California’s COVID-19 Contact Tracing App Available Today

As of this morning, California finally has a COVID-19 contact tracing app! I installed it this morning, and I’d encourage fellow California residents to do the same. If you, like me, use Android, install the CA Notify app from the Google Play store. (You may have even gotten a notification this morning encouraging you to do it.) If you have an iPhone, you don’t even need to install anything. Just go into Settings, click on “Exposure Notification,” and go from there.

If you want to understand how a contact tracing app helps us keep the virus under control, how this implementation (which uses the Google and Apple APIs) works, and why it’s taken so long to get built and adopted in the U.S., this New York Times article has a pretty good summary. If you’re worried about privacy, The Markup was on this early, and they also published an informative followup article in August.

Stripe Is Paying to Remove Carbon from the Sky, Hoping that Others Will Follow

Last year, Stripe shared on their blog their commitment “to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage.”

Their reasoning was straightforward. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions will not be enough to resolve our climate crisis. We almost certainly need to remove carbon dioxide that is already in our atmosphere. The technology to do so is in a classic early stage conundrum. Because it’s so new, it’s both not good enough and too expensive to be viable. However, those who buy early help fund improvements to the technology, which drives the price down, which leads to more customers and investments. Wash, rinse, repeat. All the while, carbon is being removed from the atmosphere.

This is the promise all early stage technology makes. The question is, who’s going to buy early? For carbon removal, Stripe raised its hand, committing to spending at least $1 million a year. Their hope was that other companies would follow suit.

I thought this was awesome, but I wasn’t blown away by the dollar amount. A million dollars isn’t nothing, but Stripe is worth $36 billion.

So I was disappointed to read in this week’s The Atlantic that a million dollars turned out to be a big deal. The article quotes Stripe’s Ryan Orbuch, who said, “We got a positive response from the carbon-removal community, because the field is so starved for capital that a million dollars will raise eyebrows.”

I find this infuriating… and sadly, not surprising. With an estimated $500 billion a year being invested in climate change by companies, governments, and philanthropic foundations, how is it that a million dollars shook up a market that is so clearly necessary right now? My guess is it boils down to two things: Lack of leadership and lack of strategic action. The need to wait for others to make an obvious idea okay before being willing to jump in themselves is very, very strong in most people.

While I find this very sad, Stripe deserves even stronger kudos for recognizing this and doing something about it.

Google Maps Timeline: Interesting or Valuable?

I was at a dinner party last night where a friend was talking about his Google Maps Timeline year-end report. Another friend asked:

Do you find it interesting or valuable?

This is a very good question to ask about technology in general.

Personally, I find Google Maps Timeline interesting, but not valuable. It’s generally interesting as journal. I’d love to import a static copy of the data automatically into Day One or other journaling software. (Lazy Web, has anyone done this already?)

Using it to track movement is interesting and potentially valuable. In 2018, I traveled 27,711 miles total, about one time around the world. I walked a bit less than a mile a day averaging 2.25 miles / hour — not as much or as fast as I would have liked. Tracking this data more regularly might encourage me to move more, but fitness trackers provide this same data in less creepy ways.

More valuable is the transit information. In 2018, I spent over 21 days on some sort of ground transportation for a total of 9,575 miles, about 26 miles / day. This was surprising for someone who works from home at least twice a week and sobering from the perspective of someone who cares about carbon emissions. That said, I don’t know that trying to optimize these totals further is very valuable. I already take lots of public transportation, carpool when I can, and drive a Prius. I could lower my carbon footprint much more dramatically by changing my diet.

I’m not sure whether Google Maps Timeline will ever be valuable for me individually. However, I do think Google makes this data valuable for me in aggregate. For example, Google is able to tell me the average wait time at my favorite coffee shops and restaurants. I could imagine this data in aggregate could be very valuable for urban planning. I would like for it to be used this way, and would be happy to give this data to someone if I trusted they would use it in useful and also ethical ways.

And there’s the rub. We still don’t have good, trusted agreements between organizations and individuals. I don’t trust the government to handle my data competently — to anonymize it appropriately, to store it securely, etc. — or to put it to good use. I trust Google to put it to good use, but I am very skeptical that they will use it ethically. That said, I trust Google a lot more than most companies, which is also potentially misguided.

Way back in the day, I did some work on these kinds of issues in community with good folks like Phil Windley, Doc Searls, and Identity Woman. Aman Ahuja and his friends at the Data Guild have also done a lot of good thinking around ethical guidelines for using data. I’m heartened by the work they’re all doing. If you know of others doing great work in this space, please share in the comments below. Be specific — what is the problem they’re tackling, and how are they going about it?

Why Are We Afraid of Data?

My friend, Gbenga Ajilore, is an economics professor. Last month, he gave a great talk at AlterConf in Chicago entitled, “How can open data help facilitate police reform?” It concisely explains how data helps us overcome anecdotal bias.

I was particularly struck by his point about how we need police buy-in for this data to be truly useful, and I was left with a bit of despair. Why is buy-in about the importance of data so hard? This should be common sense, right?

Clearly, it’s not. Earlier this year, I expressed some disbelief about how, in professional sports, where there are hundreds of millions of dollars riding on outcomes, there is still strong resistance to data and analytics.

On the one hand, it’s incredible that this is still an issue in professional sports, 14 years after Moneyball was first published and several championships were won by analytics-driven franchises (including two “cursed” franchises, the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, both led by data nerd Theo Epstein).

On the other hand, it’s a vivid reminder of how hard habits and groupthink are to break, even in a field where the incentives to be smarter than everyone else come in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars. If it’s this hard to shift mindsets in professional sports, I don’t even want to imagine how long it might take in journalism. It’s definitely helping me recalibrate my perspective about the mindsets I’m trying to shift in my own field.

The first time I started to understand the many social forces that cause us to resist data was right after college, when I worked as an editor at a technology magazine. One of my most memorable meetings was with a vendor that made a tool that analyzed source code to surface bugs. All software developers know that debugging is incredibly hard and time-consuming. Their tool easily and automatically identified tons and tons of bugs, just by feeding it your source code.

“This is one of the best demos I’ve ever seen!” I exclaimed to the vendor reps. “Why isn’t everyone knocking on your door to buy this?”

The two glanced at each other, then shrugged their shoulders. “Actually,” one explained, “we are having a lot of trouble selling this. When people see this demo, they are horrified, because they realize how buggy their code is, and they don’t have the time or resources to fix it. They would rather that nobody know.”

Seeking Google Alerts Replacement

Google Reader officially died today. I was not one of the legions of people who expressed dismay and displeasure at Google’s decision. I can’t argue with a company’s desire to focus, I don’t have any insider information as to why they made that decision, and I’m not interested in participating in tech punditry theater.

My general feeling is that, if a service that’s valuable goes away, the marketplace will replace it. That’s exactly what happened here. Feedly and several other companies moved very quickly to fill that void. I migrated to Feedly shortly after Google made its announcement, and while the service has some warts, my overall feed reading experience is better than it was with Google Reader. Score one for markets!

Despite my overall apathy toward the shift, I was annoyed to receive a notice this morning saying that Google Alerts no longer supports RSS feeds. I suppose it validates speculation that Google is de-emphasizing RSS, as I see no substantial technical reasons why it should kill what amounts to another serialization format.

So it goes. I’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to find a replacement stalking personal dashboard notification tool. Unlike Google Reader, Google Alerts has been gradually fading on its own for months now, so this is a good excuse to find something better. I’ve already been using Newsle for several months now, which I like quite a bit, but it’s centered around people, and I want something for topics as well.

Any suggestions?