TWiT 1085: In Line With Sam

TWiT Shows This Week In Tech
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This Week in Tech #1085 - “In Line With Sam”

This Week in Tech #1085 is now available.

  • Google’s expanding dominance: Android XR smart glasses, Universal Cart shopping tracking, and search market control
  • Media consolidation concerns: CBS News Radio’s closure after 99 years and billionaires acquiring newsrooms
  • Privacy and surveillance issues: police license plate tracking, targeted ad listening tools, and GM driver data collection
  • Elon Musk loses legal battle against Sam Altman over OpenAI founding
  • U.S. quantum computing investments and regulatory actions against big tech

#TWiT #ThisWeekInTech #Tech #Google #Privacy #MediaConsolidation #OpenAI

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Here, in Germany, the radio culture still seems to be going strong. They started streaming early and nearly every radio station is on FM and streaming. They are still common with manual workers, they can just have a cheap building-site radio running in the background on batteries, whilst they work. The same in cars, many people still use the radio, often DAB instead of FM these days, as it includes traffic reports. That said, I’ve been using podcasts and audio books as my main form of media in cars for nearly 2 decades nows.

The radio stations here, at least the big ones, are mainly fairly neutral, when it comes to political reporting. There is some bias, but nowhere near like the USA. Probably because no political party is big enough on its own to create a parliament, it usually takes at least 2 parties entering a coalition, if not 3, so it isn’t as easy to get the political sway on one station, it would put off too many of its potential listeners, if it was too extreme towards one end or the other of the spectrum.

Like TV, they aren’t 100% neutral, but the bias is certainly not as strong as in the USA. If a politician screws up, most media will call them out or even lampoon them. The state funded (through the GEZ tax) stations are more impartial in many respects than the commercial stations, who are run by business men with an agenda, but even the commercial stations generally pride themselves on the quality of their reporting and try and win independent, prestigious reporting prizes.

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Data collection is much more controlled over here as well. From the simple cooke selection screens (I generally select only essential cookies, no 3rd party tracking), to it being illegal to film people in public without their permission - if you look at YouTube videos from Germany, you will see that registration plates, company logos and faces are all pixelated, when webcam footage is uploaded. GPS and date information usually has to be obfuscated as well.

I use NextDNS to block around 3 million known tracking and advertising, malware, porn etc. websites. I used to use a PiHole, but switched to NextDNS because it works when I am on mobile data as well, not just when I am at home.

But it is generally illegal to sell information collected here, by many types of companies. Medical, banking and payment processing companies cannot use the information gathered for internal purposes, other than those expressed in their T&Cs and they cannot use them for advertising to you, they are also forbidden from selling or sharing the information with third parties. Likewise, ISPs are not allowed to store or sell usage information, beyond 72 hours, for legal purposes, in case they are served with a warrant for a specific IP address or user, and they are not allowed to sell on the information gathered.

The government actually lost a case in court, trying to get the ISPs to hold the information for 6 months, the court decided that would be unconstitutional. The same for broad surveillance, like the US has, asking for every phone logged into a cell in the vicinity of a crime is generally not allowed, they generally have to give a specific number or IMEI.

They also tried to get the Bundestrojaner (State Trojan software) pushed out to large numbers of people, but, again, the court told them multiple times that would be unconstitutional, they need a court order for each person they want to surveil and they have to physically install the software on those devices.

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