Category Archives: Google

Google Maps is finally getting dark theme on its Android app for users around the globe.

"What do we want? Dark theme! Where do we want it? Google Maps!," Google wrote in a tweet via its Android handle.

While Google has been testing the dark mode for Google Maps since September last year, the global rollout for Android users has begun now.

To enable the dark theme, all you need to do is tap your profile icon in the top right corner in Google Maps, look for theme settings in the list of configuration options, and then enable the entry that activates the dark mode.

Users need to download the latest version of Android OS, that is, version 10.61.2, to access this feature.

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In addition, Google has also made available the Password Checkup feature for Android handsets.

The company said that the feature is now integrated into Android phones running Android 9 and above.

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Google Maps gets dark theme on its android app for users around the globe - Business Insider India

BELLEVUE, Wash., March 18, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Today, Restaurant Revolution Technologies (Revolution) is making it easier to order food directly through Google Search and Google Maps. Through Revolution's innovative digital ordering platform, Order One, supported restaurants will soon see an "Order Online" button appear on their Business Profile on Google.

"Digital food ordering is virtually all about convenience. With Google the ordering process is simplified, and together we provide a greater level of convenience for customers and additional ordering opportunities for our restaurant partners," said Revolution Chief Revenue Officer, Robert Taylor. "With restaurant partners being able to accept orders easily on Google, restaurants can extend their reach with customers and give users alternatives to engage directly with the restaurants."

Jason's Deli is the first Revolution partner available to order directly from Google Search and Google Maps. Orders received from Google leverage Revolution's Order One patented point of sale (POS) integration, so orders will flow directly into the restaurants' POS. Additionally, delivery orders on Google will trigger Order One's Ground Control delivery enablement feature, allowing restaurants to fulfill orders with their own fleet or through one of Revolution's delivery partners.

"Google's direct ordering feature as part of our customer experience optimizes online ordering opportunities for our restaurant operations and also dramatically improves convenience for our customers," said Amy Schuster, Director of IT of Jason's Deli.

For information on Revolution and accepting food orders on Google, visit rrtusa.com.

About Restaurant Revolution Technologies

RRT Holdings, LLC (Revolution) is an industry innovator, multi-patented technology owner and the off-premise partner for restaurants nationwide. Through its Order One platform, Revolution provides a unified web, mobile and voice order management software platform that seamlessly integrates into restaurant point of sale systems. Revolution's Ground Control delivery enablement program fulfilled by DoorDash, backend services, and data capture capabilities enable restaurants to seamlessly serve off-premise orders and provide a premium, branded start-to-finish experience for their customers. The company's marketplace order insertion program, Connect, allows restaurants to seamlessly submit orders from third party marketplaces directly to the POS for optimal operational efficiencies. Learn more at http://www.rrtusa.com or follow on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Media Contact

Rich Earle, Restaurant Revolution Technologies, Inc., 619-384-6042, rearle@rrtusa.com

Rich Earle, Restaurant Revolution Technologies, 800-277-1049, marketing@rrtusa.com

SOURCE Restaurant Revolution Technologies, Inc.

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Restaurant Revolution Technologies Expands Its Online Ordering Capabilities with Google - KHQ Right Now

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A 2020 womens leadership study from LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co. found that American women held less than40% of corporate management positions, and women continue to fight underrepresentation when it comes toboard positions and CEO roles. They also face gender bias, harassment, and opposition to their management styles. Heres how one MIT Sloan alumna has pushed back on those statistics and used what shes learned along the way to help those behind her.

Anita Kibunguchy, MBA 15, product marketing lead at Google

In what ways is your professional life as a woman in the workplace different from how you imagined it would be when you started your career?

I always knew going into tech that there would be very few of us, especially Black women. When I did my undergrad at Sacramento State, my management information systems classes had three women, and we all knew each other, hung out together, and did most of our projects together. In the class, I was the only Black person. MIT was a similar experience, too. Yes, the classes were diverse, but in my MIT Sloan cohort, I was the only Black person. I don't think I expected the workplace to be any different. All I can hope for is that we continue doing more to hire and retain diverse talent, because diversity does bring upon creativity and is simply better for business overall.

Who was an ally or mentor for you as youve navigated your career? What made that person stand out, and how specifically did they help you get to the next level of your professional development?

I've been lucky to have mentors all along from when I was young. My mother and grandmother are incredible, strong women who I look up to every day. My dad instilled truthfulness he always said that the truth shall set you free.

Over time, I've met incredible people who've taken a chance on me. I've also had allies who've given me opportunities to grow, take on leadership positions, and let me be me. Most recently, two of my male, white bosses have come through for me, letting me lead a team and giving me the resources to do so. I am truly appreciative, because this is an opportunity of a lifetime, and not everyone is lucky to say so.

Certain industries are as male-dominated as ever. Where do you see progress in your own professional experience and how can we scale that throughout your industry?

With all the Black Lives Matter and other movements that took place in 2020, it was the first time you saw big tech companies really come out and make their voices heard about what was happening. All I can say is that it felt like a wake-up call, because people have been speaking of these injustices for a very long time.In the workplace, progress will come when we can hire diverse candidates and put structures in place to help them succeed and really soar. People always think it's only a talent issue, but it's more than that. Retention plays abigrole. Because once you retain folks, then others see them at these workplaces and choose to join them. People want to go where they see others like them and where they feel like they belong. Otherwise, you're the token representative, and that is a huge burden to carry.

Progress will come when we can hire diverse candidates and put structures in place to help them succeed and really soar.

How do you support women coming up behind you?

Mentorship is one of the biggest gifts you can give someone coming up behind you. I have been lucky to help many people along the way. Because of this, I started a career advice services company called AdviceMavens whoseaim is to connect, cultivate, and empower the community to advance their professional careers and personal lives. We believe that each one of us has something to give back to the community, whether from personal, educational, and/or professional experiences. I work with a lot of people to help guide them through resume, LinkedIn, and cover letter writing, as well as interview prep services.

What is the most difficult lesson youve learned in your professional life? In what unexpected ways did you grow from it?

Trust is a two-way street. Ive seen this manifest itself in both my personal and professional life. It helps foster a common understanding and you will see teammates and bosses go above and beyond to get things done once trust is built. It also helps foster psychological safety, which is a big ingredient for successful teams. I learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago, and now with the teams I lead, I try to ensure we have trust built between us, including the bosses I report to.

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This Google marketing pro sees diversity as a retention issue - MIT Sloan News

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Hundreds of people gathered for the first lecture at what had become the worlds most important conference on artificial intelligence row after row of faces. Some were East Asian, a few were Indian, and a few were women. But the vast majority were white men. More than 5,500 people attended the meeting, five years ago in Barcelona, Spain.

Timnit Gebru, then a graduate student at Stanford University, remembers counting only six Black people other than herself, all of whom she knew, all of whom were men.

The homogeneous crowd crystallized for her a glaring issue. The big thinkers of tech say A.I. is the future. It will underpin everything from search engines and email to the software that drives our cars, directs the policing of our streets and helps create our vaccines.

But it is being built in a way that replicates the biases of the almost entirely male, predominantly white work force making it.

In the nearly 10 years Ive written about artificial intelligence, two things have remained a constant: The technology relentlessly improves in fits and sudden, great leaps forward. And bias is a thread that subtly weaves through that work in a way that tech companies are reluctant to acknowledge.

On her first night home in Menlo Park, Calif., after the Barcelona conference, sitting cross-legged on the couch with her laptop, Dr. Gebru described the A.I. work force conundrum in a Facebook post.

Im not worried about machines taking over the world. Im worried about groupthink, insularity and arrogance in the A.I. community especially with the current hype and demand for people in the field, she wrote. The people creating the technology are a big part of the system. If many are actively excluded from its creation, this technology will benefit a few while harming a great many.

The A.I. community buzzed about the mini-manifesto. Soon after, Dr. Gebru helped create a new organization, Black in A.I. After finishing her Ph.D., she was hired by Google.

She teamed with Margaret Mitchell, who was building a group inside Google dedicated to ethical A.I. Dr. Mitchell had previously worked in the research lab at Microsoft. She had grabbed attention when she told Bloomberg News in 2016 that A.I. suffered from a sea of dudes problem. She estimated that she had worked with hundreds of men over the previous five years and about 10 women.

Their work was hailed as groundbreaking. The nascent A.I. industry, it had become clear, needed minders and people with different perspectives.

About six years ago, A.I. in a Google online photo service organized photos of Black people into a folder called gorillas. Four years ago, a researcher at a New York start-up noticed that the A.I. system she was working on was egregiously biased against Black people. Not long after, a Black researcher in Boston discovered that an A.I. system couldnt identify her face until she put on a white mask.

In 2018, when I told Googles public relations staff that I was working on a book about artificial intelligence, it arranged a long talk with Dr. Mitchell to discuss her work. As she described how she built the companys Ethical A.I. team and brought Dr. Gebru into the fold it was refreshing to hear from someone so closely focused on the bias problem.

But nearly three years later, Dr. Gebru was pushed out of the company without a clear explanation. She said she had been fired after criticizing Googles approach to minority hiring and, with a research paper, highlighting the harmful biases in the A.I. systems that underpin Googles search engine and other services.

Your life starts getting worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, Dr. Gebru said in an email before her firing. You start making the other leaders upset.

As Dr. Mitchell defended Dr. Gebru, the company removed her, too. She had searched through her own Google email account for material that would support their position and forwarded emails to another account, which somehow got her into trouble. Google declined to comment for this article.

Their departure became a point of contention for A.I. researchers and other tech workers. Some saw a giant company no longer willing to listen, too eager to get technology out the door without considering its implications. I saw an old problem part technological and part sociological finally breaking into the open.

It should have been a wake-up call.

In June 2015, a friend sent Jacky Alcin, a 22-year-old software engineer living in Brooklyn, an internet link for snapshots the friend had posted to the new Google Photos service. Google Photos could analyze snapshots and automatically sort them into digital folders based on what was pictured. One folder might be dogs, another birthday party.

When Mr. Alcin clicked on the link, he noticed one of the folders was labeled gorillas. That made no sense to him, so he opened the folder. He found more than 80 photos he had taken nearly a year earlier of a friend during a concert in nearby Prospect Park. That friend was Black.

He might have let it go if Google had mistakenly tagged just one photo. But 80? He posted a screenshot on Twitter. Google Photos, yall, messed up, he wrote, using much saltier language. My friend is not a gorilla.

Like facial recognition services, talking digital assistants and conversational chatbots, Google Photos relied on an A.I. system that learned its skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data.

Called a neural network, this mathematical system could learn tasks that engineers could never code into a machine on their own. By analyzing thousands of photos of gorillas, it could learn to recognize a gorilla. It was also capable of egregious mistakes. The onus was on engineers to choose the right data when training these mathematical systems. (In this case, the easiest fix was to eliminate gorilla as a photo category.)

As a software engineer, Mr. Alcin understood the problem. He compared it to making lasagna. If you mess up the lasagna ingredients early, the whole thing is ruined, he said. It is the same thing with A.I. You have to be very intentional about what you put into it. Otherwise, it is very difficult to undo.

In 2017, Deborah Raji, a 21-year-old Black woman from Ottawa, sat at a desk inside the New York offices of Clarifai, the start-up where she was working. The company built technology that could automatically recognize objects in digital images and planned to sell it to businesses, police departments and government agencies.

She stared at a screen filled with faces images the company used to train its facial recognition software.

As she scrolled through page after page of these faces, she realized that most more than 80 percent were of white people. More than 70 percent of those white people were male. When Clarifai trained its system on this data, it might do a decent job of recognizing white people, Ms. Raji thought, but it would fail miserably with people of color, and probably women, too.

Clarifai was also building a content moderation system, a tool that could automatically identify and remove pornography from images people posted to social networks. The company trained this system on two sets of data: thousands of photos pulled from online pornography sites, and thousands of Grated images bought from stock photo services.

The system was supposed to learn the difference between the pornographic and the anodyne. The problem was that the Grated images were dominated by white people, and the pornography was not. The system was learning to identify Black people as pornographic.

The data we use to train these systems matters, Ms. Raji said. We cant just blindly pick our sources.

This was obvious to her, but to the rest of the company it was not. Because the people choosing the training data were mostly white men, they didnt realize their data was biased.

The issue of bias in facial recognition technologies is an evolving and important topic, Clarifais chief executive, Matt Zeiler, said in a statement. Measuring bias, he said, is an important step.

Before joining Google, Dr. Gebru collaborated on a study with a young computer scientist, Joy Buolamwini. A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ms. Buolamwini, who is Black, came from a family of academics. Her grandfather specialized in medicinal chemistry, and so did her father.

She gravitated toward facial recognition technology. Other researchers believed it was reaching maturity, but when she used it, she knew it wasnt.

In October 2016, a friend invited her for a night out in Boston with several other women. Well do masks, the friend said. Her friend meant skin care masks at a spa, but Ms. Buolamwini assumed Halloween masks. So she carried a white plastic Halloween mask to her office that morning.

It was still sitting on her desk a few days later as she struggled to finish a project for one of her classes. She was trying to get a detection system to track her face. No matter what she did, she couldnt quite get it to work.

In her frustration, she picked up the white mask from her desk and pulled it over her head. Before it was all the way on, the system recognized her face or, at least, it recognized the mask.

Black Skin, White Masks, she said in an interview, nodding to the 1952 critique of historical racism from the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The metaphor becomes the truth. You have to fit a norm, and that norm is not you.

Ms. Buolamwini started exploring commercial services designed to analyze faces and identify characteristics like age and sex, including tools from Microsoft and IBM.

She found that when the services read photos of lighter-skinned men, they misidentified sex about 1 percent of the time. But the darker the skin in the photo, the larger the error rate. It rose particularly high with images of women with dark skin. Microsofts error rate was about 21 percent. IBMs was 35.

Published in the winter of 2018, the study drove a backlash against facial recognition technology and, particularly, its use in law enforcement. Microsofts chief legal officer said the company had turned down sales to law enforcement when there was concern the technology could unreasonably infringe on peoples rights, and he made a public call for government regulation.

Twelve months later, Microsoft backed a bill in Washington State that would require notices to be posted in public places using facial recognition and ensure that government agencies obtained a court order when looking for specific people. The bill passed, and it takes effect later this year. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment for this article, did not back other legislation that would have provided stronger protections.

Ms. Buolamwini began to collaborate with Ms. Raji, who moved to M.I.T. They started testing facial recognition technology from a third American tech giant: Amazon. The company had started to market its technology to police departments and government agencies under the name Amazon Rekognition.

Ms. Buolamwini and Ms. Raji published a study showing that an Amazon face service also had trouble identifying the sex of female and darker-skinned faces. According to the study, the service mistook women for men 19 percent of the time and misidentified darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. For lighter-skinned males, the error rate was zero.

Amazon called for government regulation of facial recognition. It also attacked the researchers in private emails and public blog posts.

The answer to anxieties over new technology is not to run tests inconsistent with how the service is designed to be used, and to amplify the tests false and misleading conclusions through the news media, an Amazon executive, Matt Wood, wrote in a blog post that disputed the study and a New York Times article that described it.

In an open letter, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Gebru rejected Amazons argument and called on it to stop selling to law enforcement. The letter was signed by 25 artificial intelligence researchers from Google, Microsoft and academia.

Last June, Amazon backed down. It announced that it would not let the police use its technology for at least a year, saying it wanted to give Congress time to create rules for the ethical use of the technology. Congress has yet to take up the issue. Amazon declined to comment for this article.

Dr. Gebru and Dr. Mitchell had less success fighting for change inside their own company. Corporate gatekeepers at Google were heading them off with a new review system that had lawyers and even communications staff vetting research papers.

Dr. Gebrus dismissal in December stemmed, she said, from the companys treatment of a research paper she wrote alongside six other researchers, including Dr. Mitchell and three others at Google. The paper discussed ways that a new type of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins its search engine, can show bias against women and people of color.

After she submitted the paper to an academic conference, Dr. Gebru said, a Google manager demanded that she either retract the paper or remove the names of Google employees. She said she would resign if the company could not tell her why it wanted her to retract the paper and answer other concerns.

The response: Her resignation was accepted immediately, and Google revoked her access to company email and other services. A month later, it removed Dr. Mitchells access after she searched through her own email in an effort to defend Dr. Gebru.

In a Google staff meeting last month, just after the company fired Dr. Mitchell, the head of the Google A.I. lab, Jeff Dean, said the company would create strict rules meant to limit its review of sensitive research papers. He also defended the reviews. He declined to discuss the details of Dr. Mitchells dismissal but said she had violated the companys code of conduct and security policies.

One of Mr. Deans new lieutenants, Zoubin Ghahramani, said the company must be willing to tackle hard issues. There are uncomfortable things that responsible A.I. will inevitably bring up, he said. We need to be comfortable with that discomfort.

But it will be difficult for Google to regain trust both inside the company and out.

They think they can get away with firing these people and it will not hurt them in the end, but they are absolutely shooting themselves in the foot, said Alex Hanna, a longtime part of Googles 10-member Ethical A.I. team. What they have done is incredibly myopic.

Cade Metz is a technology correspondent at The Times and the author of Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World, from which this article is adapted.

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Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Arent Racist? - The New York Times

OnePlus Watch won't come with Google's Wear OS and will run on a custom operating system, OnePlus Co-Founder and CEO Pete Lau confirmed on the company's forum. The anticipated smartwatch was initially speculated to run Wear OS. The company, however, appears to have preferred its custom solution for better power efficiency. The OnePlus Watch is also teased to have a burdenless design and offer seamless connectivity with other OnePlus devices. It will debut alongside the OnePlus 9 series on March 23.

Pete Lau said that instead of running Wear OS by Google, the OnePlus Watch will feature a smart wear operating system that was developed based on a real-time operating system (RTOS). [W]e believe it provides you a smooth and reliable experience while offering a great battery life, covering some of the biggest concerns we've been hearing from people looking to buy a smartwatch, he said while responding to a user on OnePlus Community forums.

In December, Lau said that OnePlus was working with Google to bring improvements including better interoperability to Wear OS. He, however, didn't explicitly mention any details about the presence of Google's operating system on the OnePlus Watch.

Lau took to the OnePlus Community forums to reveal some information about the OnePlus Watch. He said that the smartwatch comes with a stunning and burdenless design that makes it a distinct option in the market. He also highlighted seamless connectivity with OnePlus smartphones, audio peripherals, smart wearables, and OnePlus TVs. This will help users control connected devices directly from their wrist similar to how you can control music or attend voice calls using an Apple Watch.

Our priority for devices that are part of the OnePlus ecosystem is to offer fashionable designs, provide seamless connectivity and deliver a best-in-class user experience. And the new OnePlus Watch is no exception, Lau said.

The OnePlus Watch is also teased to have a best-in-class experience at an affordable price.

The OnePlus Watch is set to arrive alongside the OnePlus 9 series on March 23. It is rumoured to have an IP68-certified build, Warp Charge fast charging support, and built-in heart rate and SpO2 monitoring.

Alongside the OnePlus Watch, OnePlus is speculated to have a top-end OnePlus Watch RX in the works. The latter could run on Wear OS by Google or a tweaked Android version.

Is OnePlus 8T the best 'value flagship' of 2020? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

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OnePlus Watch Wont Run on Wear OS by Google, Will Feature Burdenless Design - Gadgets 360

On Wednesday, Google dropped either a bombshell or a nothingburger (depends who you ask) with its announcement via blog post that it will stop selling ads based on cross-site browsing and third-party cookies.

The bigger news, arguably, is that Google will explicitly not support and perhaps even take steps to hinder industry identity initiatives, such as Unified ID 2.0, initiated by The Trade Desk.

But on the cookie front, people in the advertising industry were a little surprised by the intense reaction to Googles news, considering that its already been more than a year since Google pledged to kill third-party cookie tracking in Chrome by 2022. And because the bell had been tolling for third-party cookies long before then.

The idea that cookies need to be deprecated is quite an old idea, like a decade old, said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. We were talking about this when I was on the board of Aggregate Knowledge, and cookies going away was one of the reasons we sold to Neustar when we did which was nine years ago.

So, why the furor over Googles blog post?

What Google is NOT saying

The answer comes from reading between the lines of what Google has said it will do and what Google doesnt mention.

Google is saying that it will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals on Chrome and also wont use them in its products, by which one can assume Google is talking about its third-party ad products, including DV360, Google Ads and Campaign Manager.

What Google is not saying, or at least makes no mention of, is anything to do with app tracking on Android, tracking on YouTube or tracking on any of its other owned-and-operated properties or services, including Search, Maps and Gmail. (YouTube and search ads are massively lucrative for Google.)

Repudiating third-party signals in Chrome and within its web-based ad products is completely unrelated to Googles ability to continue tracking users across its own services and properties, said Jrgen Galler, CEO and co-founder of Zurich-based cookieless DMP 1plusX.

Google has a universal ID the Google login meaning it will still be able to identify users across all of its services, Galler said.

And there is no reason to believe that Googles assurance that it wont replace third-party cookies marks a shift away from behavioral targeting on Googles owned-and-operated properties, said Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer at performance marketing agency Tinuiti.

But were awaiting further clarity here, Ahene said.

Walling up

For example, Google hasnt provided a third-party cookie sync with YouTube for some time, said Arun Kumar, chief data and technology officer at IPG.

We expect [Google] to continue to use their existing first-party solutions, like first-party cookies and authenticated users, [and] we do expect them to be consistent in this across their range of offerings, Kumar said. Our thinking is that theyll use this approach across all of their inventory, inclusive of YouTube.

The focus on first-party is directly tied to a pattern of recent decisions that demonstrate Google no longer wants to receive, store, process or transmit user-level data, even hashed or pseudonymized data, that comes from outside of their own logged-in products or that isnt of a first-party nature, such as Google Analytics, said Myles Younger, senior director of the data practice at S4-owned programmatic marketing agency MightyHive.

You can draw a straight line from the announcement of the redaction of DoubleClick log files in 2018 to the debut of Privacy Sandbox in 2019 to [the current] announcement, Younger said. Wherever possible, Google clearly doesnt want to handle external user-level data where it cant track that datas provenance or control how its used.

Fly on the wall

But how much better is a tactic like FLoC than third-party cookie tracking from a privacy perspective? That depends on a lot, including how large a cohort is and how many attributes are included.

And although FLoCs are aggregated, they essentially serve the same purpose as third-party cookies, which is to market to individuals based on their observed browsing behavior, said Ghostery President Jeremy Tillman.

Google is scrambling to save face and appease growing user privacy expectations and, once again, is doing so by throwing new labels on old tactics, he said. We should assume that Google doesnt need cross-site web browsing signals to build profiles they have so many other sources of data.

And if Google is missing anything, its safe to assume that itll use some form of predictive analytics to fill in the blanks, Tillman said.

And so its hard not to be a cynic, said Alice Sylvester, a partner at measurement consulting firm Sequent Partners.

I dont necessarily trust them to be doing this for consumer benefits, she said.

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What Google Is And Isn't Saying When It Says It Won't Build Alternative IDs After The Death Of Third-Party Cookies - AdExchanger

The Sell Sider is a column written for the sell sideand contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today's column is written by Tom Kershaw, CTO of Magnite and Chairman of Prebid.org.

For the second time in the past 13 months, Google managed to plunge the world of ad tech into complete chaos Wednesday, despite not saying much thats new or noteworthy. If you believe what you read, its the end of the open Internet as we know it, the upending of the entire publisher ecosystem, and (of course) a financial meltdown to go with it. And its not the first time.

Unfortunately for the sensationalists, the reality is that Googles bombshell announcement was entirely predictable. And even though it ducked the important, difficult questions that the Internet faces as it charts a necessary course to a consumer-first privacy regime, I actually think this is a good thing.

What did Google say? To paraphrase: We are not using e-mail address-based systems as identifiers on our properties. We are focused on the Privacy Sandbox efforts. This was obvious from the start.

But whats not so obvious is its significance. Google is no longer going to use its billions of logged-in users to oppress the rest of the Internet.

What did the industry hear instead? Google is shutting down UID, LiveRamp, and every other ad industry effort to solve for identity with a consent-based model. This is something that Google never said and couldnt really do if it wanted to.

Googles announcement, which was made by Googles Ads team, not Chrome, will have no impact on email-based identity systems such as UID 2.0 and LiveRamps ATS. These solutions will continue because they are based on consumer choice and opt-in.

But more importantly, user log-ins are just one part of the solution that the industry is putting forward to allow for relevant, effective advertising without third-party cookies. Its always been the case that logins would only cover a small percentage of the overall Internet community. In fact, most analysts feel that 20% is the upper bound of how many users we can expect to opt-in to a targeted ad experience.

The majority of the Internet will need another solution and the good news is that solution already exists and is being actively deployed by publishers and advertisers based on open-source and collaboration. That solution is publisher-driven audience segments: addressable audiences created by publisher first-party data, that is collected in a privacy-compliant manner, and presented to buyers in a fully-anonymized fashion.

How did we get here? Publishers have always had direct relationships with consumers. Through those relationships, they got permission to capture data about their interests and preferences, and then use that data to deliver tailored messages and content. In the past, that data was fragmented and uncoordinated, so it didnt provide the scale that advertisers needed.

With the evolution of identity away from third-party cookies (and towards a more privacy-friendly model), publishers have emerged as the party thats best-positioned to obtain meaningful consent from consumers. But this time, publishers are doing it differently. Organizations such as Prebid.org (where Im Chairman) are providing a real sandbox for them to collaborate and innovate.

Prebid publishers are creating collective standards for expressing audiences which theyre presenting to advertisers as anonymized, but highly performant segments. And it's working. Thousands of publisher-based segments are already running in production across the industry. For example, at Magnite (where I moonlight as CTO), more than 10% of our revenue is running through these curated markets and we are just getting started.

Too much of the privacy debate is about competing solutions, but in reality, the new Internet will consist of a combination of user logins, browser-based auctions, and critically publisher-driven solutions that preserve the accuracy and relevancy of todays model while providing an anonymized user experience. Its actually really cool stuff, not the sort of thing that should elicit panic for advertisers or developers.

Ironically, the overlooked part of Googles announcement this week was that they indicated full support for publisher controlled first-party solutions. Publishers play a key role in creating a privacy-first Internet because they are the reason consumers are online to begin with.

In the end, Googles announcement that they will focus on Privacy Sandbox isnt just predictable, its welcome. It means theyre going to actually use the same tools as the rest of the industry. Compared to the last 10 years of ad tech where Google largely left the independent Internet to fend for itself, I count this as progress. Were finally moving in the direction of a level playing field.

To be clear, the announcement will not impact the efficacy of log-in solutions. UID 2.0 and ATS will continue without Googles support, as they have from the beginning. Open source, transparent solutions that give consumers choice will always win. The combination of user logins, publisher first-party segments, and the Chrome-controlled solution, will all coexist to create the foundations of a new, better Internet.

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Google's Non-Announcement Shocks The Ad Industry Again - AdExchanger

YouTube has more than 2 billion users. It generates $20 billion a year. But those numbers dont begin to explain the size and impact of the worlds biggest video site.

So lets try this: YouTube is so big that you almost dont notice it. Its just always there, always on. It seems fundamental to digital life, like texting or email. Maybe, like my kids, you actively go to YouTube for entertainment or education. Maybe youre like a lot of other people and end up watching YouTube without even knowing youre doing it: Youre just watching a video, which means youre watching YouTube.

Its also hard to get your head around how quickly YouTube got to this place: The site didnt exist until 2005. And when Google bought it in 2006, it still seemed possible that the search giant had just wasted $1.65 billion. Sure, YouTube was a good place to watch dogs on skateboards or pirated Lazy Sunday clips, but what else could you do there?

Now we know: YouTube is a place where you can watch everything great stuff, dumb stuff, useful stuff, dangerous stuff. And its a place where you can upload almost anything, if youre inclined. Google is an open platform, meant to quickly distribute anything and everything, without any friction getting in the way.

Whether thats a good thing or a bad thing, or both, depends on your perspective.

As Shirin Ghaffary and I explore on this weeks episode of Land of The Giants: The Google Empire, YouTube and Google didnt take a linear path to get to this place.

For instance: YouTube started out as a money-losing novelty built by a couple of guys from PayPal, and Google had its own plans to dominate internet video. But Google quickly pivoted and killed off its in-house site (theres a reason you dont remember something called Google Video) and snapped up YouTube instead.

Likewise: The first people who succeeded on YouTube didnt really have a plan to succeed on YouTube. They were often just kids, like Smoshs Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, who were doing it for fun and because using YouTube was easy.

But YouTube quickly figured out that it could give the Ian and Anthonys of the world a chance to make money from YouTube by giving them a cut of some of the sites ad revenue. And now theres a universe of people uploading videos and using YouTube for profit or power or both and a constant push and pull within YouTube, which wants all of those videos on its site, except when it discovers that some of them have crossed the line.

What that line is and how YouTube decides what that line is, and why it decides to ignore other stuff that seems line-crossing to many people is a source of continual discussion in and outside of YouTube. It can be very difficult trying to figure out how and why YouTube polices its platform up until June 2020, for instance, David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had his own YouTube channel.

It also seems cleaning up the site will be a never-ending problem for YouTube and the world that YouTube affects. Thats because YouTube is an open platform, so it seems impossible to imagine a world where some combination of carefully written rules, thoughtful moderation, and robust machine learning keep the site free of odious users the kind who might want to use the worlds biggest video site to spread misinformation about vaccines or election results or white supremacy.

But YouTube executives continue to insist that the benefits of running the site as an open platform are worth it that YouTube, just like the internet, is full of everything, and were better off in a world where almost everythings available with a click. Its a complicated discussion, and an important one, which made it a great subject for a podcast: Listen here, and let us know what you think.

For more stories about Googles incredible rise, covering everything from the mobile phone wars to the companys internal tensions to its current antitrust battles, subscribe now to Land of the Giants: The Google Empire.

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The story of YouTube: Recodes Land of the Giants Google podcast - Vox.com

Virtual meetings on Google Meet can sometimes feel a little one-sided. It makes a big difference when participants can actively contribute to the conversation.

That's where Google Meet's poll feature comes in. You can quickly create questions featuring multiple choice answers during the meeting to help keep things engaging and get attendees' responses on record.

Important: To use Google Meet polls, you'll need to have a G Suite Business, Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise plus, or Google Workspace for Education Plus account.

If you're ready to create a poll in Google Meet, access the Activities tab and select "Polls" from the list of options.

Quick tip: To conduct a poll in Google Meet, you'll need to be the meeting's host meaning either you created the meeting, or someone transferred the meeting to you to moderate.

The Activities tab is to the right of the digital clock. Abbey White/Insider

Quick tip: The Activities icon is a triangle, a circle, and a square stacked on top of each other.

The Polls option is second on the Activities tab. Abbey White/Insider

Enter the information you want to poll Google Meet users on. Abbey White/Insider

Quick tip: To add another poll answer, click "Add an option."

Launching a poll will distribute it to everyone in the call. Abbey White/Insider

Quick tip: When you hit "Save," Google Meet will store the poll under the "Activities" tab so you can go back and edit and launch it at a later time.

To respond to a Google Meet poll, you must join a Google Meet with an account that allows polls.

Once a poll is live in Google Meet, you'll see a green dot over the Activities icon notifying you that a poll has launched. Click on "Activities," select the Polls option, and then select your answer from the options listed.

Quick tip: Google Meet will also notify you with a small pop-up message that a poll is live and ready to answer.

Google Meet will keep the poll results private unless the moderator enabled the "Show everyone the results" option. In either case, users will never be able to see the names of other respondents, just the number of votes on the poll.

There are a number of options and tools at your disposal to help you moderate your Google Meet poll.

Once the Google Meet is over, the moderator will receive an automatically generated email with a report on any polls that were conducted.

The moderator can click on the report attachment included in the email to see the names and votes of people who took the poll.

Follow this link:

How to create a poll in Google Meet to engage meeting attendees and gather reactions - Business Insider

Several Android apps are getting some useful updates.

Google recentlyannounced it's rolling out updatesto six different Android apps, from theTalkBack screen reader to Android Auto. The updates add useful new features, like the ability to schedule when a text message will be sent in the Messages app. Google Maps is also receiving an update of its own that adds a true dark mode throughout the entire app, not just when you're using navigation.

There's also an update to Google's password autofill tool that will tell you if your passwords have been leaked and let you know it's time to change it.

Keep in mind, these are rolling updates. That means you may not have access to them right away. The best advice I have is to keep checking the Play Store for app updates.

Below I'll walk you through the new features and how to use them.

Now playing: Watch this: Android's useful new features

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If you use Google's Password Manager to autofill your usernames and passwords in Chrome or Android apps, then this update is for you. Google will now check all of your login credentials to see if they've been leaked or exposed in a hack. If it finds your information, a prompt will let you know you need to change your password.

The new Password Checkup tool is rolling out to Android devices running Android 9 or higher. You can check if you're using Google's autofill service by opening theSettingsapp, then go toSystem>Languages & Input>Advancedand tapAutofill Service. If that path doesn't take you to the right place, since every Android phone is a little bit different, you can use the search tool in the Settings app to look forAutofill. (For example, on the Galaxy S21 Ultra the setting is underGeneral Managementin the settings app.)

Here's what it looks like when Google finds a bad password.

Once you navigate to the Autofill section, you'll want to make sureGoogleis selected.

If you haven't been using Google's autofill tool, then start saving your credentials when it prompts you. If you have been using it, then keep using it as you have been. The tool will let you know when it finds your information was leaked -- you don't have to do anything special to trigger it.

Full dark mode is finally coming to Google Maps.

For fans ofdark mode in Android apps, you'll want to keep checking the Play Store for an update to Google Maps.

Google is finally adding a true dark mode throughout the entire app. Huzzah! Prior to the latest update, Google Maps only offered a dark mode when you were actively using navigation mode. It was better than nothing, sure, but it wasn't ideal.

Once Google Maps updates on your Android phone or tablet, you can turn dark mode on all the time by going toSettings>Themeand then selectAlways in Dark Theme.

Scheduling messages is a convenient feature.

If you're not already using Google Messages as your default text messaging app, this might finally get you to make the switch. Google is rolling out an update that adds the option to schedule when a message is sent. Scheduling messages is especially useful if you don't want to bother someone at the wrong time because they're in a different time zone, or you know they're busy at work. Or you can use it to schedule a message canceling plans that you regret even making.

Once your Messages app receives the latest update, you can start to compose a message just like you always do, but instead of tapping on the send button -- long-press it. A menu will pop up, asking when you want it sent. It's as easy as that.

TalkBack is also receiving a hefty update.

Google's TalkBack accessibility feature is getting a big update to help blind or low vision users navigate and use their Android devices. There are new gestures, navigation options, spoken feedback and menus.

We have more information about theTalkBack update here. If you want to check it out for yourself, make sure to check for app and service updates in the Play Store.

Google is also adding new features to Android Auto and Google Assistant. They're relatively minor updates, but worth taking note of.

Android Auto users are getting the ability to set custom wallpapers that are displayed on their vehicle's screen. Google is also adding voice-activated games that your passengers can play during long road trips. One of the games Google mentions is Jeopardy, which is always a hit. Finally, Google is adding shortcuts to the Android Auto launch screen that will make it easy to check the weather or quick access to contacts for messaging and calls.

Google Assistant is getting improvements when you use voice commands to interact with the digital assistant when your screen is off and the device is locked. Google says that the cards that show information are now bigger, making it easier to read responses from across the room. To ensure the feature is working as expected turn onLock Screen Personal Resultsin your Google Assistant settings page.

Google does big feature releases like this every quarter or so. For example,here are some features added to Google Assistantlast year. If you're someone who'd rather look forward, then check out thenew features we've found so far in Android 12. We also have a running list ofhidden features in Android that we love.

Discover the latest news and best reviews in smartphones and carriers from CNET's mobile experts.

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Google Maps is getting a new trick (plus 5 other Android features coming) - CNET