Hi everyone, it’s John. Welcome back to returning subscribers and welcome to all the new subscribers. Thank you for the incredible feedback on the first edition.
Subscribers to Urban Tech include tech and business reporters, political operatives, startup founders, real estate professionals, engineers and comms consultants. All to say: you’re in great company! Thanks for subscribing. Please continue to share Urban Tech with your friends and colleagues. 🙏
A few housekeeping items:
For PR folks: Feel free to share any relevant news with me for potential inclusion. I’ve added a note on pitching Urban Tech to the about page.
I’m planning to start doing Q&As to share the knowledge from all the smart people in the Urban Tech space. If you know someone who would be a good fit, send me an email at john@urbantechnews.net.
I’ll also be launching a website for Urban Tech and a private slack group for subscribers in the coming weeks and month, so we can keep the conversation going between editions. Be on the lookout for more details.
Okay, let’s dive in.
A Long Thing: Amazon, IBM and other major players swear off sharing facial recognition technology with police for the near-term.
(If you haven’t seen the Nicholas Cage and Johnny Travolta classic Face/Off — highly recommend it.)
From the New York Times, feeling the pressure in the wake of George Floyd’s death and national protests across cities, tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, hit the brakes (somewhat) on controversial facial recognition technology.
Here’s Amazon’s (entire!) statement on the matter
We’re implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology. We will continue to allow organizations like Thorn, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Marinus Analytics to use Amazon Rekognition to help rescue human trafficking victims and reunite missing children with their families.
We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.
As a comms pro, I don’t think Amazon’s statement said much... They simply hit pause on one area and, as far as I can tell, continue to work with police through their Ring vertical and other areas. Key point: Ring isn’t facial recognition — yet.
The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) wrote an informative post on why facial technology is a contentious issue.
The 3 major issues Kade Crockford identified:
First, the technology itself can be racially biased. Groundbreaking research conducted by Black scholars Joy Buolamwini, Deb Raji, and Timnit Gebru snapped our collective attention to the fact that yes, algorithms can be racist. Buolamwini and Gebru’s 2018 research concluded that some facial analysis algorithms misclassified Black women nearly 35 percent of the time, while nearly always getting it right for white men.
Second, police in many jurisdictions in the U.S. use mugshot databases to identify people with face recognition algorithms. But using mugshot databases for face recognition recycles racial bias from the past, supercharging that bias with 21st century surveillance technology.
Third, even if the algorithms are equally accurate across race, and even if the government uses driver’s license databases instead of mugshot systems, government use of face surveillance technology will still be racist. That’s because the entire system is racist. As journalist Radley Balko has carefully documented, Black people face overwhelming disparities at every single stage of the criminal punishment system, from street-level surveillance and profiling all the way through to sentencing and conditions of confinement.
A lack of federal legislation on the technology creates a vacuum for smart regulation on facial recognition. Cities and states across the country are passing independent policies for the technology: SF and Oakland in California, Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts.
I think Cade from the ACLU sums up perfectly why we need to be mindful of this evolving technology"
“To avoid repeating the mistakes of our past, we must read our history and heed its warnings. If government agencies like police departments and the FBI are authorized to deploy invasive face surveillance technologies against our communities, these technologies will unquestionably be used to target Black and Brown people merely for existing.”
Ultimately I think the NY Time’s Mike Isaac gets it right why Amazon's decision falls short:
What I'm reading this week
CNBC: A housing ‘apocalypse’ is coming as coronavirus protections across the country expire
I can’t emphasize this enough: this is disastrous for a number of reasons:
“Between March 25 and April 10 of this year, nearly half of renters aged 18 to 64 reported that they were having trouble paying their rent or utilities, were food insecure or couldn’t afford needed medical care, according to the Urban Institute.”
Service workers and contractors are the most vulnerable after already being HEAVILY impacted by Coronavirus job losses.
From CNBC just yesterday: “As the United States continues to face record unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic, 30% of Americans missed their housing payments in June, according to a survey by Apartment List, an online rental platform.”
Not to mention the current public health crisis — which has already killed 117,717 Americans.
There will need to be a massive housing program as part of another round of stimulus if these numbers continue to hold. There was already a dire need for an enormous housing package from the federal government before Coronavirus.
Axios: Airbnb revives internal IPO conversations
Dan Primack shares why the company is considering moving forward with an IPO:
"Airbnb has restarted internal conversations about going public in 2020, something unthinkable just a month ago, per multiple sources close to the company."
"The big picture: Stock markets are no longer moored to macroeconomic conditions or financial performance, and IPOs are riding the tsunami."
My personal opinion on the biggest forces at play:
Airbnb has been private since it launched in 2008. 12 years is a long time for early employees and investors to wait to cash out their equity.
The company has borrowed a lot of money in the last few months to insulate itself from Coronavirus.
The company’s network of hosts have to be hurting right now, and the company needs them to succeed.
I have to imagine the company is also thinking about how a potential Democratic administration would impact the IPO, financially and regulatorily, compared to the more business-friendly administration currently in place.
The Wall Street Journal: Warehouses Serve as a Pandemic Haven for Property Investors
The key takeaway: “Large investors who buy property, who are collectively sitting on billions of dollars of cash, have shown little appetite for offices, apartments and retail space since the pandemic began, as they wait for prices to fall. But brokers and investors say demand for warehouses is still high because e-commerce, which depends on industrial real estate, hasn’t been as affected by the pandemic.”
Bloomberg: Airbnb Agrees to Give Host Data to NYC in Settlement
“The agreement announced Friday could cost Airbnb tens of thousands of listings in the Big Apple, but it also gets the home-share startup closer to its ultimate goal -- clarifying its legal status in one of the San Francisco-based company’s biggest domestic markets.”
CNBC: Instacart nabs nearly $14 billion valuation in new funding round
"Instacart has raised $225 million, led by DST Global and General Catalyst. The round increases its valuation to nearly $14 billion, from $8 billion when it last raised money in 2018."
"According to research firm Second Measure, which tracks credit card spending, Instacart’s share of grocery pickup and delivery sales jumped to 55 percent in the third week of May, up from about 30 percent in February — pushing past Walmart and making it the biggest player in the space."
It's good to be in the at-home food space right now, but the company is still facing major policy questions like do their contractors count as employees?
The Ringer: ‘The King of Staten Island’ Is More Than Just Outer-Borough Tourism
Last week, Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow released their latest project: The King of Staten Island. The movie is a raw look at dealing with trauma and perpetual fear of love, based on Davidson’s real-life. I loved it and think if you’re a fan of Apatow or Pete, you will too.
The movie's urbanism angle: Pete’s love interest is an aspiring urban planner who dreams of making Staten Island a destination.
Did you know? Staten Island has tried to secede from the city of New York several times over the years. In 1990, 83% of Staten Islanders voted in favor of conducting a secession study, and three years later, 65% of the borough’s residents voted to secede from the city.
Not Boring: Oh Snap!
Snapchat unveiled the latest additions and updates to its platform
From Packy McCormick of Not Boring: "While most of us were distracted, Evan Spiegel built a new world. Today, Snap is weaving together a complex and defensible suite of products, technology, content, and SDKs that position it to build the next big platform - the one that blends the physical and digital worlds."
As the company continues to evolve its product, it shouldn’t be shocking it continues to move the maps section and features front and center.
Maps are the new search box, as Jesse Hempel outlined in WIRED in 2018.
“Uber isn’t alone in its quest to turbo-charge maps: On your phone, the map app is the new search box. Uber, like a lot of companies, anticipates that mapping will become the way that people merge their digital and physical lives: a real-time search function for the world immediately around you. But that means maps are about to become a lot more sophisticated. 'The level of detail and precision...are core to what we do,' says head of product Manik Gupta, who spent more than seven years working on Google Maps before he defected to Uber.”
"Search has always been partially about location: if Google knows you are in Indiana, you’ll get more meaningful results when you type 'today’s weather' into your laptop. Traditionally, though, the physical and digital worlds have been divided. You use search when you need information, and a map when you need to get someplace."
My take: Snap is continuing to meld the physical and digital worlds together using maps. It will provide users with more meaningful information and content tied to the physical environment through maps.
Axios: Cities hit hardest by coronavirus saw huge drops in local commerce
JP Morgan released a new report on the impact of Coronavirus on cities — it has not been good and even worse in low-income neighborhoods.
Methodology: JP Morgan Chase analyzed a sample of credit card transactions considered to be everyday goods and services bought and sold at the local level to create a "local commerce" economic view.
Findings:
Spend on local commerce (LC) declined simultaneously across cities, with extreme declines most likely in low-income neighborhoods.
Online local commerce spend grew by 1.5 percent as offline declined sharply, and the online share of LC spend grew by 4.6 percentage points.
Only grocery and pharmacy spend grew materially, with online growth at least three times greater than offline growth.
~8 percent of LC spend shifted from restaurant to grocery spend; local access to groceries varied widely by neighborhood income quintile and across cities.
From Kim Hart at Axios:
“in low-income neighborhoods, local commerce spend plummeted much further into negative territory.
The bottom line: The data points to what we already know — that the pandemic and its economic shocks disproportionately hurt those who could least afford it.”
The Verge: Inside Nextdoor's 'Karen Problem'
Nextdoor continues to face accusations that it perpetuates racism in neighborhoods and has done little to stop it. Check out Makena Kelly’s long piece on Nextdoor’s “Karen problem."
Thanks for reading this week’s edition! Please reach out with any questions or thoughts on how can I can improve this for you. Please also share Urban Tech with your friends and colleagues who might enjoy it. Talk next week.✌🏼
JT