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[Image: Lindsay Obermeyer]
Facebook wants to be regulated
Last month, Facebook’s Zuckerberg called for more regulation of content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. The charitable reading of this is that he wants to make FB better, fairer, and less data-exploitive. The uncharitable reading: because more regulation means more compliance process, activities and people, large companies are usually better placed to handle it well, so regulation becomes a defensive moat that helps large incumbents vs their competitors.
(Good and bad Facebook: it will ban several of Britain's most prominent far-right pages for "spreading hate". FB says that it 'unintentionally uploaded' the email contacts of 1.5m users since May 2016. Facebook still not effectively understanding what's going onto its platform.)
Anyway, the UK Gov might have been listening because it has published its Online Harms white paper, and is seeking feedback on it until July.
“The new regulatory framework this White Paper describes will set clear standards to help companies ensure safety of users while protecting freedom of expression, especially in the context of harmful content or activity that may not cross the criminal threshold but can be particularly damaging to children or other vulnerable users. It will promote a culture of continuous improvement among companies, and encourage them to develop and share new technological solutions rather than complying with minimum requirements.”
Elsewhere in regulation, the pharmacy regulator has set new safety rules for the online sale of medicines.
Why meal kit companies fail
Meal kit businesses are complex and have a lot of cost: “The Achilles heel of meal-kit companies is that the business has exceptionally high customer acquisition costs, high operational and supply-chain costs, high logistics costs and low customer retention.” This means that, once the initial discounts end, the service feels too expensive.
On top of that, people are less likely to plan meals ahead, so delivered kits are fighting a broader trend: “Dinner is often a last-minute decision and sometimes people just don’t want to decide [what to eat] a week before”. Making meal kits in grocery stores may help because it gets round this second problem: people pop to the local shop to grab tonight’s dinner and see a kit that makes the meal even more convenient.
Finding AI bias
Ben Evans wrote a good piece exploring the nature of machine learning systems and what it means to talk about AI bias, and concluded:
“ML finds patterns in data - what patterns depends on the data, and the data is up to us, and what we do with it is up to us. Machine learning is much better at doing certain things than people, just as a dog is much better at finding drugs than people, but you wouldn’t convict someone on a dog’s evidence. And dogs are much more intelligent than any machine learning.”
One concern about machine learning is that they’re black boxes - it’s hard to look inside them to see how and why they’re finding patterns or making decisions. His counter-argument is that, well, everything else is a bit black-boxy too - or certainly everything else that involves a human or groups of humans. He’s right that “AI” is just a capability, an indifferent tech layer that can be done well or badly, and that the problems belong to the human layer: is the model good?, is the data good? etc.
Buuut the reason why people talk about AI bias is that many of the commonly-cited use cases for AI involve it replacing humans in tasks that involves complex decisions, judgements, for example like this... actual... judge.
Related: “So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board” - Google ends AI ethics board after one week.
Health data
NHSX will mandate tech and data standards across the NHS, so that “our systems can talk to each other. This will save time, money and ultimately lives.” NHSX leads digital transformation efforts across health and social care.
Amazon Alexa can now be used for patient medical data in the US. Some new Alexa skills are now HIPAA-compliant - HIPAA is a US health privacy law/standard for secure access to patient data. (So you might wonder how secure services are which don’t use the HIPAA-compliant Alexa skills…)
Cheaper electric cars
Bloomberg reckons that by 2022 the up front cost of electric vehicles will be lower than for combustion vehicles - battery technology is getting better and a lot cheaper. If you leave aside the important emissions benefits for a second, the tricky maths for today’s car buyer is whether the lower maintenance and running costs of an electric vehicle would outweigh the higher up-front purchase cost. So if this prediction is true a lot of EVs are going to be sold and leased.
Parking garages with loads of cameras to tell you where there’s a free space and remind you where you parked.
Other news
“Marketers have brought this upon themselves. We’re overloaded, we’re not paying attention. We have to hear it from a trusted source before we’ll click. So nothing lights a fire on the internet overnight. Which means that big publicity campaigns fall flat. And if you can see the sell beneath the supposed event, people are turned off.” - virality is over in the age of fractured attention.
“For every minute Ms. Wojcicki spent discussing it, users uploaded to the site an additional 500 hours of footage.” - content moderation at YouTube’s scale (Wojcicki leads YT).
“Our industry has much to do” - British Interactive Media Association’s Tech and Inclusion report.
“With Security Keys, instead of the *user* needing to verify the site, the *site* has to prove itself to the key. Security is as much about human factors as cryptography” - a good explanation of using security keys to minimise the risks of “phishing”. If the account is important (or one you’d use to regain access to your *other* accounts, like an email address), then getting a hardware 2 factor authentication token is a lot better than relying on text message-based 2FA.
“The card in the photo still displays the @monzo BIN (5355 22) and the name of one of our staff members…” - in the gap between designing a new thing and design about a new thing, there are sometimes mistakes.
"face the ball to be the ball to be above the ball" - an AI generated a new sport for humans from the rules of many other sports. TBH, it sounds better than the sports that humans typically design for machines, like “perform this task without end”.
Co-op Digital news
18 months on: our Digital Technology Operations team - the cloud cost dashboard is great.
Lessons learnt by a non-digital colleague: the benefits of agile ways of working - featuring the sterling work of Richard Sullivan, the newsletter’s most committed collaborator.
Events
- Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 23 Apr 1pm at Angel Square 12th floor.
- CMO CRM show & tell - Tue 23 Apr 2pm at Angel Square 13th floor.
- Line managers' drop-in clinic - Tue 23 Apr 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- #public_speaking club - development session - Wed 24 Apr 12pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Data management show & tell - Thu 25 Apr 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor.
- Northern Policy Forum presents: What makes a place? - Thu 25 Apr 6pm at Federation House.
- Membership show & tell - Fri 26 Apr 3pm at Federation House 6th floor.
- Azure global bootcamp - Sat 27 Apr 9am at Federation House.
- Joy Diversion, a day exploring, mapping and wandering in Manchester and Salford - Sat 27 Apr 11am at Federation House.
- Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 29 Apr 1.30pm at Federation House.
- Year 8 Routes to Employment - Tue 30 Apr 8am at Co-op Academy Leeds, Stoney Rock Lane, Leeds LS9 7HD.
- Food ecommerce show & tell - Tue 30 Apr 1.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Health team show & tell - Tue 30 Apr 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Line managers' drop-in clinic - Tue 30 Apr 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Web team show & tell - Tue 30 Apr at Federation House 6th floor.
- Saving The Environment With Data - Tue 30 Apr 6.30pm at Federation House.
- Co-operate show & tell - Wed 1 May 10am at Federation House 6th floor.
- Data ecosystem show & tell - Wed 1 May 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor.
- AMA: How to Learn, Sell and Run Design Sprints - Wed 1 May 3pm at Federation House.
- Membership show & tell - Fri 3 May 3pm at Federation House 6th floor.
More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
Thank you for reading
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