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WhatsApp, the popular messaging app with more than 2 billion users, has been getting a lot of heat and losing users in recent weeks after announcing (and then delaying) changes to how it shares data with its owner Facebook. And it’s not done with how it’s tweaking privacy and security. Now, it’s adding a new biometric feature to the service to bring in a new authentication layer for those using its web and desktop versions.
The company said that from today, it will let people add in a fingerprint, face, or iris scan when to use WhatsApp on desktop or web.
The feature is coming as part of a new look for the desktop versions, ahead of what the company hints will be more updates coming soon.
With the new feature, you will now have the option (not requirement) to add in a biometric login, which uses either a fingerprint, face ID, or iris ID — depending on the device — on Android or iPhone handsets, to add in a second layer of authentication.
When implemented, it will appear for users before a desktop or web version can be linked up with a mobile app account, which today relies just on using a QR code: the QR code doesn’t go away; this is a second step users will need to take, similar to how you can choose to implement two steps of authentication on a handset to use the WhatsApp mobile app today.
WhatsApp says that on iPhone, it will work with all devices operating iOS 14 and above with Touch ID or Face ID, while on Android, it will work on any device compatible with Biometric Authentication (Face Unlock, Fingerprint Unlock or Iris Unlock).
The service is another step forward in WhatsApp creating more feature parity between its flagship mobile apps, and how you interact with the service when you use it elsewhere.
While WhatsApp started as a mobile messaging app, it has over the years been building out other ways of using it, for example adding desktop support in 2015 to the iOS version.
Mobile still accounts for the majority of WhatsApp’s users, but events like global health pandemics, which are keeping more of us inside, are likely leading to a surge of users of its Web and native desktop apps, and so it makes sense for it to be adding more features there.
WhatsApp told TechCrunch that it is going to be adding in more features this year to bring the functionality of the two closer together. There are still big gaps: for example, you can’t make calls on the WhatsApp web version. (That feature may be one coming soon: as of last month, it started to get spotted in beta tests.)
To be extra clear, the biometric service, which is being turned on globally, will be opt-in. Users will need to go to their settings to turn on the feature, in the same way that today they need to go into their settings to turn on biometric authentication for their mobile apps.
What comes next for biometrics?
WhatsApp’s recent announcements about data-sharing changes between it and Facebook have put a lot of people on edge about the company’s intentions. And that’s no surprise. It’s a particularly sensitive issue since messaging has been thought of a very personal and sometimes private space, seen as separate from what people do on more open social networking platforms.
Over the years, however, that view has been eroded through data leaks, group messaging abuse, and (yes) changes in privacy terms.
That means there will likely be a lot of people who will doubt what Facebook’s intentions are here, too.
WhatsApp is pretty clear in outlining that it’s not able to access the biometric information that you will be storing in your device, and that it is using the same standard biometric authentication APIs that other secure apps, like banking apps, use.
But the banking app parallel is notable here, and maybe one worth thinking about more. Consider how the company has been adding a lot more features and functionality into WhatsApp, including the ability to pay for goods and services, and in markets like India, tests to offer insurance and pension products.
Yes, this new biometric feature is being rolled out today to create a more secure way for people to link up apps across devices. But in the interest of that feature parity, in future, it will be interesting to see how and if biometrics might appear as those other features get rolled out beyond mobile, too.
Levity, which has been operating in stealth (until now), is the latest no-code company to throw its wares into the ring, having picked up $1.7M in pre-seed funding led by Gil Dibner’s Angular Ventures. The Berlin-based startup wants to bring AI-powered workflow automation to anyone, letting knowldge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of their job without the need to learn how to code.
Suitable for customer service, marketing, operations, HR, and more, Levity has elected to be a horizontal offering from the get-go. Typical repetitive tasks that can be automated includes reviewing and categorizing documents, images, or text. The premise is that conventional, rule-based automation software isn’t able to automate tasks like these as it requires cognitive abilities, meaning that they usually done manually. This, of course, is where machine learning come into play.
“We want to solve the problem that people spend so much time at their jobs doing boring, repetitive stuff that can be automated to free up space and time for fun and interesting work,” says Gero Keil, co-founder and CEO. “Even though this is what AI has been promising us for decades, there are very few solutions out there, and even less for non-technical people who can’t code”.
To that end, Keil says Levity’s entire mission is to help non-technical knowledge workers automate what they couldn’t automate before. Specifically, the startup targets work processes that involve making decisions on unstructured data, such as images, text, PDFs and other documents.
“For example, if a company receives hundreds or thousands of emails from partners and customers with attachments every day, someone typically has to download the attachment, look at it and then decide what to do with it,” explains Keil. “With Levity, they can train their own custom AI on all of the historic data that they have accumulated, and once it has learned from that it seamlessly integrates with their existing tools and workflows e.g. Dropbox, Gmail, Slack etc.”
More broadly, he says there are many companies struggling to “productionize AI” that would really benefit from having an end-to-end platform “that enables them to build their own AI solutions and make them part of their processes”.
Keil argues that Levity’s main competitor is people doing work manually, but concedes that there is crossover with automation machine learning tools, workflow automation offerings, and labeling tools,
“Instead of going deep into every domain of the ML value chain and making the lives of developers and data scientists at large corporations easier, we focus only the most essential bits and pieces, wrap them in simple and enjoyable UX and abstract the rest away,” he says. “That makes us the best for non-developers in small and medium-sized businesses that want to automate previously non automatable processes in the most straightforward way. The people that have the automation problem become the same people that solve the automation problem; it’s a paradigm shift just like what Wix and Squarespace did to websites”.
Adds Gil Dibner, general partner and founder at Angular Ventures, in a statement: “Levity is driving a massive shift that will affect all knowledge workers. By allowing knowledge workers to easily train AI engines, build AI-powered automations, and integrate them into their everyday workflows, Levity is radically democratizing the benefits of AI.”
Alongside Angular, Levity’s other backers include: System.One, Discovery Ventures (founders of SumUp), Martin Henk (founder of Pipedrive) and various additional unnamed angel investors.
Apple has shared a few more details about its much-discussed privacy changes in iOS 14. The company first announced at WWDC in June that app developers would have to ask users for permission in order to track and share their IDFA identifier for cross-property ad targeting purposes. While iOS 14 launched in the fall, Apple delayed the tracking restrictions until 2021, saying it wanted to give developers more time to make the necessary changes.
Now we’ve got a slightly-more-specific timeline. The plan is to launch these changes in early spring, with a version of the feature coming in the next iOS 14 beta release.
This is how Apple describes the new system: “Under Settings, users will be able to see which apps have requested permission to track, and make changes as they see fit. This requirement will roll out broadly in early spring with an upcoming release of iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14, and has already garnered support from privacy advocates around the world.”
And here are the basics of what you need to know:
- The App Tracking Transparency feature moves from the old method where you had to opt-out of sharing your Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) to an opt-in model. This means that every app will have to ask you up front whether it is ok for them to share your IDFA with third parties including networks or data brokers.
- The feature’s most prominent evidence is a notification on launch of a new app that will explain what the tracker will be used for and ask you to opt-in to it.
- You can now toggle IDFA sharing on a by-app basis at any time, where previously it was a single toggle. If you turn off the “Allow apps to request to track” setting altogether no apps can even ask you to use tracking.
- Apple will enforce this for all third-party data sources including data sharing agreements, but of course platforms can still use first party data for advertising as per their terms of service.
- Apple expects developers to understand whether APIs or SDKs that they use in their apps are serving user data up to brokers or other networks and to enable the notification if so.
- Apple will abide by the rules for its own apps as well and will present the dialog and follow the ‘allow apps to request’ toggle.
- One important note here is that the Personalize Ads toggle is a separate setting that specifically allows or does not allow Apple itself to use its own first party data to serve you ads. So that is an additional layer of opt-out that affects Apple data only.
Apple is also increasing the capabilities of its Ad attribution API, allowing for better click measurement, measurement of video conversions and also — and this is a big one for some cases, app-to-web conversions.
This news comes on Data Privacy Day, with CEO Tim Cook speaking on the issue this morning at the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels. The company is also sharing a new report showing that the average app has six third-party trackers.
While this seems like a welcome change from a privacy perspective, it’s drawn some criticism from the ad industry, with Facebook launching a PR campaign emphasizing the impact on small businesses, while also pointing to the change as “one of the more significant advertising headwinds” that it could face this year. Apple’s stance is that this provides a user-centric data privacy approach, rather than an advertiser-centric one.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/apple-app-tracking-transparency/
Tesla is open to licensing its software, including its Autopilot highly-automated driving technology and the neural network training it has built to improve its autonomous driving technology. Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed those considerations on the company’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, adding that the company has in fact already “had some preliminary discussions about licensing Autopilot to other OEMs.”
The company began rolling out its beta version of the so-called ‘full self-driving’ or FSD version of Autopilot late last year. The standard Autopilot features available in general release provide advanced driver assistance (ADAS) which provide essentially advanced cruise control capabilities designed primarily for use in highway commutes. Musk said on the call that he expects the company will seek to prove out its FSD capabilities before entering into any licensing agreements, if it does end up pursuing that path.
Musk noted that Tesla’s “philosophy is definitely not to create walled gardens” overall, and pointed out that the company is planning to allow other automakers to use its Supercharger networks, as well as its autonomy software. He characterized Tesla as “more than happy to license” those autonomous technologies to “other car companies,” in fact.
One key technical hurdle required to get to a point where Tesla’s technology is able to demonstrate true reliability far surpassing that of a standard human driver is transition the neural networks operating in the cars and providing them with the analysis that powers their perception engines is to transition those to video. That’s a full-stack transition across the system away from basing it around neural nets trained on single cameras and single frames.
To this end, the company has developed video-labelling software that has had “a huge effect on the efficiency of labeling,” with the ultimate aim being enabling automatic labeling. Musk (who isn’t known for modesty around his company’s achievements, it should be said) noted that Tesla believes “it may be the best neural net training computer in the world by possibly an order of magnitude,” adding that it’s also “something we can offer potentially as a service.”
Training huge quantities of video data will help Tesla push the reliability of its software from 100% that of a human driver, to 200% and eventually to “2,000% better than the average human,” Musk said, while again suggesting that it won’t be a technological achievement the company is interested into keeping to themselves.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s 2020 Q4 earnings call that all engineering work is now complete on the Tesla Semi, the freight-hauling semi truck that the company is building with an all-electric powertrain. The company expects to begin deliveries of Tesla Semi this year, the company said in its Q4 earnings release, and Musk said the only thing limiting their ability to produce them now is the availability of battery cells.
“The main reason we have not accelerated new products – like for example Tesla Semi – is that we simply don’t have enough cells for it,” Musk said. “If we were to make the Semi right now, and we could easily go into production with the Semi right now, but we would not have enough cells for it.”
Musk added that the company does expect to have sufficient cell volume to meet its needs once it goes into production on its 4680 battery pack, which is a new custom cell design it created with a so-called ‘tables’ design that allows for greater energy density and therefore range.
“A Semi would use typically five times the number of cells that a car would use, but it would not sell for five times what a car would sell for, so it kind of would not make sense for us to do the Semi right now,” Musk said. “But it will absolutely make sense for us to do it as soon as we can address the cell production constraint.”
That constraint points to the same conclusion for the possibility of Tesla developing a van, Musk added, and the lifting of the constraint will likewise make it possible for Tesla to pursue the development of that category of vehicle, he said.
Tesla has big plans for “exponentially” ramping cell production, with a goal of having production capacity infrastructure in place for a Toal of 200 gigawatt hours per year by 2022, and a target of being able to actually produce around 40% of that by that year (with future process improvements generating additional gigawatt hours of cell capacity in gradual improvements thereafter).
