Ramsi Woodcock:

In an age in which two of the five largest tech firms in the United States both earn about ninety percent of their revenues by selling advertising space, it is hard to believe that as late as the 1970s the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

viewed non-false, non-misleading advertising as anticompetitive conduct capa- ble of violating the antitrust laws.’ But the FTC did, believing that advertising has the power, through repetition and brand image creation, to induce con- sumers to buy things that they do not really want, to the disadvantage of com- petitors selling the things that consumers would otherwise buy.2 From the 1950s to the 1970s, the FTC brought a series of antitrust cases against some of the nation’s largest advertisers, including Procter & Gamble and Kellogg, in which the power of advertising to create an illegitimate competitive advantage through the manipulation of consumer preferences played an important role. Buoyed perhaps by the consumer movement, which peaked during this period, the FTC won the agreement of the federal courts that heavy advertising of S.O.S. scrub pads, the ReaLemon brand of concentrated lemon juice, and Clorox bleach were anticompetitive because, as Justice William 0. Douglas put it in the Clorox case, advertising “imprint[s]” a brand “in the mind of the con- sumer.”‘

Yael Grauer:

Disclaimers: Some of these opt-outs take a long time to go through. Sometimes, information is pulled from other sources and you’ll need to opt out multiple times for the same site. Data brokers come and go (and are bought out by others), and they also often change their opt-out pages. I try to update this ~every six months, but it’s not always current. Finally, even opting out of these sites doesn’t mean that your address is secure. In many states, real estate data and voter registration information is public (or easy to obtain). And, of course, location data can be found by physical means (e.g., following you home) and through other people who know it (i.e., social engineering). That said, removing your home address from data broker sites can significantly lower your attack surface and make it harder for people to find it.

Byrne Hobart:

Palantir’s relationship to privacy is highly dependent on exactly where you draw the creepy line. They collect data to make inferences about behavior, and in their intelligence work that means collecting data to identify potential terrorists. Their users certainly consume more data than they would with a manual counterterrorism approach, but the outcome is that less of it gets looked at by humans. So the difference is between abstract but extensive privacy violations (your phone/text metadata, financial transactions, and other behaviors all factor into their model) and literal but less common ones (someone manually reviewing the same things to decide if your Venmo transaction with the memo “Dinner at Afghan restaurant” indicates that you might be training with the Taliban.) What’s worse, the possibility of a human manually snooping around your personal information because you got unlucky, or the extremely high probability that an algorithm will review your behavior and flag it as totally innocuous with no human intervention?

Palantir is certainly sensitive to political shifts. They say as much in the S-1, and have said so elsewhere, too. But the picture is not quite what one might expect. They started to generate revenue in 2008. In Obama’s second term, revenue compounded at 37% annually, reaching $466m in 2016. In 2017, growth slowed to just 11%, and their annual growth under Trump has been just 17%.

The way they describe their views—and the way they contrast them with other tech companies—is that they’re ultimately deferring to what voters want. As Alex Karp puts it:

Micki Wagner:

“From my standpoint, the marketing is great, but we have to actually convince people,” Entwistle said. “There’s the process, and there’s benefits to doing it, but we’ve got to make that happen because what I’m seeing just socially is people who have lived in New York for a long time are literally giving up their apartments in the city, and they’re moving to the suburbs right now. There’s a mass exodus that can be damaging unless we can turn that around, and when people leave the city, and when companies don’t have their employees coming into buildings, then the revenues start to go down…It’s a big challenge but there’s ways to work through it over time and, again, if you have that ability to draw from other resources, even the government, even the State of New York, for the time being, if there’s a place to access that liquidity to get through this rough patch, everybody will be fine in six or 12 or 24 months, I would imagine. That would be my bet.”

“I think we need to make our cities wonderful places to live,” Butler-Adams added. “They need to be amazing; they need to be free. They need to be gorgeous. You need to open the door and the children charge out. You need to make the people live in it. At the moment, the people are getting out of the city because they’ve been stuck in a tiny flat for three months, and this isn’t the end of the coronavirus…We need to rethink how we live our cities and make them wonderful places to live, vibrant, interesting, artistic and draw people in, draw the young in, draw the talent in and make people feel welcome. Stuffing a city full of metal boxes, stress, anger, air pollution, that’s not the way to have a city. They’re where most of us live. Cities need to be the most beautiful places to live, full of culture and diversity and richness, and that’s what we need to think.”

Katherine Trendacosta:

For the record, HBO Max is a streaming service from AT&T, which owns Warner Bros. and, of course, HBO. HBO Go, by contrast, is the app for people who subscribe to HBO through a cable or satellite provider. And HBO Now is a digital-only subscription version of HBO. HBO Max is, somehow, not HBO. It’s a new streaming service, like Disney+, offering both the back catalogs of HBO and Warner Bros. and new exclusives. The name, which emphasizes HBO and doesn’t alert people that this is a service where they can watch Friends, has been a marketing problem.

But the marketing problem, while hilarious, is not where the biggest concerns lie. The real problem is with AT&T offering HBO Max for free to customers with certain plans, not counting it against data caps for its mobile customers, and launching without support for certain TV devices.

Let’s go through what’s happening here piece by torturous piece. First: HBO Max is free if you are a subscriber to certain AT&T plans—high-speed home Internet, unlimited wireless plans, and premier DirectTV plans, to name a few. But Americans pay more for worse Internet than their peers in Europe and South Korea. With high-speed home Internet, most Americans have two or fewer choices. The most meaningful choice an AT&T home Internet subscriber in the U.S. makes is between expensive low-speed service or very expensive “high-speed” service.

Marshall Allen:

A new analysis of smartphone data, conducted at ProPublica’s request, shows how interconnected the country is with visitors to Las Vegas — which heightens concerns about the limitations of interstate contact tracing. The companies X-Mode and Tectonix analyzed travel to and from Las Vegas during four days, a Friday to Monday, in mid-July. In compliance with privacy laws, X-Mode collects data from smartphone users, mainly those using fitness and weather apps that track their location. The data represents about 5% of the smartphone users in the United States. Tectonix analyzed the data and visualized it on a map.

During the four-day period, about 26,000 devices were identified on the Las Vegas Strip. Some of those same smartphones also showed up in every state on the mainland except Maine in those same four days. About 3,700 of the devices were spotted in Southern California in the same four days; about 2,700 in Arizona, with 740 in Phoenix; around 1,000 in Texas; more than 800 in Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland; and more than 100 in the New York area.

The cellphone analysis highlights a reason the virus keeps spreading, said Oscar Alleyne, an epidemiologist and chief program officer with the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “People have been highly mobile, and as a result, it makes sense why we see the continuation of the surge.”

Mark Glennon:

Americans have been “blinded from science,” according to a recent research report about their understanding of COVID-19. And it’s not about the controversial aspects like treatments and lockdown policies. It’s about ignorance of fundamental, undisputed facts on who is at risk.

A leading financial firm, Franklin Templeton, figured that people’s behavioral response to the pandemic will play a crucial role in shaping the economic recovery, so they teamed up with Gallup, the polling outfit, to find out what people know and don’t know.

“These results are nothing short of stunning,” concluded the firm. “Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

That’s no exaggeration, and the implications go far beyond the economic behavior Franklin Templeton was interested in.

Here is what they found:

First, the Franklin Templeton-Gallup survey found that the general population has a little understanding how heavily the pandemic is focused on the older population. It is not broad-based. From the report:

• On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.

• Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.

• Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).

Craig Torres:

The concentration of market power in a handful of companies lies behind several disturbing trends in the U.S. economy, like the deepening of inequality and financial instability, two Federal Reserve Board economists say in a new paper.

Isabel Cairo and Jae Sim identify a decline in competition, with large firms controlling more of their markets, as a common cause in a series of important shifts over the last four decades.

Those include a fall in labor share, or the chunk of output that goes to workers, even as corporate profits increased; and a surge in wealth and income inequality, as the net worth of the top 5% of households almost tripled between 1983 and 2016. This fueled financial risks and higher leverage, the economists say, as poorer households borrowed to make ends meet while richer ones shoveled their wealth into bonds — feeding the demand for debt instruments.

“The rise of market power of the firms may have been the driving force” in all of these trends, Cairo and Sim write in the paper. Published this month by the non-partisan Fed Board staff, which doesn’t reflect the views of governors, it’s the latest in a series examining the risks that weaker competition poses to a market economy.

That issue is increasingly prominent on the agenda of both America’s main political parties. Democrats said in a recent summary of policy priorities that they’re “concerned about the increase in mega-mergers and corporate concentration across a wide range of industries.” The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump is probing large technology platforms.