The fact that Amazon has started using AI-powered cameras in delivery vans that constantly record footage of drivers has led to accusations of mobile corporate surveillance.

Cameras

The Driveri combined video recording and AI cameras have been introduced to the cab of Amazon delivery vans to record drivers with the stated intention of helping to improve driving.  The system has four separate HD cameras comprising of a road-facing view, a driver-facing view and two side views. The system films/records all the time but only uploads footage if one of 16 different factors (safety triggers) is observed.  For example, this could be drowsiness, speeding or sharp braking.

The system can also issue verbal warnings to drivers based upon the detection of certain safety triggers.  For example, it has been reported that a driver yawning prompts the system to pull over and take a break for 15 minutes.

The system has no audio or live-view functionality, and the drivers can turn off the cameras facing them only while their vehicle is stopped.  As soon as the vehicle moves, however, this starts the cameras working again.

The Footage

The footage from the cameras is sent to Amazon’s last-mile trust and safety team to be shared and used for coaching by the driver’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program, and also for any investigations (e.g. theft or property damage).

Amazon Says…

Amazon says that the cameras are intended to support drivers in being safer on the road and in being able to better handle incidents if they happen, thereby being able to “set up drivers for success”.

Critics Say…

Critics, on the other hand (of which there are many), have generally made the point that the cameras represent an unwelcome form of surveillance and invasion of privacy for the drivers and for the wider public.

For example, digital rights advocacy group ‘Fight for the Future’ Tweeted “Amazon’s plan to install artificial intelligence-powered cameras on its fleet of thousands of delivery vehicles amounts to the largest expansion of corporate surveillance in human history. We’ll be launching a campaign this week to stop this nightmare.”   Evan Greer of Fight For the Future Tweeted that “every Amazon vehicle will now also be an Amazon surveillance camera. And right now there are essentially no laws in place to govern what Amazon can do with all that footage once they collect it” and that “Basically this means any time you see an Amazon delivery vehicle in your neighbourhood, it will be watching and recording you. The potential for abuse is staggering. This turns every single Amazon delivery vehicle into a mobile surveillance machine. Orwellian is an understatement.”

Also, the Director of the UK’s Big Brother Watch privacy group, Silkie Carlo, has been quoted as saying that “Amazon’s appetite for surveillance knows no bounds. This intrusive, constant monitoring of employees creates an oppressive, distrustful, and disempowering work environment that completely undermines workers’ rights”.  The GMB union have also expressed similar concerns about the use of the cameras and there have been reports that Amazon Drivers in a private Reddit group have expressed fears about what could happen to them if they made driving mistakes that were noted by the cameras.

Tips

Amazon has also been on the negative side of the news over a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint in the US, alleging that Amazon’s Flex program took almost $62 million in tips from its drivers between 2016 and 2019.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For Amazon, using cameras to film drivers to improve performance and settle disputes may seem like a practical solution but there is clearly a great deal of suspicion and a lack of trust about Amazon and its motives among privacy groups, unions, drivers, and others.  Rights such as privacy, together with not having to feel like big brother is always watching you, is something that most workers value.  Amazon, however, is a very large and powerful company that has become even more powerful during the pandemic and it is clearly going to become much more difficult and costly for workers, unions, rights/privacy groups and others to stand up to Amazon and hold them to account, particularly when, even though the story represents bad PR, it is unlikely to hit Amazon sales.  Nevertheless, this kind of story is extremely negative and is likely to attract public sympathy even if it doesn’t affect their loyalty and now it remains to be seen how Amazon will respond in rolling out this program that sounds like something it had committed to going ahead with.

Microsoft has announced the general availability of a one-of-a-kind customised, synthetic voice for brands, generated using Custom Neural Voice, the Text-to-Speech (TTS) feature of Speech in Azure Cognitive Services.

What Is It?

The Custom Neural Voice from Microsoft uses deep neural networks and a powerful base model built with speech data from many different speakers to create a Neural “text-to-speech” (TTS) model that is able to learn the way phonetics are combined in natural human speech rather than using classical programming or statistical methods. The result is a very natural sounding voice.

Microsoft is now inviting a customer to apply to be approved to use it, or developers can now add TTS capabilities to their apps by creating an Azure Speech instance and selecting from over 200 pre-built TTS and Neural TTS voices across 54 languages/locales.

Benefits

The benefit of this synthetic voice system is that it does not require a large volume of voice data to produce a fluent, natural sound because of the extra power of the deep neural networks and base model. Users can, therefore, expect to be able to build realistic voices with just a small number of training audios and companies can spend a fraction of the effort traditionally needed to prepare training data while at the same time increasing the naturalness of the synthetic speech output when compared to traditional training methods.

Why Have A Brand Voice?

According to Microsoft, we are now in a world where voice-based interactions are increasingly becoming the norm and, therefore, “your voice is your brand”. Microsoft says that a recognisable digital brand voice can help customers connect with a brand in new ways.

Microsoft points out that it has received interest in customised synthetic brand voices from a range of businesses across the Media and Entertainment, Telecom, Automobile, Education, and Hospitality sectors.  Examples of where/how a brand voice can be used include usage for apps, on a website (customer service chatbots), in videos, on the telephone (centre operations combined with conversational AI), on a range of devices (e.g. phones, speakers, TV/cable boxes), in cars as a key interaction point with customers, smart voice assistants, in online learning materials and audio books, for public service announcements (stations, airports and venues), or as assistive technology to help with accessibility.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Bots are commonplace these days and as Microsoft’s announcement demonstrates, the technology to quickly create a realistic ‘brand voice’ and the opportunities for companies to use one are now much more common and widespread.  Realistic, AI-powered voices can be really helpful to companies that want to scale-up customer service without huge expense, plus it is a flexible tool that can help companies to re-enforce their brand in a very modern way.  Giving people access to the power of their deep neural networks and base model means that for companies wanting to use Microsoft’s synthetic voice (which companies can apply to do here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-ai/build-a-natural-custom-voice-for-your-brand/ba-p/2112777) can a get a really professional sounding brand voice together much more quickly for a fraction of the effort than if they used other traditional methods.  Making this technology available, albeit by application, means that many more, smaller businesses can now seriously consider having their own realistic-sounding voice/bot. The pace at which this kind of technology is developing is good news for all kinds of companies looking to use this as an element of their service in the near future.

In the light of the recent controversy over GameStop shares, we take a look at the growing trend for casual, amateur investing and how the Robinhood app has enabled this.

Robinhood

Robinhood is a free-trading app that lets any investor trade stocks, options, exchange-traded funds, and cryptocurrency without paying commissions or fees.  Robinhood is paid by “market makers” who are typically large investment firms/financial institutions that create liquidity in the market e.g., Citadel.  These market-makers quote both a buy and a sell price and hope to make a profit from the difference between the two, known as the spread.

As Robinhood explains, “When you buy or sell a stock, Robinhood sends your orders to market makers that execute your trades. Market makers send a record of the trade to Robinhood Securities, which works with a clearinghouse to record the trade. It takes two days for the clearinghouse to transfer the stock to the buyer and funds to the seller. This is known as “clearance and settlement.”

This way of ensuring that everyone gets what they agreed to when the trade executed is referred to in the industry as the trade date plus two days to settle (T+2).

What Happened With GameStop?

Recently, Robinhood prevented users from buying shares in GameStop (GameStop Corp., an American video game) and some other companies (Nokia and AMC) after a big price surge upwards for (what had previously struggling) GameStop. It has been reported that amateur investors following the Wall Street Bets forum on Reddit started putting lots of money into buying GameStop’s stock in order to push up the price. This, in turn, would have made it difficult for any of the big hedge fund investors who may have been relying on “short selling”/”shorting”.  This practice, which is essentially betting on the value of a company’s stock value to fall sharply involves hedge funds borrowing shares from investors for a fee and waiting until their value falls before buying them back (for a lesser amount) to make a profit.

The buying of shares by the Reddit forum investors, therefore, appears to have put pressure on the big hedge funds to try and buy back the shares they had borrowed quickly to stop any bigger losses (known as ‘covering’). Unfortunately, this buying back would have helped to keep inflating the value.

Controversy

Robinhood suddenly intervened by preventing users from buying shares in GameStop.  This caused controversy and anger and there were accusations that when it looks as though small, amateur investors look like making some money and hurting the established big hedge funds, their opportunity is stopped. The point was also made by some people that those on Wall Street may only appear to care about the rules when they’re the ones getting hurt.

Government Too

President Biden’s Press secretary Psaki had already said that the new administration’s team had been monitoring the situation and Massachusetts state regulator William Galvin asked the New York Stock Exchange to suspend GameStop for 30 days to allow a cooling-off period, saying that it looked more like gambling than investing.

Legal Action

Afters investors were stopped from buying GameStop shares, a legal action was then filed (last week) which claimed that Robinhood was acting purposely to rig the market in favour of the big financial institutions (who are not Robinhood’s customers) and to retail investors of possible financial gains.

Other Accusations

There were also accusations by commentators on behalf of some of the big financial institutions that the huge amount of trading in GameStop shares by individual investors had been used as a way for people to get their own back on them and deliberately try to demonstrate that they have the power to hurt them.

Also, there were accusations on some social media accounts that billionaire financier Ken Griffin had put pressure on Robinhood to cease GameStop trading in order to benefit Citadel Securities (his company) which acts as a market maker for Robinhood.

Robinhood Says

Robinhood denied that it did anything to deliberately favour the big financial institutions and deprive its customers.  In a blog post it explained that as a Clearing brokerage, Robinhood Securities is a member of clearinghouses which have membership rules, approved by the SEC, that govern the activity of their members. This means that, if a firm’s customers have more buy than sell orders, and the securities they’re buying are more volatile, this can trigger problems and charges.  In the case of Robinhood, the amount required by clearinghouses to cover the settlement period of some securities rose ten-fold, causing the rules to kick-in and this triggered the placing of “temporary buying restrictions” on a “small number of securities”.

Robinhood was keen to point out in its blog post that, “It was not because we wanted to stop people from buying these stocks. We did this because the required amount we had to deposit with the clearinghouse was so large—with individual volatile securities accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in deposit requirements—that we had to take steps to limit buying in those volatile securities to ensure we could comfortably meet our requirements”.

Robinhood says its goal is still “to enable purchasing for all securities on our platform”.

Popular During Lockdown

Amateur investing, such as that on Robinhood, has become more popular during the lockdown as people have sought ways to learn new things, perhaps make some money during difficult times, and find an extra income-stream going forward.

Criticism

Robinhood has also been the subject of some criticism in that it could be perceived as making investment seem like a “game for dabblers”, could be very risky for investors and could create disruptive bubbles in some stock.

Silver

In the wake of the GameStop episode and following this kind of criticism, it appears that investors have already started targeting silver trading with the silver price hitting 8-year high.

Some analysts have said, however, that it would not be as easy for retail investors to have a massive impact the silver price, because there are not many shorts in this market and there is a large off-exchange market for silver where banks trade on behalf of clients.

Looking Ahead

The move to silver shows that amateur investing looks set to continue and it is likely that there may be more surprises to come via many investors using Robinhood after they have seen that they can have a real effect on markets and on the big players in some of those markets.

The LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr in Norway was issued an £8.5m penalty for the alleged sharing of users’ sensitive personal data with third-party advertisers without obtaining appropriate consent.

Complaint

The fine is the result of a legal complaint by the Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) last year, where it expressed concern that users of the app may not have been in control of their data and that the sharing of personal data (for targeted advertising purposes) was putting them at risk of discrimination, manipulation, or exploitation.

What Data?

The kind of data that Grindr collects includes chat texts and images, physical characteristics, HIV status, and details of sexual preferences, as well as email addresses and location and device data.

Safety

In addition to the matter of data protection law, this case involved concerns about the safety of those users whose data was being shared because many may live in areas where they can still be legally discriminated against e.g., Russia, the UAE or Pakistan.

Findings

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority, known as Datastilsynet, concluded in the case of Grindr that valid consent to share personal data with advertisers, particularly data that needs special protection such as sexual orientation had not been obtained from users by Grindr.

Datastilsynet also found that in being made to accept the whole privacy policy in order to use the app, users were not being asked for the specific consent necessary for sharing data with third parties and that information about Grindr’s data-sharing hadn’t been effectively communicated.  It was found that the app had transmitted users’ locations, user-tracking codes, and the app’s name to at least five advertising companies.

The app has been given until 15 February to respond to the case.

Grindr Says

In a statement in the New York Times, a Grindr spokesperson said that the company had obtained “valid legal consent from all” of its users in Europe on multiple occasions and was confident that its “approach to user privacy is first in class” among social apps.  Also, the spokesperson said that “We continually enhance our privacy practices in consideration of evolving privacy laws and regulations and look forward to entering into a productive dialogue with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority”.

Nevertheless, Norway’s data regulator thought that Grindr’s actions had been severe enough to warrant a major fine.

Not The First Time

This is not the first time that Grindr’s data protection has been called into question.  For example, last January, its Android app was found to have been sharing very accurate location information about users, and in October 2020 an email hacking vulnerability was found in the app.  Also, in April 2018, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it was investigating Grindr after it was discovered that the app had shared data with two external companies, including information on HIV status and date last tested.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

This is a reminder to businesses everywhere that specific consent and being clear about data practices is very important and that relying on unlawful ‘consent’ could lead to huge fines. In this case there also a clear element of danger and threat to the users of the app if their information is shared because in some countries, users may face legal discrimination, violence and more. Grindr has been in the spotlight before over its data practices and it is a shame that lessons don’t appear to have been learned.  This story also highlights how the practices of advertising technology companies may also warrant some scrutiny as although targeted advertising may be good for businesses, it should not be at the expense of the potential safety and wellbeing of those whose data has been used.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has asked the UK Treasury to consider increasing the maximum contactless payment to £100.

Changing Payment Behaviour

The move away from handling cash due to its potential infection-passing risk, and the lockdowns making consumers less likely to visit ATMs or town centres have led to a move away from cash towards contactless.

Figures

For example, the total value of contactless payments in 2020 increased by 7 per cent compared with 2019 and there was a 29 per cent increase in the use of contactless in UK grocery stores.  Barclaycard figures show that contactless payments accounted for 88.6 per cent of all card payments in 2020.

£45 In April 2020

The maximum limit for contactless had already been increased from £30 to £45 in April last year in a bid to take account of the changing situation for shops and merchants. UK Finance data shows that although the proportion of contactless payments fell, probably due to measures taken to close parts of the hospitality industry (pubs and restaurants), and public transport measures, there was an increase in the total value of contactless payments in the UK in October.

Contactless Fraud Increase Worry

Raising the maximum payment to £100 on contactless, where identity verification is not required, has led to some expressing concern about a possible resulting increase in fraud.  Figures (UK Finance) for 2020 show that fraud accounted for 2.5p in every £100 spent.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The FCA appears to be responding to the changing needs of consumers and merchants as the pandemic has led to a greater reliance on contactless.  Although the FCA set the boundaries for payments it is down to the card issuers to decide upon the actual limits. Although a £100 limit sounds convenient from a consumer’s point of view, shops are concerned that the trade-off is the risk of higher-value theft and the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has expressed concern about the risk of even greater losses from incomplete contactless payments at self-checkouts costing retailers more than the millions it’s costing them already in lost revenue. The BRC has also suggested that a higher priority issue to address than the maximum payment limit is high card fees.  With the pandemic dragging on and people into their second month of the latest lockdown, it does look like there will be an increase to the new £100 maximum contactless limit.