 The massacre in New Zealand was tragic. We won't be covered in this podcast, but I thought some prayers are with you all. Love you and God bless. This is Tech Talk with Buona, Episode 296. An Apple a Day Makes Spotify Pay. Welcome to Tech Talk with Buona. This technology podcast covers tech news and reviews for the entire week. And now here's your host, me, Buona McCall. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Episode 296 of Tech Talk with Buona. We've got a great show lined up for you. Today is March 15th, 2019, and I'm coming off a long late night of playing the Division II on my Twitch stream at Twitch.tv. We've got about, think about four or five stories to talk about. A lot of privacy-based stuff, mainly with Facebook, Apple, Google. You know that typical social media stuff that I used to talk about way back in 2008. I don't even know what the year was. But yeah, we've got a great show lined up for you. I'm a little bit late. It's about 1 p.m., and normally I would be wrapping up my morning stream, but I started about noon today. So if you ever get time to come by, this is a thing we're going to be doing every Friday afternoon or Friday morning. We're going to be recording Tech Talk with Buona. Game Chat Buona didn't get recorded this week because I have a new computer. Say hello to my new computer. His name is Buona OK. Yes, I named the computer Buona OK because that's one of my crazier emotes and on my Twitch stream. Have you heard of it? Twitch.tv slash Buona. You might have heard of it. So yeah, we're going to be getting started with this. And I'm going to warn you. I'm going to give you a soapbox warning because when it comes to privacy issues, I tend to have a pretty massive soapbox. So let's get to it. And for our first story, we're going to talk about Facebook. Oh, my gracious goodness, goodness me. Facebook was in the news and old Zuck posted a 3000 word blog post talking about the future of Facebook. And I got to say, I am not. I was not. I am not surprised, but I was not expecting this. So he goes on to talk about very, very sensitive topics, mainly because Facebook was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Committee. Committee talking about a lot of this stuff, basically defending what they were doing. But it seems like Facebook is making an internal shift. First, I'm going to talk about what the shift is and then get my opinion on it. Here's a quote from I'm reading over at rstechnica.com, but you can go over to the actual blog post itself. I'll put both links in the show description. Here's the first quote. Public social networks will continue to be very important in people's lives for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there's also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that's focused on privacy first. I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypting services where people can be confident. What they say to each other, stay secure, and their messages and content won't stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about. He adds that this will be built around the following principles, private interactions, encryption, reducing permanence, safety, interoperability, and secure data storage. Now they're talking about adding into an encryption across Facebook. Here's a, I like how ours breaks it down because they have all these meaningful quotes. I'm going to read through all these so you can have the facts. Just the facts, ma'am. When billions of people use a service to connect, some of them are going to misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion. We have a responsibility to work with law enforcement to help prevent these wherever we can. We are working to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can't see the content of the messages. And we will continue to invest in this work. Also, they talk about reducing permanence. Messages could be deleted after a month or a year by default. This will reduce the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later. Of course, you'd have to change the time frame to turn off auto deletion for your threads if you wanted. And we also could provide an option for you to set individual messages to expire after a few seconds or a minute if you wanted. There are some services out there that do this very well. And they're talking about merging WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Here's a quote from Zuck. He says, people want to be able to choose which service they use to communicate with people. If you want to message people on Facebook, you have to use Messenger or on Instagram, and you have to use Direct. And on WhatsApp, you have to use the WhatsApp. So with this new approach, they want to be able to merge all of this and integrate it with SMS. They also want to store user data away from government overreach. They talk about, as they build their infrastructure around the world, we've chosen not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights, like privacy or freedom of expression. So those are most of the major topics you talked about. Again, you can go back and read the blog post. So what do I think about this? When I first read this, I was, my thought was, this stuff has been important for years. It's not something that's coming. And Facebook is speaking as if this is the future. And in my world, and Buona's world, this is now. I mean, I remember private networks. I remember IRC channels with a password. It's like, the privacy has always been a thing since I could remember being on the internet. In the age of the new digital social media, the sharing was a part of social media, but it wasn't all of social media. But I think if you look at this from the perspective of Facebook and their warped view of reality, yes, it's a soapbox, this is a new direction for them. They're looking at it as, okay, in our world, everything is public and shared, even if you think it's private. Because if I send a message to somebody, I just assume that nobody else can see it, right? You know, without having to work and do a whole lot of hacking. But, you know, according to this blog post, they're going to make it so this stuff is secure, but in my world, it should be secured from the get-go. This quote really gets me. I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private. I have, I can't remember, the last time I thought I was talking to somebody in private and it was public. You know, I always assumed something was private. Like if I DM somebody on Twitter, I'm assuming it's private. Like I said, there's means about this. People can hack and, you know, there's snooping technology. If I send you a DM on Discord, I'm assuming that's private, between me and you, or whoever else is looking over your shoulder. Private interactions has always been the thing for me. And, you know, certain things I don't want to say in public. So, and I talk in public too. I have IRC. I have Twitch chat. I have Discord. I have public forums. I have Twitter. I say stuff on Instagram. Yes, I still use Instagram. I know, I know. You give me that look. And these things are not, they are not what I consider to be public. The things that are private, I consider to be private. And those things that I consider to be public, I'd be public. And when I think about public and private, you know, I always assume that encryption is just a thing. My messages are not going to be plain text sitting on a server somewhere, or my history is not going to be easily accessible for somebody to get. And I just assume a lot of these things are there when I use a service these days. Because this is 2019. These things should be baked in to services. Enter an encryption to me when it comes to communication should be a thing for everybody right now. There shouldn't be plain text crap. I mean, in the age of, it's like there's SSL, there's a ton of encryption tools out there that make it kind of easy to do into an encryption. So the fact that they're just introducing this and this is the future kind of is troubling to me. I knew Zuck and Company weren't all the best when it came to this stuff, but reading this, it's like they're playing catch up. I mean, if you want a sound bite for this article, that's what I think it is, in terms of what the summary is. Facebook is playing catch up. Majority of other services out there are already doing a lot of these things. As far as merging WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, I knew they were going to do this. This is a Toji So moment. Even when they promised that they weren't going to merge WhatsApp with Facebook and they're not going to merge Instagram or whatever, they're not going to merge, they promised that a while ago, I knew they were going to do it. It's just, it's Facebook, they're going to do it. And this is a quote here that says, Facebook has said in the past that it would not merge WhatsApp data with the rest of Facebook, but Facebook will break this promise by making the three apps share the same back end according to the New York Times sources. The three messaging platforms together have about 2.6 billion users. See, that's why they're doing it. It's a shadow broker chat. It's a shadow broker. I'm talking to my chat on Twitter. It's the shadow broker. Facebook is data brokerage chat. They're data brokers of the current century. And they got access to 2.6 billion users worth of data. They're going to broker that data and make money off of it. They're going to make money off of it. Check it out. This is the future of Facebook. I think they're playing catch up. That's my opinion on this. What do you guys think? Let me know. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Apple in the same vein as privacy. Hot off the heels of this article from Mr. Zuckerberg, Apple posted a great, great video detailing what they think about privacy. This video is pretty short. It's about a minute. Apple does things short and sweet. And they show all instances of where people want privacy. Like, there's a guy, there's two guys talking in a restaurant and the waitress comes over and she takes their stuff and they stop talking and then when she leaves, they start back. There's a dog barking at a no trespassing sign. I think one of my favorite ones is when there's a girl who got passed a note and the teacher goes, what's on that? And then she eats the note. Oh man, some good stuff in here. And there's one more lady. You don't have to watch the video. I'm just going to describe the whole thing from my brain to you. So you have to watch it. There's a lady doing her makeup and this guy's just like looking at her like, hey lady, doing your makeup. So she rolls up her window. She's like looking at her like, I don't want you to watch that. So this is great timing by Apple just like at CES, beginning of the year. Apple doesn't go to CES but they put up a huge privacy billboard in Vegas. I know they paid a lot of money for it, basically talking about privacy. I think that was CES. I'm pretty sure it was. So we had a little discussion in our chat this morning about it, as I was reading over the story. And it's just when it comes to Apple versus Google, this is the discussion here. When it comes to Apple versus Google, it's kind of a no brainer. Apple has a certain policy and certain procedures on the App Store, what apps can and can't do, what type of telemetry is allowed on the iPhone, what can be communicated, what you can turn on and off, what things are allowed and not allowed. They're very clear on all of that stuff and they let you know and they turn that stuff off and if apps violate that, they don't get allowed to be on the Apple Store. Whereas Google, they make their money. You know, they're another shadow broker. We talked about Facebook. They make their money off of your data, off of your profiles. That's their business. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise that Google is that way, but that is what they do. Apple makes their money from your pocket. You go buy an iPhone, you go buy an iPad and mark up. It is going to be marked up. You go buy a MacBook, it's going to be higher. Their profit margins are big because that's how they make money. They don't make money off of your profiles. Okay, Apple doesn't do, that's not their business. And if they do make money off of it, it's going to be a very, very small percentage of their overall business. They've gone on record many times to say that privacy is very, very important to them. And they've been true to their word as far as we can tell. Now there's going to be violations. There's going to be things that happen where Apple's going to violate this. I think they've actually done it in the past, but they correct it almost immediately. So if I got a choice, again, this is not Apple being a saint and Google being the evil villain. If I got a choice between the two companies, if I got a grid and I say, okay, here's my privacy column, it's either iPhone or Android, or iOS or Android. Who am I going to pick? So when I make that decision, it's an easy thing for me. I go with Apple every time, because the way they treat privacy versus the way Google treats privacy is night and day. Some people don't care about that stuff, which is why I don't, and somebody says I prefer Android, I'm like, okay, you must feel a certain way about privacy. But I come from the school of, I don't have anything to hide, I just don't want you to see it. You know, when I eat dinner, I don't leave the curtains open so you can watch me eat my food. You know, just like that, that's why I think that commercial is so good. It's like, privacy is part of your life. Whether you have something to hide or not, there's a certain level of privacy that people want. And some people these days, they share everything about their lives and they don't care what Google does with their data. So I say more power to you, but if I got a choice, I'm not going to do that. So check this out, guys. This is a great, great follow up to the Zuckerberg thing about privacy. Apple basically is just thrown down the gauntlet and just raspberry Google and Facebook saying, if privacy matters in your life, it shouldn't matter on the phone that contains your life. I think that was a tagline at the end of it. Check out the article. Let me know what you think. If you disagree, you probably do. I don't know. But I don't care because I'm me and I don't know what I'm saying right now. Next story, boy, next story. All right, we talked about Facebook. We've talked about Apple. Now let's talk about Google. Google has removed 2.3 billion bad ads and banned ads on 1.5 million apps plus 28 million pages. And they've added a new policy manager to get rid of all those bad ads. So what are bad ads? I almost said chat. I've been live streaming too long. I just actually did a retake behind the scenes footage. I just actually did a retake where I removed the word chat and I almost said it again. This is this is too much. But they've done all these things to protect you from bad ads. These are malicious ads that are either misleading, like click here to download. You know, how many times if you went to an app page, it's like click here to download the app and it's actually an ad or your computer has been infected. Click here to remove the infection. All these different malicious ads and just scams that are being propagated over AdSense. And Google AdSense is probably the largest ad delivery platform in the world. And you've got all this malware. It is the primary motivator behind AdBlock. A lot of times people think that AdBlock is just about annoyance. No, no, no. That was the old days where you wanted to block pop-ups or you don't want to see this long video play. These days, AdBlock is synonymous with security and safety because there are so many malicious ads that people are not doing it for convenience. They're doing it for their safety. And the fact that Google is taking this policy, they're adding a new policy manager which goes into great lengths to protect you from bad ads. Man, this is really good. Using both manual reviews and machine learning in 2018, Google said remove 2.3 billion bad ads that violated its policies which at their most general forbid ads that mislead or exploit vulnerable people. Along with that, this is a quote from TechCrunch. Along with that, Google has been tackling the other side of the bad ads conundrum, pinpointing and shutting down sites that violate policies and also profit. That's the thing, man. They're making money by scamming you on two fronts. They also profit by using its ad that where Google said it removed ads from 1.5 million apps and nearly 28 million pages that violated publisher policies. On the most pr- on the proactive side, the company said that it also introduced a new ad policy manager in April to give tips to those creating and posting ads to avoid listing non-compliant ads. So they're giving you this thing, this tool so you don't break the rules. You'd be like, I didn't know Google. I didn't know that I would. No, you can use this thing to figure that out. This is, I like this quote. Google's ad machine makes billions for the company more than 32 billion dollars in the previous quarter. Ads account for 83% of all Google revenues. What kind of company is Google? Again, this is how they make money. They're shadow brokers chat. Ads and ad profiles and data that all lumps into one thing. Those revenues underpin a variety of wildly popular free services such as Gmail, YouTube, Android and of course the search engine. But there's undoubtedly a dark side too. Bad ads and slip-pass algorithms and mislead exploit vulnerable people and sites like, did I say chat again? I'm just going to end it here. Check it out guys. Over on TechCrunch.com they got the details. 2.3 billion ads removed. Just crazy. Band ads on 1.5 million apps. 28 million pages. Thank you Google for being proactive. Chat. And for our next story we got a juicy one man. Like I was preparing to read this. Like I was like, all right, we're going to talk about Apple addressing Spotify's claims but not as demands. And this is a spat between Apple and Spotify or some stuff. And I was expecting just a normal, you know, story. I'm like, it looks okay. I went through and read all this and this is a good old fashioned fight. This is like, this is 50 cuffs at the multi-billion dollar company level. Apple and Spotify are going at it. First, let's go back in a little bit of history. Spotify put out this big, big, big, big media campaign called Time to Play Fair. And it is a website called timetoplayfair.com. You can go there right now. And they're basically accusing Apple of a lot of stuff. They put together a massive, easy to read timeline about how we got here going back to 2007 to the present. And Spotify is claiming that not only is Apple being anti-competitive and anti-consumer, but they're actually breaking the law and there's lawsuits in place about to happen. So what are their complaints consist of? They're talking about how Apple not only is, you know, just being Apple, I guess, they're charging too much, 30% on top of what they already make, 30% markup, but it's affecting their business. Spotify is claiming that Apple is hurting them and not giving consumers true choice. And it's kind of, it's a very, very harsh accusation that they're hurting Spotify's business because they're charging 30% for every transaction. Now these transactions, mind you, are when you try, are you trying to upgrade your Spotify account to premium? I want to make that clear. You can download Spotify for free. You don't pay anything to Apple when you download Spotify. It's when you want to upgrade to premium. So it's the upsell. So that was, that was the attack. Here comes the defense. Apple posted a press release or a 1000 plus words statement on their website addressing Spotify's claims. It's some juicy stuff in here. So to start off with marketing speak, this is how I expect the whole thing to be. They're like, oh, we believe that technology achieves its true potential when we infuse it with human creativity and engineering. I'm like, yep, here we go. Here's marketing. But then it takes a toll. It takes a turn. Check this out. It says what Spotify is demanding is something very different. They were talking about how working for artists and whatnot. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem, including substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store as customers, without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making every smaller contribution to the artist, musicians, and songwriters who created, even going so far as to take their creators to court. Oh my gosh. Talk about throwing down the gauntlet. Spotify has every right to determine their own business model, but we feel an obligation to respond when Spotify wraps its financial motivations in misleading rhetoric about who we are, what we built, and what we do to support independent developers, musicians, songwriters, and creators of all stripes. Holy crap. Apple has somebody, somebody woke up the bear. Somebody poked the bear during hibernation and he's like, I am both shocked and pressed and I'm excited. I don't know what that, I don't know how to feel right now. They go on to address all the major points. They claim that we're blocking, they said Spotify claims we're blocking their access to products and updates in their app. So they went on to address those point by point and they concluded that Spotify is free to build apps and compete on our products and platforms and we hope they do. I think this is the summary though. I mean, there's a lot of counterpoints here, but this is the one I'm going to go with. They said Spotify wants all the benefits of a free app without being free. Whoever at Apple came up with that line, needs a raise because that wraps up this whole this whole thing in a nutshell. Spotify wants they want to be able to get their app and everybody's hands immediately without paying anything. And on top of that they want these customers to be able to upgrade to their premium without paying anything. So they want all the benefits of a free app without being free. Here's the bullet points Apple puts out. A full 84% of apps on the app store pay nothing to Apple when you download the user app. 84%. That's not discrimination as Spotify claims, it's by design. Apps that are free to you aren't charged by Apple. Apps that earn revenue exclusively through advertising like some of your favorite free games aren't charged by Apple. And get this now, Apple Apple's not Google. So the revenue streams are very discreet. They're very discreet revenue streams. There's nothing truly hidden behind the scenes. App business transactions where users sign up or purchase digital goods outside the app aren't charged by Apple. Apps that sell physical goods including ride hailing and food delivery services name a few aren't charged by Apple. The only contribution that Apple requires is for digital goods and services that are repurchased inside the app using our secure in app purchase system. As Spotify points out that revenue share is 30% for the first year of an annual subscription but they left out that it drops to 15% in the years after. I'm pretty sure Spotify has been on on app store for more than a year. I don't know if this is from the user perspective or Spotify perspective. I guess if a user is on there for more than a year it drops to 15% I don't know either way it drops to 50% after a year. That's not the only information Spotify left out. See this is Apple's drop the gauntlet man. They're not holding back. The majority of customers use their free ad supported product. Get this now. Ad supported by the way. So they're making money off of it. Which makes no contribution to the app store. So they download Spotify for free. They make money off the ads. Apple gets none of that. A significant portion of Spotify's customers come through the partnerships with mobile carriers. This generates no app store contribution but requires Spotify to pay a similar distribution fee to retailers and carriers. So they got to pay them too. Even now only a tiny fraction of the subscription falls under Apple's revenue sharing model. Spotify is asking for that number to be zero. I really think that is the the the whole thing in a nutshell. I'm not saying I'm not saying Apple is perfect in this situation but I do think Spotify is leaning on the side of being unreasonable. I mean you can't you can't you can't you can't have your cake and eat it too Spotify. I mean either you're going to be free. I mean either you're going to charge for the app. Maybe they should just charge for the app. I don't know either you're going to have maybe they should charge like $1.99 or $2 for the app because you can't just have free free free and then be able to upset premium for free free free and using Apple's resources benefits servers secure stuff support and not give Apple a dime. It's unreasonable to think that and both of these companies have a lot to learn when it comes to to giving back to the artists as well. Apple breaks that out. They're like you know Spotify is suing artists right now and they even link to stuff. Did they link to that? I don't think they linked here. But they talked about it about how Spotify is now suing people suing the artists after they after a law was passed that they have to give more warranties that they're suing artists. So check this out guys. This is this is an old fashioned this is this is 50 cups man. And I got to say I'm never ever seeing Apple this aggressive. Honestly, I've never seen Spotify that aggressive. It must be some really monetary. It must be some really big monetary motivations behind this but I've never seen either of these companies so aggressive publicly. This is on Apple's site on their press release. This is their newsroom. And they're going at a company. They've never done that with Microsoft. They've never done that with Samsung. They never did that with Google. They never did that with just about anybody else they compete with. This is super duper super duper aggressive. Check it out guys. Check out the articles. Let me know what you think. And that concludes episode episode 296 of Tech Talk with Buona. Thank you all for watching. I'm sorry. I got a little bit sandboxy. A little bit. I'm sorry. It's soap boxy not sandboxy. What's a sandbox? Follow my Twitter. Twitter.com. Slice Buona. Follow me on Twitch. Twitch.tv. Slice Buona as well. I stream practically every day in the morning in the afternoon starting at 10 a.m. at 8 p.m. We've been playing a lot of Division 2 Space Engineers Elite Dangerous Warframe. We're going to be playing Satisfactory coming up that game. It's going to be awesome. So check us out over there. Instagram.com. Slice Buona. Follow me over there Slice Buona. Buy Corsair Things. I'm sponsored by Corsair. Check us out over there. We record this podcast every Friday morning. We're supposed to start 10 a.m. Today we started late. Over my Twitch stream live, you can come by and watch while I record this. You can watch all the bloopers and stuff. And me call my podcast audience chat because that's what we like to do here. We like to call you chat chat. How you doing chat? Thanks so much for listening, guys. I'll be back next Friday for more exciting tech news and reviews. We're on Spotify, by the way. Remember that article? We're on Spotify. We're on Google Play. Go to my website, buona.tv.slice podcast. Find this podcast as well as others in game chat with Buona because we like to have fun and talk about tech. All right. I'll see you guys next week. Have a great day and I'll see you next time.