Google&#8217;s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/03/22/google-android-government-surveillance-fight/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">proud of its track record</a> in protecting more than one billion Android phones and tablets from malevolent hackers. But in the last 12 months, it&#8217;s been dealt a few blows, including the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/05/26/google-shuts-down-massive-ad-fraud-on-play-store/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">biggest ad fraud to ever hit its mobile operating system</a> and the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/11/30/gooligan-android-malware-1m-google-account-breaches-check-point-finds/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">most significant single theft of Google accounts</a> thanks to an Android malware called Gooligan.
Those alarming events were set off via networks of cybercriminals focused on the platform, where coders combine their technical skills with the will and financial backing of organized gangs. Sometimes, the latter group don&#8217;t even have to pay for the former&#8217;s digital tools. Sometimes, the technically-savvy types open their minds for free.
That&#8217;s just what a character calling himself Maza-In did just before last Christmas, when he or she posted an in-depth guide on the Exploit.in hacker forum for creating Android &#8220;bankers&#8221; &#8211; malware designed to steal bank login details from users of Google&#8217;s platform. The post not only included directions, but source code for a banker too. There was also a description of the required backend infrastructure, all of which combined could deliver realistic-looking bank pages designed to trick victims into handing over their usernames and passwords.
And now, Android security experts have <a href="http://blog.checkpoint.com/2017/05/16/the-mobile-banker-threat-from-end-to-end/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">pinned</a> a spike in banking malware on Maza-In and that post. They claim that Maza-In, in one fell swoop, caused a sudden leap in Android banking fraud, as cybercriminals took that open sourced code and adapted it to spread both in and outside Google’s official Play store. According to an independent researcher going by the moniker <a href="http://b0n1.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/tracking-android-bankbot.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">b0n1</a>, as many as 60 variants of malware containing the Maza-In banker have been pushed out into the wider world by hackers hoping to make some easy money.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2016/03/01/making-millions-paranoia/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Making Millions From Paranoia</a>
Check Point, which has been tracking the mini-explosion in Android bank fraud with ElevenPaths, a Telefónica security unit, told Forbes it had records of several dozen servers operating Maza-In&#8217;s malware, the largest of which controlled close to 3,000 bots. ElevenPaths said that, from Google Play alone, downloads of apps based on Maza-In&#8217;s code stood at above 10,000 and expected to rise, not to mention the number of downloads outside the store.
Those aren&#8217;t massive numbers. But what Maza-In and those who adapted his work for their own machinations have proven repeatedly are flaws in Google Play&#8217;s security, namely the Bouncer technology that&#8217;s supposed to keep bad apples out. Just two weeks ago, a sample of BankBot, based on Maza-In&#8217;s creation, was seen inside Google Play initially disguised as a video downloader tool. On June 13th, a very similar looking video downloader was up on the market; underneath was, again, a banker using Maza-In&#8217;s work. Going further back to April, a malware called Charger, which also borrowed heavily from Maza-In, was doing much the same, but masquerading as a flashlight app inside the official store, <a href="https://www.welivesecurity.com/2017/04/19/turn-light-give-passwords/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ESET reported</a>. All were removed from Google Play as soon as the tech giant was alerted, but not before thousands were infected.
&#8220;Before this Maza-In code, there were a lot of Android banking Trojans, for sure,&#8221; said ElevenPaths security researcher Sergio de los Santos. “But accessing the source code was not easy and this helps all kinds of people create variants and even get into Google Play. Giving a very simple and effective framework to create and manage your own banking Trojan opens the door to hundreds of profiles of attackers that want to get into business the easy way.
&#8220;Maza-in made it very simple to add different banks to attack, so you may see people from Latin America with their own samples focused on banks in there, UK people, Russians.&#8221;
A hacker responds
Maza-In says he is no cybercriminal, though. (As Maza-In uses a profile picture of Bob Marley, Forbes has chosen to refer to the hacker in the masculine). In an interview over encrypted chat, he said he only wanted to highlight weaknesses in Google’s operating system, not spawn a spike in Android cybercrime. He claimed, for instance, that despite security firms&#8217; claims he was behind the BankBot banker, another individual was responsible.
Yet he was aware of the criminal use of his code, revealing others, whether they&#8217;d given the malware additional features or not, were selling it for between $2,000 and $3,000 a pop on the web&#8217;s underground markets. &#8220;I did not expect it to work out that way, that it would spread so much,” he told me in Russian (translated by Google Translate).
&#8220;I did not write an article to harm people… I&#8217;m interested in studying the holey Android, since Google is not able to make a good operating system… by this I wanted to show the vulnerability of the Android and thought that Google would take care of security.&#8221; Unlike security pros who disclose bugs in return for credit or monetary reward, Maza-In said he didn&#8217;t contact Google.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2013/09/01/industrial-thief-line-can-rob/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Industrial Thief On The Line, How Can I Rob You?</a>
In describing just what he thought was wrong with Android security, he added: &#8220;The biggest problem is that the device can install any application, get full access to the device and can be substituted for fake banking applications [that can] intercept SMS [and] manage the device. In general, everything is possible.&#8221;
As for Check Point and ElevenPaths&#8217; assessment he was a malware creator supporting criminal operations, Maza-In said they&#8217;d exaggerated. He even claimed to be working on an Android anti-virus application.
But whilst analysts from both firms agree there&#8217;s no evidence he&#8217;s actively exploiting Android devices, they say it&#8217;s clear he is a malware creator who&#8217;s not followed best practise in highlighting security issues. &#8220;The blog contains explicit evidence that Maza-in is indeed behind the malware. He also boasted about his malware not being caught until January on one forum,&#8221; said Daniel Padon, mobile security researcher at Check Point. According to Lookout Mobile Security researcher Michael Flossman, Maza-In is just one handle used by a crew of Android fraudsters running all the aforementioned fraud malware.
&#8220;If you really want to show how unsecure Android is, you write an article about it, you code a proof of concept, you contact the right people to spread the word,&#8221; said de los Santos, explaining his disbelief at Maza-In&#8217;s claims to innocence.&#8221;But creating a Trojan? Oh, come on.&#8221;
Whatever the hacker&#8217;s involvement in the murkier parts of the internet, he and those who took advantage of his guide have given Google a headache. The company didn&#8217;t respond to requests for comment. But with the frequent appearances of these bankers on Google Play, it&#8217;s apparent the company has some work to do to keep ne&#8217;er-do-wells out of the market and users&#8217; Android devices. &#8211; Written by Thomas Fox-Brewster, FORBES STAFF

‘I Want To Expose Google’s Mistakes’: The Russian Hacker Blamed For A Big Android Fraud Problem

It’s a question that had to be answered sooner or later, the silent question in most entrepreneurs’ minds. It’s a topic I have  discussed privately, but now it’s something I think should be explored publicly.
If you look at the tech capitals of the world – Silicon Valley, Seoul and Tel Aviv – you won’t find any globally renowned black technology entrepreneurs.
It concerns me that a black entrepreneur has not come up with a major breakthrough in technology and gained a personal net worth of over a billion dollars as a result. Bear in mind, I did not say millions as there are many around today who are worth that.
Money is not the defining criteria though. To get to the bottom of this question we need to look at innovation, an idea that took the world by storm like WhatsApp.
Being African is also not in question, the continent has entrepreneurs such as Mark Shuttleworth and Elon Musk who have delivered powerful tech innovations and have billions in their pocket to prove it.
In order to answer the question, we need to confront three issues, cronyism, racism and nepotism. Firstly, they exist; we can’t run away from them.
Nepotism is a global issue. Everyone supports who they know, even people of color. This means that the success of a previous generation cascades to the generation that follows. This continues any race’s probability of success.
Many believe that racism is preventing black Africans from rising to the top. This belief is wrong. Asians and Jews at one point suffered tremendous discrimination, but they succeeded despite that challenge. Today, those two ethnicities are leading the business world.
Another challenge faced by many tech companies started by black entrepreneurs is the moment they come up with an idea, they are immediately thinking of ways to monetize it. You have to make money because you have bills to pay and there is the pressure of friends and family members wanting to see the fruit of what you have been working on.
At the main goal of the most successful tech companies, like Google, Quora and LinkedIn, their main goal was to get  as many people to use their technology as possible. Once that was achieved, they started to figure out how to make money from them. WhatsApp and Quora are still trying to figure this out, but they have millions of users to work with.
Investors in the United States encourage that. You need to attract interest first, monetization will be figured out afterwards and together. The message is that they will give you money if you can show your users have an active interest. Unfortunately, this is not the case in all countries around the world.
I believe Africans are brilliant. We, however, need an ecosystem that can be supportive for all ethnicities on the continent, not just black people. Nairobi and Cape Town are beacons in Africa for the vibrant tech ecosystem they have enabled in their cities. These ecosystems were largely built by the entrepreneurs themselves.
There are two black entrepreneurs who started major technology companies that should be mentioned, David Steward from the United States and Mike Adenuga from Nigeria. Steward runs World Wide Technology, the largest black-owned company in America, with revenue of $7.4 billion in 2015. World Wide Technology is tech service based.
Adenuga, with a personal worth of $3.8 billion, runs telecommunication company Globacom, with over 30 million subscribers. It is not a global brand and it doesn’t have to be.
My point is Africans are created equally and have conquered almost every industry. Competing with the rest of the world should be a challenge, not a competition. Let’s collaborate, with each other and counterparts of all backgrounds, to advance this world technologically.

Where Is The Black Mark Zuckerberg?

Stafford Masie brought Google to South Africa and paid a hefty price. With 20 years in IT, Masie worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. And if ever you want insight into his tenacity, you have to go back to Bloemfontein in the 1990s.
“When I came back to South Africa, I worked at Telkom as a network analyst. I then became an instructor; they sent me to Cape Town and Durban to do a training course and then they sent me to Bloemfontein. It was a five-day course; I was prepared to do it and then these white guys walked in, asked if I was the instructor and walked out. They refused to be taught by someone of color. I was confused and angry; I didn’t know what to do. A lady came to me and said ‘look this is the situation, we are dealing with it, please go back to your hotel’. So I went back to my hotel distraught. I remember calling my dad and he said ‘You have to choose between two paths, you could be the victim or you could go back in there tomorrow morning and make sure you are the best of the best,’” says Masie.
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“I went back in and today some of those guys are my best friends.”
By 2006, Masie had traveled and lived abroad, and held one of the top positions at his then company Novell SA. His success, however, kept him away from his wife and children. Just when Masie thought it was time to rekindle his relationship with his family, he was given the biggest opportunity in his career – Google SA. Stafford did it all; he developed Google Search, Maps, Street View and he hired staff.
It was three years too many for his family and his personal life ‘hit the wall’. Masie was forced to leave Google SA to spend time with his crumbling family.
“I left Google reluctantly, I left Google negatively, I left Google unwillingly, I was hoping to salvage a marriage and spend time with my children again,” says Masie.
But it was too little, too late. His marriage ended.
“I got lost over all the years of giving so much to my career. I lost family and a marriage.”
Masie, the husband, lost, but Masie, the entrepreneur, was determined to win. He threw himself into his work. Masie sent shockwaves through the payment space, creating Payment Pebble, a device that turns your smartphone or tablet into a mobile card machine to receive credit or debit card payments on the go. It was a world first through his founding company, Thumbzup, founded in 2010.
“I have the greatest team, that’s what I have. So whatever anyone else is building out there, I don’t care. I’m not building a product to compete, I am building a team to be sustainable,” says Masie.
The idea of Payment Pebble came to Masie in an unexpected way that he will never forget. While waiting to see a mayor in the Gauteng province, a woman with a baby strapped to her back with a towel was rushed into the mayor’s office in tears. Stafford asked the receptionist what was going on, she explained that the council had turned off the woman’s utilities because she hadn’t made payments. The woman had the money, but wasn’t able to make the payments because she had just given birth to twins and fell ill during childbirth. With no lights or water in the middle of winter, one of the twins died.
Masie knew he had to do something.
“The Payment Pebble wasn’t a technological thing; my love for IT is personified by this. IT can solve that woman’s problem. That guy could have showed up at her house, if he had a payment pebble, he could have accepted her card payment and there could have been a full reconciliation of payment. He would have left and not switched off the lights and the child would be alive today,” says Masie.
“The Payment Pebble is a good example of African innovation solving African problems, it’s a great product,” says Mark Walker, the Regional Director for Africa at the Industrial Development Corporation.
Stafford took his idea to the banks.
“We spoke to all the banks and we realized that all the banks wanted a product. What we liked about Absa was that they wanted a partnership,” says Masie.
Four years later, the Payment Pebble is the largest mobile point of sale in Africa and is launching in one of the largest financial institutes in Australia and Latin America.
Masie believes his leadership style is the reason for his success as an entrepreneur.
“First of all, I am not a boss. I think I am more a leader, someone who is in the trenches shooting with the soldiers. Even though I may be a higher rank, I am in there with them. It is the only way I can be,” says Masie.
Lydia Paledi, an office manager at Novell SA, worked under Masie during his time at the company and has high praise for the entrepreneur.
“He was the best boss I’ve ever had and I wish he could come back.”
Despite his success, Masie dwells on his mistakes. He admits that he thinks of quitting at least once a day.
“It’s a constant battle with yourself; when you invent something, it’s nice to see it on billboards. When you pass Melrose Arch there is this massive billboard, when you look on the TV, it’s on CNN. It’s an incredible feeling but it’s short lived. You are always looking for the next big thing,”
he says.
Masie’s dream was to become a rescue helicopter pilot. Even though that didn’t happen, he is settled with his Payment Pebble and his microlight and six-seater Jabiru planes that he flies privately.

The Smile That Says  I Survived

It’s mid-September, and Volkswagen of America has a problem: It won’t have any new models coming out until the spring. Keeping VW front and ­center in consumers’ minds has drawn a group of marketing folks from the automaker and two of its ad agencies to Google’s BrandLab at its YouTube headquarters south of San Francisco. Dedicated to “evangelizing the art and science of brand-building,” the richly appointed meeting space is basically a man cave for ad creatives, complete with overstuffed couches, booze and the mother of all big screens, an assemblage of 32 flat-panel displays massed into 300 square feet of video overload.
In one corner of the BrandLab, Google’s Jeff Rozic goes to work running VW’s folks through a rapid-fire succession of video ad campaigns the BrandLab feels have worked. His earnest delivery is well-honed, courtesy of 100-plus similar “private workshops” held for potential advertisers from Coca-Cola to Toyota over the past year. VW has some catching up to do, a point Rozic makes intentionally or not by highlighting 13 travel vignettes produced by a rival, Nissan Mexico. His larger point: Don’t clutter a story with too blatant a call to action. “We shouldn’t apologize for trying to sell cars,” one VW exec protests. “Sure,” Rozic shoots back, “but you have to be careful to distinguish when you’re telling a story and when you’re selling.”
Fair point. Rozic is clearly selling—and it’s a product intended to change Google’s path. The king of the click is now lecturing one of the world’s most accomplished advertisers to forget those clicks and amp up the image ads. CEO Larry Page can go on as much as he wants about self-driving cars, wearable computers or any of the company’s other “moon shots.” But Google fundamentally remains the most disruptive advertising company of the past half-century. As its total advertising-revenue growth rate has halved in the past two years, from 29% to 15% (thanks in part to Facebook and Twitter), it’s now charging full-bore toward the biggest pot of advertising gold it doesn’t own: brand advertising, the image ads you see in glossy magazines and on television.
Most online ads—the banners that litter nearly every commercial website and, most notably, Google’s search ads—have failed to help marketers move the needle on classic advertising measures like brand awareness and intent to purchase. ­Instead, they mainly drive people to a product page to click the buy button. ­Direct marketing is lucrative: Search is still upwards of 60% of Google’s ad revenue, helping it earn an estimated 15.8% net margin in 2013—but image ads will come to dominate digital advertising in this decade.
Look at the numbers: Digital brand advertising is an $18 billion market this year, according to eMarketer. Its forecast implies that number will double by 2018, at which point it will have passed search and direct marketing, with plenty of room to grow.
Television advertising, comprising almost entirely image ads, is currently a $200 billion global market. And it’s a vulnerable one, as the medium’s iron grip on the bulk of ad spending looks a little less firm as younger people scatter to YouTube and Netflix when they aren’t Snapchatting or Instagramming on iPhones or skipping ads entirely on their DVRs. Some 75% of respondents to an Interactive Advertising Bureau poll of 5,000 ad execs expect to see some spending move from TV to digital video in the next year.
This explains the man cave. YouTube remains one of the greatest acquisitions of the Internet era. Larry and Sergey paid $1.65 billion in 2006 for a business that today would conservatively be worth $20 billion as a stand-alone. So what’s another $400 million or so to build out a brand ad business?
The return has been fairly quick: In October Publicis’ MediaVest, the ad agency for Coca-Cola, Honda and other big advertisers, inked a deal to spend tens of millions of dollars over the next year on Google video, display and mobile ads. It was Google’s first agreement with such an online partner to buy ads in advance, as agencies and marketers do on television. In November Publicis agencies DigitasLBi and Razorfish went bigger, committing to spend $100 million on YouTube and Google’s banner and mobile ad networks this year. “Google is one of the few players with a platform big and wide enough to attract these dollars,” says Razorfish CEO Pete Stein.
And Google sources insist that more of these “upfront” deals will be announced shortly, which has investors—who have driven the stock to a recent alltime high of over $1,150—feeling bullish. Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer at the asset management firm Solaris Group, a Google investor, figures the company could capture about 6% of TV ad spending by 2020, or $20 billion a year. Given that Google’s total revenue this year will come in at around $60 billion, this is the growth the company needs to continue its dominance.
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Susan Wojcicki was Google’s 16th hire. Marissa Mayer came a few hires later, yet it was Mayer, now Yahoo’s CEO, who became the flashy female face of Google. No matter. Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-ski), the senior vice president in charge of all Google ad products, plays the anti-Marissa. She favors jeans and hoodies around the office, displaying a self-deprecating plainness that one former employee says is reminiscent of Chance the gardener from the movie Being There. “She never felt she needed to be the smartest person in the room,” says another ex-colleague.
Instead, she’s become the most powerful person—male or female—in advertising. She manages effectively without drama and thus has been Page’s go-to exec for wins such as the introduction of AdSense, which pays other sites to run Google ads (now a $13 billion business), and the acquisitions of DoubleClick, an ad-serving pioneer, and YouTube. “She only works on big problems, not small ones,” says ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson, who worked for her a decade ago.
Her vision of the future of advertising (and hence Google)? Since content is flowing across so many digital devices—a trend Google is trying to accelerate with such initiatives as its Chromecast device for streaming online video to TVs and its flurry of Android smartphones and tablets—she sees nearly all advertising eventually going digital, too, putting it squarely in Google’s wheelhouse.
“Advertisers will have to go where the users go,” says Wojcicki, sitting outside her office at the Googleplex, sipping a “detox” lemonade with maple syrup and a dash of cayenne. “A big chunk of dollars will follow.”
Wojcicki envisions an operating system for advertising that can connect search, display, YouTube and branded content, and bundle it all up into campaigns that span computers, smartphones, tablets, connected TVs and—who knows?—maybe Google Glass. Some marketers are moving quickly in that direction. For the recent launch of its D Rose 4 sneakers, Adidas ran ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network, a partnership of some 2 million sites, backed up by mobile ads for a second-screen experience and search ads to catch those who want to buy them right away.
For some time Wojcicki has talked about the “perfect ad,” the one that people see at precisely the time they want to know about a product or are ready to buy it. Search ads now approach that ideal for direct sales, but Wojcicki pictures image ads, supplemented by data on personal preferences and behavior, that can plant the seed for brand or product preference just as well. It’s an advertising axiom that people are more receptive to messages when they’re leaning back on the couch watching TV than when engaged in online activities. Wojcicki contends the potential is for just the opposite. “If users are engaging with something, they’re choosing to see it,” she says, and Google can use that overt choice to serve even more relevant ads.
So how would a Web display ad—largely, the vilified banner—engage?
Upstairs at Google’s display-ad headquarters off the main campus in Mountain View, Calif. scrawled equations blanket a wall-size whiteboard. The equations are a scrap of the impossibly complex mathematical formulas that power its $12.5 billion display network business. “They turn into beautiful rich-media ads,” Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, explains dreamily as we walk by.
When Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, he told Mohan to “revolutionize” display ads so they’re just as useful as Google’s obscenely profitable search ads. Mohan, a veteran of pre-Google DoubleClick, is a true believer. (With a reported $100 million in stock grants to keep the likes of Facebook and Twitter at bay, he isn’t driven by the need for more money.) He has bought or built what even rivals concede is the broadest set of software needed by advertisers and publishers to sell and place ads, including a state-of-the-art ad exchange that sells space as fluidly as the Nasdaq sells stock.
Mohan, who likes to decry the 40% of “spray and pray” TV advertising he says is wasted on indifferent audiences, offers a vision of the future in which Google can marry its data about individual consumers with the reach of TV and measure the results, too.
Google can generate that reach with its display network, which ­ranges from tiny outfits to the New York Times and USA Today. It serves ads on those websites for a cut of revenue. (Tellingly, even NBC partakes, though Google has put a big, fat target on its back.) The network ­reaches 90% of the Web’s population and serves impressions to a billion people worldwide a month. It was tough sledding early on, as ads began showing up on dodgy niche sites, but an ongoing cleanup campaign has big brand advertisers increasingly interested. The number of advertisers booking space months ahead—an option chiefly used by big marketers looking to influence brand consideration—has quadrupled from a year ago, but Google isn’t offering specifics.
Still, the banner ads have been losing out to “native” ads, which use content rather than a boring banner to attract people’s attention. “Facebook is a bigger bet for us right now than YouTube,” says Laurent Fa­racci, the U.S. chief marketing officer for Reckitt Benckiser, owner of brands such as Lysol and Clearasil. Instead, Mohan has bet on rich “engagement ads” for the display network. For instance, one might expand to play videos, games or apps when hovered over for two seconds. Samsung recently ran millions of them to play a live video stream of a new smartphone and smartwatch. In June Burberry ran display and mobile ads through Google that prompted people to snap a photo of their own puckered-up lips and send the digital imprint of the kiss to a loved one.
They’re starting to work. Now used in about 1,000 campaigns daily, engagement ads command around double the price of standard banners, which vary wildly but average around $3 per thousand viewers reached. That’s partly because advertisers can choose not to pay unless someone actually views those ads—like those who pay for clicks rather than views in the banner world—so they’re more valuable. Still, branding remains a challenge for a company whose success so far derives from cold mathematics. Back at the BrandLab, there’s an elegant arrangement of two dozen digital photo frames mounted on a pedestal, all playing videos of flames. “Great stories are told around the campfire,” a Google project manager explains. Cute. Except this campfire gives off no heat. For that, Google needs some of the sizzle of Hollywood.
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The warren of studios and soundstages southwest of Hollywood is strewn with cameras, lights, toolboxes and half-empty coffee cups. One stage features stock horror-movie sets, like the hotel hall from The Shining. In another studio, three women, one of them with scissors in hand, are preparing to film a video on how to cut your own bangs. Once a hangar where Hughes Aircraft built the Spruce Goose in the 1940s, this 41,000-square-foot building is now YouTube Space LA, possibly the world’s largest production facility dedicated to online video.
It’s YouTube’s latest bid to shed its dog-on-a-skateboard-video image and make the site a cleaner, more well-lit place for big TV marketers. That bid began a couple of years ago with YouTube’s $300 million drive to create some 200 TV-like channels from the likes of Shaquille O’Neal and Amy Poehler. While they don’t have TV networks quaking just yet, YouTube has been able to command higher ad prices closer to those of TV than Web display ads. YouTube gross ad revenue jumped 51% in 2013 to $5.6 billion, netting $2 billion after payments to content and ad partners, according to eMarketer.
Here’s the funny thing, though: It turns out that some of the most popular channels are not network wannabes. They’re from producers such as PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles, invisible to those over 30. Likewise, some of the most popular ads on YouTube don’t even look like the TV ads that Google has hoped to capture. It’s dawning on big marketers from American Express to General Electric that to take advantage of the social and interactive nature of online they need to forge a new sensibility, not simply rerun TV commercials.
In a new take on its long-running Campaign for Real Beauty, for instance, Dove launched a video on YouTube in April that featured an FBI-trained forensic artist sketching two portraits of women. One was based on their own descriptions and another on a stranger’s, which produced more attractive images. By May the Unilever brand’s touching three-minute video had drawn more than 114 million views worldwide, becoming the most-viewed online video ad ever. “It’s not just 30-second ads,” says Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s director of content strategy. “It’s creating something that people want to engage with and share with friends.”
So now it’s up to Byrne, whose previous job was head of YouTube’s original programming push, to make it easy for big brands to reach YouTube’s 1 billion monthly viewers.
Similar to Rozic’s ad-campaign boot camps in the BrandLab, Byrne brings companies such as PepsiCo and Johnson &amp; Johnson to YouTube LA for a four-day workshop on creating compelling stories, videos and YouTube channels. He’s aiming to get more than 100 advertisers into the program this year, both at YouTube LA and in a new combo studio and BrandLab being built in New York.
If Byrne has his way, the new world of brand marketing online will look a lot like a shoot at an unassuming neo-eclectic house in Anaheim Hills, 45 minutes southeast of Los Angeles. In the living room a crew of six is filming the sixth episode of Grace’s Faces, on Bobbi Brown Cosmetics’ I love makeup channel on YouTube. It features Grace Helbig, a 28-year-old YouTube star whose own self-produced channel, Daily Grace, draws more than 2 million subscribers to her wacky takes on life. For this new show, Helbig shows up at the doors of fellow YouTube stars to do a makeover.
Her subject this day is Rebecca Black, the 16-year-old who became an instant star in early 2011 for her self-produced monotonous pop hit, “Friday,” that year’s most-watched video on YouTube. Marc Reagan, manager of artistry at Bobbi Brown, is showing Black how to apply various kinds of makeup. Dull barks from a dog banished to the garage only add to the authenticity, apparently. Helbig jumps into the frame, bubbling with a whiff of irony, “You look like an angel!” For a companion show, Touching Your Stuff, Helbig prowls the house rifling through personal effects. “In this medium you can get your Idol moment without paying $20 million,” says Reza Izad, whose Collective Digital Studio produces I love makeup and more than 200 other channels, such as the Annoying Orange—a piece of talking citrus that heckles other fruit until they get sliced with a knife.
It’s all pretty nutty, but there’s nothing amateur about Grace’s Faces. Or even overtly commercial. Bobbi Brown isn’t mentioned anywhere in Grace’s Faces despite the use of its cosmetics. Still, the company says it’s happy with the 300,000 views the channel got the first week and the 70,000 channel subscriptions it drew in the next two weeks. “We felt like comedic programming would be in line with our brand personality and would resonate with a younger audience,” says Bobbi Brown President Maureen Case. Marketers don’t pay YouTube to run the shows, but they do pay to run lots of ads to drive people to watch them.
Google will ultimately win this race for a simple reason: Video ads perform better than TV spots, says David Cohen, Universal McCann’s chief investment officer, based on multiple studies his agency has done. “But TV advertising is a frictionless system,” he adds, “a well-oiled machine.” Google can play around with Larry Page’s moon shots, one of which might eventually land, but what will pay for those flights of fancy? Making digital display just as free of friction, something Google knows how to do. It’s just a matter of time.

Google Wants It All

The last few years have seen an unprecedented number of people rushing to develop mobile apps for iOS and Android. But looking at the installed user base on each platform and information on the payouts made by the different companies, it appears that the vast majority of developers will find themselves with little revenue to show for.
Google, Apple, Microsoft : Rich in users, developers
The consensus around the industry is that Google dominates the mobile market with 900 million users, while Apple follows with 600 million iOS devices purchased, and Microsoft comes in third place with an estimated 12 million Windows Phones sold (the vast majority of those, 81%, being sold by Nokia).
With different forums aimed at attracting developers, each company handles announcing the size of their markets differently.
Apple, at its WorldWide Developer Conference, talked about 1.25 million apps in the app store accounting for 50 billion downloads and $5 billion paid off to developers in the last year. To the company, it is a sign of pride to be able to pay this developer community. Internal data from the app store, gathered from sources close to the company, indicate that the numbers are in line with the actual payments made to developers.
At Google I/O, the largest Android developer conference, Google touted 150,000 developers responsible for over 800,000 apps. While the company does not break out revenue numbers on their apps, recent data in their financial filings seemed to indicate somewhere around $900 million in pay-outs to developers “over the last 12 months” and discussions with external research analysts put the number of downloaded apps from the Google Play store at around 48 billion, close to what Apple has claimed.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has been claiming 160,000 apps in their store from 45,000 developers. In a recent interview, Microsoft officials claimed that the average user downloaded 54 apps, which would put their download count at 650 million to date. While the company does not break out data for its mobile division, looking at the variations in the accounts payable line of their 10-Qs over the last few quarters before and after they introduced their app store shows a variation of up to $100 million since 2011 that could be attributed to the app store.
So taking all that data into account, we can summarize it as follows:
Looking at this, it is clear that Apple is winning the game in terms of total number of apps and money paid to developers. But lost in the shuffle is how much money developers can actually make on those platforms.
Meager dollars per download
Taking the data in front of us, we can get a sense of how many apps the average developer creates and what kind of revenue a developer can expect from those apps, on ave-rage (granted, power laws dictate that a small number of developers will do extremely well while the vast majority will fail, but we’re trying to look at averages here).
Based on this, the average developer on those platforms is pretty busy, developing 3 to 5 apps depending on the platform. Interestingly, Android is the big winner on downloads for a given app but this is largely offset by substantially lower revenue, with the average app download bringing in around 2 cents to its developer; Apple fairs 5 times better, bringing in a dime for every one of the 40,000 potential app downloads a developer could strive for. But the interesting thing is that Microsoft’s platform may be substantially more rewarding for its developers, bringing in $.15 per download (a fact that is offset by download numbers shown to be only 10 percent of what the other platforms can offer).
With the average paid app retailing for $.99, what we see here is the direct impact of free apps on those marketplaces. Android’s substantial lead in offering free apps cuts deeply into the average revenue paid out to developers while the smaller availability of free apps on the Windows platform may work to its advantage.
But what does that mean in terms of actually revenue?
Impact on developers’ wallets
Multiplying the average revenue per app by its average number of downloads, we can get a sense as to what an average developer can expect to make on an app today. Taking the same number and multiplying it by the number of apps an average developer creates, we get a sense of the revenues one can pull from going that way:
What we see here is that while decent amounts of money can be made on an app, a hard-working developer on iOS will be able to get a new car, while Android and Microsoft developers will be forced into the used car market if they plan to take those earnings on the road. At $4,000 in average revenue per app, Apple has a lead but it still begs the question as to how many developers can actually make a living directly from apps on any platform. Direct revenue from the apps themselves may not be able to justify large development teams but other revenue sources (advertising, for example) may help developers increase their take.
Of course, these are average values and many hope to find the next big hit, the one that will be on the higher end of the median. But for every app that goes north of those numbers, the average for the remaining apps drop.
Where are the opportunities?
There is, however, some hope. While Apple has developed a rich market for developers, Google and Microsoft both have opportunities to improve. For Google, the focus should be on improving the numbers by helping developers monetize their apps so they can come more in line with what Apple can offer. Even if they only reached half of what Apple does in terms of revenue per download, they would be able to match the revenue developers make. For Microsoft, the story is all about the number of users. If they were to manage their average revenue per app while growing their user base, they could potentially out-earn all the other platforms.
In all three cases, however, there is much work to be done to increase monetization of free apps. And that may be the next growth opportunity for any developer as it presents an opportunity that is substantially larger than the existing one.
Every app developer hopes to build the next big hit but, as is the case for any hit-driven market, a large group will be left behind with little to show for their efforts. At the end of the day, the model for mobile apps is no different than any other of the past: whether it is gold in the Yukon, websites in the 1990s, or app developers today, larger amounts of revenue will go to those who enable development than to those who are doing the development. Levi Strauss made his fortune selling picks and shovels to gold prospectors; Adobe, Amazon, and Google made theirs enabling web developers; and as the mobile revolution takes hold, some new players will emerge providing tools to create apps and those may be the biggest winners.

How Much do average apps make?

It must be lonely at the top, sometimes. Since Kenyan geek, lawyer and political activist Ory Okolloh became Google’s policy advisor for Africa in early 2011, she is one of the few women in senior management in information technology (IT), a still largely male-dominated industry.
“The absence of women in technology is a challenge, not just in Africa but across the world,” Okolloh sighs. Through her work at Google, she wants to change that—by getting more Africans online, encouraging the creation of local internet content relevant to Africans and creating opportunities for young Africans to become developers and entrepreneurs.
Google, in a clever way of growing its own next generation of potential employees, is focusing on attracting women to the IT sector through close collaboration with universities, fellowships and internship programs. As a result, the number of women in IT should increase, Okolloh believes, and should translate into women taking up leadership positions.
<div id="attachment_960" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-960" class="wp-image-960 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/369-198_1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Ory Okolloh, Johannesburg; 7 June 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
“You need to build a pipeline first before you can look at how to get women into the higher, more visible roles,” she says.
She also hopes her own career path—after growing up in a relatively poor family in urban Kenya, she graduated from Harvard Law School in the United States, then accepted a high-powered position at multinational tech giant Google—will be an inspiration to other African women: “I hope I come across as very normal, so women can look at me and think, ‘I can do that too’.”
It was at Harvard that Okolloh discovered the power of the internet.
“I started blogging, which as a woman, gave me a voice and a space that I didn’t have to negotiate with anyone,” she says. Freedom of speech, liberation from patriarchal structures and participation in current political and social debates were no longer abstract concepts. Okolloh could exercise them every day and perhaps, most importantly, without intermediaries.
It was a realization that gave her life a new course. In 2006, she co-founded a parliamentary watchdog site Mzalendo (‘patriot’ in Swahili) which increased the accountability of Kenya’s government by recording bills, speeches and other official documents and making them available online. A year later, when the east African country was engulfed in violence following disputed presidential elections, Okolloh created yet another site, Ushahidi (Swahili for ‘witness’) that collected and mapped eyewitness reports of violence. The open source software created for the website has since been used to track violence in Eastern Congo, monitor elections in India and Mexico and map crime in the middle-American city, Atlanta.
Although Okolloh describes herself as a nerd, she is far from geeky. Fashionable, witty, warm and charming, she says working in the IT sector doesn’t mean hiding behind a computer screen.
“I can’t code to save my life,” she admits. “I’m much more interested in how technology can change lives.”
Her role as Google’s Africa policy advisor allows her to pursue this goal. The 34-year-old spends her days jetting from one of the continent’s 54 nations to the next to convince governments and private sector representatives of the importance of internet access for everyone.
“I try to encourage them to adopt policies that lead to getting more people online, to put in place regulations and come up with initiatives that can give people more access to the internet,” she says.
Internet connectivity and expansion should be a key aspect of any African country’s economic growth strategy, Okolloh believes: “The internet needs to be treated as an ‘infrastructure’. It’s as core, as critical, as electricity, water or roads in terms of growing the economy.” Optimistic about Africa’s future, she trusts in the continent’s ability to generate economic growth, but is wary about how it is being harnessed.
“This is a key decade for the continent in terms of opportunities. The question is how we make it a sustainable, inclusive and transformative growth, not just a boom decade.”
One way to do this is to improve internet access—currently only about 10% of Africans are online—which will have a direct impact on people’s pockets, Okolloh says, because the internet gives everyone, even those without much capital, access to the world.
“That’s why I’m drawn to technology. It’s an opportunity for people without resources, particularly young people and women, to place their stake in the ground. Those who can’t get a loan, can’t set up a manufacturing plant, can’t get an agent, but have access to this platform where they can make something happen for themselves. You can’t create jobs for everyone, you have to encourage entrepreneurship,” she says.
That has certainly been true in her own life. A mother of three young daughters, it’s largely thanks to the internet, and a supportive husband, that Okolloh manages to juggle a demanding career, frequent travel and family life as well as she does.
“The internet is a key enabler for women because it gives them mobility, flexibility and connectivity wherever they are. It helps them juggle multiple roles, work from home, be more efficient,” she says.
But until Okolloh reaches Google’s goal of Africa reaching a level of connectivity that matches that of Western nations, she will have to overcome some major challenges. Although the necessary undersea cables have been landed to connect the continent to the world’s major data hubs in the States and Europe, transmitting data inland is still too expensive.
“We still have a long way to go to tap the internet’s full potential in Africa,” Okolloh admits.
Another obstacle to innovation is lack of regional integration, which would allow entrepreneurs access to all 54 African markets.
“For innovation to really flourish, as an innovator, entrepreneur or business, you need to be able to at least sell to the continent, if not worldwide,” she explains. The basis for this would be a regionally accepted online payment system, like PayPal in the States, to facilitate e-commerce continent-wide. To date, Africa doesn’t have one.
In addition to that, Okolloh, who was on the Forbes list of Names You Need to Know in 2011 and named by Foreign Policy as one of the world’s top 100 thinkers in 2010, is rooting for more local content creation including text in local languages and country-specific geo-mapping to create “an internet that speaks to you where you are”. Currently, local content is at a dismal 2%.
“I would like to see Africans not only consume technology, but produce it. It’s about making the internet more relevant to Africa but also about sharing our content with the world,” she says.
The more Africans use the internet daily, the more likely Google is to make a profit on the continent. Since the web-search giant started operations in Africa in 2007, it has expanded into South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Uganda and opened offices in each of them, employing a total of about 90 staff.
“We are still laying the groundwork, understanding the market. We will grow as a business if people are online and local content is online,” Okolloh says, predicting that Google will profit in Africa within this decade.

Google Her

One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange happened on Syria’s Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google and Facebook, they instead saw a page of white Arabic script scrawled across a black background.
“This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown. Please read carefully and spread the following message,” it read. “Your Internet activity is monitored.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-350" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO011612_044.jpg" alt="" width="963" height="768" />
Then the page switched to a white screen filled with instructions on using free encryption and anonymity software like Tor and TrueCrypt to evade surveillance and censorship. Emblazoned above the text was a round, mysterious symbol: a star inside an omega, hovering over a pyramid surrounded by lightning bolts. Below it were written the words: “This is Telecomix. We come in peace.”
Telecomix, a loose-knit team of international hacktivists, had been scanning the Syrian Internet in a massive sweep, dividing 700,000 target connections among its members in Germany, France and the U.S., probing for hackable devices with software tools like Nmap and Shodan. They compromised vulnerable Cisco Systemsproduced network switches to find other devices’ passwords, snooped on open cameras revealing street scenes and even officials’ desks, and at one point retrieved the log-in credentials for 5,000 unsecured home routers, which they used to insert the above-mentioned surveillance warning into browsers across the country.
As the globally distributed hackers combed Syria’s networks and posted their findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built by the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob’s day job at a Pentagon contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine’s logs showed the Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.
“At first we were just poking around, but when I saw that, I had this feeling of dread,” says Punkbob, who requested that FORBES not use his real name. “To see exactly what Syria was tracking and who was providing the technology to do it.…That was when it felt real.”
Since Telecomix published 54 gigabytes of those logs, the resulting attention has forced Blue Coat to admit that its gear had been used by Syria, a potential violation of international sanctions against that country. The company didn’t respond to FORBES’ request for an interview, citing an ongoing internal review and a related Commerce Department probe. (Note that the investigation didn’t deter private equity firm Thoma Bravo and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan from a recent deal to take Blue Coat private for $1.3 billion.)
The disclosure of Blue Coat’s gear in Syria has touched off revelations that hardware from other U.S. firms, including NetApp and HP, was also used by blacklisted regimes. The industry now faces tough new questions about tech firms’ responsibility for how their products are used—and by whom.
Telecomix sees its Blue Coat discovery as a turning point in the group’s mission: Founded to fight for free speech, it now aims to also expose those who fight against that ideal, including any Western tech firm aiding the wrong side. “I hope that the Blue Coat thing was the start of something much bigger,” says Chris Kullenberg, a lean and lip-pierced Swedish political science grad student at the University of Gothenburg and a Telecomix founder. “The goal is to put political pressure on these companies. It started with rage and frustration. What can we do? Well, we can hack a few boxes and expose this to the world. That’s the motivation that drives hackers deeper and deeper into the networks.”
Telecomix likely broke Syrian law. But some more traditional advocates appreciate their work. “It crosses a line we wouldn’t be comfortable crossing,” says Brett Solomon, president of the digital human rights group Access Now.
“But sometimes it takes someone like Telecomix to put a spanner in the works.”
Actively hacking networks is a new game for Telecomix’s Web revolutionaries, who call each other “agents” or “Internauts.” But unlike the hacker group Anonymous, which began with juvenile pranks before attacking Scientologists, opponents of WikiLeaks and defense contractors, Telecomix was born political. The group was created at a Gothenburg conference in 2009 to oppose the European Union’s so-called Telecoms Package, industry-influenced laws that would have cut Internet access for anyone repeatedly downloading copyrighted files. “In a sense, corporations have always been the enemy,” says Kullenberg.
The hackers dug up and published the phone numbers of every EU Parliament member, then convinced the copyright-flouting Swedish download site the Pirate Bay to post a link on its home page, which received 20 million monthly visitors. The Parliament’s phones were jammed for days, and the statute was eventually dropped.
The populist uprisings of the Arab Spring brought Telecomix’s goals—and its enemies—into sharper focus. A few days into the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt Hosni Mubarak shut down all but one of his country’s Internet service providers. “Telecomix members consider themselves citizens of the Internet,” says one American Telecomix hacker who goes by the nickname the Doctor. “So we took that as a personal affront.” Agents arranged with the hacker-friendly Internet provider French Data Network to fire up modem banks and give users free dial-up connections. Then the group faxed thousands of leaflets to Egyptian universities, offices and cybercafes, explaining how to skirt the blackout.
Telecomix’s scanning of the Syrian Net began as reconnaissance to prepare for an Egypt-style Internet shutdown. Stumbling onto the Blue Coat logs was a fateful fluke. When the hackers realized what they’d found, they downloaded close to 100 gigabytes of data, using the Tor anonymization network to cover their tracks. The process took weeks. In October Telecomix released hundreds of millions of lines of text listing hundreds of sites the Syrian government was blocking, from porn to Facebook to Chat- roulette, along with enough users’ communication logs to show that the regime was using their Blue Coat gear to not only filter but also monitor dissidents’ activities.
Blue Coat’s scandal demonstrates the complexity of regulating surveillance technology. The firm claims it hadn’t known about its devices in Syria, arguing they must have found their way into the country through a reseller in the United Arab Emirates. “Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life that may be the result of actions by a repressive regime,” it wrote in a statement. “We don’t want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States.” But critics like cryptography guru Bruce Schneier and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum point out that Blue Coat devices link back to its servers for licensing and updates, implying the company may have turned a blind eye to its Syrian users.
Some Telecomix agents say they’ve also spotted equipment sold by Fortinet in Syria. Fortinet responds that it “has in place a policy prohibiting shipping its product to countries where shipment is embargoed.” And what about resellers who pass it on to those countries? “At that point it’s out of our hands,” a spokesperson says. Hazy as the line may be, it’s clear some companies have crossed it. Marketing documents published by Wiki Leaks show 160 firms advertising surveillance gear, often in Arabic as well as English. British firm Gamma International brags that it can spy on users of Gmail, Skype and iTunes; its sales pitch was found in the files of the Egyptian government after Mubarak fled.
Telecomix is determined to remain a watchdog against Western firms aiding foreign Big Brothers. Two Swedish members, Chris Kullenberg and Jonatan Walck, have registered a site called Internaut.cat where they plan to publish future disclosures of the group’s findings, using Sweden’s strong media laws to shield their sources. “We’re at a point now where Internet users are becoming aware of what’s being done to them,” says the Doctor. “Companies that sell gear designed to track people should expect to be outed.”

Web Vigilantes

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have long imagined a future in which facial recognition technology makes anonymity in public obsolete.  A research study at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that this Minority Report future has already arrived, thanks to facial recognition products now commercially available, combined with the 750-million-person identity database called Facebook.
<div id="attachment_86" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-86" class="size-large wp-image-86" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_066-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="267" />Carnegie Mellon prof Alessandro Acquisti—the real guy, with his biometric face print—worries technology may expose everyone to constant scrutiny</div>
A CMU research team led by associate professor Alessandro Acquisti took candid photos of 93 random students on campus using a $35 webcam. Within seconds the researchers were able to determine the identities of a third of their photogenic guinea pigs, using of fthe- shelf facial recognition software from PittPatt, a software company recently acquired by Google, and publicly available profile photos from Facebook. The researchers had an even higher rate of success using the same technology to identify more than 100,000 Pittsburgh singles with otherwise pseudonymous accounts on a dating site, adding yet more complexity to the world of online dating. “We’ve been thinking about privacy in cyberspace, but we need to start thinking about it in the real world, with augmented reality,” says Acquisti. He was also able to determine the first five digits of some of the identified students’ Social Security numbers based on previous research he has done showing that those numbers are predictable if you know a person’s birth date and birthplace. That information is usually available on a person’s Face- book profile page.
It seems that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell was wrong. Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t being orchestrated by the governmental- Big Brother of 1984 but by advances in technology designed for convenience’s sake adopted eagerly by private citizens. Acquisti calls it the “democratization of surveillance”. And it’s coming fast. Soon after the riots broke out in London at the beginning of August, a technophile band of vigilantes formed a Google Group to discuss applying the methods pioneered by Acquisti’s research team to online photos and videos of rioters, in order to help identify looters for prosecution by law enforcement. Facial recognition tools identify a person by analyzing dozens of features, such as the length of a forehead and the distance between the eyes and the nose. Google, Facebook and Apple have already made them freely available for people to tag their friends and family in photo albums. But at what point will you have the option to snap a photo of a stranger and then pull up his or her name and whatever information the Internet offers up about them? The capability is there, but the willingness to unleash it isn’t. Yet. Google has said that its image search tool, Goggles—which uses a photo instead of text as a search term, letting you snap a photo of a painting, for example, and find out who its creator is—has the capability to find people’s identities based on a photo. But the search giant had chosen not to enable the feature because it was deemed too creepy.
When Facebook recently rolled out an internal facial recognition tool allowing friends to automatically tag other friends in photos, it inflamed some privacy advocates (whose combustion levels tend to be high around anything new that Facebook does). Those advocates seemed to overlook the fact that the very existence of Facebook’s extensive database of photos linked to people’s names creates the possibility for third parties to build a facial biometric print. While Facebook’s terms of service prohibit the scraping of information from its site, there are no technological tools in place to prevent it. And, even if there were, scraping is certainly not limited to Facebook.
“For most of us there are already identified photos of us somewhere on the Internet, and this trend will only increase,” says Acquisti. (Face.com did the doctoring on the photo on page 58.) The CMU researchers wrote a facial recognition iPhone app but decided not to release it to the public. “We developed the app to make a point,” says Acquisti. “A future in which we infer sensitive information from faces is already here, and we better start thinking whether we really want to live in that future.” Their tool, though, would be valuable only for those seeking to identify the 25,000 CMU students whose photos the researchers grabbed from Facebook. We’re still a few years away from an app that would work on a national or global scale. The two main hurdles, Acquisti says, are finding a large and reliable source of facial images (hello, DMV!) and securing enough computing power. Comparing a photo to a database of, say, 300 million photos would take many hours, whereas a functional app would need to do it in ten seconds. “If I had to guess, I would say that we are less than five years away,” says Acquisti.
Specialized facial recognition products are already on the market. BI2 Technologies has developed a $3,000 iPhone add-on called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System) that dozens of police departments across the country started adopting this year. Police officers can use MORIS to take photos of suspects, and the app, using iris scans and facial recognition, will identify anyone who already has a photo in a criminal database. Microsoft and Intel have worked together to create digital billboards with face-detecting cameras that pick up on the gender and age of passersby to show them relevant ads. A startup named SceneTap installed similar cameras in bars in Chicago earlier this year, so that Windy City nightlife lovers can use their smartphones to check the crowdedness, gender ratio and average age of patrons at a given bar before deciding where to go. So far law enforcement officials are tentative about using the technology to identify people not already in criminal databases.
Though a Canadian insurance corporation graciously volunteered the use of its driver’s license photo database to Vancouver police after the devastating post-Stanley Cup hockey riot there in July, authorities declined the offer after privacy advocates expressed concerns about violation of Canadians’ civil liberties. In London, Scotland Yard is using facial recognition tools along with tips from the community to identify rioters. As good as the technology has become, it still has accuracy problems that can cause significant harm. A Massachusetts driver sued his state DMV after his license was wrongfully revoked because he looked too much like another driver, leading to ten days of administrative wrangling to get it reinstated. “We are not the beautiful and unique snowflakes we think we are.
There are many people who look likeus,” says Acquisti. More than 30 state DMVs already apply facial recognition algorithms to driver’s license photos to prevent identity fraud. If you’re worried about your privacy, now might be a good time to change your Facebook profile photo to one in which you’re wearing ridiculously oversize sunglasses.
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Tag: Google

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