last June, almost a year ago, and delayed implementation until now to give developers some extra time to adapt. Without this new feature, the developer can track user data from within an app using Apple's identifier for advertisers or IDFA, as well as a third party tool. And the company could then combine that data with similar data from outside the app to build a profile. Users who knew this was going on could go and opt out in settings, but generally most people are unaware it's happening. App tracking transparency, the new feature leaves that entire tracking system in place. Nothing changes as far as what's capable. Developers can still use IDFA, can still use third party tools to build a profile of users, but this is the change they have to ask first. Tracking is no longer on by default, which required the user to go opt out before. Instead, if a developer wants to continue combining in-app data with other data from outside the company, they have to push a prompt. That prompt is standardized and says, allow app name, whatever the app's name is, to track your activity across other company's apps and websites. And then there's a second paragraph that makes it clear that the data will only be used for personalized marketing and advertising. So everything still works the same. You just have to say, yes, that's okay. You've asked me first. It's a forced opting. You can opt in or you can opt out. If you tap allow, nothing changes. The app keeps collecting the info, combining it with data from outside the company and improves ad targeting. What advertisers are worried about is that more people when asked are expected to tap ask app not to track, then would have gone and opted out in settings, which will reduce the number of people that they can target. Because if a customer chooses that option, the company is prohibited from combining in-app data with third-party data. They can still technically do it, but if they get caught, they get kicked out of the app store for a violation of policy. Now, a few things to note here. Apps can still combine data if they're owned by the same company. So Facebook can combine its data from Instagram with the Facebook app and WhatsApp, since it owns all three apps. And Apple is offering a tool called SK Ad Network that lets a company find out how many times its app was installed after an ad was seen in another app and how many times users clicked on an ad for their product with another app, but it doesn't give any personally identifying data. Also, developers who buy an ad from Apple on the app store can get some data faster and more detailed data, like which version of an ad was seen and what keywords it appeared on. If you want to turn off all of this at once and not deal with all the pop-ups, there is a setting under privacy called tracking that you can set to allow apps to request to track off. You can set that to off, then you won't have to answer any more of the pop-ups. You can also go in that same menu and grant permission to apps if you said no and then change your mind like, no, you know what I would like personalized ads from them. But that is what is going on. And I don't know, Erin, what do you think? Is this advertising reaction an overreaction or is it like, no, they're gonna get hurt by this? So one thing that was interesting is part of Facebook's stance in all this is that this is something that's really gonna hurt small businesses. And when it comes to some kind of like mom and pop shop that's trying to use targeted advertising and this is gonna be a blow to them, but Apple is out there saying that that's not really the case. And there was even some research, I think from the Harvard Business Review that was talking about how it's the, that reaction is gonna be a little bit overblown. And I think the reaction, even if it isn't overblown, maybe doesn't matter because the principle is, we're asking people, do they wanna be tracked or not? And the alternative is to assume they wanted to be tracked if they didn't know they were being tracked. And I don't think people in general who aren't in advertising would be okay with that when you put it that way, right? Right, I mean, that's certainly what it seems like. And again, part of this is just this basic idea that we kind of know that your average person doesn't have a super solid grasp on what exactly is going on with their data. And so when you have an option that is like pretty simple to opt in or opt out and there's definitely like advocacy groups and people out there who have suggested kind of simple ideas like this could, without imparting a whole lot of deep knowledge on the part of the user, give them a way to better track or keep from being tracked, what's going on with their data. Yeah, I mean, I think in apps, not all apps have advertising, but many do, especially really popular apps that at one point did not. I think for the most part, people are used to, yeah, you see ads, maybe it's an ad that's relevant to you, maybe you ignore it kind of case by case. And we've all had that situation where we're like, gosh, I was just talking about those sweatshirts. How do they know? It's like, there's this whole system in place, this advertising system behind the scenes that is really robust and works in, it's not very mysterious ways, it turns out. It's all based on our behavior. I think what is most interesting to me is which apps by folks who didn't really pay attention to this before, who didn't have this prompt before, and now are getting this prompt like, do you want this app to track you? Which are the apps that are perceived as the shadiest, or the apps that, you trust the very least to have information like this, even though this is not the kind of information that has anything to do with an app, selling your private information to a shady enterprise. It's all about advertising, but yeah, as you mentioned, Aaron, there's a lot of, what do people understand about this process and do they understand that in many cases that the power is completely in their hands and they might not want to change anything at all? Yeah, this forces it out of the open and lets users make a more educated decision. And if your business was built on ignorance, I don't know that that's a good defense. Well, Privacy Analysis Company, AppSensis posted on Tuesday that Android's implementation of COVID-19 contact tracing made contact tracing logs potentially accessible to pre-installed apps. The contact tracing system uses rotating Bluetooth identifiers. Those identifiers don't reveal any identifying information and are changed every 15 minutes. So they're not logging your location, they're just identifying you in some way. The identifiers are logged in privileged memory inaccessible to most software. That's good so far, right? But system apps that are pre-installed by manufacturers like Samsung or Lenovo have system privileges. You might say, well, why do they have that? So they're pre-installed apps and they can read crash report logs. But that access could also potentially be used to access the contact tracing logs as well. So far, there's no indication any system apps tried to access the contact tracing logs, but it's something that is possible. So what is Google gonna do about it? Has Google done anything about it? AppSensis reported the vulnerability to Google back on February 19th. Google spokesperson Jose Castagneta told the markup that the rollout of this update to Android devices began several weeks ago and will be complete in the coming days. Little bit vague. AppSensis doesn't consider the problem fixed and we're at the end of April. What's taking so long? We don't know. Google probably knows, but it's not saying. Joel Reardon, co-founder and forensic lead of AppSensis told the markup, quote, this fix is a one-line thing where you remove a line that logs sensitive information to the system log. Doesn't impact the program. Doesn't change how it works. So Reardon thinks this should have been fixed fast. What do we think? I, okay. I think that this probably should have been fixed and Google should have acknowledged it, just if for no other reason than the optics of it. But if I were to look at this and wonder, okay, why is Google dragging their feet? It's probably because from an engineering mindset, you think of these pre-installed apps as part of the operating system. Pre-installed apps have to be vetted by Google. They undergo more scrutiny than Play Store apps. They're more trustworthy. They get audited. And if there was anything shady going on, Google would know about it. So in their mind, I think they see this as like, well, anything on our operating system level could access these logs, but they don't. So why should we do anything about it? Or do we need to spend the engineering resources to do anything about it? The threat level is very low. We trust these partners. But at this point, they should write that one line of code that he was talking about, I think. You know, I think that the point about optics is an interesting one because I remember when it first was announced that companies like Google were going to be working on these tracker apps, there was definitely a wave of concern at the time about, you know, this is some sensitive information and how can we be totally sure that if we're, you know, giving over some data for the sake of convenience or maybe some safety, that it's gonna be in good hands. And the thing to keep in mind is there's not a lot of data here. This is Bluetooth identifiers that are anonymous. They don't have your location. Any of the other data in this logs is probably also available in other logs like your MAC address, et cetera. So it's the manufacturer of your phone being able to have these rotating Bluetooth IDs. And if they wanted to, they could plow through all of the Bluetooth identifiers they have in a database and match them up to figure out who in their system was near each other. Wouldn't even be a complete system since it wouldn't include data from all the contact tracing apps out there. So it just really, I don't think it would be very valuable data either, but in the end, it's like, they guaranteed that the system would have no leaks and it's got a tiny leak. Yeah, and it doesn't sound like the leak is all that hard to fix. Yeah, that makes it even more like, come on, just write the maranthalana code. Unless it's more complicated than that, I don't know, but it sounds like it should be pretty easy. Nikkei sources say that Apple's next-gen processor right now being called the M2, we don't know what it'll officially be called because this is all based on sources, but it has gone into production at TSMC according to Nikkei and could start shipping to assemblers in July. The M2 is reportedly being built on TSMC's five nanometer plus lines and will like the M1 integrate the CPU, GPU and neural processing unit in one. New MacBook Pros are estimated to arrive sometime in Q2 or Q3, a new Mac Pro possibly later this year or early 2022. So we don't know which, if any of these, a new processor would go in. But if you were, we were speculating during the Apple announcement last week about like, when are they gonna come out with the next processor and what machine is that gonna go in? And so here's another tidbit for you. It's hitting the fabrication lines. Yeah, for all those people who were like, well, M1 sounds good and everything, but aren't they already just working on the M2? The answer is yes. Apparently yes, yeah. Now you know. I don't know what this means. I don't know that this changes anything if you're like, should I wait to buy X? Remember we were talking about Niko? She's like, I kinda wanna wait to buy a MacBook Pro. I think this doesn't change anything. You wait until they announce the thing you want and then you try to buy it as soon after that or you just ignore the whole cycle and buy the thing you need when you need it. But I know people like to keep track of this stuff. So it's interesting to note. Hey folks, you want DTNS as a video podcast? I mean, if you're watching the video, you're like, yeah, I already get that. But if you don't, you can get the video RSS feed at dailytechnewshow.com slash subscribe. We've talked a lot on DTNS about TikTok, why it's popular, whether it was gonna get banned in various countries or will be in the future, whether it might be the final thing that takes on Facebook, everybody's been wondering, what's that app that's going to come along eventually? But what it's used for is also really interesting. You might talk to a dozen people about TikTok and their experiences and what they like and what they see. And you might get a dozen different reasons that they use it and what is on their for you page from recipes, language learning to real estate, DIY, everything, it is on TikTok somewhere. Now, Erin, last month you wrote an article for CNET about how TikTok is even being used as a dating app. And I have racked my brain because I knew we were gonna talk about this today and I can't figure out, besides flirting in a comment section, how that happens. Yeah, so there's three main ways. And like you said, I mean, one way is yes, people just flirt with each other by sending DMs and commenting, but the two other ways are kind of interesting. For one, there's a bunch of people who just get on TikTok and they might post a video where they're saying, like, hello, I'm single and I would like to change that or maybe they need a wedding date for like their brother's wedding or something in a couple of months. And they just flat out ask for that. And something else that has popped up that I thought was really interesting is there are a few accounts that are acting like matchmakers. And so one account, for example, is a young woman who's in Chicago who has this series where she kind of calls it like exposing my hot friends. And she does these little like montages of her friends who are single and in her estimation very eligible and basically kind of posts a little like highlight reel of them and she's been having enough success that she's trying to actually turn this into a business. Wow. That actually makes perfect sense. So like a sizzle reel for dating. Yeah. Well, and it's like, if she, I mean, being a matchmaker is a real job, right? And so if she's good at it, it's like you could build a business and start with TikTok. In fact, it would be a great way to scale your business very quickly. Right, and it's also interesting because some of the folks that I talked to expressed a certain amount of discontent with like the dating apps that are out there now and saying that it's just too hard to get to know someone based on a series of static photos that somebody might have, you know, on their profile. But if you're looking at someone's account, and this is the caveat that everybody does like image management and kind of curates their presence. But it is kind of harder to hide every little aspect of your personality if you're doing these like off the cuff, you know, TikTok videos. And so people are ending up with this feeling like they're getting a little bit of a better view of a person mainly because of the sort of presence that they have on their channel. I think a lot of people's first reaction would be like, oh, but this is so much less secure. At least if I go through a match or something, I'll be able to know that there's some security involved there because they've been adding it over the years, but on TikTok, it's the Wild West. Exactly. And that's where this can get maybe a little concerning or sort of a interesting situation because at the end of the day, TikTok is not set up to be a dating app. And so, you know, in another circumstance, somebody sliding into your DMs with sort of a, I don't know, creepy message or something would not be welcome. In a lot of cases, it's not. And you also have to remember that this is an app that has like teenagers and stuff on it. But it's interesting the way that a lot of people for example, are trying to use like hashtags like single or over 30 or things like that to try and keep themselves in a certain pool of people. Not foolproof, of course, but yeah, your label of the Wild West definitely feels true in a situation like this on TikTok. I mean, I guess it's somewhere between a club or a bar. It's a little more distant than that. But you know, and you get the benefit of a club or a bar where you see more of what the person is really like than you do on a Tinder. For sure. And that was one of the points that someone brought up to me early on was that, we know that we saw this huge spike in popularity in TikTok early on in the pandemic. And this is a point in time when, we're kind of getting used to this idea that we're not gonna be around each other. We're not gonna be at the clubs and the bars and whatever else we do on a Saturday night. And so the description that one of my sources gave me was like, this is almost turning into something of a public square. And so this is your chance to go and see a bunch of effectively strangers, but in a way that kind of feels like a more public setting. And I think there may be for, I think that the, oh, I'm online dating stigma is, I mean, sure it exists in some form, but it's not what it used to be. It's very, very normal for somebody to look at a variety of apps that are at their disposal, many of them free to find a match of some kind. But because TikTok isn't a dating app, right? We're talking about this like, huh, that's a novel way to use TikTok. Maybe there's a little bit more of a, well, I'm on TikTok for lots of reasons and this is just one reason I don't have to make me being single be like my whole identity and the reason that I'm part of this. Like maybe like dip a toe in type of a thing. Sure. And I think that that also speaks to an aspect of this is like one of the sources I was talking to who spends a lot of time on TikTok was completely not surprised that things were evolving in this way because as we were talking a few minutes ago, there's just so much that happens on TikTok. And if you're going there to get recipes or learn how to like, caulk your bathroom or, you know, something like that, you can find that. And so, you know, what she was kind of telling me is that it's not surprising to her or wouldn't be surprising to her if kind of TikTok continues to evolve in a way where you're just kind of taking care of an increasing number of sort of like social needs in a way. Yeah, because you can use TikTok for so many different things as Sarah was saying earlier, like for some it's language learning, for others it's recipes, for some it's like remodeling ideas or even real estate, even doing like, you were saying there were home tours or something you saw, right? Right, so one of the people that I follow just out of sheer curiosity is a real estate agent in New York City. And he does tours of apartments in New York City and tells you what you're getting for how much. And sometimes these are listings that he's actually kind of in charge of or, you know, however that works. And so I'll see that he's put like his phone number or something in the comments and be like, if you're interested, like text me, call me and we can talk about this apartment, which I just think is really fascinating and not something I would have thought of as, you know, TikTok as a place to go to if I were looking for a new apartment. Yeah, it's fascinating because TikTok is different for everybody in a way that I don't think Twitter or Facebook are. Like some people think of TikTok as a particular sub community. So dating feels like that's a natural part of like, oh, I hang out with all the cooking people or all the Korean language people and like, oh, that person's kind of cool. Oh, they're single. Well, that's interesting, you know, and then you've got a shared interest right from the start. Right, exactly. And that's, you know, what's funny, like you said, if you're on there for a while and you're kind of actively trying to manage the videos and, you know, everything that pops up, like you end up with an incredibly distinctive for you paid, whether it's like, I see a lot of illustration, software tips, you know, for example. But if the thing that's on your mind that's really pressing is dating and sort of humor around being single and life is a single person and whatnot, that's, it's a whole other thing on there. Yeah, yeah. Well, really quickly, Spotify has made paid podcast subscriptions available in the U.S. today through its anchor service with 12 independent shows and a collaboration with NPR on several of their shows. Podcasters won't have to pay anything, but transaction fees, the amount that, you know, credit card processing and that stuff. For the first two years, after which Spotify will start taking 5%, unlike Apple subscription service, Anchor, which is owned by Spotify, creates a special RSS link that the user can add to whatever app they want. They make it easy to add it to Spotify, but you can add it to anything similar to how Patreon RSS works. Subscriptions within Spotify will send listeners to the show's anchor webpage where you subscribe and then it kicks you back to Spotify if you want to subscribe through Spotify. So we knew this was coming. There'd been a Wall Street Journal article about it earlier and now it's here. Well, you know, look at you, Spotify. You're really taking podcasting seriously, aren't you? Yeah, we knew this was coming, but it's, I mean, it's an attractive deal, depending on, you know, what your goal is as a podcaster. And it's not locked into the app the way Apple is. This works more like, Acast also works this way, which powers Patreon podcasting. And so I think this is a better way to do it because Spotify owns a podcasting company because they bought Anchor. This is a more open way to do that. And I think that's better for the podcasting ecosystem, to be honest. Well, German startup Wingcopter has launched the Wingcopter 198, an autonomous delivery drone capable of making three separate deliveries per single flight. Wingcopter was founded back in 2017 as a drone manufacturer. Then the company expanded its business model to include drone delivery as a service in sectors like healthcare, e-commerce and grocery. Using what the company calls logistical highways in the sky. Wingcopter's patented tilt rotor propellant mechanism offers multi-copter and fixed wing drone capabilities within the single drone that can get up to 93 miles per hour. It's pretty fast. And carry payloads of up to 13 pounds over about 47 miles on a single battery charge. It'll go even farther if you have something that's less than 13 pounds. Wingcopter is pursuing certification from the Federal Aviation Administration in the US for commercial flights in the United States. It would only be one of a few that has that certification. So we'll see if that happens. It's got rotors on the wings. Like, this seems obvious in retrospect. It can do everything. This is great. I, you know, it's like Uber pool. It's just like, I don't, you know, don't make me come all the way back to get the next. I can do three deliveries. Just have to be light things. Yeah. And it gives it a lot more flexibility, a lot more adaptability as well. Yeah, absolutely. Well, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today, they include Paul Thieson, Kevin and Paul Boyer. Two balls today, Anna Kevin. Also thanks to our brand new boss, Video Guy 99.99. I like your style, Video Guy. You just started backing us on Patreon and we would like to thank you, new boss. Also thanks to Erin Carson. Erin, it's been too long. We're so glad to have you back today. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Right, you can always find me at scenet.com and on Twitter, I'm at Erin Carson. Excellent. Thank you, Erin. We are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30, UTC. Put it on your calendar. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha, ha, ha.