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Just over a year ago it looked like polarized politicians and terrified tech companies could agree on one U.S. policy issue: the need for national privacy regulations. Tech behemoths didn’t really want stricter rules, of course. But they recognized that, faced with clampdowns in Europe and one powerful state, California, a coordinated effort would be better. Populists of various hues were happy to come down on the side of more data protection for consumers.
As David Meyer argues persuasively in the new issue of Fortune, the pandemic has upended the world’s thinking on privacy just as thoroughly as it has disrupted so many aspects of our lives. Meyer writes that even committed privacy activists recognize that fighting the nasty virus will require clever surveillance and that various smartphone technologies and other techniques will be the best way to do this.
Surveillance-aided “contact tracing” already seems to be effective in one authoritarian regime, China, and at least two Asian democracies, Singapore and South Korea, all of which have attitudes toward civil liberties that are different from the West’s.
The fact of the matter is that the West has moved beyond the simple phase of the “techlash” of the last couple of years. Now many of us understand that technology gadgets and their digital platforms offer the best chances of fighting the pandemic quickly and efficiently, at least before a vaccine is available.
You can see the privacy-invasive solutions forming in real time. The New York Times wrote late last week about how France, which fears surveillance more than most, has done a 180 and plans to mimic Singapore’s approach. Also in The Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr., in an important article that looks at the two-year pandemic outlook, points to the adult-film industry of all things for its use of an app that verifies actors are H.I.V negative.
As Meyer concludes in Fortune: “It’s safe to say more surveillance, not less, will be the new normal in a forever changed world.”
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San Francisco and Seattle have fought two of the most effective battles against the novel coronavirus among U.S. cities. As a resident of the former city, I’m grateful and more than a little surprised. After all, it was just in February that I chronicled the city’s many shortcomings. As of Sunday, there has been a cumulative total of 20 deaths in San Francisco attributed to COVID-19. (All is not perfect, and Heather Knight explained this weekend in The San Francisco Chronicle about the deteriorating situation in the Tenderloin.) As for Seattle, Fortune’s Erika Fry has published an account of how the business community rallied to help fight the pandemic. It is an important read.
On Wednesday, Fry and I are going to discuss her story and the state of affairs in the tech industry’s two top cities. I’ll have more information tomorrow about how to sign up to watch that conversation.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Connecting the dots. Carnegie Mellon unveiled a new effort to track and forecast the spread of COVID-19 by using survey responses about symptoms collected by Google and Facebook. In initial tests, 1 million Facebook users a week and 600,000 Google users per day were self-reporting whether they had symptoms such as fever and cough. Combined with other data, researchers at the university think they will be able to use the responses to forecast the number of hospitalizations and ICU admissions on a county level weeks in advance.
Sports is human life in microcosm. One trend definitely on the rise during the pandemic is not just playing video games, but watching other people play video games. Amazon's Twitch has the lead as as a viewing service. Now Facebook is getting into the market with a game-watching app for iOS and Android.
Someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie. Sales of the humble Raspberry Pi computer have skyrocketed lately as everyone from ventilator innovators to work-at-home designers looks for a cheap way to compute. The foundation that makes the simple, low-cost machines says it sold 640,000 in March, its second-best month ever.
Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba wants to make sure it's not falling behind its local or U.S. rivals in cloud offerings. The company said Monday it will invest $28 billion, equal to half its annual revenue, in expanding cloud data centers over the next three years.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. In the latest effort to pressure Internet giants to prop up media companies, Australia's competition watchdog is ordering rules to force Google and Facebook to share more revenue with journalism producers. Among the planned rules, the Internet companies also will have to favor original sources in search results and disclose changes to algorithms that could affect content rankings.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The coronavirus pandemic is already inspiring deeper thinking about our priorities as a society. VC legend Marc Andreessen published a bit of a rant (in the best possible sense) about how we should focus much more of our effort and resources on creating "new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward."
Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard? Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build? Solve the climate crisis by building — energy experts say that all carbon-based electrical power generation on the planet could be replaced by a few thousand new zero-emission nuclear reactors, so let’s build those. Maybe we can start with 10 new reactors? Then 100? Then the rest?
In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The retailers that are smartest about shopping tech will finish on top after the coronavirus By Phil Wahba
The SBA gave some fintech companies the green light too late, leaving the smallest of businesses without PPP loans By Jen Wieczner
When red is unlucky: What we can learn from China’s color-coded apps for tracking the coronavirus outbreak By Naomi Xu and Clay Chandler
COVID-19 will change the entire notion of offices: Companies eye rental savings after working from home By Vivienne Walt
Buying time: How watches are finding new homes online By Daniel Bentley
What refunds are due to you? Here’s how industries are handling things By Chris Morris
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a 50% discount for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
While baseball, basketball, and most other sports leagues are on hiatus due to the pandemic, one sport is doing just fine, having adapted to online play years ago: chess. And there was quite the upset in the world of chess in the final of the Banter Blitz Cup. Longtime world champion Magnus Carlsen lost to a 16-year-old from Iran named Alireza Firouzja. How did the kid do it? "You should be a little lucky," Firouzja said after the match. A rematch could happen soon, as the Magnus Carlsen Invitational tournament starts today with a $250,000 prize.
Aaron Pressman