Techlife News

Image: Teresa Crawford Peter McNally, an analyst for market-research
firm Third Bridge, said United’s revenue forecast
for the first quarter “is a little disappointing,”
and he wants United to say more precisely
when it might stop losing money. On the plus
side, he noted that United has raised $26 billion
from government and private sources and has
nearly $20 billion in liquidity left to survive
the pandemic.

“They are not running out of money,” McNally
said. “There’s one thing we’ve learned from this
crisis: The market doesn’t stop giving these
airlines money.”

Excluding some one-time gains, United said its
fourth-quarter loss worked out to $7 per share.
That was worse than the $6.62 per share loss
predicted, on average, by 19 analysts in a FactSet
survey. In the same quarter of 2019, United
earned $641 million.

Revenue tumbled to $3.41 billion, nearly
matching the $3.42 billion that was forecast
by analysts. Revenue from international flights
plunged 83%, compared with a 72% drop in
domestic revenue.

About 56% of seats were sold on the average
flight in the fourth quarter, and that was after
United cut thousands of flights because of
weak demand.

Cargo was a rare bright spot, with revenue up
77% from a year earlier, but cargo makes up a
tiny part of United’s overall business.

Shares of United Airlines Holdings Inc. rose 1%
to $45.18 in regular trading before the financial
results were released. During extended trading,
they were down about 2%.

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AMAZON OFFERS ASSIST
WITH US COVID-19
VACCINE DISTRIBUTION

Image: Steven Senne

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Amazon is offering its colossal operations
network and advanced technologies to assist
President Joe Biden in his vow to get 100
million COVID-19 vaccinations to Americans in
his first 100 days in office.
“We are prepared to leverage our operations,
information technology, and communications
capabilities and expertise to assist your
administration’s vaccination efforts,” wrote
the CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer
division, Dave Clark, in a letter to Biden.

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Image: Ross D. Franklin “Our scale allows us to make a meaningful
impact immediately in the fight against
COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in
this effort.”

Amazon said that it has already arranged a
licensed third-party occupational health care
provider to give vaccines on-site at its facilities
for its employees when they become available.

Amazon has more than 800,000 employees
in the United States, Clark wrote, most of
whom essential workers who cannot work
from home and should be vaccinated as soon
as possible.

Biden will sign 10 pandemic-related executive
orders on Thursday, his second day in
office, but the administration says efforts
to supercharge the rollout of vaccines have
been hampered by lack of cooperation
from the Trump administration during the
transition. They say they don’t have a complete
understanding of the previous administration’s
actions on vaccine distribution.

Biden is also depending on Congress to provide
$1.9 trillion for economic relief and COVID-19
response. There are a litany of complaints from
states that say they are not getting enough
vaccine even as they are being asked to
vaccinate a broader swath of Americans.

According to data through January 20 from
Johns Hopkins University, the seven-day
rolling average for daily new deaths in the U.S.
rose over the past two weeks from 2,677.3
on January 6 to 3,054.1 on Wednesday. More
than 400,000 people in the U.S. have died
from COVID-19.

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MORGAN
STANLEY PROFITS
RISE 48%, HELPED
BY STRONG
MARKETS

Morgan Stanley saw its fourth-quarter profits
surge 48% from a year earlier, as the Wall Street
bank benefited from the market’s upward swing
and investors jubilation for tech stocks and IPOs
late last year.
The New York-based firm posted a profit $3.39
billion, or $1.81 a share, up from $2.31 billion,
or $1.30 a share, in the same period a year
earlier. The results were significantly better than
the $1.30-per-share profit that analysts had
expected, according to FactSet.
Like its primary competitor Goldman Sachs,
who also saw a massive profit increase, Morgan
Stanley saw a surge of revenue in its core
investment banking and trading operations.
Investment banking revenues were up 46%
from a year earlier, mostly due to higher equity
underwriting fees. Morgan Stanley has a large
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business taking companies public, and several
large tech firms went public in the last three
months of the year. That was a boon for the
firm’s underwriting business.

Trading revenue rose 32%. The stock market
steadily moved higher the second half of 2020,
which resulted in the stock market hitting
several highs along the way. Bond trading
revenues were also higher.

Morgan Stanley’s wealth management arm,
which the company grew over the last decade
to help the firm find steadier sources of profits
instead of the boom-bust cycle of markets, also
had a strong quarter. Net revenues in the firm
were up 24% from a year earlier.

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GOOGLE, FRENCH
PUBLISHERS SIGN
COPYRIGHT NEWS

PAYMENT DEAL

Google has signed a deal with a group of French
publishers paving the way for the internet giant
to make digital copyright payments for online
news content.
After months of talks, Google France and the
Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale said
Thursday that they agreed to set up a framework
under which the U.S. company will negotiate
individual licensing deals with publishers.
Google has already negotiated a few individual
payment deals with some French news
publishers such as national daily paper Le
Monde and weekly magazine l’Obs.

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The company was forced to negotiate with
publishers and news agencies for reusing their
material online under a “neighboring rights”
law that took effect after France became the
first country to adopt new European Union
copyright rules.

Google had initially balked at paying for news,
saying new companies benefited from the
millions of readers it sends to their websites. But
last year an appeals court ordered the company
to open talks with publishers.

Under the framework agreement, payments
will be based on criteria such as the amount
published daily and monthly internet traffic.

Google did not spell out how much money
would be paid to the group’s members.

News companies had pushed for the EU
copyright reform amid worries that quality
journalism is declining as ad revenue gets
siphoned off by the digital giants.

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GM TEAMS
UP WITH

MICROSOFT ON
DRIVERLESS
CARS

General Motors is teaming up with Microsoft to
accelerate its rollout of electric, self-driving cars.
In the partnership announced this week, the
companies said Microsoft’s Azure cloud and
edge computing platform would be used to
“commercialize its unique autonomous vehicle
solutions at scale.”
Microsoft joins General Motors, Honda and
other institutional investors in a combined
new equity investment of more than $2 billion
in Cruise, bringing its valuation to about $30
billion. Cruise, which GM bought in 2016, has

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been a leader in driverless technology and got
the go-ahead from California late last year to test
its automated vehicles in San Francisco without
backup drivers.

Auto companies have been joining forces and
bringing technology firms on board to try
to spread out the enormous costs -- and by
nature, risks -- of developing self-driving and
electric vehicles.

Honda is in on the Cruise project with GM,
Volkswagen and Ford have teamed up with
Pittsburgh autonomous vehicle company Argo
AI, and Hyundai joined with Fiat Chrysler last
summer in a deal to use Waymo’s driverless
car technology.

Toyota and Uber are also working together,
while Amazon skipped over the automaker
part of the equation and last summer bought
self-driving technology company Zoox, which
is developing an autonomous vehicle for a ride-
hailing service.

Mass adoption of driverless vehicles — and
profits — are still a ways off, said industry analyst
Sam Abuelsamid of Guidehouse Insights.

“The reality is that the automated driving
landscape is taking much longer to mature
that had been anticipated a few years ago,”
Abuelsamid said. “It’s probably going to be
mid-decade before we start to see significant
volumes of these vehicles.”

Abuelsamid added that the importance of
adding a company like Microsoft to the mix
is its cloud computing power and the ability
to analyze data from the vehicles to improve
the technology.

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Image: Paul Sancya

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“Microsoft is a great addition to the team as
we drive toward a future world of zero crashes,
zero emissions and zero congestion,” said GM
Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. “Microsoft will
help us accelerate the commercialization of
Cruise’s all-electric, self-driving vehicles and
help GM realize even more benefits from cloud
computing as we launch 30 new electric vehicles
globally by 2025 and create new businesses and
services to drive growth.”
General Motors has been aggressively
revamping its image, saying the industry has
reached a history-changing inflection point for
mass adoption of electric vehicles. The 112-year-
old Detroit automaker this month unveiled a
new corporate logo to signify its new direction
as it openly pivots to electric vehicles. It wants
to be seen as a clean vehicle company, rather
than a builder of cloud-spewing gas-powered
pickups and SUVs.
GM scrapped its old square blue logo for a lower
case gm surrounded by rounded corners and an
‘m’ that looks like an electrical plug.
Shares in GM jumped more than 9% after the
announcement, to $54.58.

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GOOGLE MUSCLES
UP WITH FITBIT
DEAL AMID
ANTITRUST
CONCERNS

Google has completed its $2.1 billion acquisition
of fitness-gadget maker Fitbit, a deal that could
help the internet company grow even stronger
while U.S. government regulators pursue an
antitrust case aimed at undermining its power.
The completion of the acquisition comes 14
months after Google announced a deal that
immediately raised alarms.

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Google makes most of its money by selling ads
based on information it collects about its billions
of users’ interests and whereabouts. Privacy
watchdogs feared it might exploit Fitbit to peer
even deeper into people’s lives.

But Google wound up entering a series of
commitments in Europe and other parts of
the world pledging it won’t use the health
and fitness data from Fitbit’s 29 million users
to sell more ads. It insists it is more interested
in adding Fitbit to its expanding arsenal of
internet-connected products, which include
smartphones, laptops, speakers, cameras
and thermostats.

“This deal has always been about devices, not
data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning
that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy,” Rick
Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of
devices and services, wrote in a blog post.

Google is scooping up Fitbit — a company
that has sold about 120 million devices in 100
countries since its 2009 founding — while
it fights a series of lawsuits filed by the U.S.
Department of Justice and state attorneys
general. The lawsuits allege Google abuses
the power that it has amassed as the owner of
the world’s most dominant search engine. The
Justice Department’s lawsuit isn’t scheduled to
go to trail until September 2023.

Since starting out with nothing more than its
namesake search engine in 1998, Google has
become a dominant player in email, digital
maps, web browsing and mobile devices
through its Android operating system. The
success of those free services propels a digital
advertising empire and is the main reason

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Google’s corporate parent, Mountain View,
California-based Alphabet Inc., boasts a market
value of nearly $1.2 trillion.
The Justice Department had until Jan. 13 to
object to the Fitbit deal, but didn’t file a formal
objection. The agency didn’t immediately
respond to a request for comment.
Google said it is ready to answer any further
questions the Justice Department has about its
Fitbit deal.
“We are confident this deal with increase
competition,” the company said in a statement.

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As messaging giant WhatsApp prepares to hand
over more data to Facebook, users are flocking
to rival services in protest, with Signal jumping
from 250,000 downloads on the App Store a
week to almost 10 million. The move sparks
debate over the relationships we hold with the
world’s biggest technology companies and a
new war on privacy is rearing its head.

WHATSAPP CONTROVERSY

As Facebook continues to integrate its
Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp
services to harvest more data from consumers
and to futureproof itself against anti-trust
investigations and growing pleas to break itself
up, the company announced early January that
it was planning to make changes to its privacy
policy. For the first time, the application will
begin sharing information about what you share
on the app with Facebook, designed to build
a stronger picture of users and deliver more
effective advertising as a result. The firm added
a pop-up to its instant messaging platform,
telling users that they had no choice but to
comply with the changes. Facebook said that,
on February 8, users who don’t wish to adhere to
the app’s policy will no longer be able to use the
application and instead must use another tool,
though the company has now pushed the
deadline to May following criticism.

Back in July 2020, Facebook changed its
WhatsApp policies to include sharing data
with “third-party services or other Facebook
Company Products that are integrated with our
Services,” though at the time users were able
to opt-out. Everything from your IP address
and home address to phone numbers, mobile

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Image: Nasir Kachroo device information, transaction data, and other
information can be carried over from WhatsApp
to add to Facebook’s already-overgrown picture
of consumers, with millions of trackers following
users’ moves across the web. Apple fought back
against some of these changes in 2020 with iOS
14 and macOS 11 Big Sur, though the company
delayed its anti-tracking permission rules
to give developers more time. As Facebook
continues to grapple against governments,
private lobbyists, and consumers, the latest
move to bring WhatsApp in line with its other
services has not gone down well, and now
consumers are looking to rival messaging apps
in protest of the change.

In India, home to the world’s biggest WhatsApp
userbase, the company has lost the trust
of its users, so much so that Facebook has
taken out newspaper advertisements to ask
them to stay, clarifying some of its privacy
policy changes to appease concerns from
customers. Speaking of the policy updates,
Facebook said that it was “giving businesses
the option to use secure hosting services from
Facebook to manage WhatsApp chats with their
customers, answer questions, and send helpful
information like purchase receipts,” and added
that “Whether you communicate with a business
by phone, email, or WhatsApp, it can see what
you’re saying and may use that information for
its own marketing purposes, which may include
advertising on Facebook,” but for many users,
their statement came too late.

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THE RISE OF RIVALS

Following widespread criticism of Facebook’s
new privacy policy on social media, millions
have taken to the App Store and Google Play
Store to vote with their feet, uninstalling
WhatsApp from their phones and deleting their
Facebook accounts. Instead, they’re switching to
apps like Telegram, whose founder Pavel Durov
described the events of recent weeks as the
“the largest digital migration in human history”
after his app welcomed 25 million new users in
just 72 hours, which takes the company to an
impressive 500 million monthly active users; a
quarter of WhatsApp’s.

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Image: Thomas Trutschel

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Signal, another free-too-use encrypted received so many new downloads in the week
messaging app, was downloaded 246,000 times that it deployed dozens of new servers, releasing
in the week before WhatsApp announced the a statement to tell users that they “continue to
change and 8.8 million times the week after. In shatter traffic records and add capacity as more
India, downloads climbed from 12,000 to 2.7 and more people come to terms with how much
million in the week, and in the United Kingdom, they dislike Facebook’s new terms,” reassuring
the figure rose from 7,400 to 191,000. The United new and existing users that they’re “ready
States also saw downloads jump from 63,000 in to serve you.” Even Tesla founder Elon Musk
the week prior to the announcement to more publicly endorsed Signal in a tweet on
than 1.1 million, demonstrating the public January 7 in yet another blow to Facebook.
mood against Facebook and WhatsApp. Signal In the same period as Signal and Telegram’s

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growth, WhatsApp saw downloads shrink from
11.3 million to 9.2 million, though it’s important
to mention that the app has been downloaded
an eye-watering 5.6 billion times since launching
in 2014, suggesting that it’ll weather the storm
and hold onto a significant proportion of its
userbase, who are none the wiser of its changes.
Indeed, it’s universally known that consumers
don’t read terms and conditions or updates
to privacy policies - some are lobbying for law
changes to simplify such documents.

iMessage could prove to be a real contender
against WhatsApp, though the fact it’s not
cross-platform limits its potential. According to
9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy, now is the ideal time
for the company to make the commitment to
bringing iMessage to Android devices.

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For the vast majority of consumers, rival
messaging apps such as Discord, Bridgefy, Kik,
Snapchat, Skype, Keybase, and Viber offer the
same features as WhatsApp, but what they
do not yet offer is the universal userbase. Any
developer can build a back-and-forth text
and image-based messaging app, adding in
exciting features like emoji stickers and support
for GIFs and audio - no one app is better than
the other. In the months ahead, consumers
must decide whether they can be bothered to
have three or four messaging apps installed on
their smartphones, chatting to different friends,
colleagues, and clients on each platform, or
whether they’ll bite the bullet and return to
WhatsApp, allowing the company to hold onto
even more of its personal information. In fact,
some technology journalists have pointed out
the irony and hypocrisy of this recent surge in
WhatsApp criticism, noting that the messaging
giant has been sharing user information with
Facebook since 2016. Surely, if we want access
to unlimited, free messaging, we need to pay
something for it? In the case of WhatsApp, our
data is the currency, which is becoming more
valuable every day. Telegram, for example, is
yet to monetize its offering, though says
it will begin doing this year. So, speaking
hypothetically, what makes Telegram better
than Facebook?

A NEW WAR ON DATA PROTECTION

As consumers become increasingly conscious
of their personal data, technology giants must
work harder to persuade us to part with our
information. The good old days of handing over
our address, phone number, age, salary, and

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interests are over - instead, brands must pry
out sensitive information over time through
strategically-designed algorithms and tie-ups
with third-parties. Whether it’s Google’s pixels
following us around the web or we’re feeding
Instagram our wants and needs in the form of
likes and comments, the system is simply too
powerful for the majority of us to fight back, so
companies like Apple are going to do it for us.

Apple has made its stance on privacy pretty
clear, and though it’s made a few faux pas of
its own along the way, its reputation is a darn-
sight more stellar than some of its competitors.
In iOS and macOS updates over the past couple
of years, Apple has increasingly gone in hard on
companies like Google and Facebook. Facebook
was so threatened by Apple’s upcoming ad-
tracking changes that it issued a full-page
letter as an advertisement in the New York
Times in December, though Apple was quick to
fire back, telling journalists that its privacy focus
was “a simple matter of standing up for our users.
Users should know when their data is being
collected and shared across other apps and
websites — and they should have the choice to
allow that or not. App Tracking Transparency in
iOS 14 does not require Facebook to change its
approach to tracking users and creating targeted
advertising, it simply requires they give users a
choice,” offering a firm and confident response
that sets us up for a bright future. App Store
privacy labels, another controversial change in
Silicon Valley, help consumers see how personal
data is collected and used by companies,
giving them autonomy over which apps they’re
comfortable installing on their phones, changing
the narrative going forward.

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Image: iMore

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In the months ahead, we’ll see further clap backs
from Facebook and Apple as new policies are
introduced, and developers will finally need
to ask users for permission to gather data and
track them across mobile apps and websites on
iOS and iPadOS. For consumers, it’s great news,
and the fact so much noise is being made about
WhatsApp’s relatively minor privacy change
demonstrates a notable shift in consumer
attitudes towards data harvesting and the
power technology companies hold. Though
we’ve still got a long way to go to create a world
where Silicon Valley put users, not shareholders,
first, we’re at least on the journey…

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