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tv   Best of Bloomberg Technology  Bloomberg  April 1, 2018 6:00am-7:00am EDT

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♪ emily: i'm emily chang and this is "the best of bloomberg technology." bringing you the top interviews from this week in tech. an important stop on the zuckerberg apology to her where he snubs the u.k. parliament but agrees to testify on capitol hill. plus uber agrees to sell operations in southeast asia. we will talk about what they get in return and the global plans startup.orld's biggest
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and tesla tumbles the most in two years as questions swirl around the fatal accident. first, to the lead. mark zuckerberg has decided it is time to face a congressional music. the facebook ceo will appear before the u.s. house energy and commerce committee to answer on his role in the cambridge analytica scandal. this according to a congressional official familiar with the plan. he has been the subject of criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. he will not, however, appear before a u.k. parliamentary committee. we spoke with sarah frier, who covers the social network for bloomberg, after the news broke, as well as caroline hyde, who joins us live from london with reaction from europe. >> zuckerberg has come to terms with the fact that he will do this. he said last week, if i am the right person to answer these questions, i will do it, but i have to do be the right person. congress can back and said, you are the right person. we want to hear from you. so zuckerberg has come to terms with that, and in front of congress, there are going to be so many questions that facebook
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just can't answer. a lot of questions in particular about where this data has gone that was shared with third party developers back before 2014. facebook really doesn't know. they are going to do some audits, but they don't have the answers to where are these 50 million user profiles now, when did cambridge analytica delete them? they relied on cambridge analytica, telling them all of -- gone.gone to until the reporting from "the new york times," saying that wasn't the case. emily: what is the reaction from the u.k., saying he will send deputies instead? caroline: anger. he came back fighting the head of the committee, which is investigating how fake news might have played a role in the brexit vote. damien collins, who heads up that particular committee, has come back very strongly to the
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news, and it will be the cto or cpo. he said it is absolutely astonishing that mark zuckerberg is not prepared to submit himself to questioning, urged him to think again. if he has any care for people, he is trying to be emotional. but he wrote to facebook in the letter, saying, "a senior facebook executive who they hoped would be mark zuckerberg." mark zuckerberg feels in this case he is not the right person. the cto and cpo said they are among the longest-serving executives, with extensive backgrounds, and are well-placed to answer the committees. but interestingly, there's also this statement from facebook. they say, the u.k. and you shouldn't matter to you.
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eu shouldn't matter to you. we can now confirm that around 1% of the global downloads of the app that came from the eu and u.k. -- remember, this app is the one that was designed by kogan, that was passed on to cambridge analytica, and therefore gave them 50 million users of facebook. of those 50 million, hardly any were from the eu are u.k. emily: meantime, facebook is getting its ducks in a row to lobby lawmakers. they are hiring for 11 different positions on capitol hill. talk to us about the extent of facebook's lobbying efforts, as of now, how it compares to other tech companies. and what they are trying to change. sarah: the first thing we have to note is that the facebook budget spent on lobbying in d.c. is so much smaller than the companies that have been doing it for years -- google, microsoft, apple.
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facebook is pretty slow to join this party. in the past, they didn't have a very competitive relationship with washington. they grew up in barack obama's presidency. now they are realizing that they need to make nice, they need to figure out how to get in on these issues before they come to a head, and most of all, how to explain their product to congress and lawmakers, because a lot of them don't understand some of the fundamental ways it works, like the fact that most ads are not purchased through human sales, they are purchased through this automatic advertising system. these are all things that have become very clear in the last few months, but like the general public, congress has a lot they want to educate. emily: and the controversy continues to swirl. we are learning new layers to the broader cambridge analytica story, and there's a whistleblower who worked as a contractor at cambridge analytica who told parliament basically that brexit could have gone the other way if there hadn't been, as he calls it, cheating.
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give us a little more background on what we learned here. caroline: this is christopher wylie, the whistleblower for "the observer" and "new york times" pieces. notably, he is saying, look, potentially the brexit vote could have gone differently if perhaps some of these related analyticao cambridge and related entities were mixed up in the brexit vote and were paid significant amounts and could have helped sling it. -- swing that. he also says more than 500 million people that have been affected iv cambridge analytica -- by cambridge analytica data overall, and notably, he talks about a company that peter teal is on the board of, it could be wrapped up in all of this. emily: that was sarah frier and
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caroline hyde. and as the fallout continues in the wake of the exploitation of data on millions of facebook users, we caught up with dick costolo and asked him to weigh in on the controversy. dick: one of the concerns or questions i have is the impact it will have on the way people think about api's and access to data in the future. obviously, facebook has built out this platform approach that enabled third parties to act as -- to interact with it in gauge -- interact with and engage with people on facebook, and turned that off from years ago. we are seeing the consequences of some of that. i think it will have an impact on the way technology and company is forward think about how the data will be used, how they can audit, how it is disposed of. emily: how does facebook use data differently than twitter? as i understand it, twitter is
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more protective of user data, though twitter has its own issues which we can talk about. do you think facebook has been too permissive, too careless about user data? dick: not to be an apologist for what has been going on, but this platform was public. people knew what those api's were capable of, and they have been long disabled. the big difference between twitter and facebook is that on facebook, there is lots and lots of personally identifiable information. that turns out to be particularly helpful to advertisers. advertisers want to be able to demographically target, micro target, and twitter doesn't have a lot of the information. to go back a few years, when i was running twitter, frequently that was thought of as a disadvantage. twitter doesn't know enough
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about its users, so i can't target my advertisement as accurately as i can on facebook. so there are two sides to this coin, and in some instances it's a real benefit to the platform's business, and in other areas, it comes back to hot you. you.unt emily: we are seeing former facebook or is increasingly speak out about facebook. brian acton tweeted #deletefacebook. he's the guy that sold his share for $20 billion. do you think this will take off? do you think this will have a significant impact on users desirability to use the platform? dick: i'm sure these people will be returning all their ill-gotten gains any moment now. i don't think this is -- these things happen. they come up every now and then, where there is a big news event. facebook is such an important
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part of a lot of people's lives. it may be the case that a certain number of people in silicon valley, inside the bubble, will delete it. i don't think it will be a big movement. it's too important a part of too many people's lives. emily: is it disingenuous for people who made a lot of money on facebook -- dick: i already made a joke about that, come on. [laughter] i think it's easier, certainly, when you are not a part of the company anymore to sent back and -- sit back and lob in molotov cocktails. there are people working extremely hard inside these
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companies to do the right thing. the head of product at twitter as been talking a lot about the issues twitter is trying to deal with. so there are people inside these companies trying to do the right thing, i tend to not love it when people sit on the sidelines and lob in criticisms. emily: mark zuckerberg said in an interview that perhaps tech should be regulated, not a question of if, but how. do you think tech should be regulated, in this so, how? dick: i think it probably will. there will end up being regulations. it seems like that is heading in our direction. the challenge, particularly around areas of technology, is it tends to be frequently -- areas and concepts which are difficult -- difficult to , which makes it difficult to lobby. there are lobbyists on all sides of these equations. and finally, i worry that in most cases, the regulations start to fight the last war, right? in the past, this happened, so let's prevent that from happening again. technologies are changing so quickly, they don't anticipate
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the next issue or challenge the -- may be coming up. they cause of these companies work and maybe aren't addressing what the companies have to do what society has to deal with next. emily: on that note, he says that version two of russian meddling is happening on the platform. it's probably happening on facebook and twitter. can facebook and twitter stay ahead of us? -- this? now that they know it has happened, can we really keep up? dick: it's an arms race. like spam was in the past, like phishing and other challenges. the differences now there are state actors, not just a few people trying to hack into an account. when you have state actors who have enormous amounts of resources, it will be a battle keeping up with them, and going after their new attack sectors. they will never attack the same way they attacked in the past. they will try new and different tactics. keeping up with that will be a real challenge for these platforms. emily: some of my conversation
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with former twitter ceo, dick costolo. google could owe oracle $8.8 billion for using its java programming code. a lawsuit says they violated oracle's copyright. the case was first filed in 2010, and then remanded to a federal court in california to determine how much the alphabet unit should pay. google said it is considering all of the next steps in this case. coming up, apple announces a new, lower-cost ipad that aims to go head-to-head with chrome book in the education market. details next. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio, bloomberg.com, and in the u.s. on sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: apple is making a new push to go head-to-head with
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, a marketeducation apple helped pioneer but has let languish. at an event in chicago on tuesday, the unveiled the new ipad that will square off with the cheap cronbach laptop, as well as a new education app to compete with google's classroom software. >> when apple was founded 40 years ago, and for decades after that, it was really synonymous with both creative users, internet users, but also education users. growing up in school we had emacs back in the day, but that has languished over the past few years. recent data indicates ipads and iphones had 17% of k-12 shipments, while google had a combined 60%, and microsoft had 22% of the market here -- market. so clearly there was a problem and apple needed to address it, so they decided to go back to an ipad they released last year, a $329 ipad without many of the bells and whistles, but it was
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good enough for education users. what they are doing this year is they are updating it with a slightly faster processor, support for the apple pencil, and a few other bells and whistles in the forms of camera, lcd screens and such, putting it in this huge new education market. in addition to that, they have new software, a new app, new apps for their swift programming apps. a lot of new education software going along with the education hardware. but the bigger picture news here is the push around it. nothing they announced today is very novel or breakthrough, they are just refocusing the marketing strategy around students, teachers, and general education. emily: all right, mark gurman in chicago. thank you so much for breaking it all down.
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i want to continue the discussion with shira ovide in new york. shira, you are quite strong and saying apple may not be able to reverse its fortunes in this market. why not? shira: mark talked about the market share losses that apple has had in the education market, mostly because of google. it's honestly one of the under told stories and technology, the way that google has managed to sweep into u.s. schools and take over the computing market there. i think apple's weakness here -- and they talked about this today -- was in software. the big selling point of cronbach is not just the low-cost device, but this ecosystem, this bundle of devices, plus all the software that kids, teachers, and administrators need to both manage those devices and to have kids email, write papers, get
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assignments from teachers, and apple made some of those promises today, but the question is, can they deliver? can a company whose software history is a little checkered, thinking about some of the failings of software like iwork, which got a refresh today, icloud, itunes, does apple have the software chops to go head-to-head with google? emily: that said, apple wasn't first to market, but they came to dominate. why couldn't something like that happen in education as well? shira: totally there. in has been a seesaw market for decades. apple had a turn, microsoft had a turn, google was more recently. apple could absolutely rebound
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from some of their earlier losses in the educational market, but again, there is some weakness that google exploited on the software side, and in talking to teachers using teachers as evangelists in the educational market. if apple is focused on the education market, i think they absolutely can rebound. i'm just not sure they have the technical chops or the focus on education they need to really make a go of it. emily: that was shira ovide. still ahead, tesla falls the most in two years as investors question the company's ability to keep up with production demands. and its driverless ambition. that story is next to and a reminder, all episodes of "bloomberg technology" livestream on twitter. check us out. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: waymo and jaguar are
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teaming up on 20,000 autonomous cars, integrating the self driving system into the jaguar electric suvs. tests begin this year. the suv is that to become part of their ride-hailing taxi service by 2020. alphabet is investing $1.3 billion in the venture. is the path forward for driver driverless cars still unclear go -- -- unclear yet unclear? one involves an uber autonomous car in arizona, and another involving a tesla model s in in california. tesla stock tanked off the news this week. the company said they are working with authorities to retrieve the vehicle's logs. the crash killed the driver of the car, and there were concerns that the electric car maker won't reach production targets for the all-important model 3 sedan.
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we spoke with max chafkin. max: there was a very significant accident, and tesla is saying it's the most damage they have ever seen to one of their model x suvs. the rescind this is a problem for tesla is that they also have -- the reason this is a problem for tesla is that they also have this huge production sprint going on, trying to get as many model threes produced this year as possible. to the extent that they are not able to hit those numbers, and you have something like this that calls into question the company's long-term prospects, that could be a toxic mess for a company like tesla. emily: combine all of that with the general news about production delays. how much does this really set tesla back? max: so bloomberg has a model that is very impressive -- we don't know how close it is -- the model has been showing that tesla's production is likely ramping up toward the end of the
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corridor. so it is possible that even though the numbers have not looks uber good, that elon musk will come out and say we knocked it out of the ballpark, because they were able to do a last-second sprint. that said, this is more than the sprint. they have to get to hundreds of thousands of cars per year, which is something they haven't done, no one has done with an electric car. so investors are going to be reading the tea leaves, but whatever happens this next quarter, they will have to continue growing production on a huge scale for the coming year, basically. emily: we do have a chart here that maps real-time negative news sentiment hitting tesla. red is negative, green is positive. they have been getting a lot of bad news lately, so not surprising the way this chart looks. what do you make of tesla's response and the fact that they have never seen a crash like this before? they are working with government agencies. is that standard? max: yeah. what tesla -- the line they are
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trying to walk is they want to take this seriously. we are seeing this with uber as well. they want to take this seriously, but they want to leave open the possibility that, yes, even though there may have been very that accident here, a very bad crash, maybe even one in which the car didn't perform as they had hoped, that their autopilot could still be better, on average, than a human behind the wheel. that was the argument that was made in the wake of the crash last year where a person was tragically killed. it is the general tension around autonomous driving in general. even people who believe in this industry know they are going to be bad things that are going to happen, and they just hope the number of those bad things is less than what happened today. emily: right. and i wonder -- we are hearing uber will not renew its license, they have taken self driving cars off the road. if this is going to take a lot
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, toer then a somewhat hope get self driving cars on the road, en masse, in a way that is surely safer than the roads as they are today. max: 100%. that is one of the reasons you are seeing tesla's stock take the hit. elon musk said the cars on the road today could be self driving cars with some updates and stuff. part of the bet on tesla is that self driving will come sooner than people think, that it will be how tesla is able to dominate the auto industry. if it takes longer because the tech isn't there or because regulators can't get their heads around it and we as a society can't come to terms with whatever compromises have to be made, that will hurt the companies like tesla betting on it. emily: that was max chafkin. still ahead, the trump administration zeros in on high-tech industries in its push to rebalance global trade. which industries will be most impacted? that is next.
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plus, more of our coverage on the fallout from facebook's data scandal. runningsend advertisers or can the social network keep advertisers onboard? that is next. ♪ retail.
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♪ emily: welcome back to "the best of bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang. president trump is pushing to rebalance global trade in america's favor, and the global tech industry is preparing for a huge impact. white house adviser peter navarro said wednesday the trump administration's tariffs on china will focus on high tech industries where beijing wants to lead. peter: certainly, the focus of the tariffs are on what is called the china 2025 industries. china, in my view, brazenly has released this china 2025 plan that basically told the rest of the world, we are going to dominate every single emerging industry of the future, and therefore, your economies are not going to have any future.
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emily: we spoke with adam segal of the council of foreign relations on wednesday as the story was still unfolding. adam: when they name the specific sectors they are going to try to penalize, then we will see a lot of people trying to lobby, to be left out of the tariffs, and we are going to have a good sense of where you might fit on that supply chain, and how you might be punished. emily: so, you know, again, who do you think the winners and losers could be essentially? adam: well, they have been fairly clear that they want to punish china in high-tech. so, in iot and internet of think devices, in automation, in robotics, the made in china 2025 plan is basically an attempt to move china up the value chain from just labor-intensive production to internet-based 3-d design. if you are in any of those
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areas, it is possible that you will be caught up in the tariffs. artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, those are all areas that would be likely targeted. emily: i want to ask you about artificial intelligence specifically because there has been so much talk about how the chinese could win in the race for the most sophisticated artificial intelligence. talk a little bit about how advanced china's efforts are compared to the united states. adam: well, the chinese really have three advantages. the first is just the size of the data and the market. 750 chinese web users, and that data is available to the big players tencent, baidu, alibaba. the other is an ability to use that data. chinese privacy concerns not as
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high in the u.s. as they are in europe. and then third, a government strategy. a very big push from the top for china to be a competitor in this space. the chinese firms are still not as competitive as u.s. firms. most of the important research is being done in the u.s. china lacks on the talent side, but they are clearly a fast competitor to the united states. emily: all right, now we do have a bit of breaking news. veteran affairs secretary david shulkin is being replaced by president trump. the president will nominate his personal physician, ronny jackson, to succeed him. the turnover in the white house, adam, continues. it actually leads to a pretty good question on these issues, on the tariffs. given the uncertainty of who is in these jobs, how do you think that will affect how the policy actually plays out?
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adam: well, it has certainly affected the chinese. they have been scrambling to figure out who they should talk to, and who they should negotiate with. i think the president has been pretty consistent about wanting to reduce the deficit, the trade deficit with china. so, i suspect no matter who is in the positions right now, we will see consistency there. earlier, you showed us the quote from peter navarro, and he seems to have really positioned himself to take the lead on these issues. with the report out, i think there will be consistency in policy, even if there is some more moving around of the deck chairs. emily: now, the administration is also reportedly considering trying to penalize, or influence chinese investment in u.s. tech sectors, specifically talking about semiconductors and 5g. you know, how do you expect that to play out?
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adam: well, as you know, we have already seen that. the president blocked the broadcom acquisition of qualcomm. we have seen leaks of documents that supposedly the government was thinking about nationalizing the 5g networks. but i think the most likely move forward is the reform of the process. the committee on foreign investment in the united states. and there has been concerned that some of the ways that china has been acquiring technology, either using minority positions, going after companies that are bankrupt, or trying to buy an ip. i think that process will be reformed as a bill with broad bipartisan support, and that will make it harder for the chinese to invest in a number of critical and sensitive technologies. emily: that was adam segal on the council on foreign relations. now back to our continued coverage of the fallout from facebook's data scandal. an analyst at bayer is warning of a potential halt for some
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advertising campaigns on the facebook network. and facebook's ceo mark zuckerberg took out for full page ad in newspapers in the to apologizeu.k. for facebook not doing enough. is that enough to keep the happy? we spoke with the debbie on monday. debbie: advertisers are thinking about a couple of important issues. the first one is, what are users doing? are a lot of them doing the #deletefacebook, or keeping their accounts but using facebook less? and does that then leave fewer people or fewer hours of time spent on facebook, and less room for my advertising? they are also i think concerned about any sort of regulatory impact on the data they have access to with regards to targeting advertising. if there were any sort of regulation that would involve reducing their ability to target advertising, that is going to
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impact their ability to use facebook going forward. and i think that is going on the minds of advertisers as well. emily: let's talk about what we are seeing with engagement. i have a chart here, which shows you daily active users as a percentage of monthly active users, which is a really interesting way to examine engagement, how many facebook users are going to the app every single day. and that are seeing it auto. teau.a how much of a concern is that? debbie: i think that obviously, facebook does want to see growth in daily active users, but not only that, they want to see growth in engagement. not just people randomly or absentmindedly scrolling through their feed, but interacting and talking to people, engaging with their friends and family. that is why you saw facebook a couple of months ago redo its algorithm to favor that content from friends and family, as they need people to spend more active time on facebook, not just
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logging in once a day to randomly look at what is there. emily: so, you know, talking about advertising in particular, there is a lot of questions as to how facebook will potentially evolve the way that it uses data in order to target users, in order to target advertising. i have another chart here, which shows that as the prices of ads have grown, the growth in ads has actually slowed. you know, i am curious, what do you think advertisers are going to do here? are advertisers going to wait this out? are they going to keep pouring money into facebook because it is still one of the best ways to reach a very specific user? or are they going to leave? debbie: you know, those are conversations we are having market orwith e
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subscriber base. i can tell you right now, we are seeing that facebook is still one of the largest platforms around in order to reach a mass audience of people. and you have to remember at the end of the day, and a lot of major brand advertisers still want to reach and a lot of people. so that is one side of it. i think the targeting is another issue. certainly, the ability to very finely and precisely target people on facebook is something that advertisers love about facebook. and once again, if there is any limitation to that going forward, that will give them some pause. but for now, advertisers looking for branding goals or that massive reach are going to continue to use facebook, and are going to continue to want to spend time in dollars there, and -- and dollars there, and watch what happens in the next couple of weeks or months with regard to the usage. emily: debbie, always great to have you on the show. i want to continue to look at what this means for facebook and advertisers with michael wolff, the ceo and founder of activate. prior to that, he was president and ceo of mtv
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networks and a yahoo! board member. he joins me live from new york. so, michael, i am curious, just speaking to debbie earlier, about the power that facebook still has, and the fact that crises like these, facebook has weathered before. how big a deal is what facebook is going through right now you --much of an impact will going through right now? how much of an impact will this actually have on facebook from a reputational and business perspective? michael: stepping back and looking at the big picture, facebook is an integral part of marketers' campaigns today, and there are advertisers looking to facebook to help drive their sales. when you think about it, when you segment advertisers, there are advertisers that look at branding and there are advertisers that use google and facebook for what you would call performance, to drive specific sales. and apart from google and facebook, those are the two of the most important ways in which advertisers are not only joining sales online, but driving visits
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into an automobile dealership and coupons. it is going to be an important part of what advertisers do and it will continue to be. the bigger issue -- go ahead. emily: so, right. i want to ask you from a reputational perspective. in terms of trust, users might opt in to this, but even when users opt in or check a box, they do not understand how their data is being used. facebook has not done a good job about being clear about how the data is being used. will this fundamentally undermine trust in facebook and thus impact engagement? michael: yes, it will undermine trust but at facebook, there is a lot that facebook can do to reestablish that trust. first of all, it is less about privacy and it is more about control. facebook needs to be explicit in allowing people to have control. second of all, facebook needs to be clear to its users, what
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information they have on them, and how that information is being used. in the last couple of days, there has been news that facebook was using data from atsapp and on on wh facebook messenger and calls for advertising targeting. facebook needs to make it clear to users how they are using their data, and if users feel they can have control, they are not going to delete facebook. emily: coming up, sure, the ai that powers your facial recognition app is great, but did you know it could be hiding an inherent bias? that is next. this is bloomberg. ♪
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♪ emily: twitter is banning ads
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for initial coin offerings and token sales on its site. they said, "we know that this type of content is often associated with fraud." the decision comes after facebook dropped cryptocurrency ads in january, and google said they would ban such at starting in june. artificial intelligence is supposed to make our lives easier. from robots taking over monday tasks to the technology that unlock sure smartphone by scanning your face, but is that tech really colorblind? really gender blind? a study by researchers at m.i.t. shows that the gender of darker skinned women was incorrectly identified 35% of the time. so, just how do we un-bias ai? we spoke with a postdoctoral researcher at microsoft who study bias in ai systems. >> i do not know if we can un-bias it completely, but we can try to mitigate the bias and the effect of the bias. so i think the first thing we need to do, and what i am working on right now, is give people a guideline as to how and
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where a particularly data set can be used. emily: for example, some of your most recent research showed facial recognition software is far less accurate for women, and specifically women of color and for white men. that is essentially sexist and racist. can you explain? >> the so, in this work, what we did was we looked at commercial gender classification systems. what they do is look at a picture of a phase, and they -- face and they tell you whether the picture in it is that of a man or a woman, male or female, binary classification. they do not handle any other types of identities. so even in this case, when we looked at the accuracies and break them down by the intersection of race and gender, sorry, i do not even want to say race because race is not a very well-defined thing. we looked at skin types. we looked at skin tone, which is way oftologist-approved
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looking at skin types. as the skin gets darker and darker for women, this gender classification system has worse and worse error rates and approaches random chance. so, the answer to your earlier question, one of the ways we can mitigate this bias could be to try to gather more diverse training sets, and also test our algorithms by different populations instead of having one single number that says my algorithmem has a -- has a particular accuracy at 90%. but when you break it down by subpopulation, you might see it works much better for some populations than others. emily: is this something that apple face id, for example, has a problem with? >> i have not done a study of apple face id, but there was a highly-publicized article of this chinese woman who said that the face id did not work well on her. i am pretty sure this is a problem that happens across the board in most industries, across
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not even just face recognition, but other types of algorithms as well. emily: face id, facial recognition is just one example, but what are the consequences of this on the broader scale, if we do not start retraining these algorithms and rewriting them, and to get new data to fix it? >> one thing people do not understand is that ai components are being used everywhere by everyone. this is everywhere. they are being used in many different places in many high-stakes scenarios. for example, if you look at face recognition algorithms, they are being used identify what people think are criminals and for surveillance. whether or not facial recognition should be used as surveillance is one debate people should have anyway. but even if it were to be used for surveillance, we have to make people understand that these face recognition algorithms are not accurate enough to be used for surveillance. emily: you say women are at a
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bigger risk of losing jobs because of this. how so? >> i am not sure if women are unilaterally at a bigger risk of losing jobs because of ai. but i do think that anybody who is marginalized in our society is at a higher risk of losing jobs because of ai. this is because many of the lower-paying jobs that are more easily automatable are being done by people who are from lower income, by people who have been historically marginalized. so, i think anybody who our society has marginalized is more likely to lose jobs because of ai. emily: how much of this can be solved by getting women and people of color into ai, and into machine-learning, and how much we cannot solve because it has already been done? >> i think that a lot of issues of bias could be mitigated by not only having more people who
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are from historically-marginalized communities in ai, but just interacting with these people. so, it is not a coincidence that the two authors of the paper you were just describing on gender classification systems, and showing how biased they are, are black women. if you are not interfacing with people negatively affected by bias in ai, you are less likely to think that this problem is a big problem. emily: do you think companies like microsoft, facebook and google are doing enough to build diverse teams, and try to make sure that the bias does not get rewritten over and over again? >> no. i do not think companies are doing enough to build diverse teams. i absolutely do not. i would say this unilaterally across tech companies, there is a lot more talking about diversity then there is action. sure, there is some action going on, but it is not a priority.
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emily: coming up, uber exits southeast asia, selling their operations to grab. we will talk about the ride-hailing operation in the region next. this is bloomberg. ♪
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♪ emily: samsung vice chair jay y. lee is visiting europe in his first business trip since getting out of jail. the trip signaled an ignorant to -- eagerness to get back to managing the global tech giant. samsung de facto chief met with global business partners. the company declining by email to say when he left and what he plans to do in europe. the local korea economic daily reported he departed on march 22, a day before an annual shareholders' meeting, maybe seeking acquisitions. uber has agreed to sell its southeast operations to grab. withdrawing from yet another fast-growing region. grab will acquire all of uber's
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operations in a region of millions of people, including uber eats. in return, the u.s. ride hailer will take a 27.5% stake in a combined entity, and its ceo will join the board of grab. we spoke with the managing partner at ggb capital on monday on the phone. he is one of grab's earliest investors leading the b round and it serving on the board and was also involved in the deal in china. jixun: the competition has definitely happened in china and in southeast asia, has, you know, required a lot of investment, and in some ways, there is a lot of wasteage in the process. so, the consolidation does make a lot of sense for both grabbed -- grab and uber in southeast asia. i think the trend of what they
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did in china with dd, and now in southeast asia, is both a good deal for both companies. emily: uber also got a huge investments from softbank. it has its hand in other ridesharing companies around the world. how much do you think that is playing a role in the decisions that are being made about strategic partnerships? jixun: well, i think he is a very influential man. he has a stake now in dd and uber and grab over the years, and from his perspective obviously, this consolidation makes a lot of sense. he definitely has a hand in it, in the whole process. i do think that the local services is the direction to go going just beyond the , ridesharing because if you
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look at what is happening in china, dd, despite consolidation will face competition. the competition is not over yet. i think that the consolidation is a step forward for grab and uber to have a strong goal of landing on the local businesses. emily: if that is the case then, what would your message about -- the new uber ceo about india, -- to the new uber ceo about india, about latin america? what are these markets that they should wave the white flag in? jixun: well, i don't know enough about these other markets to make, to provide good advise, but hopefully, what we're seeing in southeast asia is the ridesharing service, it is a fairly local business. and i think it has to extend beyond just ride, per se.
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you have to offer a more comprehensive service on your platform and that includes food delivery service. with higher density cities, like beijing, shanghai, and other cities in southeast asia, the bike sharing, including jakarta, bike sharing can be a strong contender to this as well. so, you have to have this comprehensive service on the ground. so these are the markets like india, i do not know enough about them to make those comments as of now. emily: thank you. and that does it for this edition of "the best of bloomberg technology." we will bring you all the latest in tech throughout the week. be sure to tune in on wednesday -- tuesday for the debut of spotify's direct listing debut. one of the most hotly anticipated of 2018. tune in every day, 5:00 p.m. in new york, 2:00 p.m. in san francisco. and remember, all episodes are
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live streaming on twitter. check us out. that is all for now. this is bloomberg. ♪ retail.
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carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i am carol massar. jason: i am jason kelly. we are here in the magazine's headquarters in new york. carol: a lot to talk about, including trade. we are talking about the battle between the u.s. and china. jason: and we go inside volkswagen. scandal-ridden -- using flower power to fight it. carol: i love the story. we talk about the cost of becoming the athlete. first $1 billion you know who we are talking about. jason: tiger woods. carol: yes, we are. jason: that is ahead on "bloomberg businessweek." ?

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