August 26, 2021 • 20 mins
Content platform OnlyFans reverses a policy change after protests and criticism hit the company. Too many government agencies around the world rely on facial recognition software. The EU wants to track cryptocurrency transactions and more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. This is the
tech news for Thursday, August twenty one. Should be a
(00:26):
pretty short and sweet episode. Let's get to it now.
Last week, I reported the Only Fans, which is a
content platform that is most famous for hosting adult content
and sexually explicit content, was promoting a streaming video app
that would strictly stick too Safe for work content because
(00:50):
that was the only way the company was going to
get the app through and accepted into the Google and
Apple app stores. But following that was a roller coaster
of a story. First, the company said it was planning
to change its content policies, and namely Only Fans initially
announced that it would no longer allow for sexually explicit
(01:15):
content on the site, and it sounded as though nudity
would not be forbidden, but anything expressly sexual would be.
That precipitated a protest, which included content creators who essentially
made the site what it is, the argument being this
site wouldn't exist without that content. Sex workers were among
(01:39):
those protesting and other supporters they were criticizing the company's decision.
Well now only Fans has since reversed that decision and
said this planned change in policy will not happen. After all,
it was supposed to happen October one, and now it's
not going to happen. Moreover, the company said the whole
reason for this proposed change the first place wasn't necessarily
(02:02):
because the company had shifted towards a more conservative philosophy,
but rather it comes down to money, or maybe more precisely,
it comes down to payment processing. So, according to this
argument at issue, our companies like MasterCard and Visa, these
are payment processing companies that facilitate financial transactions, you know,
(02:27):
obviously for thousands of companies, right, not just only Fans,
but all around the world. Now, without these transaction services,
it becomes increasingly difficult to handle financial transactions, particularly at scale,
and so companies depend upon these very large entities to
make the flow of money possible because obviously without money
(02:50):
there's nothing, you know, creators want to be paid, the
site needs to make money. So these processing services hold
a lot of power and hold a lot of power
over the payment processing services are various conservative groups that
object to sexually explicit content. This is not the first
time we've seen platforms, you know, either bow or attempt
(03:14):
to bow to pressure from payment services. Patreon went through
something very similar. There were also reports that Only Fans
was struggling to secure investment money, and that the issue
of sexually explicit material on the site was the reason
for that challenge. But at any rate, the protests seemed
to have swayed Only Fans to change course yet again
(03:36):
and reject the requirement for content creators to follow a
new policy. Now, the reason I wanted to cover the
story was not for its salacious nature. It wasn't because
of controversy or to you know, throw sex into the mix,
but rather to highlight how politics and influence groups and
(03:56):
money play a huge role in everything in including in
the tech sector and on online platforms, and that we
can't really look at any issue without taking the larger
context into account, or else we miss important details. So
while your personal stance on the appropriate or inappropriate nature
(04:19):
of sexually explicit content is valid, like that's part of
your philosophy, and I do not wish to put my
own thoughts on there I would say that, you know,
ultimately we're looking at a lot of people using a
lot of influence to try and push things towards a
specific agenda, and that's where the conflict comes out of.
(04:42):
I don't think it was a lot of people reduced
to this to essentially say that only FANS was turning
its back on the people who had made the site
what it was. I think there's an element of that
that is true, but I think it is far more
complicated than that summary. Moving on, Earlier this week, I
(05:03):
talked about the ongoing semi conductor shortage and how we
might see that issue affects stuff like, you know, the
supply of various technologies and products. Well, the Wall Street
Journal reports that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is
the largest semi conductor chip manufacturer in the world, is
going to increase its prices potentially by as much as
(05:26):
twenty percent. Now, if you're gonna bump up your prices
by a fifth, that's pretty significant. And most of these
chips are not going to people like you and me.
These are being purchased by other companies which are then
using those chips as components in other products, which can
include anything from advanced technology to simple gadgets. But if
(05:49):
the semi conductor companies are raising their prices and these
other secondary companies are going to have to pay more
money to buy a basic component, I bet you can
guess where that bumping cost is gonna go next. Yeah,
this very likely means that for a fairly wide range
(06:09):
of products, we're likely to see prices start to go up. Otherwise,
the companies that are selling this stuff will have to
do so at a loss, and that's, you know, not
great in the business plan. You don't want to sell
things for less than what you paid to make them.
And we've definitely seen this already happen in the automotive world,
although that's a more complicated issue. You've got a limited
(06:32):
supply of cars and you've got steady demand, and by
the laws of supply and demand, if the supply is
low and the demand is high, then prices tend to
go up. Just kind of how it works in in
that free market sort of approach. However, it would not
surprise me to see this tent trend kind of affect
(06:55):
a wider variety of technology in the months to come,
which is not great new especially as we move towards
the holiday season, we will have to see. One group
of policies that has had an enormous impact on business
in general, but the tech world in particular, is the
g d p R, or General Data Protection Regulation in
(07:17):
the European Union. These rules restrict how companies can collect
and use personal information of EU citizens, and it includes
numerous protections for citizens of the EU in an era
where data collection is pretty much the name of the game.
This is why a lot of sites include those little
pop up notifications about cookies and tracking and whatnot and
(07:40):
allow you to opt out of that or to leave
the site before you know the data collection begins. Well,
the UK famously said peace out to the EU, and
now Oliver doubt In, the Culture Secretary for the UK,
says that the nation is going to take a slightly
different path from the EU and leave at least parts
(08:01):
of the g d p R regulations behind. However, this
is all much easier said than done, because while the
UK might not be part of the EU anymore, it
definitely has lots and lots and lots of transactions with
the EU. Frequently, I mean as as much as a
small subsection of Brits might like to think that they
(08:23):
are a world unto themselves, something that a lot of
Americans can identify with the fact is there are actually
a lot more people outside of the UK than there
are in it. Anyway, whatever new rules take the place
of g d p R in the UK, we'll have
to meet EU approval or else the UK might see
various data channels connecting it to the continent, kind of
(08:46):
shut down. The UK has named John Edwards, who currently
is the Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand, as a potential
candidate to take over the job of Information Commissioner, which
would start in November of this year, and that he
would then oversee the drafting of new rules. It will
likely be a pretty complicated process to make certain that
(09:09):
the new rules are compatible enough with g DPR and
protect British citizens adequately, and to you know, kind of
remove some of the stuff that the UK sees as
being unnecessary or counterproductive. And I wish them luck in
those endeavors. I have a few more news stories, but
before we get to that, let's take a quick break.
(09:38):
BuzzFeed News published an article that reveals that twenty four
countries have made use of clear View ai s facial
recognition technology, and you may have heard me talk about
clear View AI before. That company has actually run into
some trouble with various online platforms after using technology to
scrape those platforms for publicly posted images in order to
(09:59):
build out an enormous facial recognition database without the consent
of the people who's you know, images they collected. And
you might say, well, if someone posts a photo publicly
on their Facebook profile, like if their profile is public
and they post it to the public, you know, setting,
(10:20):
then it's fair game because it's all public, right, But
what if that photo includes other folks in it? It's
not like just a selfie. What if a friend of
yours takes a photo that has you in it, and
then they post that photo on their public Facebook profile,
and then clear View AI scoops up that photo and
now your face is also in that database, even though
(10:43):
you never gave consent. You don't publicly post pictures, at
least in this hypothetical situation, and so you never had
an option to opt in or opt out of this.
It just happened because a friend of yours decided that
that picture just needed to go up on that Facebook profile.
All of that just stinks, right, I mean this affects
people who aren't even on Facebook. Right. You've got people
(11:07):
who just know people who are on Facebook, and they
happen to show up in pictures and they had no
saying any of this. This is just one of the
many problems that privacy rights advocates have with clear view AI.
Another big one is that facial recognition technologies are notoriously
prone to bias, and that this frequently means the tech
(11:29):
is just playing bad at recognizing images, specifically of non
white people, and this can lead to false positives. That
has actually happened in numerous cases around the world where
police have acted upon uh incorrect facial recognition hits. So
this disproportionately affects people of color. It is, It is bad.
(11:54):
Buzzfeeds report shows how widely used this tech is within
various institutions around the world, old including agencies that are
funded by taxpayers. So in other words, we're all paying
to be spied upon and potentially misidentified. There's been a
growing movement around the world to restrict facial recognition technology use,
especially in investigations, and some communities outright ban police use
(12:18):
of that technology. Honestly, I'm all for banning facial recognition
tech for those kinds of investigations. And I've said this before.
Relying on technology to solve a social problem when the
tech just isn't there yet, that's just a recipe to
make a bad social problem even worse, or to create
(12:40):
new social problems that interact with existing ones. Not a
good thing. Tech is not a solve all approach to
all of our problems, and relying on tech to be
that is a recipe for disaster. I see the same
thing playing out with climate change, where people are saying,
I'm not worried the as we're gonna come up with
(13:01):
tech to solve this problem. There's no guarantee will do that.
There's no guarantee it will be on a timeline that
will actually make a difference. You cannot use the you
know tech as some sort of literal deos X makena
to come in and rescue us. All right, soap box
set aside, but sticking with facial recognition tech, The Register
(13:23):
reports that a South Korean government agency called the Personal
Information Protection Commission or p i p C, found that
Facebook created facial recognition templates for two thousand South Koreans
without first securing proper consent, and that this happened between
April two thousand eighteen and April two thousand nineteen. The
(13:45):
government has then find Facebook six point four six billion one. Now,
that's about five and a half million dollars, and let's
be honest, that is a lot of money. Five and
a half million dollars, that's a ton of money. I
would I would be gob struck to get five and
a half million dollars, But for Facebook, that probably doesn't
(14:06):
even amount to a catered dinner at Facebook anyway. The
organization also told Facebook that it would need to destroy
the facial recognition info the company had developed for South Koreans,
and then if it wanted to rebuild it, it it would
first have to obtain consent from each person before starting
back into that process. It also issued a warning to
(14:29):
Google and told the company to make its privacy policies
and settings more transparent. And Netflix got hit with a
two million one or are just under a hundred dollars
in fines for collecting the data of users without first
gaining their consent. So we're seeing more pushback in this field.
(14:51):
But again, like those amounts I mean, they might probably
make sense within the context of South Korea, but they
are so small in the grand scheme of these come
as that while you know, no one ever wants to
pay a fine, it's barely an inconvenience. The EU is
looking to chip away at some of the features that
cryptocurrency enthusiasts happen to like a lot, namely that whole
(15:16):
bit about privacy, you know, being able to make transactions
without everyone knowing your business. The EU wants companies like
coin base and cracking, so essentially companies that handle like
digital wallets and stuff, to collect information on people who
are conducting cryptocurrency transactions. And this gets really interesting to
me because it actually shows how how there's some conflicting
(15:41):
philosophies at play in the EU when it comes to
digital information. Because on the one hand, you have some
fairly extensive data protection laws on the books that are
meant to help citizens protect their privacy and their security
and to know who has their data and how they
are using that. But on the other hand, well, you know,
(16:03):
they want to keep track of these transactions, and thus
that means giving up some privacy in order for that
information to be traceable. Uh. And there's a couple of
reasons for that. One is that you clearly are thinking
about taxation, right if you want to tax transactions that
otherwise are going hidden. Another is that a lot of
(16:24):
criminals use cryptocurrency in an effort to launder money from
illicitly gained sources. That's something clearly the authorities would want
to know about. They'd want to be able to trace that,
So there are some legit reasons for countries to want
to do this. This rule would require crypto companies to
make these transactions traceable, and it would bring cryptocurrency kind
(16:46):
of in line with the rules that guide other banking
and financial institutions, including the fact that you would not
be allowed to have an anonymous digital wallet. Like digital
wallets would have to be tied to specifick individuals and
that would need to be traceable. And finally, the search
business is seriously big business, like like wicked big. And
(17:09):
one way to try and wrap your head around how
big search is in the sense of like how much
money it makes is to look at how much Google
will pay Apple to allow Google Search to be the
default search engine for Safari and thus the default search
engine for Mac and iOS devices. Now. Back in Google
(17:31):
reportedly coughed up ten billion dollars for that privilege, and
this year, according to an analyst firm called Bernstein, the
amount might be closer to fifteen billion dollars and it
would just increase from there, so next year would probably
be closer to eighteen to twenty billion dollars. That is
(17:53):
a princely sum. Indeed, now the analysts say this isn't
set in stone, and Google might ultimately decide that the
expense it pays is not worth the benefit it gets,
or you might have a regulatory agency step in and say, hey,
this doesn't seem like it's a good practice. It seems
(18:14):
anti competitive, and that would mean that you're falling into
some you know, trends of monopolies and you start getting
into illegal territory. But what it really shows you is
that Google is definitely an ad company, right, Like that
is Google's business. Search just happens to be the prime
way that Google gets eyeballs on advertisement and that's what
(18:38):
generates revenue for the company. So, yeah, Google provides a
search service, but it's business is in advertising. So I
guess it's true that you've got to spend money to
make money, and that applies even when you're looking at
multibillion dollar corporations. Now, if like me, you're wondering how
much Google pulls in from its search business, like, what
(19:01):
is justifying this incredible expense, Well, in the company reported
revenues of a hundred four billion dollars in the search
and other category, and that in turn was more than
all of Google's revenue for that year. So yeah, these
are the big leagues we're talking about. Still blows my
mind that it's that big, though. And that's it for
(19:25):
the news that I have for you guys on Thursday,
August one. Will be back next week with more tech
news and episodes. If you have suggestions for topics I
should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on
Twitter to handle is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
(19:48):
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. GW
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. This is the
tech news for Thursday, August twenty one. Should be a
(00:26):
pretty short and sweet episode. Let's get to it now.
Last week, I reported the Only Fans, which is a
content platform that is most famous for hosting adult content
and sexually explicit content, was promoting a streaming video app
that would strictly stick too Safe for work content because
(00:50):
that was the only way the company was going to
get the app through and accepted into the Google and
Apple app stores. But following that was a roller coaster
of a story. First, the company said it was planning
to change its content policies, and namely Only Fans initially
announced that it would no longer allow for sexually explicit
(01:15):
content on the site, and it sounded as though nudity
would not be forbidden, but anything expressly sexual would be.
That precipitated a protest, which included content creators who essentially
made the site what it is, the argument being this
site wouldn't exist without that content. Sex workers were among
(01:39):
those protesting and other supporters they were criticizing the company's decision.
Well now only Fans has since reversed that decision and
said this planned change in policy will not happen. After all,
it was supposed to happen October one, and now it's
not going to happen. Moreover, the company said the whole
reason for this proposed change the first place wasn't necessarily
(02:02):
because the company had shifted towards a more conservative philosophy,
but rather it comes down to money, or maybe more precisely,
it comes down to payment processing. So, according to this
argument at issue, our companies like MasterCard and Visa, these
are payment processing companies that facilitate financial transactions, you know,
(02:27):
obviously for thousands of companies, right, not just only Fans,
but all around the world. Now, without these transaction services,
it becomes increasingly difficult to handle financial transactions, particularly at scale,
and so companies depend upon these very large entities to
make the flow of money possible because obviously without money
(02:50):
there's nothing, you know, creators want to be paid, the
site needs to make money. So these processing services hold
a lot of power and hold a lot of power
over the payment processing services are various conservative groups that
object to sexually explicit content. This is not the first
time we've seen platforms, you know, either bow or attempt
(03:14):
to bow to pressure from payment services. Patreon went through
something very similar. There were also reports that Only Fans
was struggling to secure investment money, and that the issue
of sexually explicit material on the site was the reason
for that challenge. But at any rate, the protests seemed
to have swayed Only Fans to change course yet again
(03:36):
and reject the requirement for content creators to follow a
new policy. Now, the reason I wanted to cover the
story was not for its salacious nature. It wasn't because
of controversy or to you know, throw sex into the mix,
but rather to highlight how politics and influence groups and
(03:56):
money play a huge role in everything in including in
the tech sector and on online platforms, and that we
can't really look at any issue without taking the larger
context into account, or else we miss important details. So
while your personal stance on the appropriate or inappropriate nature
(04:19):
of sexually explicit content is valid, like that's part of
your philosophy, and I do not wish to put my
own thoughts on there I would say that, you know,
ultimately we're looking at a lot of people using a
lot of influence to try and push things towards a
specific agenda, and that's where the conflict comes out of.
(04:42):
I don't think it was a lot of people reduced
to this to essentially say that only FANS was turning
its back on the people who had made the site
what it was. I think there's an element of that
that is true, but I think it is far more
complicated than that summary. Moving on, Earlier this week, I
(05:03):
talked about the ongoing semi conductor shortage and how we
might see that issue affects stuff like, you know, the
supply of various technologies and products. Well, the Wall Street
Journal reports that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is
the largest semi conductor chip manufacturer in the world, is
going to increase its prices potentially by as much as
(05:26):
twenty percent. Now, if you're gonna bump up your prices
by a fifth, that's pretty significant. And most of these
chips are not going to people like you and me.
These are being purchased by other companies which are then
using those chips as components in other products, which can
include anything from advanced technology to simple gadgets. But if
(05:49):
the semi conductor companies are raising their prices and these
other secondary companies are going to have to pay more
money to buy a basic component, I bet you can
guess where that bumping cost is gonna go next. Yeah,
this very likely means that for a fairly wide range
(06:09):
of products, we're likely to see prices start to go up. Otherwise,
the companies that are selling this stuff will have to
do so at a loss, and that's, you know, not
great in the business plan. You don't want to sell
things for less than what you paid to make them.
And we've definitely seen this already happen in the automotive world,
although that's a more complicated issue. You've got a limited
(06:32):
supply of cars and you've got steady demand, and by
the laws of supply and demand, if the supply is
low and the demand is high, then prices tend to
go up. Just kind of how it works in in
that free market sort of approach. However, it would not
surprise me to see this tent trend kind of affect
(06:55):
a wider variety of technology in the months to come,
which is not great new especially as we move towards
the holiday season, we will have to see. One group
of policies that has had an enormous impact on business
in general, but the tech world in particular, is the
g d p R, or General Data Protection Regulation in
(07:17):
the European Union. These rules restrict how companies can collect
and use personal information of EU citizens, and it includes
numerous protections for citizens of the EU in an era
where data collection is pretty much the name of the game.
This is why a lot of sites include those little
pop up notifications about cookies and tracking and whatnot and
(07:40):
allow you to opt out of that or to leave
the site before you know the data collection begins. Well,
the UK famously said peace out to the EU, and
now Oliver doubt In, the Culture Secretary for the UK,
says that the nation is going to take a slightly
different path from the EU and leave at least parts
(08:01):
of the g d p R regulations behind. However, this
is all much easier said than done, because while the
UK might not be part of the EU anymore, it
definitely has lots and lots and lots of transactions with
the EU. Frequently, I mean as as much as a
small subsection of Brits might like to think that they
(08:23):
are a world unto themselves, something that a lot of
Americans can identify with the fact is there are actually
a lot more people outside of the UK than there
are in it. Anyway, whatever new rules take the place
of g d p R in the UK, we'll have
to meet EU approval or else the UK might see
various data channels connecting it to the continent, kind of
(08:46):
shut down. The UK has named John Edwards, who currently
is the Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand, as a potential
candidate to take over the job of Information Commissioner, which
would start in November of this year, and that he
would then oversee the drafting of new rules. It will
likely be a pretty complicated process to make certain that
(09:09):
the new rules are compatible enough with g DPR and
protect British citizens adequately, and to you know, kind of
remove some of the stuff that the UK sees as
being unnecessary or counterproductive. And I wish them luck in
those endeavors. I have a few more news stories, but
before we get to that, let's take a quick break.
(09:38):
BuzzFeed News published an article that reveals that twenty four
countries have made use of clear View ai s facial
recognition technology, and you may have heard me talk about
clear View AI before. That company has actually run into
some trouble with various online platforms after using technology to
scrape those platforms for publicly posted images in order to
(09:59):
build out an enormous facial recognition database without the consent
of the people who's you know, images they collected. And
you might say, well, if someone posts a photo publicly
on their Facebook profile, like if their profile is public
and they post it to the public, you know, setting,
(10:20):
then it's fair game because it's all public, right, But
what if that photo includes other folks in it? It's
not like just a selfie. What if a friend of
yours takes a photo that has you in it, and
then they post that photo on their public Facebook profile,
and then clear View AI scoops up that photo and
now your face is also in that database, even though
(10:43):
you never gave consent. You don't publicly post pictures, at
least in this hypothetical situation, and so you never had
an option to opt in or opt out of this.
It just happened because a friend of yours decided that
that picture just needed to go up on that Facebook profile.
All of that just stinks, right, I mean this affects
people who aren't even on Facebook. Right. You've got people
(11:07):
who just know people who are on Facebook, and they
happen to show up in pictures and they had no
saying any of this. This is just one of the
many problems that privacy rights advocates have with clear view AI.
Another big one is that facial recognition technologies are notoriously
prone to bias, and that this frequently means the tech
(11:29):
is just playing bad at recognizing images, specifically of non
white people, and this can lead to false positives. That
has actually happened in numerous cases around the world where
police have acted upon uh incorrect facial recognition hits. So
this disproportionately affects people of color. It is, It is bad.
(11:54):
Buzzfeeds report shows how widely used this tech is within
various institutions around the world, old including agencies that are
funded by taxpayers. So in other words, we're all paying
to be spied upon and potentially misidentified. There's been a
growing movement around the world to restrict facial recognition technology use,
especially in investigations, and some communities outright ban police use
(12:18):
of that technology. Honestly, I'm all for banning facial recognition
tech for those kinds of investigations. And I've said this before.
Relying on technology to solve a social problem when the
tech just isn't there yet, that's just a recipe to
make a bad social problem even worse, or to create
(12:40):
new social problems that interact with existing ones. Not a
good thing. Tech is not a solve all approach to
all of our problems, and relying on tech to be
that is a recipe for disaster. I see the same
thing playing out with climate change, where people are saying,
I'm not worried the as we're gonna come up with
(13:01):
tech to solve this problem. There's no guarantee will do that.
There's no guarantee it will be on a timeline that
will actually make a difference. You cannot use the you
know tech as some sort of literal deos X makena
to come in and rescue us. All right, soap box
set aside, but sticking with facial recognition tech, The Register
(13:23):
reports that a South Korean government agency called the Personal
Information Protection Commission or p i p C, found that
Facebook created facial recognition templates for two thousand South Koreans
without first securing proper consent, and that this happened between
April two thousand eighteen and April two thousand nineteen. The
(13:45):
government has then find Facebook six point four six billion one. Now,
that's about five and a half million dollars, and let's
be honest, that is a lot of money. Five and
a half million dollars, that's a ton of money. I
would I would be gob struck to get five and
a half million dollars, But for Facebook, that probably doesn't
(14:06):
even amount to a catered dinner at Facebook anyway. The
organization also told Facebook that it would need to destroy
the facial recognition info the company had developed for South Koreans,
and then if it wanted to rebuild it, it it would
first have to obtain consent from each person before starting
back into that process. It also issued a warning to
(14:29):
Google and told the company to make its privacy policies
and settings more transparent. And Netflix got hit with a
two million one or are just under a hundred dollars
in fines for collecting the data of users without first
gaining their consent. So we're seeing more pushback in this field.
(14:51):
But again, like those amounts I mean, they might probably
make sense within the context of South Korea, but they
are so small in the grand scheme of these come
as that while you know, no one ever wants to
pay a fine, it's barely an inconvenience. The EU is
looking to chip away at some of the features that
cryptocurrency enthusiasts happen to like a lot, namely that whole
(15:16):
bit about privacy, you know, being able to make transactions
without everyone knowing your business. The EU wants companies like
coin base and cracking, so essentially companies that handle like
digital wallets and stuff, to collect information on people who
are conducting cryptocurrency transactions. And this gets really interesting to
me because it actually shows how how there's some conflicting
(15:41):
philosophies at play in the EU when it comes to
digital information. Because on the one hand, you have some
fairly extensive data protection laws on the books that are
meant to help citizens protect their privacy and their security
and to know who has their data and how they
are using that. But on the other hand, well, you know,
(16:03):
they want to keep track of these transactions, and thus
that means giving up some privacy in order for that
information to be traceable. Uh. And there's a couple of
reasons for that. One is that you clearly are thinking
about taxation, right if you want to tax transactions that
otherwise are going hidden. Another is that a lot of
(16:24):
criminals use cryptocurrency in an effort to launder money from
illicitly gained sources. That's something clearly the authorities would want
to know about. They'd want to be able to trace that,
So there are some legit reasons for countries to want
to do this. This rule would require crypto companies to
make these transactions traceable, and it would bring cryptocurrency kind
(16:46):
of in line with the rules that guide other banking
and financial institutions, including the fact that you would not
be allowed to have an anonymous digital wallet. Like digital
wallets would have to be tied to specifick individuals and
that would need to be traceable. And finally, the search
business is seriously big business, like like wicked big. And
(17:09):
one way to try and wrap your head around how
big search is in the sense of like how much
money it makes is to look at how much Google
will pay Apple to allow Google Search to be the
default search engine for Safari and thus the default search
engine for Mac and iOS devices. Now. Back in Google
(17:31):
reportedly coughed up ten billion dollars for that privilege, and
this year, according to an analyst firm called Bernstein, the
amount might be closer to fifteen billion dollars and it
would just increase from there, so next year would probably
be closer to eighteen to twenty billion dollars. That is
(17:53):
a princely sum. Indeed, now the analysts say this isn't
set in stone, and Google might ultimately decide that the
expense it pays is not worth the benefit it gets,
or you might have a regulatory agency step in and say, hey,
this doesn't seem like it's a good practice. It seems
(18:14):
anti competitive, and that would mean that you're falling into
some you know, trends of monopolies and you start getting
into illegal territory. But what it really shows you is
that Google is definitely an ad company, right, Like that
is Google's business. Search just happens to be the prime
way that Google gets eyeballs on advertisement and that's what
(18:38):
generates revenue for the company. So, yeah, Google provides a
search service, but it's business is in advertising. So I
guess it's true that you've got to spend money to
make money, and that applies even when you're looking at
multibillion dollar corporations. Now, if like me, you're wondering how
much Google pulls in from its search business, like, what
(19:01):
is justifying this incredible expense, Well, in the company reported
revenues of a hundred four billion dollars in the search
and other category, and that in turn was more than
all of Google's revenue for that year. So yeah, these
are the big leagues we're talking about. Still blows my
mind that it's that big, though. And that's it for
(19:25):
the news that I have for you guys on Thursday,
August one. Will be back next week with more tech
news and episodes. If you have suggestions for topics I
should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on
Twitter to handle is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
(19:48):
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. GW
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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