Surveilled — Issue 34
Surveilled
Issue 34
A weekly summary of what I've found interesting at the intersection of economics, finance and technology.
Blog posts
With the first high-level meetings for APEC 2020 taking place in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya this week, I wrote a short wish list. In my view, regional cooperation is essential for coping with today’s challenges, not least in the digital realm. Read
Headlines
Europe wants to set up a provider of cloud services — based in the region obviously, and that can compete with the global players like Google, Amazon and Alibaba. Sounds a lot like a stereotypical European white elephant, but it does illustrate the high stakes around the control of data now. Read
Ownership is a thing of the past — Tesla remotely disabled the Autopilot feature on a second hand car, because the buyer had apparently not paid for the feature. This is of course inconceivable for anyone who currently owns a car, but it is probably an inevitable evolution, given the move to subscription pricing for software as well. The unknown is to what extent this will end getting regulated. Read
It happens to the best — Google Photos allows its users to download all of their pictures and videos, but it seems that in the process, some videos were ending up with other, random users. Not great for a photo sharing service, but again, practically inevitable given the nature of software and the complexity involved. The lesson is to be very careful with what goes into the cloud. Read
Google Maps is turning 15 — speaking of Google. When it launched, Maps was an amazing improvement on what was then available, and it made everyone admire Google’s prowess and wonder what they would do next. In hindsight, not all of that worked out so great… Read
Surveillance capitalism’s guerrilla resistance — to evade Instagram’s tracking, teens share some of their accounts' details with others and ask them to like, follow, search etc. different things to their own interests, to confuse the Instagram algorithms. Two things: first, this is a form of revealed preference that shows the discomfort with surveillance capitalism’s practices, and second, do not underestimate the ability of the young to deal with the world. Read
Context
Foreign Policy with a long article on how technology strengthens autocracy. Not long ago we thought it might to do the opposite. Read
Technology companies find themselves having to deal with laws specific to the countries they operate in, and which nominally go against their values. These kinds of test will become more frequent. Also, see the item above. Read
Companies that bet on the cloud are displacing incumbent behemoths (e.g. Salesforce vs SAP or Oracle.) Read ($)
Wide-angle
An anthropological analysis of face masks in the time of coronavirus, fascinating. Read
That's it for this week's edition. As always, thanks for reading and please forward this to anyone who you think might be interested, it would be much appreciated.