Tech News: OnlyFans does a 180

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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