Linked List: May 27, 2021

Thursday, 27 May 2021

Vizio Makes Nearly as Much Money From Ads and Data as It Does From Selling TVs ★

R. Lawler, writing a few weeks ago for Engadget:

Issuing its first public earnings report earlier today, [Vizio] revealed that in the first three months of 2021, profits from its Platform+ business — the part that sells viewer data and advertising space via the SmartCast platform — were $38.4 million. […] Its device business (the part that sells TVs, sound bars and the like) had a gross profit of $48.2 million in the same period, up from $32.5 million last year. While the hardware business has significantly more revenue, profits from data and advertising spiked 152 percent from last year, and are quickly catching up.

Walt Hickey, Numlock News:

Vizio is a television company with a data collection operation on the side, but is slowly becoming a data collection company with a television operation.

Is there a single privacy-respecting streaming platform other than Apple TV?

Is there a brand of TV that you can safely allow to connect to the internet?

Facebook-Sponsored Research Paper Lambasts Apple’s iOS 14.5 Privacy ★

William Gallagher, writing for AppleInsider:

“Harming Competition and Consumers Under the Guise of Protecting Privacy,” is a new academic research paper funded by Facebook. Citing the social media company on 11 of its 22 pages, it takes the position that Apple’s privacy features are “devastating” and that, “app developers, advertisers and the ads ecosystem lose.”

The paper, subtitled “An Analysis of Apple’s iOS 14 Policy Updates,” is written by D. Daniel Sokol of the University of Florida Levin College of Law, and Feng Zhu, from the Harvard Business School.

“While thinly veiled as a privacy-protecting measure, Apple’s iOS 14 policy changes harm the entire ad-supported ecosystem — from developers to advertisers to end consumers,” they write in the full paper. “By sharply limiting the ability of third-party apps to create value through personalized advertising, Apple’s policy changes undermine competition.”

Let’s get them some lollipops, make the boo-boo feel better.

(Alternative quip: “By sharply reducing burglaries, police are limiting the ability of pawn shops to create value from stolen goods.”)

The Media’s Lab Leak Fiasco ★

Great column today from Matt Yglesias:

Because there is obviously a big media fuckup angle to this story, the two biggest deal accounts for a lot of media-skeptics are Donald McNeil making the case for a lab leak and Nicholas Wade making the case for a lab leak because those are both veteran science reporters who got “cancelled.” But I do think it’s important to try to understand exactly who got what wrong here. My best assessment is to agree with Josh Rogin that this is a case of a smallish group of reporters and fact-checkers proclaiming a scientific consensus where none ever really existed.

Josh Rogin (28 March 2021):

To anyone saying there is a “scientific consensus” about the origin of the coronavirus — Robert Redfield is a scientist. There is no consensus. Stop writing that falsehood into your stories, please.

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.

At a meta level, it is fascinating to watch the top news publications unwind themselves from last year’s mistake of lumping “accidental leak from well-intentioned Wuhan research lab” with the actual baseless conspiracies about bioweapons or the SARS-CoV-2 virus being “engineered” from scratch to destabilize the world economy or whatever.

Here’s an unwinding from the Washington Post two days ago; here’s the New York Times’s unwinding and CNN’s today. The Post’s headline is instructively defensive: “Timeline: How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible” — the theory has been credible and compelling all along. What’s “sudden” is that journalists are now realizing — as Yglesias says — that they fucked up last year establishing a baseline conventional wisdom that it was pure crackpottery.

Yglesias’s piece is a terrific summary of the whole debacle.