Kim Lyons | The Verge

A short history of every time Apple CEO Tim Cook praised augmented reality

2023-06-04T15:22:03-04:00

With Tim Cook as CEO, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, having passed a $3 trillion market cap in the past and sitting at around $2.6 trillion as of this writing. For all of his nearly 12 years as the head of the company, though, there hasn’t been one single product tied to him the way the iPhone, iPad, and revitalized Mac computers are so inextricably linked to Steve Jobs.

But while Cook’s impact on the company has largely been in his operational mastery and the massive pay-off of his strategy in pivoting to services, he’s consistently found time to talk about one platform as potentially game-changing without fully committing to the tech through actual new product releases: augmented reality.

That was despite Cook’s denigrations of early AR headgear like Google Glass. This would become a running theme: AR good, VR not so good. In September 2021, he went as far as to call himself “AR fan number one.” Although he once called virtual reality “really cool,” he’s also said it’s “for set periods, but not a way to communicate well” while taking swipes at the metaverse in an interview last year.

Now, on the eve of a presumed announcement of Apple’s new “Reality Pro” mixed reality headset, it’s much easier to see where it was all going. The company has been slowly integrating the technology that will presumably breathe life into the new device for years, adding AR features to its iPhone and iPads that, while none of it has ever made more than a momentary splash, may have been crucial development experience for Apple.

One example is the 2019 Minecraft Earth demo at WWDC that showed a hint of Apple’s capabilities without tipping its hand about any new hardware. As you’ll see in his various comments from 2016 onward, while Cook mentions gaming, it sounds like his vision for the Reality Pro is much broader, viewing it as a collaborative technology consistent with Apple’s overall philosophy about creating tech that integrates with your life.

Here’s a brief history of all the times Tim Cook said he was convinced AR was the future.

July 2016: Cook says in a quarterly earnings call that “AR can be really great.”

We have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run, we think there’s great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity. The number one thing is to make sure our products work well with other developers’ kind of products like Pokémon, that’s why you see so many iPhones in the wild chasing pokemons.

(Cook pronounces it “pokey-mans.”)

September 2016: Cook tells Good Morning America in an interview that he believes AR is a bigger deal than VR.

There’s virtual reality and there’s augmented reality — both of these are incredibly interesting. But my own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far.

[AR] gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things — visually — for both of us to see. Maybe it’s something we’re talking about, maybe it’s someone else here who’s not here present but who can be made to appear to be present.

There’s a lot of really cool things there.

August 2016: Cook makes a brief mention of AR in a Washington Post profile:

I think AR [augmented reality] is extremely interesting and sort of a core technology. So, yes, it’s something we’re doing a lot of things on behind that curtain that we talked about.

October 2016: In an appearance at Utah Tech Tour, Cook goes into detail about how crucial AR may become and why he views it as superior to VR — while stressing that AR presents significant technology challenges before it can be adopted for mass consumerism.

In terms of it becoming a mass adoption [phenomenon], so that, say, everyone in here would have an AR experience, the reality to do that, it has to be something that everyone in here views to be an “acceptable thing.”

And nobody in here, few people in here, think it’s acceptable to be tethered to a computer walking in here and sitting down, few people are going to view that it’s acceptable to be enclosed in something, because we’re all social people at heart. Even introverts are social people, we like people and we want to interact. It has to be that it’s likely that AR, of the two, is the one the largest number of people will engage with.

I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day, it will become that much a part of you, a lot of us live on our smartphones, the iPhone, I hope, is very important for everyone, so AR will become really big. VR I think is not going to be that big, compared to AR. I’m not saying it’s not important, it is important.

I’m excited about VR from an education point of view, I think it can be really big for education, I think it can be very big for games. But I can’t imagine everyone in here getting in an enclosed VR experience while you’re sitting in here with me. But I could imagine everyone in here in an AR experience right now, if the technology was there, which it’s not today. How long will it take?

AR is going to take a while, because there are some really hard technology challenges there. But it will happen, it will happen in a big way, and we will wonder when it does, how we ever lived without it. Like we wonder how we lived without our phone today.

October 2016: Cook tells BuzzFeed News that while “VR has some interesting applications,” AR is superior to VR because “there’s no substitute for human contact. And so you want the technology to encourage that.”

Augmented reality will take some time to get right, but I do think that it’s profound. We might … have a more productive conversation, if both of us have an AR experience standing here, right? And so I think that things like these are better when they’re incorporated without becoming a barrier to our talking. … You want the technology to amplify it, not to be a barrier.

February 2017: Cook expands his thoughts on AR’s potential, adding a new comparison: AR is a big idea, like the smartphone.

I’m excited about augmented reality because unlike virtual reality which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what’s happening presently. Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world for a long period of time and today you can’t do that because you get sick from it. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance.

I regard it as a big idea like the smartphone. The smartphone is for everyone, we don’t have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic, or country or vertical market: it’s for everyone. I think AR is that big, it’s huge. I get excited because of the things that could be done that could improve a lot of lives. And be entertaining. I view AR like I view the silicon here in my iPhone, it’s not a product per se, it’s a core technology. But there are things to discover before that technology is good enough for the mainstream. I do think there can be a lot of things that really help people out in daily life, real-life things, that’s why I get so excited about it.

June 2017: In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg News, Cook details his vision for AR at Apple:

I think it is profound. I am so excited about it, I just want to yell out and scream. The first step in making it a mainstream kind of experience is to put it in the operating system. We’re building it into iOS 11, opening it to developers—and unleashing the creativity of millions of people. Even we can’t predict what’s going to come out.

There’s some things that you can already get a vision of. We’ve talked to IKEA, and they have 3D images of their furniture line. You’re talking about changing the whole experience of how you shop for, in this case, furniture and other objects that you can place around the home. You can take that idea and begin to think this is something that stretches from enterprise to consumer. There’s not a lot of things that do that.

You’ll see things happening in enterprises where AR is fundamental to what they’re doing. You’re going to see some consumer things that are unbelievably cool. Can we do everything we want to do now? No. The technology’s not complete yet. But that’s the beauty to a certain degree. This has a runway. And it’s an incredible runway. It’s time to put the seat belt on and go. When people begin to see what’s possible, it’s going to get them very excited—like we are, like we’ve been.

October 2017: At an event at Oxford, Cook responds to a student who asks what technology he would consider “transformative.” Cook says there are widespread uses for AR:

I’m incredibly excited by AR because I can see uses for it everywhere. I can see uses for it in education, in consumers, in entertainment, in sports. I can see it in every business that I know anything about.

I also like the fact that it doesn’t isolate. I don’t like our products being used a lot. I like our products amplifying thoughts and I think AR can help amplify the human connection. I’ve never been a fan of VR like that because I think it does the opposite. There are clearly some cool niche things for VR but it’s not profound in my view. AR is profound.

October 2017: In an interview with Vogue UK, Cook says while Apple wasn’t looking to build a “giant database of clothes,” it would support companies in the AR space who were doing this work.

If you think about a runway show in the fashion world, that’s a great application of AR because some of these, you want to see the dress all the way around, you do not want to just see the front.

November 2017: With the introduction of its ARKit platform on iOS 11, Cook says in a quarterly earnings call that Apple has created the world’s largest augmented reality platform:

There already are over a thousand apps with powerful AR features in our App Store today with developers creating amazing new experiences in virtually every category of app aimed at consumers, students and business users alike.

Put simply, we believe AR is going to change the way we use technology forever. We’re already seeing things that will transform the way you work, play, connect and learn. For example, there are AR apps that you interact with virtual models of everything you can imagine from the human body to the solar system. And of course you experience them like you’re really there.

Instantly education becomes much more powerful when every subject comes to life in 3D. And imagine shopping when you can place an object in your living room before you make a purchase – or attending live sporting events when you can see the stats on the field. AR is going to change everything.

This is not quite what came to pass (more on that later).

October 2017: Post-ARKit launch, Cook admits he thinks AR technology for headsets or glasses isn’t yet up to par as far as Apple is concerned.

I can tell you the technology itself doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way. The display technology required, as well as putting enough stuff around your face — there’s huge challenges with that. The field of view, the quality of the display itself, it’s not there yet.

We don’t give a rat’s about being first, we want to be the best, and give people a great experience. But now anything you would see on the market any time soon would not be something any of us would be satisfied with. Nor do I think the vast majority of people would be satisfied.

Most technology challenges can be solved, but it’s a matter of how long.

February 2018: During Apple’s Q1 earnings call, Cook described “great excitement” around augmented reality among customers.

Augmented reality is going to revolutionize many of the experiences we have with mobile devices, and with ARKit, we’re giving developers the most advanced tools on the market to create apps for the most advanced operating system running on the most advanced hardware. This is something only Apple can do.

October 2018: Cook tells NowThisNews during an interview about Apple’s Watch that AR is poised to become indispensable.

I think that one day we will wonder how we ever lived without it. We can have a much more enhanced conversation with the power of AR. The future is now.

January 2020: Cook tells an audience in Dublin, Ireland, that augmented reality “is the next big thing” and that it will “pervade our entire lives.” He gives an example of a company using AR and describes its potential uses.

Yesterday, I visited a development company called War Ducks … in Dublin – 15 people and they’re staffing up and using AR for games. You can imagine, for games it’s incredible but even for our discussion here. You and I might be talking about an article and using AR we can pull it up, and can both be looking at the same thing at the same time.

I think it’s something that doesn’t isolate people. We can use it to enhance our discussion, not substitute it for human connection, which I’ve always deeply worried about in some of the other technologies.

April 2021: During an interview with journalist Kara Swisher Cook agreed with her that augmented reality is “a critically important part of Apple’s future.” He imagines AR being used in health, education, retail, and gaming.

I’m already seeing AR take off in some of these areas with use of the phone. And I think the promise is even greater in the future.

September 2021: In an interview with tech YouTuber iJustine, Cook said that he was AR’s number one fan and reiterated his hopes for it as a collaboration tool.

I am so excited about AR. I think AR is one of these very few profound technologies that we will look back on one day and went, how did we live our lives without it? And so right now you can experience it in thousands of ways using your iPad or your iPhone, but of course, those will get better and better over time.

Already it’s a great way to shop, it’s a great way to learn. It enhances the learning process. I can’t wait for it to be even more important in collaboration and so forth.

So I’m AR fan number one. I think it’s that big.

After a comment from Justine about the future impact of AR, he continued:

I mean, simple things today that you can use it for, like if you’re shopping for a sofa, or a chair, or a lamp, in terms of really experiencing it in your place, we’ve never been able to do that before until the last couple years or so. And that’s at the early innings of AR. It will only get better.

June 2022: During WWDC 2022, Cook told the state-run outlet China Daily AR needs to focus on humanity:

“I am incredibly excited about AR as you may know, and the critical thing in any technology, including AR, is putting humanity at the center of it. That is what we focus on every day,”

September 2022: During a livestream at the Università Degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy, Cook said he thinks we will wonder how we lived without AR:

I think that we’ve had a great conversation here today, but if we could augment that with something from the virtual world, it would have arguably been even better. So I think that if you, and this will happen clearly not too long from now, if you… zoom out to the future and look back, you’ll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet.

April 2023: Cook again explained Apple’s interest in AR while being interviewed by GQ’s Zach Baron:

If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection.

We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it.

Baron then paraphrased Cook’s proposal that users could measure a glass pane or put some art up on the wall. Cook also said Apple isn’t trying to follow up anyone else’s efforts:

Can we make a significant contribution, in some kind of way, something that other people are not doing? Can we own the primary technology? I’m not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else’s stuff. Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that’s how you innovate.

What’s Apple’s plan for AR?

Clearly, Tim Cook has been bullish on AR for a long time. Until we see the new headset, the extent of Apple’s foray into AR will have been the 2017 launch of ARKit — which use iPhones’ and iPads’ cameras and sensors to overlay images in 3D space when the device is pointed at a given area — for iOS 11. ARKit is available across Apple’s devices, which has spurred a lot of cool little projects by amateur AR enthusiasts. When it launched, The Verge wrote that the tech had the potential to allow Apple to catch rival Google in the AR space.

Ultimately, AR on phones, for most people, probably means the occasional quick measurement or level check when you can’t find your bubble leveler. And let’s not forget plopping a virtual chair in your room, which is an admittedly cool use of AR. But one of the most striking examples of what a combination of AI and augmented reality can produce was the recent introduction of TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” face filter, which had been used in over 58 million videos by mid-May.

There have been fun apps that take advantage of ARKit beyond those use cases — Tim Cook loved the Statue of Liberty AR app enough that he cited it when he tweeted about the transformative power of AR. And, of course, there’s Pokémon Go, though that game may have been lightning in a bottle, with nothing having achieved its massive success since.

In short, the company’s AR work on phones hasn’t been the sort of bombshell that Cook’s words hint at. It’s not clear yet that the Apple mixed reality headset’s debut will be any different, at least in the short term.

Reports started trickling out in 2018 that Apple had a timeline to launch both an AR headset and AR glasses. By 2019, the company reportedly had 1,000 engineers working on its VR and AR initiative codenamed “T288”.

Rumors are heavily pointing to a WWDC 2023 reveal, possibly under the name “Reality Pro.” Descriptions available so far lay out a mixed-reality device that can seamlessly switch between AR and VR with a dial not unlike the Apple Watch’s digital crown, with an M2 Ultra processor and an external battery pack.

But it’s a first-run product that will probably come with first-run problems that will need dedicated work from Apple and good third-party support to ensure long-term success. There are supporters and detractors both inside the company and out, but given Cook’s enthusiasm and the Reality Pro’s long development period, it’s probable Apple is in it for the long haul.

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Apple has taken its time making the Reality Pro, or whatever it’s actually called. This is, after all, the company that introduced the AirPower wireless charging pad, showed it off to the world, then canceled the product because it wasn’t up to company standards — and that was just a charging accessory, not a potential new computing paradigm.

Update September 16th, 12:40PM ET: Added quote from his post-Apple event interview with iJustine.

Update June 4th, 2023, 1:30PM ET: Added quotes from this April GQ profile and additional information about the headset ahead of its rumored introduction at WWDC 2023.

Florida Gov. DeSantis revokes Disney’s special tax status

2022-04-22T16:17:51-04:00

Florida’s governor has signed a bill stripping Disney of its special tax status in the state | Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a bill stripping the Walt Disney Company of its special tax status in the Orlando area. The move is widely viewed as retaliation against Disney for its criticism of the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, a position DeSantis took umbrage at.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek apologized last month to employees who protested what they viewed as a failure by the company to support its LGBTQ community. Disney then issued a press release that said its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that.”

DeSantis said Friday he was “just not comfortable having that type of agenda get special treatment in my state,” according to The New York Times.

The Parental Rights in Education law — its official name— bars Florida educators from talking about “sexual orientation or gender identity” with students in certain grades and allows parents to sue school districts if a teacher mentions the topics.

Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature took swift action on the measure to end Disney’s special tax status, with the State House voting to approve on Thursday 68-38, following a 23-16 vote to approve in the State Senate.

The law effectively dissolves any special tax districts in Florida created since 1968, including the Reedy Creek Improvement District that Disney has controlled for 55 years. It allowed the company to control decisions about its real estate holdings in the area, which includes four theme parks, two water parks, stores and restaurants, a sports complex, and hotels. Responsibility for Reedy Creek will now likely belong to Orange and Osceola counties, including nearly $1 billion in long-term bond debt.

The Reedy Creek district will cease to exist as of June 1st, 2023, if the law remains in place.

Disney didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday.

Twitter is testing a CC button for captions on videos

2022-04-22T12:50:24-04:00

Twitter is testing a CC button for closed captions on videos. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter said on Friday it’s testing a new “CC” button to turn captions on and off on videos with captions available. The feature is rolling out to some users on iOS and will be coming “soon” to Android, the company says.

As shown in a video tweeted by Twitter’s Support account, the button appears in the upper-right corner of a video attached to a tweet.

View Link

As its board considers a takeover bid by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has been rolling out a lot of new features in recent weeks — some focused on accessibility and some by popular request from users. The company took some heat in 2020 when it was revealed that Twitter employees who wanted to work on accessibility features volunteered their time, but it’s since added a dedicated team focused on accessibility.

Earlier this month, Twitter announced that its ALT badge and improved image descriptions are now available globally, making alt text descriptions more prominent for all users. The company also confirmed it’s finally working on a long-requested functionality to edit tweets, which it’s rolling out first to its paying Twitter Blue subscribers. And reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong found evidence the service is testing a feature to allow users to set a status, codenamed “vibe.”

It’s also testing an experiment where it will promote developers’ third-party safety tools as part of its Twitter Toolbox.

Apple Cash virtual debit cards may be switching from Discover to Visa

2022-04-22T11:53:57-04:00

Apple Cash debit cards may be switching from Discover to Visa. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple Cash, formerly known as Apple Pay Cash, may be transitioning from the Discover payments network to Visa, a new report from MacRumors suggests. Visa has a much larger global network than Discover, which might account for the move.

Since its launch in 2017, Apple Pay Cash had a partnership with Green Dot Bank on Discover’s network, but in recent days, users have noticed that Apple Cash virtual cards now have a Visa logo on them. Apple Cash virtual cards live in users’ Apple Pay mobile wallets, and let them send peer-to-peer payments via iMessage. They function like virtual debit cards, and can be linked to a bank account or other debit card. Apple Card customers’ cash back earnings can be paid to Apple Cash accounts as well.

Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday so we don’t know if this transition will be happening for all Apple Cash users or when. But MacRumors says users who have Discover Apple Cash accounts can generate a new Apple Cash account number on the Visa network by deactivating Apple Cash in their device settings (I wasn’t able to reproduce this on my own device so far), and then reactivating.

California net neutrality law to remain intact after appeals court says it won’t reconsider earlier decision

2022-04-21T11:54:29-04:00

California’s net neutrality law remains intact | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A federal appeals court has denied a request for a rehearing on its January decision that upholds California’s net neutrality law. The 2018 law, widely considered the strongest in the US, was signed into law a year after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the Open Internet Order. That order had established stringent net neutrality rules that prohibited internet service providers from throttling or blocking legal websites and apps, and banned ISPs from prioritizing paid content.

California’s law, which finally took effect last year, also prohibits throttling and speed lanes. Wireless trade associations including the NCTA, the CTIA, and ISPs including Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T sued to block California’s law from taking effect, saying the FCC decision should preempt the state law. But that challenge was rejected by a district court judge. The Ninth Circuit voted 3-0 in January to uphold the lower court ruling, saying the FCC “no longer has the authority” to regulate broadband internet services because the agency reclassified them as “information services, instead of telecommunications services. The FCC therefore cannot preempt the state action.

FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel praised the decision on Twitter, reiterating her position that she wants to see net neutrality become “the law on the land” again. The FCC can’t currently reinstate net neutrality at the federal level however since the panel lacks a majority and the two Democrats and two Republicans remain deadlocked on the issue. President Biden’s FCC nominee Gigi Sohn is still awaiting a confirmation vote in the Senate.

The CTIA did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday, while the NCTA’s senior vice president of strategic communications Brian Dietz said that organization had no comment on the decision. If the telecom companies want to continue pursuing the matter, the next step would be an appeal to the US Supreme Court to hear the case.

Apple store workers in Atlanta file for the company’s first union election

2022-04-20T15:05:03-04:00

Apple retail workers in Atlanta have voted to unionize. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

An Apple retail store in Atlanta has filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The workers at the Cumberland Mall store, which includes salespeople, technicians, creatives, and operations specialists, would be represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). More than 70 percent of the group of about 100 eligible workers signed the union authorization cards, according to a news release — the minimum required is 30 percent.

If a majority of the workers vote to unionize, the store would be the first unionized Apple store in the US. Their petition now goes for formal review by the NLRB.

“Apple is a profoundly positive place to work, but we know that the company can better live up to their ideals and so we’re excited to be joining together with our coworkers to bring Apple to the negotiating table and make this an even better place to work,” Derrick Bowles, an Apple Genius worker at the store, said in a statement Wednesday.

A report from The Verge late last year detailed the difficulties many hourly Apple employees face, including low wages and a high-stress workplace. In February, the company increased benefits for its full- and part-time retail workers. The Atlanta workers said, while they provide critical sales and services to the company, Apple doesn’t provide cost-of-living raises or access to equitable stock options.

“We work hard at Apple because we really believe in the products and the company and we want to make sure that every Apple worker is able to afford quality housing and basic living expenses,” said Elli Daniels, a product zone worker at Apple.

Workers at other Apple stores are also involved in union drives, but not all are working with the CWA. Retail Apple workers at the Grand Central Terminal store in New York City announced they were collecting signatures to form a union after voting in February to affiliate with Workers United. That’s the same group working with Starbucks stores across the country on unionization efforts. Known as Fruit Stand Workers United, the Grand Central workers are demanding a $30-per-hour minimum wage and other improvements to their reimbursement and benefits.

The workers are part of a larger movement among retail employees who felt exploited during the pandemic by corporations that saw huge financial windfalls. A group of workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted earlier this month to become the first to unionize as part of the newly-formed Amazon Labor Union. And workers for a Google Fiber contractor in Missouri voted last month to form the first-ever union at parent company Alphabet. They’ll be part of the Alphabet Workers Union, also affiliated with CWA.

Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Airbnb to sue host of Pittsburgh party where a shooting left two dead

2022-04-20T12:33:23-04:00

Two people were killed in an Easter weekend shooting at this Pittsburgh Airbnb rental. | Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

After a shooting at an Easter weekend house party at an Airbnb in Pittsburgh left two teenagers dead and another eight people with gunshot wounds, Airbnb says it plans to pursue legal action against the person who booked the party.

“Airbnb strictly bans parties, and we condemn the behavior that is alleged to have prompted this criminal gun violence and the tragic loss of life,” spokesperson Ben Breit said in a statement emailed to The Verge. The booking guest has been permanently banned from the platform, he said. The party was “unauthorized,” Breit added, and was held without the knowledge or consent of the property host.

The shooting happened on Easter Sunday just after 12:30AM, according to Pittsburgh police. Some 200 people were at the party in the city’s East Allegheny neighborhood, and police said as many as 50 rounds were fired inside, forcing some people to jump out of windows to escape. Security footage showed Pittsburgh police visited the scene of the party around 11PM in response to a noise complaint but left after warning a person — who said he was the property owner — to turn down the music, Pittsburgh City Paper reported.

In June 2019, Pittsburgh was the site of a fatal shooting at an Airbnb rental in the city’s Hill District neighborhood, where two people were shot and killed.

Airbnb banned “party houses” in November 2019 after five people died in a shooting during a large Halloween party at a rental in California. Its policy prohibits gatherings of more than 16 people and stipulates that any evidence of parties can incur a $500 fee. The policy includes a curfew of 10PM to 7AM and restricts entire home listings made by people under the age of 25. Breit also pointed to the company’s neighborhood support line where neighbors can flag possible parties or party houses to the company.

On Tuesday, Pittsburgh City Council introduced legislation that would require operators of short-term rentals to be licensed by the city’s permits department. Property owners would have to keep records of anyone who entered the property and establish a contact person to be available to authorities in the event of an emergency.

Airbnb said Wednesday it was in close contact with the Pittsburgh police and Mayor Ed Gainey’s office to support the investigation into the shootings. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.

DuckDuckGo’s browsers and extensions now protect against AMP tracking

2022-04-20T10:24:15-04:00

DuckDuckGo says it’s now preventing AMP tracking. | Image: DuckDuckGo

Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo says it will “protect” against tracking by web pages with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework (or AMP) enabled. “When you load or share a Google AMP page anywhere from DuckDuckGo apps (iOS/Android/Mac) or extensions (Firefox/Chrome), the original publisher’s webpage will be used in place of the Google AMP version,” the company said on Twitter. The technology allows Google to track users, DuckDuckGo notes, and forces publishers to use AMP by prioritizing those links in its search results.

AMP technology is bad for privacy because it enables Google to track users even more (which is already a ton).

And, Google uses AMP to further entrench its monopoly, forcing the technology on publishers by prioritizing AMP links in search and favoring Google ads on AMP pages.
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) April 19, 2022

AMP was originally introduced — or so Google said — as a way to make mobile web pages load faster. But developers and others eyed AMP with suspicion, and some took issue with how Google prioritized AMP pages in search results. Improvements to mobile websites since AMP’s introduction have made it somewhat less useful to publishers in recent years, and many (including The Verge parent company Vox Media) don’t use the framework at all.

Google spokesperson Lara Levin said in an email to The Verge that the allegations about AMP were “misleading and repeat a number of false claims.” AMP, she added, is an “open source framework that was collaboratively developed with publishers, tech companies, and Google as a way to help web content load faster” that lets publishers and websites “easily create great web experiences.”

DuckDuckGo’s announcement came as Brave, another privacy-focused browser, announced it would also skip AMP-rendered pages where possible. “And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed,” the company said in a blog post. The tech is “harmful to users and to the Web at large,” according to Brave’s post.

Update April 20th 5:56PM ET: Adds comment from Google spokesperson

Sen. Warren pushes TurboTax for answers about its efforts to block free tax filing

2022-04-18T22:07:45-04:00

As millions of Americans file their 2021 income taxes online today, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is demanding answers from Intuit about its popular TurboTax e-filing product.

In a letter to Intuit CEO Sasan K. Goodarzi, Warren says the company has used “extensive lobbying and adroit influence peddling” to prevent Americans from filing their taxes for free online.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed suit against Intuit in March for deceptive marketing, an action Warren calls “both welcome and long overdue.” Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Katie Porter (D-CA) also signed onto the letter.

“scamming taxpayers into paying for services that should be free”

Many of Warren’s complaints center on the Free File program, an IRS partnership with a nonprofit coalition of tax prep companies founded in 2003 to provide free tax services to low-income filers. Under the terms of the partnership, 2021 filers with an adjusted gross income of $73,000 or less are eligible for the services, which are listed on the IRS website.

Intuit’s participation in the program came under criticism after a series of ProPublica reports showed that both Intuit and H&R Block had misled Free File-eligible filers into paying to file their taxes. The companies also deliberately made the free versions of their software difficult to find in online search results, according to ProPublica. Intuit left the Free File program in 2021.

In the letter to Goodarzi, Sen. Warren writes that “the Free File program has been a failure, scamming taxpayers into paying for services that should be free,” adding that “deceptive practices and outright sabotage from Free File companies” were largely to blame for the low rate of taxpayer participation in the program — a rate of only about 3 percent, by Warren’s estimation.

In response, Intuit director of corporate communications Derrick Plummer provided the following statement to The Verge:

Intuit strongly believes that Americans should be at the center of their financial life and is proud to have helped more taxpayers file their taxes for free than all our competitors combined. Over the past eight years alone, Intuit’s free tax preparation offering has helped nearly 100 million Americans file their taxes completely free of charge. We are clear and fair with our customers and open and transparent about our advertising practices, and our participation in the Free File program was done in compliance and with the oversight of the IRS. We are reviewing the letter from Sen. Warren and other policymakers and will respond.

Warren’s letter also points to a March 31st report from OpenSecrets, which found that Intuit employed former government officials, including former members of Congress, in its lobbying efforts. Intuit’s corporate political action committee has given donations to both Democrats and Republicans, according to the data. The company spent $3.3 million on lobbying in 2021.

Warren’s letter also notes a “revolving door” problem in enforcement, in which Intuit hires former regulators to help deflect government action. A recent court filing revealed that the company had hired former FTC chair Jon Leibowitz “to defend itself from an FTC complaint,” which Warren says raises conflict of interests concerns. A 2019 report from Public Citizen found that Leibowitz was one of dozens of former FTC officials with such potential revolving door conflicts.

Update 10:07PM ET: Added statement from Intuit.

Disconnected: Samsung.com sales reps say the system makes them work for free

2022-04-14T06:00:00-04:00

When Samsung announced its new Galaxy S22, the biggest Android smartphone launch of the year, Jennifer Larson was ready to finally make some money. On February 9th, she logged into the Ibbu app, where she sells phones to waiting customers at Samsung.com via online chats. Typically, the yearly Galaxy Unpacked showcase is a huge sales event for Samsung and a potentially big payday for her. “They built it up like it was Christmas, I got all pumped up,” Larson says.

But on this product release day, Samsung’s website was experiencing widespread glitches; customers couldn’t complete orders, and some were getting blank screens. If they could connect to the chats at all, customers were frustrated. Larson gave up after about two hours and called it a day.

And really, why would she stay? She thought Unpacked would be a break from the increasingly grim reality of her job, which has been to field a growing number of completely unpaid customer service calls. Instead, it was more of the same — hours of customer complaints she wasn’t going to get paid for handling.

Samsung’s experts are commission-only, with no hourly rate. So if they don’t sell anything, they don’t get paid. Originally, the money was good, but a once-promising work-from-home job has deteriorated into a confusing mess of misdirected customers and inconsistent directions from superiors, Larson and her co-workers say.

Samsung gets free customer support and an increasingly desperate sales team

Meanwhile, Samsung customers looking for support may not be aware that they’ve been routed to someone whose only financial incentive is to sell them a new product. Larson and her colleagues are portrayed as subject matter experts there to help customers — think Apple’s Genius Bar — but the expert’s goal is really to close sales. Even if they want to help, they aren’t trained in customer support.

But a dozen Samsung.com chat agents tell The Verge that they’re expected to do it anyhow. They claim the company’s trying to have it both ways: Samsung gets free customer service and an increasingly desperate sales team.

Larson began working for staffing agency Ibbu in December 2019. At first, she says she was making between $800 and $1,200 a week doing sales chats for products from companies like Otterbox and Life Group. She was able to provide more financial support for her daughter at college and pay for her other kids’ sports and extracurricular activities. The money was consistently good enough that when the pandemic shut everything down, Larson quit her teaching assistant job to work for Ibbu full time. “It really helped support me through COVID,” she says.

Experts were seeing their customer satisfaction scores drop amid technical issues on Samsung’s website during the Galaxy Unpacked event." data-portal-copyright="" />

But the steady pay evaporated as she began to encounter more and more service requests, dealing with customers who need help but aren’t looking to buy anything. The automated chat system now regularly sends the experts customer service chats mixed in with the expected sales chats. While Ibbu tells The Verge that its staff are explicitly not supposed to take customer service chats, both Ibbu and Samsung allegedly encourage workers to convert customer service chats into sales. And, if experts don’t keep up their customer satisfaction score by handling those customers, they can be fired.

Experts are expected to have an average customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) of at least 4.3 out of 5. They receive one point for every chat, three points anytime a customer gives them a rating over 4, and six points for every “achievement” a customer rewards them. But if they try to help a customer seeking support and the customer leaves unhappy, they can give the expert a bad rating — so experts can end up with low ratings for doing work they’re not officially supposed to be doing and aren’t being paid for, either.

If an expert’s rating drops below 4.3, they receive a warning. Larson says they used to get a 100-chat grace period to turn things around and get their rating back up, but that Ibbu has since cut it down to just 20 chats. If their CSAT doesn’t improve after three warnings, they can be terminated.

Even when Larson’s colleagues want to help customers, they often can’t.

Otterbox never told Larson how to sell phone cases, with most communication coming from Ibbu representatives. It was different when she started working with Samsung products. Executives from Samsung would join them on training calls, and Larson felt like she was part of the company. “It was like ‘Oh, they want us to succeed, they’re training us,’” she said.

Over the past few months, though, that began to change; even when seeking answers to problems like website glitches or customer questions, Larson says “it’s like pulling teeth to get replies.” And the site is riddled with problems, she adds. One example: a bug that caused an item’s price to change when a customer put it into their shopping cart.

“We’re supposed to deal with those problems, but we don’t have access to anything,” Larson says. “We’re like the first line of defense for customers, but they don’t train us how to deal with them or how to answer their questions. Why should I waste the customer’s time?”

In the official training documents that experts receive — with both Samsung and Ibbu logos emblazoned at the top of each page — a section header specifically reads “do not answer customer service questions” and provides directions for how to handle such situations.

“The ibbu chat is exclusively for online shoppers interested in BUYING something. If someone chats with you about anything else, such as product support, order support, warranty, etc., you should NOT try to respond.”

A screenshot of a Samsung Ibbu training document." data-portal-copyright="" />

Instead, the expert should direct the customer to the support link and close the chat, the instruction document reads. The document tells the experts to refer to themselves as “just a Samsung community member.”

But during a March 31st video call with experts, a recording of which was shared with The Verge, a Samsung employee described the chat platform the experts use as a “hybrid” for both customer service and sales and encouraged them to keep handling support chats even though they may not have the training.

When one expert said he wasn’t sure they should be doing customer service chats, pointing out that those chats didn’t really help with their conversion rate, she doubled down. “I want to encourage you to continue to do that.” She said providing excellent customer service would help with customer retention, which would help with the experts’ CSAT scores.

Samsung e-commerce and e-promoters sales manager Scott Walker said on the March 31st call that the sales experts should think of their customer service work as a team effort. “You kind of have to focus on the whole team intermeshed with our brand,” Walker said. If experts “make the customer really feel good about the information that you’re telling them, they’re going to come back. You may not get that sale, but somebody else will.”

While experts are supposed to get credit for a sale if a customer buys within two weeks of a chat, at least five experts told The Verge they aren’t always seeing that in practice.

Samsung refused to comment for this story after repeated requests, directing us to Ibbu. In an email to The Verge, Ibbu says that misdirected chats represent only a small percentage of customers that the sales experts handle.

The staffing agency explains:

Visitor requests are pre-qualified through a chatbot that filters out and forwards purchases requests to experts while excluding Customer Service requests. However, a very limited number of visitors may still occasionally bypass our automated chatbot filters and make customer service-related inquiries. Yet these requests amount to hardly 2.5% of all conversations answered by ibbü experts.

But Larson and other experts said that the 2.5 percent figure was definitely lower than what they were seeing. Based on her own research, Larson estimates it’s closer to 25 percent. And several experts told The Verge that, in recent months, they can go an entire shift — several hours long — where they receive nothing but customer service chats.

In its email to The Verge, Ibbu also writes that “independent experts have full control of their schedule, work whenever they want, wherever they are, are not exclusive to any mission, do not report to anyone, and may stop using ibbü at any time.” In other words, they’re independent contractors — not employees. It’s a favorable situation for Samsung.

But the experts say they’ve received direct instructions for doing their jobs from both Samsung and its staffing agency. One expert, who asked The Verge not to use his name for fear of retaliation, recalled being “mystery-shopped” by a Samsung executive “who is like the vice president of customer service for Samsung,” he said. After going through the shopping process, she scolded him for not using a particular tool. “She’s like ‘You can make so many more sales if you use this.’”

Experts say they can’t make sales in customer service chats

In general, experts we spoke to echoed Larson’s sentiment that the work used to be lucrative but isn’t what it used to be. One said he used to make between $800 and $1,300 a week when COVID restrictions first began and everyone was working from home. On the Monday after Samsung’s big February event, which he expected to be a productive day, he made only three sales after chatting with almost four dozen customers.

Another expert says he enjoys helping customers with Samsung appliance sales and doesn’t depend on the money he makes. But he agreed that things have gotten grim over the past several months and dismisses the idea that sales experts will be able to make significant money handling customer service chats. A customer who wants to cancel an order or find out when a washing machine will arrive isn’t really looking to buy anything, and he doesn’t have access to the information that might help those customers anyway. “But the Ibbu people still have an expectation that I can make a sale off that chat,” the expert says.

A third expert tells us he proactively asked if the company would be more lenient when assessing the experts’ ratings during the Unpacked day glitches, and he said an Ibbu representative assured them that experts wouldn’t be penalized for the site problems.

But, on Friday of that week, he received a warning that his CSAT had dropped to 4.1. And he wasn’t the only one to report a negative impact from Samsung’s Galaxy S22 launch day issues on their customer satisfaction scores.

An Ibbu expert received a warning even after he says he was told the company would be “lenient” because Samsung suffered an outage during Galaxy Unpacked." data-portal-copyright="" />

Ibbu bills itself as “an on-demand community of experts, curated specifically for your brand by iAdvize,” the parent company for Ibbu and its experts. It portrays them as brand ambassadors who can earn money on the side for their knowledge, and its website details how they’re compensated. Companies that enlist its services can optionally choose to pay workers for every chat instead of just on commission. The website explains: “Experts are paid according to different plans depending on your objectives: either per conversation or per transaction after a conversation. Whichever plan you choose, the experts are incentivized to offer the best quality of service.”

But, like the other companies Ibbu contracts with, experts who sell Samsung products are paid commission only. And Larson notes that the 1.5 percent commission experts get from Samsung sales is significantly lower than the 8 percent she made from other Ibbu clients. So experts have to sell a lot of high-priced Samsung devices and appliances to earn a decent paycheck.

Samsung seems to have profited from the arrangement. It contracted with Ibbu parent company iAdvize in 2019. An undated case study interview on iAdvize’s blog with Ed Billmaier, director of e-commerce customer service at Samsung Electronics America, claims that since partnering with iAdvize, Samsung grew its e-commerce sales by 10x “while fulfilling its objective of giving US customers the information they need, when they need it and how they want it, when considering a purchase on Samsung’s website.”

Samsung declined to answer questions about its use of Ibbu experts, including why Samsung uses contractor sales experts untrained in customer service to handle customer questions. The company instead directed questions to Ibbu.

If the system isn’t sending them enough money-making chats and the internal communication is so confused, why continue on as an expert? Larson says she takes frequent week-long breaks and is considering leaving altogether. Another expert tells us that people stay because they remember how lucrative the chats used to be. (He remembers product launches where he earned $1,000 in one night.)

“You could do really well on a big sale or a product launch,” another expert added. “I don’t know how people that did this full-time stay, though. It seems like it’s not set up for people to last.”