• YouTube banned several prominent white supremacist channels for violating a recently-updated policy that prohibited content suggesting that members of protected groups were inferior. YouTube stated that since the new hate speech policy was implemented, over 25,000 channels have been terminated; what made the bans this week significant is that the terminated accounts belonged to some really prominent creators, many of whom indicated they would be appealing the bans.
• Facebook removed accounts associated with the fringe “boogaloo” movement. For those of you not familiar, the boogaloo movement has been described as a loosely-organized extremist group preparing for a second American Civil War. Facebook removed 220 accounts, 28 pages, 106 groups, and 95 Instagram accounts, in addition to more than 500 other groups and pages that were hosting similar content.
• Facebook’s actions may be a response to the more than 400 companies that have joined an advertising boycott of Facebook for the month of July (and perhaps beyond?), in protest over how the company handles hate speech and other harmful content.
• Reddit banned over 2,000 of its communities for violating new content policies. Two significant communities were r/The_Donald (conservative content) and r/ChapoTrapHouse (liberal content). Reddit stated that “communities and people that incite violence or promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.”
• Streaming service Twitch temporarily suspended President Trump for what it termed “hateful conduct.”
• And the country of India banned TikTok and 58 other China-based apps for engaging in activities “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India. This may be related to recent tensions between India and China, including an incident that left 20 Indian soldiers dead. But it’s also not the first time India has banned TikTok.

Why lawyers should care There will be many who say these actions by social media companies violate our First Amendment rights. There’s also an argument that none of these social media companies are governmental entities, and they have the right to govern their platforms as they see fit. Indeed, the CEO of Reddit stated:

I have to admit that I’ve struggled with balancing my values as an American, and around free speech and free expression, with my values and the company’s values around common human decency.

In the case of India, we can see how an entire government’s power can take away content platforms that are being used by millions of Indians every day.

No matter where your opinions fall on this issue, we are just in the beginning stages of trying to figure out how all of this  works, and as usual the law will play some part in determining its outcome.

Even if you don’t care about the legal aspects involved, I’m guessing most of you use one or more of the platforms that took action this week – so it’s in your best interest to know what those platforms are doing, and how they are trying to serve you as a community member.

(A warning before I start: I’m an Android fan, and a lot of the features mentioned below have existed in Android phones for some time now, so I tend to get a bit snarky when Apple announces these amazing new features. I’m sure they WILL be amazing, because Apple is nothing but thoughtful when it rolls out new features – I’m just glad Apple users get to enjoy the same things I’ve enjoyed these past few years…..)

iOS 14 is in the House

The big news at most WWDC events is usually the new features coming to iOS, the iPhone operating system. And this year there were indeed some pretty big announcements, the biggest in the form of….widgets? Instead of boring rows of apps on your home screen, you can now place widgets that show your calendar, the weather, sports scores, or more. This was previously available in the Notification Center, but coming to the home screen is pretty huge. Android has offered widgets for years, but Apple’s widgets look elegant and polished, and should be fun to use.

iOS 14 is also introducing an App Library, a gallery that shows you all of your apps, grouped by category (again, something Android has had for a while now). Some of the other features include:

• More varied memoji – now your memoji can wear a facemask or be age-appropriate
• Dedicated map view for cycling and electronic vehicle users – to alert you to increases in elevation, or let you know where that next charging station is along your route.
• Digital Car Key – a new way to lock and unlock your car with your phone, although this is just available for BMW 5 Series owners so far.
• App Clips – similar to Android’s Instant Apps, these are like “mini apps;” you won’t need to download a full version of the app to get access to its functionality.
• Handwriting to Text – this is what I’m most excited about. Available on iPadOS, you can use your Apple Pencil to write in any text field and have your handwriting converted to text

Why lawyers should care My friend Jeff Richardson gives his usual great rundown of the latest iOS features in Why lawyers will love iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. I think the biggest new development for lawyers is the iPad’s Handwriting to Text – the ability to have your handwriting converted instantly to a format that you can turn into a letter or a document just seems incredibly powerful for lawyer productivity. But collectively, all of these features are important to lawyers, because they represent, each in their small ways, better ways to work. Having your calendar available as a widget on your homescreen will save you time in opening your calendar app; knowing where your next charging station is will help make sure you get to that deposition or hearing on time. You may not use all – or even many – of these features. But you owe it to yourself to try some of them out, to see if any of them can make your current digital life a bit simpler.

New Silicon

Probably the biggest announcement Apple made at WWDC was about something lawyers probably care very little about: silicon chips. For years, Apple has used Intel-manufactured computer processors in its computers. Now, Apple is going to be developing its own ARM chips, moving away from Intel. If you want to nerd out on the business details, read Apple, ARM and Intel from Ben Thompson.

Why lawyers should care If you don’t care who makes the processors in your Macs, you should care how this is going to affect you going forward. This is going to impact lawyers (and everybody else, really) in two major ways:

1. The transition to the new processors will take about two years to complete, and in the meantime there will be some overlap between devices with Intel processors, and Macs with the new chips. So if you are planning a Mac purchase in the next year or so, you will want to ask the right questions to make sure you are getting a device that suits your needs and is built for the long haul.
2. Perhaps most important, Macs that run on ARM-based processors can also run iOS and iPad apps, side by side with your Mac apps. Just think about that for a minute – right now there are around 1.8 million iOS and iPadOS apps in the App Store, and you’ll be able to run all of them on your Mac. So what we’re seeing is a bit of the “iPadification” of the Mac, but not completely; no Mac has a touchscreen – yet. Could this mean we could see Macs with touchscreens in the next few years? We’re closer to finding out.

Watch Out! More Tracking Features

I continue to be amazed at the features Apple can pack into its Apple Watch. The new WatchOS 7 is adding a ton of new tracking features, including:

• Sleep Tracking – with a Wind Down mode
• Hand Washing – it will be able to detect when you are washing your hands, and for how long. Very handy in a pandemic!
• Dance Tracking – because dancing is a form of fitness too…right?

Jeff Richardson has a more detailed run-down in Why lawyers will love watchOS7, so give that a read.

Why lawyers should care If you’re an Apple Watch user, you know why you should care. Take advantage of those new features!  But even if you’re not, the amount of information watches and fitness trackers are capturing about our daily lives is mind-boggling. There are privacy-related issues that come from the collection of so much personal information, but more importantly these watches are discovery goldmines, which litigators will no doubt seek to plunder in lawsuits where physical movement becomes relevant.

The bad news is that none of this new software is out yet – expect to see final versions arriving later this Fall.

But I do listen to a fair number of podcasts – legal, technology, and otherwise – and I plan to start making some recommendations here for those of you who are looking for something new to check out.

And the first one I want to recommend is Rabbit Hole, from Kevin Roose at the New York Times. According to Kevin, a catalyst for the audio series was a knee-jerk reaction he had to an article posted on Twitter, which got him wondering: was he actually mad, or did the digital world we live in make him feel like he should be mad?

Rabbit Hole is an examination of how our personalities and opinions are being shaped by the technology we use, and specifically how the algorithms running that technology are increasingly successful at directing our tastes and thoughts.The series tells the stories of people who are doing the shaping, as well as those who have been shaped, for better or (mostly) for worse. These eight episodes focus on YouTube; its algorithm has arguably been the most influential on shaping internet viewer behavior. It was disturbing to learn that the main character of the first few episodes listened to more than 40,000 hours of YouTube videos in a single year. I’d guess he’s not the only one.

Why lawyers should care. First, that whole duty of technological competence thing. Knowing how technologies like YouTube work will help you advise clients who may have their own YouTube channel, or represent clients who have in some way been adversely affected.  Second, I’ll bet some of you who don’t spend a lot of time on YouTube have a rather benign view of it – when it’s a tool that really deserves more awareness and attention.

So this week, I’d like to offer my take on two tech stories that caught my eye – not necessarily because they are the biggest, but because they touch on issues important to me – and I think to lawyers, too, as well.

WHAT DOES “INCOGNITO” REALLY MEAN?

Have you ever used Google Chrome’s Incognito Mode?  If so, you may have a claim in a new $5 billion lawsuit filed against Google this week. The lawsuit claims that despite promising you the ability to surf anonymously, Google is still tracking and collecting browsing information from you without your knowledge, using Google Analytics and Ad Manager.

Here’s how Incognito Mode is supposed to work: it allows you to open a browser tab where your activity won’t be tracked by Google inside the browser – so while you are Incognito, Chrome will not collect your browsing history, any website cookies or site data you come across, or any information you enter into web forms. However, Google doesn’t promise that your Incognito web surfing is completely anonymous: it warns you that your activity still might be visible to the websites you visit, your employer or school, and your internet service provider. (Note: this is at least partly due to a flaw in the software that still makes user activity detectable by websites – an flaw that can, and should, be fixed. Nevertheless, Google does acknowledge that front and center.)

So, when you use Incognito Mode and you visit another website, that website might be using Google Analytics to monitor its traffic and visitors – and in so doing, Google Analytics might nevertheless be collecting information about you even though you started out in Incognito Mode in the first place.

Why lawyers should care. I like to think lawyers will always be interested in the legal merits of a lawsuit, no matter what the topic. But as individual consumers on the internet, you should also care because it’s important to understand how information is collected about you, so you can take appropriate action if it matters to you. Does this case have merit? The plaintiff’s argument seems to rely on the fact that all of these independent websites chose to use Google Analytics, which was just waiting to collect information from Incognito users. One site I found claims that Google Analytics is used by around 55% of all internet websites – which is not a small percentage, but is actually smaller than I expected, for Google. It feels like a somewhat attenuated position to take – it will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

THIS EXPLAINS WHY NO ONE USES A PASSWORD MANAGER

I am in the midst of a multi-part series on the blog about getting and actually using a password manager. I am always amazed at the number of lawyers who choose to maintain a very loose password management strategy, using the same, fairly easy-to-break passwords on multiple sites. Now I think I’ve figured out why I can’t convince many people to use one: because no one really cares. My proof? A recent survey from Carnegie Mellon’s Security and Privacy Institute that only around one-third of users change their passwords after they have been notified of a data breach.

What this means is that, if 100 people are notified that a website they frequent was the victim of a data breach, 66 of those people will choose to say “yeah, someone might have my login credentials for this site, but I’m good.”  My mind is fairly boggled at the thought.

To be fair: the study may be subject to some level of bias.. The results were compiled by analyzing the web traffic of an opt-in research group where users sign up and share their full browser history for the sole purpose of academic research. Is it possible that the most security-minded of us would decline to share our browser history with a university? Very likely. So take this study with a requisite grain of salt.

Why lawyers should care. Whether or not the study is flawed, there were still a lot of people surveyed who don’t particularly care if their passwords get compromised. Are you one of those people? If so, do you routinely interact with confidential information of your clients on any of these sites? Good password management should be at the foundation of a lawyer’s obligation of technical competence – so please, even if you aren’t using a password manager, please exercise some good common sense when dealing with passwords on the internet.  It doesn’t hurt to use a password manager, either.

An Internet-Shaking Executive Order

This week, Twitter did something for the very first time: it fact-checked one of the President’s tweets. To do this, Twitter inserted a link in the President’s tweet (on the topic of mail-in ballots and fraud in California) that said “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”

In response, the President issued An Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship (4/17/2021 update: the Executive Order has since been rescinded), causing an uproar across the tech community. In summary, the order requests the following:

• An examination of whether social media platforms – and this means all social media platforms, not just Twitter – enjoy immunity from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as has been previously understood.
• That federal taxpayer dollars not fund or finance online platforms that restrict free speech
• That both federal and state agencies should review whether any social media platform engages in unfair or deceptive acts

  

Why lawyers should care. First of all, this whole thing presents a lot of meaty legal issues – First Amendment, interpretation of federal law, potential new legislation – what’s not for lawyers to like? But thinking beyond that, realize that most of you are utilizing, in some way, the social media platforms that this executive order seeks to affect. If the executive order is successful (which will take a while to determine – there are likely to be many legal challenges to it), it could mean significant changes about how social media platforms treat information posted by you, the user. The change could be good, it could be bad – who knows at this point?

We may finally be getting closer to addressing the question that’s been lingering for years with regard to social media: should anyone beyond you and me get to “decide” what’s true and what’s not true? We all obviously have the power ourselves to determine what’s true and what’s not, I just don’t think it’s quite that simple. Which may explain why we find ourselves in the current situation.

I try very hard not to post anything political on this blog – I view technology as a very bi-partisan medium. But sometimes politics comes barreling right into technology, and I can’t help but talk about it. I won’t engage on the merits of the executive order or the political implications, but I do think this topic deserves attention so we are prepared for whatever comes next.

If you Virtually “Build” It, Will They Come?

This week Microsoft held its annual developer conference, Build, as a virtual event for the first time ever. Build is more for the developer geeks, but there were still a few interesting announcements to come out of the conference that should interest lawyers.

• The Fluid Framework is described by some as “Google Docs on steroids,” and it’s going to be a new way for people to collaborate on documents. But instead of a single document or spreadsheet, Fluid components will be like Legos, which allow you to insert text, charts, tables, lists, and anything anywhere you want, and share them instantly. Instead of inserting a static chart, you’ll have a dynamic chart that can be edited anywhere you paste it – and where you can see your collaborators editing it in real time – whether that’s in an email chain, a chat app, or even Word or Excel.
• Microsoft Lists is not a task manager, but an evolution of SharePoint lists, which some of you might have seen before. They are editable lists you can use within the Office 365 environment, that work much like an online database. The tool will come with a set of pre-configured templates specific use cases like onboarding new hires, event planning, managing assets, handling vacation requests, and more.

Why lawyers should care Microsoft has really stepped up its game the past few years in improving its software products, making them more connected, more relatable, and (yes, believe it or not) easier to use. Sorry to those of you using Google or Pages, but Microsoft 365 really leaves everything else in the dust when it comes to office productivity, and you owe it to your firm and your clients to at least check it out if you don’t already use it.

Making Twitter Less Troll-y

One of the things I dread most about using Twitter is that occasionally someone unpleasant will reply to one of my tech-related tweets with an unnecessary, inappropriate comment. I ignore a lot of them, but what I’d really like is not to see them at all. Now, Twitter is trying to make that possible: they are experimenting with new settings that would allow you to choose who can reply to your tweet and join your conversation. It sounds a little bit like Facebook’s feature that allows you to share with everyone, or only your friends.

Why lawyers should care The last thing anyone needs on Twitter, lawyers or otherwise, are trolls that make interacting on social media a depressing experience. For those of you who don’t engage much on Twitter, or maybe who are staying away for this reason, the ability to control who sees your posts could be enough to get you to check it out and engage with an online audience.

COVID-19 App Development Is Underway

I’ve reported a few times over the past few weeks about Apple and Google’s efforts to design a contract tracing API that will allow state health agencies to develop apps that can help trace those who have been infected with or exposed to COVID-19. Contract tracing is an important and necessary method to make sure we are able to better understand and control the spread of the virus, at least until a vaccine is available to help with immunity. Well, Apple and Google have rolled the API out to state developers, and so far only three states have signed on to the exposure notification system: Alabama, South Carolina, and North Dakota. Hopefully, more will follow. In the meantime, Apple updated iOS to version 13.5, with coronavirus exposure alert support.

Why lawyers should care If you believe in the idea that using technology to support contract tracing, then it makes sense to support what Apple and Google are trying to accomplish. Because I personally don’t believe fighting a virus should be politicized, I think that using technology in innovative ways to fight coronavirus should be encouraged and used wherever possible. But even if you fall down on the other side of this issue and think that such apps represent an invasion of our privacy, then you should care about how these apps are developed, rolled out, and used; rather than fight against them, why not support ways that these apps can help us, while still protecting our privacy. It doesn’t have to be an either/or.

Dropping down off my soapbox, and wishing you a safe and happy Memorial Day weekend – see you next week!

The Thunderspy who Hacked Me

If you own a Windows or Linux computer manufactured before 2019, take note: your computer might be at risk. A Dutch research identified an attack that targets the thunderbolt port installed in literally millions of computers. Called Thunderspy, the attack can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer, and even hard disk encryption, to gain full access to your computer – and all within 5 minutes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that 1) it won’t work against Macs that are running MacOS; and 2) it requires physical access to the computer. So unless your laptop is stolen and out of your possession for more than 5 minutes, you should be okay. If you’re paranoid, this article from Ars Technica will hopefully calm your fears, as well as offer tools you can download and run to see if your computer is vulnerable.

Why lawyers should care. I don’t like to say it, but I am sure there are a lot of you out there whose computers not as secure as we’d like them to be. Although your computer is likely to be okay, is it worth your time to at least check it out?

Taking a STand against reply-all

It’s hard to name something people hate more about email than the evil of the Reply-All. (These days, maybe it’s failing to mute yourself on a Zoom call – you know who you are). It all starts innocently, or maybe with a complete lack of personal awareness: one person in a group email replies to another, but instead copies everyone by mistake.  Someone else replies back to everyone, asking not to be copied, which results in others from the group replying back to everyone with the same message. A few years ago, the New York Times fell victim to a “Replyallpocalypse“, with what some would say were hilarious results; even further back in 2008, a Reply-All storm at the U.S. State Department resulted in an email server crash.

Finally, Microsoft to the rescue. It’s rolling out a new feature in Exchange Online that will detect and block a Reply-All storm. Initially, it will only work with emails sent to over 5,000 recipients; over time, they will tweak the feature so that it works with more of the company’s Microsoft 365 customers.  See what I just said? You need to be a Microsoft 365 user to get this functionality, whenever it rolls out to your firm or company. Just another reason to get Microsoft 365.

Why lawyers should care. C’mon, who here hasn’t Replied-All when we shouldn’t have?

Take care out there, and have a great weekend.

Because there’s a lot of competition. It seems like every couple of weeks I see a new password manager pop up somewhere on the internet, and I have started to worry that the market is just too saturated, and it’s hard to make a choice. In the course of a 30-minute search, I discovered the following password managers out there for your consideration:

If you really want to do your due diligence and research the best password managers, by all means feel free to take a look at all of the options above. If you do, make sure to apply the requirements identified in the last post (and displayed in the chart below), and make sure the password manager in question meets every single requirement. You could spend hours and hours doing this, if you want.

Or.

You can focus on just three password managers. These are the tools with which I have personal experience, and which consistently show up in “best password manager” review articles. You cannot go wrong with one of these choices. They are:

LastPass is the password manager I use, and is my top choice. LastPass was released in 2008, and was purchased by LogMeIn in 2015. Fortunately, the acquisition has not had any effect (so far) on LastPass development. As you will see in the next post in this series, I like LastPass primarily because it is so easy to use, and available everywhere I need a password.

1Password has actually been around longer than LastPass – since 2006. It was originally developed only for Mac users, which is one of the reasons I never tried it. In the past few years it has expanded to other platforms, and remains one of the strongest password managers available.

Dashlane is the relative newcomer in this group, as it was released in 2012. Dashlane is what I would call the “quiet competitor” in this field, because I never see a lot about it online; most of the discussion seems to be dominated by LastPass and 1Password. But it’s still a strong choice, and worthy of belonging in the Top 3.

So, how do these three actually stack up? The results are pretty boring; they each meet all of the requirements for a good password manager. So while the chart below may not offer you a lot of new information, it should hopefully demonstrate that you won’t go wrong by choosing any of these tools.

So, what’s next?  Hopefully, those of you who aren’t using a password manager will be taking a hard look at these three options over the next couple of weeks. In my next post, using LastPass, I’ll show you how easy it is to create and manage passwords for all of your most important accounts.

Did I miss anything here?  Do you use a different password manager that beats my top three choices? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below.

Microsoft Dives Deep with Surface. While most of us are at home, it’s nice to see that companies are still releasing new technology. And Microsoft did so in a big way this week, unveiling FOUR new Surface devices. They are:

• Surface Book 3 – Microsoft’s convertible laptop with the removable tablet
• Surface Go 2 – A smaller more compact Surface to compete with the iPad and other tablets
• Surface Headphones 2
• Surface Earbuds – truly wireless earbuds, which might make you look a little bit like Frankenstein

The first looks by most tech sites are positive; the real test will come closer to the end of the month when devices start to roll out and the reviews roll in. Why lawyers should care: increasingly, Microsoft’s Surface line has offered very strong alternatives to Apple’s MacBook line, and traditional workplace laptops from Dell and Lenovo. Lawyers I know who use Surface Pros love them, and I have had good experiences with the Surfaces I have owned over the past few years.

One Small Step for Facebook, One Giant Leap for the Internet? This week, Facebook announced the formation of its Oversight Board, a group of 20 individuals tasked with focusing on Facebook’s most challenging content issues – hate speech, harassment, and protecting people’s safety and privacy. The board is made up of individuals from fifteen countries, and includes a former Prime Minister of Denmark, a Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and a formal federal judge nominated by President George W. Bush. Eventually, the board will grow to 40 members.

Initially, the Board will review a selected number of “highly emblematic” content moderation issues from Facebook and determine whether the decisions to allow or prohibit the speech were made in accordance with Facebook’s stated values and policies. If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like their opinion, he cannot shut down the board; they intentionally operate separately from Facebook. Which is what makes this interesting for the rest of the Internet. The Board was deliberately structured to have a life beyond the company, and possibly spin off oversight boards for Twitter, YouTube, or any other platform that makes content management decisions. Why lawyers should care: two reasons. First, the board is full of lawyers with backgrounds in free speech, human rights, and constitutional law – of the 20 board members, 10 have legal backgrounds. Second, there are tons of problems with Facebook and most of our social media platforms; we should applaud any effort to address these problems and make them better places for all of us.

“Contact Tracing” is now “Exposure Notification” – as I mentioned here two weeks ago, Apple and Google have been at work developing software that will help to track individuals infected with COVID-19 and notify those who might have come in contact with an infected person. Two weeks ago, they called the technology “contact tracing,” to track the manual process that public health officials undertake to track the course of any virus. Now called “Exposure Notification,” the Apple/Google alliance have begun testing the exposure notification API; a full release is expected in just a few weeks. Note I said API and not app; Apple and Google are only developing the software by which other app developers, primarily public health agencies will develop the actual apps that will be used. Apple and Google answer a lot of questions about the technology in this FAQ, and this Medium article describes what such an app might look like.

The critical question now is: will you, or anyone else, download such an app? A survey conducted this week indicates that more than 60% of Americans are either unable (no phones) or unwilling to use such an app. It’s not clear whether 40% adoption of an exposure notification app would be sufficient to stop a viral spread; I guess we’ll have to see what happens. But apps developed using the Apple/Google API are not the only game in town – other apps have already rolled out in various places, both here and abroad. Naturally, there are privacy and security concerns around these apps, although most privacy experts seem satisfied that the Apple/Google-based apps will keep a user’s identity reasonable secure.

As the Economy Suffers, Big Tech is Thriving – For Now. We are now in the midst of earnings season, and this week the big tech companies reported Q1 results. Although most tech companies are cautious about Q2, the global crisis did not have much of an effect on Q1 earnings. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Qualcomm, Spotify and eBay all reported positive quarters. But all of them likewise admitted that the rest of the year will be a question mark.

Your Next Business Meeting on Facebook? Not to be left out of the video meetings craze, this week Facebook announced the arrival of Messenger Rooms, in what is clearly a response to Zoom’s exploding popularity – and subsequent near-downfall due to privacy and security issues. Messenger Rooms will eventually hold up to 50 people with no time limit on the meetings; you can create a room directly from Messenger or from Facebook itself. Eventually you’ll be able to create a Messenger Room from Instagram Direct (remember, FB owns Instagram), WhatsApp and the Facebook Portal frame. To be clear, Messenger Rooms is not a competitor for the business meeting space – the hope is to cut into Zoom’s share of the virtual happy hour, exercise class, and book club circuit. Given that Facebook is experiencing a huge surge in traffic with everyone at home, it’s a ready-made group of people who can easily click a button and start a meeting or party with all of their Facebook friends. We’ll see how it catches on over the next few months.