Technology

Therean empty space in my heart for a minimalist phone with only the most basic functions. Bad for my heart, but good for a handful of companies putting out devices aiming to fill it. Punktlatest, the MP02, goes a little ways to making the device I desire, but it isn&t quite there yet.

Punktfirst device included just texting and calling, which would likely have worked as intended if not for the inconvenient choice to have it connect only to 2G networks. These networks are being shut down and replaced all over the world, so you would have ended up with a phone that was even more limited than you expected.

The MP02 is the sequel, and it adds a couple useful features. It runs on 4G LTE networks, which should keep it connected for years to come, and it has gained both threaded texting (rather than a single inbox and outbox — remember those) and Blackberry encryption for those sensitive communications.

It has nice physical buttons you can press multiple times to select a letter in ye olde T9 fashion, and also lets you take notes, consult a calendar, and calculate things. The battery has 12 days of standby, and with its tiny monochrome display and limited data options, it&ll probably stay alive for nearly that even with regular use.

Its most immediate competition is probably the Light Phone, which also has a second iteration underway that, if I&m honest, looks considerably more practical.

Now, I like the MP02. I like its chunky design (though it is perhaps a mite too thick), I like its round buttons and layout, I like its deliberate limitations. But it and other would-be minimal phones, in my opinion, are too slavish in their imitations of devices from years past. What we want is minimalism, not (just) nostalgia. We want the most basic useful features of a phone without all the junk that comes with them.

The Light Phone 2 and its nice e-ink screen.

For me, that means including a couple things that these devices tend to eschew.

One is modern messaging. SMS is bad for a lot of reasons. Why not include a thin client to pass text to a messaging service like WhatsApp or Messenger Of course iMessage is off limits — thanks, Apple — but we could at least get a couple of the cross-platform apps on board. It doesn&t hurt the minimalist nature of the phone, in my opinion, if it connects to a modern messaging infrastructure. No need for images or gifs or anything — just text is fine.

Two is maps. We sure as hell didn&t have maps on our featurephones back in the day, but you better believe we wanted them. Basic mapping is one of the things we rely on our phones for every day. Whateveron this minimal phone doesn&t have to be a full-stack affair with recommendations, live traffic, and so on — just location and streets, and maybe an address or lat/long lookup, like you&d see on an old monochrome GPS unit. I don&t need my phone to tell me where to eat — just keep me from getting lost.

Three, and this is just me, I&d like some kind of synchronizing note app or the ability to put articles from Pocket or whatever on there. The e-ink screen on the Light Phone is a great opportunity for this very specific type of consumption. Neither of the companies here seems likely to add this feature, but that doesn&t change the fact that itone of the few things I regularly use my phone for.

Light Phone 2 is possibly getting music, weather, and voice commands, none of which really screams &minimal& to me, nor do they seem trivial to add. Ride-share stuff is a maybe, but it&d probably be a pain.

I have no problem with my phone doing just what a pocketable device needs to do and leaving the more sophisticated stuff to another device. But that pocketable device can&t be that dumb. Fortunately I do believe we&re moving closer to days when there will be meaningfully different choices available to weird people like myself. We&re not there yet, but I can wait.

Facial recognition technology presents myriad opportunities as well as risks, but it seems like the government tends to only consider the former when deploying it for law enforcement and clerical purposes. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) has written the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Trade Commission, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission telling them they need to get with the program and face up to the very real biases and risks attending the controversial tech.

In three letters provided to TechCrunch (and embedded at the bottom of this post), Sen. Harris, along with several other notable legislators, pointed out recent research showing how facial recognition can produce or reinforce bias, or otherwise misfire. This must be considered and accommodated in the rules, guidance, and applications of federal agencies.

Other lawmakers and authorities have sent letters to various companies and CEOs or held hearings, but representatives for Sen. Harris explained that there is also a need to advance the issue within the government as well.

Sen. Harris at a recent hearing.

Attention paid to agencies like the FTC and EEOC that are &responsible for enforcing fairness& is &a signal to companies that the cop on the beat is paying attention, and an indirect signal that they need to be paying attention too. What we&re interested in is the fairness outcome rather than one particular companypractices.&

If this research and the possibility of poorly controlled AI systems aren&t considered in the creation of rules and laws, or in the applications and deployments of the technology, serious harm could ensue. Not just positive harm, such as the misidentification of a suspect in a crime, but negative harm, such as calcifying biases in data and business practices in algorithmic form and depriving those affected by the biases of employment or services.

&While some have expressed hope that facial analysis can help reduce human biases, a growing body of evidence indicates that it may actually amplify those biases,& the letter to the EEOC reads.

Here Sen. Harris, joined by Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Elisabeth Warren (D-MA), expresses concern over the growing automation of the employment process. Recruitment is a complex process and AI-based tools are being brought in at every stage, so this is not a theoretical problem. As the letter reads:

Suppose, for example, that an African American woman seeks a job at a company that uses facial analysis to assess how well a candidatemannerisms are similar to those of its top managers.

First, the technology may interpret her mannerisms less accurately than a white male candidate.

Second, if the companytop managers are homogeneous, e.g., white and male, the very characteristics being sought may have nothing to do with job performance but are instead artifacts of belonging to this group. She may be as qualified for the job as a white male candidate, but facial analysis may not rate her as highly becuase her cues naturally differ.

Third, if a particular history of biased promotions led to homogeneity in top managers, then the facial recognition analysis technology could encode and then hide this bias behind a scientific veneer of objectivity.

If that sounds like a fantasy use of facial recognition, you probably haven&t been paying close enough attention. Besides, even if itstill rare, it makes sense to consider these things before they become widespread problems, right The idea is to identify issues inherent to the technology.

&We request that the EEOC develop guidelines for employers on the fair use of facial analysis technologies and how this technology may violate anti-discrimination law,& the Senators ask.

A set of questions also follows (as it does in each of the letters): have there been any complaints along these lines, or are there any obvious problems with the tech under current laws If facial technology were to become mainstream, how should it be tested, and how would the EEOC validate that testing Sen. Harris and the others request a timeline of how the Commission plans to look into this by September 28.

Next on the list is the FTC. This agency is tasked with identifying and punishing unfair and deceptive practices in commerce and advertising; Sen. Harris asserts that the purveyors of facial recognition technology may be considered in violation of FTC rules if they fail to test or account for serious biases in their systems.

&Developers rarely if ever test and then disclose biases in their technology,& the letter reads. &Without information about the biases in a technology or the legal and ethical risks attendant to using it, good faith users may be unintentionally and unfairly engaging in discrimination. Moreover, failure to disclose these biases to purchasers may be deceptive under the FTC Act.&

Another example is offered:

Consider, for example, a situation in which an African American female in a retail store is misidentified as a shoplifter by a biased facial recognition technology and is falsely arrested based on this information. Such a false arrest can cause trauma and substantially injure her future house, employment, credit, and other opportunities.

Or, consider a scenario in which a young man with a dark complexion is unable to withdraw money from his own bank account because his bankATM uses facial recognition technology that does not identify him as their customer.

Again, this is very far from fantasy. On stage at Disrupt just a couple weeks ago Chris Atageka of UCOT and Timnit Gebru from Microsoft Research discussed several very real problems faced by people of color interacting with AI-powered devices and processes.

The FTC actually had a workshop on the topic back in 2012. But, amazing as it sounds, this workshop did not consider the potential biases on the basis of race, gender, age, or other metrics. The agency certainly deserves credit for addressing the issue early, but clearly the industry and topic have advanced and it is in the interest of the agency and the people it serves to catch up.

The letter ends with questions and a deadline rather like those for the EEOC: have there been any complaints How will they assess address potential biases Will they issue &a set of best practices on the lawful, fair, and transparent use of facial analysis& The letter is cosigned by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

Last is the FBI, over which Sen. Harris has something of an advantage: the Government Accountability Office issued a report on the very topic of facial recognition tech that had concrete recommendations for the Bureau to implement. What Harris wants to know is, what have they done about these, if anything

&Although the GAO made its recommendations to the FBI over two years ago, there is no evidence that the agency has acted on those recommendations,& the letter reads.

The GAO had three major recommendations. Briefly summarized: do some serious testing of the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS) to make sure it does what they think it does, follow that with annual testing to make sure itmeeting needs and operating as intended, and audit external facial recognition programs for accuracy as well.

&We are also eager to ensure that the FBI responds to the latest research, particularly research that confirms that face recognition technology underperforms when analyzing the faces of women and African Americans,& the letter continues.

The list of questions here is largely in line with the GAOrecommendations, merely asking the FBI to indicate whether and how it has complied with them. Has it tested NGI-IPS for accuracy in realistic conditions Has it tested for performance across races, skin tones, genders, and ages If not, why not, and when will it And in the meantime, how can it justify usage of a system that hasn&t been adequately tested, and in fact performs poorest on the targets it is most frequently loosed upon

The FBI letter, which has a deadline for response of October 1, is cosigned by Sen. Booker and Cedric Richmond, Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

These letters are just a part of what certainly ought to be a government-wide plan to inspect and understand new technology and how it is being integrated with existing systems and agencies. The federal government moves slowly, even at its best, and if it is to avoid or help mitigate real harm resulting from technologies that would otherwise go unregulated it must start early and update often.

You can find the letters in full below.

EEOC:

SenHarris & EEOC Facial Rec… by on Scribd

FTC:

SenHarris & FTC Facial Reco… by on Scribd

FBI:

SenHarris & FBI Facial Reco… by on Scribd

Itno secret that Evernote, the productivity app that lets people take notes and organize other files from their working and non-work life, has been trying to regain its former footing as one of the most popular apps in the U.S., and that doing so has been an ongoing struggle.

Just two weeks ago, we reported that Evernote had lost several of its most senior executives, including its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner.

Now, Chris O&Neill — who took over as CEO of Evernote in 2015 after running the business operations at the Google X research unit — is sharing more demoralizing news with employees. To wit, hefiring dozens of them. At an an all-hands meeting earlier today, he told gathered staffers that Evernote has no choice but to lay off 54 people — roughly 15 percent of the companyworkforce — and to focus its efforts instead around specific functions, including product development and engineering.

We&ve reached out to the company for more information about what the move means for Evernote. [Update below.]

In the meantime, this newest development certainly doesn&t look encouraging. In fact, a person who tipped TechCrunch off to the executive departures two weeks ago characterized Evernote as &in a death spiral,& saying that user growth and active users have been flat for the last six years and that the companyenterprise product offering hasn&t caught on.

Itworth noting that in addition to shoring up its ranks, Evernote may soon be facing a funding shortage, if these layoffs were&t prompted by one. The company has raised nearly $300 million over the years, including from Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and T. Rowe Price, but the last round it raised, according to Pitchbook, was a $6 million mezzanine round that closed in 2013.

You can learn more about what happened today via a note that O&Neill just sent to staffers.

For those of you who missed our All Hands today, I have some difficult news to share.

As part of an ongoing evaluation of our business, we&ve decided to make a tough, but necessary decision to set Evernote up for future success. We&ll be saying goodbye to 54 talented and dedicated people, each of whom has contributed to Evernotemission. This was an extremely difficult decision and one that we did not take lightly.

As you&ve heard me say during the past few months, I set incredibly aggressive goals for the year. We&ve grown significantly this year, but at the same time we invested too far ahead of that growth.

We must adjust quickly when part of our strategy is not meeting our expectations. Going forward, we&re streamlining certain functions and will continue to make investments to speed up and scale others, like product development and engineering.

I understand that todaynews may cause concern. We need to remember our amazing community of people who rely on our products and believe in our mission. Together, we have built a product that serves over 225 million people around the world who trust us with more than 9 billion notes containing their most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations.

As I discussed in All-Hands, Evernote grew over 20% in the first half this year and we are in a stable financial position. Our Q3 revenue numbers remain strong and we expect to end the quarter north of $27 million. We have over $30 million in cash on our balance sheet and will exit 2018 generating more cash than we spend.

Though today is hard, this is the right decision for the business and the best way for us to invest in our future. For those friends and colleagues impacted today, we&ll be providing severance and other benefits to support them in their transition. We&ll have a series of AMAs to answer your questions that were not addressed today. As always, feel free to contact me with your questions.Tomorrow, I will publicly address our customers, partners and community on our blog.

Chris

Update: We&ve just been in touch with Evernote. It pointed us to a newly posted piece by O&Neill in which he outlines the companystrategy going forward, which includes to &operate with a more focused leadership team,& to &operate more efficiently,& and to &double down on product development — both quality and velocity.&

As for its funding situation, an Evernote representative insists that things are far from dire. The company is not fundraising, says this person; further, we&re told Evernote has $30 million on its balance sheet and will exit the year without burning cash.