Category: PSP Hacks

These days privacy online feels like an unattainable dream. Everything you do becomes data for companies, which sell that data to affiliates, which then sell your data back to you in the form of targeted ads and personalized recommendations. That is just how things are. But what if it didn’t have to be?

Last week, I met with a team from Canopy, a tech startup that’s created a software developer kit that it hopes will enable companies to create personalized experiences without compromising your privacy. As a proof of concept, earlier this week, the company launched its first app, Tonic.

The idea behind Tonic isn’t exactly new. It’s one of those curated reading experiences—you get shown a bunch of articles, you pick the ones you like, and the next day you get new material to read based on your preferences. The main difference is you don’t have to sign up for an account or enter in your personal data, like age, gender, email, phone number, or location. Instead, it pulls data in a way that’s intended to not betray your privacy while still allowing the app to make intelligent predictions about stories you may want to read.

Theoretically speaking, if Canopy were to license its software to, say, Spotify, it would mean that you’d still get a pretty accurate Discover Weekly playlist, but neither Canopy nor Spotify would know exactly what you were listening to or when, according to the company. That could have some significant implications if you were to apply that kind of privacy-protecting tech to location data, for example.

The key is something called differential privacy, a framework that has its basis in mathematics. It’s a way to share information about a group and its behaviors while protecting the privacy of individuals within that group by obscuring data that exposes your identity.

“Differential privacy is a framework that allows you to make tradeoffs between privacy and accuracy,” Bennett Cypher, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me over the phone. More specifically, Cypher told me, the basic principle is you define an Epilson parameter (math!) that generates noise or confusion to obscure a data set. It’s like giving a ballpark estimate—you get a sense of something, but you don’t know the exact particulars. The higher the parameter, the less noise and more accurate your information. A lower parameter means more noise and greater privacy.

Before your eyes cross, a real-life example Cyphers gave me is the census. The government has a lot of aggregate data about its citizens—and it probably wants to share demographic information from that set without revealing anything about any one particular individual. Let’s say you live in a small census block with only one or two people. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out personal information about you, given the right parameters. Differential privacy would be a way to summarize that data without putting any one individual at risk.

So, how does that translate to private yet personalized experiences online? Canopy’s head of product, Matthew Ogle, told Gizmodo the secret sauce is in your phone. Instead of creating a behavior model of each user on a server, as many apps do, Canopy does that locally on your phone. When the app does make a request of Canopy’s server for content, what it sends is an encrypted, differentially private version of your behavior. So instead of a model built on your individual preferences, you’re an indistinguishable part of an aggregate of users who like the same things you do.

For most of us, never needing to sign up for another service to reap the benefits of doing so sounds ideal. We do that now because the perks of a personally curated experience seem to outweigh the cost of giving up your privacy. It’s much easier to feel the benefits of an auto-generated playlist than vague privacy violations that you may not even know are happening. That said, it seems like a no-brainer to do this for everything. So why isn’t this more of a thing?

One reason is differential privacy hasn’t been around for that long. “It’s sort of new,” says Cyphers. “There’s not a lot of agreement on what a good parameter is—people are sort of making it up as they go. It’s important for companies to be upfront with what parameters they’re using.”

As for Canopy’s Tonic app, the stakes are low. Reading recommendations don’t carry the same risk as financial transactions or location data, though Canopy’s team did indicate that applying it to those type of data was a feasible long-term goal if things go well. Still, there are limitations as to how far differential privacy can go at the moment.

“One problem is in order to get that tradeoff between privacy and accuracy, for a lot of applications it doesn’t make sense,” Cyphers says. To get a lot of privacy, you have to add a lot of noise, so it becomes sort of useless. It only works in very specific applications.”

For starters, differential privacy isn’t like encryption, where you can just slap it onto varying technologies and call it a day. You can’t send a differentially private email. A differentially private photo would look like static. It works in Tonic’s case because the tech is being applied to the act of discovery.

“The privacy and accuracy tradeoff is real,” Canopy founder and CEO Brian Whitman said over email. He noted that while differential privacy isn’t well-suited to generalized machine learning tasks—think predicting something about a unique person’s behavior—because accuracy would take a significant hit. That said, when it comes to discovering likes and preferences, nothing about that has to be about the individual on the backend.

“The point is we’re not trying to pinpoint a single thing about a single person,” White said. “That is still hard with differential privacy and federated learning. We are understanding larger populations and doing a great job of it. We never should have built recommenders that understood people individually anyway.”

Basically, something like Tonic is a baby step in the right direction. Differential privacy has been used elsewhere—Apple, for instance, said it uses it in improving features like QuickType and Emoji suggestions, as well as some Safari features, and disclosed the Epsilon parameters used. (That said, there’s some disagreement as to how well Apple implemented the tech, leading back to the need for companies to be transparent about their parameters.) Still, even with differential privacy’s limitations, given the looming possibility of federal privacy legislation and discerning users, it wouldn’t be surprising if it starts popping up more frequently in the apps and services we all use—and that’s probably a good thing.

In general, the more pizza we have the better, so get ready for some good news. It is almost always better value to order larger-sized pizzas, according to math (well, an engineer). Here’s why.

Over at NPR’s Planet Money blog, Quoctrung Bui explains:

One day last year, an engineer and I went to a pizza place for lunch. The engineer told me he wasn’t very hungry, but he said he was going to get the 12-inch medium instead of the 8-inch small—because the medium was more than twice as big as the small, and it cost only a little bit more. This sort of blew my mind.

…The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius.

So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.

And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.

They also include an interactive graph that compares average pizza prices from pizzerias and chains across the country. You can drag the slider at the bottom of their graph to see exactly how much larger that bigger pizza is compared to the smaller ones, and at the average prices for each, how much you actually come out ahead.

For example, One 18-inch pizza has roughly the same area as 1.7 14-inch pizzas or 5.1 8-inch pizza, To get the same amount of pizza you get in an $18.68 18-inch pizza, you’d have to spend an extra $5.29 on 14-inch pizzas, or an extra $23.09 on 8-inch pizzas. See how the numbers add up? It’s almost universally a better deal—mathematically, mind you—to just get the bigger pizza.

Of course, this is a mathematical exercise—a rational, logical method of determining how to get the most return on your pizza investment. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to buy a massive pizza if you can’t eat it all, don’t want to overeat, don’t have the funds to purchase the larger size or have no way to store the leftovers. But for all other occasions, get the big pizza.

This story was originally published on 10/23/16 and was updated on 9/17/19 to provide more thorough and current information.

NBCU is again going after Gen Z and millennials with the launch of a new digital news brand and soon-to-arrive streaming network, called LX — short for “Local X.” Local, because the focus is on local news and “X” because…well, it sounds cool? (NBCU says it’s for LX’s “exponential abilities,” if you want the official reasoning.)

The service will be run by NBCU’s 42-station group, NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations, which will next year begin delivering LX’s programming as both an over-the-air and streaming network.

The company says the news programming on LX will feature “visually rich,” longer-form content — which is a switch from NBC’s other, earlier efforts in targeting the younger demographic.

For instance, NBC’s new streaming news network, NBC News Now, launched in May, delivers hourly live updates called “Briefly’s” as one of its key features. NBC also invested in a Snapchat news show, “Stay Tuned,” where it delivers a selection of top stories in just a few minutes.

LX is a different sort of news-telling experience — one that’s more akin to a news magazine, rather than a traditional local newscast.

Its “Visual Storytellers,” as the reporters are called, will work within their own communities — including LA, Boston, Dallas, Miami and New York — to offer local stories and background on complex issues, says NBCU.

Among the group of storytellers are LA’s Chase Cain, formerly of Hulu, who will use 360-degree videos as part of his storytelling efforts; Ngozi Ekeledo, previously a reporter for the Big Ten Network in Chicago, now in Boston; a two-time Emmy winner whose background is in local TV news, Clark Fouraker, in Dallas; plus Bianca Graula, a bilingual journalist who will focus on Miami stories; and former Vice News Tonight reporter Alexa Liautaud, in New York.

The programming launched on Monday with stories about climate change, urban farming, a surfing program for black women in California and a young female Asian chef and James Beard nominee who launched a successful restaurant without experience or training.

Currently, the content is airing on YouTube at NBCLX, on LX.com and across social media platforms (@NBCLX.)

In April 2020, LX will debut as an over-the-air streaming network with live programming included, too. That means local newscasts will be added into the mix of coverage.

And the network will feature fewer and shorter ad breaks at that time, the company says.

More broadly, the service aims to attract an audience of younger people who no longer watch television in the traditional sense. Today’s cord cutters and “cord nevers” often get their news from social media, podcasts, apps and other digital-first sources.

That’s a challenge for a news division focused on local TV.

“Our younger audiences want stories that are relatable. They want to feel a connection with the people delivering the news to them. They want more context about what’s happening in their neighborhoods. LX will deliver this and more,” said Valari Staab, president, NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations, in a statement. “Our team has been working hard to create a place that younger audiences can go to watch stories that are about them, and get the background about complex issues happening in their own backyard but still walk away feeling inspired about the power we all have to affect positive changes for our communities,” she added.