Verizon and AT&T have pledged to stop providing information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy.
The data has apparently allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo
Verizon became the first major carrier to declare it would end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others. It did so in a June 15 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. AT&T followed suit Tuesday after The Associated Press reported the Verizon move.
Neither company said they are getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon and AT&T are the two largest U.S. mobile carriers in terms of subscribers.
Chief privacy officer Karen Zacharia said Verizon would be careful not to disrupt “beneficial services” such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance. In an email to the AP, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer cited similar reasons for cutting off the intermediaries “as soon as practical.”
Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C Interactive. Verizon says their contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates.
Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to “terminate their ability to access and use our customers’ location data as soon as possible,” Zacharia wrote.
Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U.S. within seconds. Popular commercial uses for the information include keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention; and targeted marketing offers.
The cutoff won’t affect users’ ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of providing data to third parties with which users have no direct contact.
Spell check was an early convenience for computers. Now there are millions of small utilities to make life easier. Here are Kim Komando’s top 5. Kim Komando, Special for USA Today
Starting your own business takes a whole lot of guts, optimism, and passion. Not to mention a ton of hard work and the need to pinch pennies anywhere you can. The Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that supports education and entrepreneurship in Kansas City, says it also takes a healthy dose of cash: The new average investment needed to get a company off the ground is around $30,000.
Thankfully, there are a few genius tech hacks that can save money, time, and sanity.
1. Repair, don’t replace
Just about everyone needs a fast computer these days, but arming employees with the latest models can be a real budget breaker. While the newest ones are too expensive, second-hand or older notebooks can be painfully glitchy and slow. One inexpensive hack for this is a USB flash drive called Xtra-PC (prices start at $35) that plugs into — and speeds up — aged PCs or Macs.
“I’ve been a consultant for 13 years, and a big mistake a lot of (small and medium-sized businesses) make is to replace perfectly good computers. Not only is this unnecessary, but it also creates a lot of e-waste,” said Ron Forseth, CEO of Forseth Development, Inc. in Colorado Springs. “Most companies need their machines to run at maximum speed and efficiency, and Xtra-PC can prolong the life of a computer by about five years.”
Another option is to call-in quick help nearby. Aaron Watkins, founder of the Sacramento-based STEMtrunk toy subscription rental service, discovered a quick tech fix recently when his team needed a bevy of iPhone battery-replacements. “As an entrepreneur, your phone is your life. I called a service called Puls to fix our phones. These guys came to me within 24 hrs of me needing it, replaced my phone screen and battery in under an hour, and cost less than the Apple recommended vendors (who had appointments days out and wanted to keep my phone overnight),” Watkins said.
2. Go gig economy
Outsourcing quick tech help isn’t the only way to save money. Whether you’re getting a small business off the ground or sustaining a decades-old family enterprise, hiring staff has to be done very, very carefully. If you’re trying to minimize costs, the “gig economy” might just save you a bundle on everything from developers, designers, and finance experts — to people who write blog posts, translate, and even run errands for you.
Some of the top picks include; Upwork, Toptal and Guru for helping find people with the skills many small businesses need. For fast and cheap help with just about everything else, there’s Fiverr, and for more specialized branding and design, several people recommend 99Designs.
“99designs connected us with a terrific designer who was a perfect fit for our needs and nailed our brand aesthetic in a fraction of the time. Using 99designs was a big time and money saver,” Dave Pributsky, founder of 2920 Sleep, wrote in an email.
3. Get a virtual personal assistant
The days of a business owner yelling out of the office door to tell the secretary to schedule an appointment went out with bell bottoms, and today it’s just as easy to use Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to handle it.
No matter what platform you favor, these digital helpers can schedule reminders, keep lists, and look up phone numbers or other information as soon as you ask for it. Even if you don’t find these assistants all that helpful in your personal life, you’ll be surprised at how much they can help streamline day-to-day small business tasks. Schedule this, delete that, search my email for whatever — it’s a dream come true for a scatterbrained business owner just trying to keep it all together.
Gmail deserves a special nod here. “The new Gmail is amazing,” said Nick Desai, co-founder of health startup Heal. “It integrates calendar and email on the same page in a powerful way and makes search better. That power eliminates the need for someone to do my scheduling.”
4. Embrace social media and DIY ads
Several small business owners also rave about advertising and selling on social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram and other apps give you a direct line to your customers, as long as you know how to reach them.
Facebook Business lets you build a social hub for your company for free. You can set your hours, post updates and tell your followers about sales and promotions. Customers can review your business and help bring in new business with word-of-mouth advertising. Similarly, Instagram Business works a lot like its Facebook sibling, letting you create a social presence for your company within the app. You can also post stories and photos to build a conversation about your products or services, and give potential customers a behind-the-scenes look at how your company is growing.
How much does this all matter? Quite a bit, actually. “With one click, our audience can learn more about our products and go directly to our site,” said Shari Lott, Founder & CEO of spearmintLOVE. “Reducing search time and clicks improve conversion and revenue. When we launched Instagram Shopping, we experienced a 25% increase in traffic and an 8% increase in revenue attributable to Instagram Shopping.”
“Technology is the equalizer for small businesses on a budget to contend in the marketplace, said Natasha D. Oates, Founder of UpRetreats.com therapy and life-coaching in North Carolina.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s digital video show TECH NOW. E-mail her at jj@techish.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.
On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such an unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
For years, Android users have had plenty of options for listening to podcasts. The Google Play store offers perfectly competent apps, like Pocket Cast, Stitcher, and Player FM’s simply named Podcast. But Google hasn’t had a homegrown option since 2012, when it discontinued Google Listen just before the Serial-led podcast boom. Tuesday, it corrected that oversight. Google Podcasts is here, and it’s a very promising start.
Much like the recently launched Google Tasks, the Podcasts app feels fairly minimalist at launch. It greets you with section called For You, which includes new episodes of podcasts you’ve subscribed to, a separate tab for any episodes that are currently in progress, and another tab for any that you’ve downloaded. I occasionally use Google Play Music to listen to podcasts—you still can, if for some implausible reason you prefer it over a dedicated app. When I opened the Podcasts app, I was happy to find that the “All 8 Unicorns” episode of Story Pirates was marked at the timestamp where my daughter had left off.
Google
Continue to scroll down, and you’ll see fairly anodyne sets of recommendations: top podcasts overall, trending podcasts, and then the most popular among categories including Comedy, Society & Culture, News & Politics, Sports, Religion & Spirituality, and Arts. There’s a whole lot of public-radio content in that initial mix.
When you search for and click on a given podcast, you can scroll through recent episodes, as you might expect. The Podcasts app will also recommend a related podcast underneath the one you chose. Individual podcast pages is also where you’ll find one of the app’s few fun surprises: Tap on the menu icon in the upper-right corner, and you’re given the option to add the podcast to your homescreen.
As for playback, there’s not much that stands out. You can play, pause, skip forward 30 seconds or skip back 10. The only real granularity comes in the ability to control the speed of playback, with literally 16 speeds to choose from ranging from half to double-time. You can’t rate episodes or series yet, or make playlists, much less enjoy more advanced options like the Overcast app’s recent Smart Resume feature, which ensures that when you pick a podcast back up after taking a break, it starts during a pause in talking.
Even the settings menu could almost be singular instead of plural: It only lets you choose when to auto-remove completed and unfinished episodes.
None of this should register as a complaint. It’s more of a warning to power-podcasters, who might want to stick with Pocket Cast until Google builds out its native solution a little more fully. Personally, I don’t require a ton out of a podcasting app in the same way I don’t make many demands of an FM radio. It makes the sounds I want, when I tell it to, and that’s plenty.
Besides, the real allure of Google Podcasts comes from the broader freight of Google itself. First, the app offers AI-powered recommendations based on what you already subscribe to and your listening patterns. As you continue to use it, the home screen will dynamically change, zeroing in from generic suggestions to more specific ones, like Top podcasts by WYNC Studios, and Popular with listeners of How Did This Get Made? Those nudges seem mostly on point at launch, although you do run into some seeming outliers: Apparently, Real Time with Bill Maher is popular with listeners of Story Pirates, which again is a show that turns children’s adorable, nonsensical stories into scripted radio plays.
Still, Google has built one of the world’s most powerful companies off of recommendations. Hopefully, as it continues to fine-tune its algorithms in Podcasts, it creates real opportunities for discovery, rather than merely surfacing the same top-tier podcasts under different headers.
“The recommendation is helpful and useful, and given the company’s lineage, pedigree, and history of using data to make recommendations, I think we should assume it’ll get better and better at that,” says Erik Diehn, CEO of Midroll Media, a podcast advertising network that works with major shows like Freakonomics Radio and WTF with Marc Maron. “That’s going, I think, to do good things for discovery, and bring new users into podcasts who might think oh, there’s nothing there for me.”
‘I think there’s no question that it will help bring more people into the podcasting world.’
Erik Diehn, Midroll Media
It helps that broadening the horizons of the podcasting world is one of Google’s stated goals here. “While there are more podcasts than ever before, there continues to be an imbalance in who is creating them,” wrote Google Podcasts product manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen in a post announcing the app. “Looking at top charts, only about a quarter of the most popular podcasts tend to be hosted by women, and even fewer by people of color.” He went on to say that Google is partnering with the industry to “increase the diversity of voices and remove barriers to podcasting,” with more details apparently to come this summer. Google did not respond to a request for further comment.
Podcasts has another key advantage in its ability to sync up with other Google Assistant-powered devices, like Google Home. Start a podcast during breakfast on your smart speaker, and you can seamlessly pick it up on the subway from your smartphone. If you’ve bought into the Google ecosystem, it removes another dollop of friction from your day.
Google has already tipped future features, and a commitment to building out Podcasts from here. The company says it’s working on automated subtitles for reading along, and its acquisition of popular podcasting app 60db last fall hints at more to come in the recommendation space.
Beyond your own interest in Podcasts, its very existence amounts to a sea change in the podcasting world. The majority of people who listen to podcasts do so on an iPhone, largely because Apple launched a dedicated Podcasts app all the way back in 2012, and gave it prime real estate on the home screen. A Podcasts app with the full weight of Google behind it could rapidly close that gap just by existing.
“It would have to be an absolutely horrendous experience to not move the needle. They’ve clearly delivered a solid baseline product,” says Diehn. “I think there’s no question that it will help bring more people into the podcasting world.”
Just how many people depends on another open question: Whether Google will make Podcasts part of the bundle of Google apps that ship on Android smartphones by default. Even if not, though, it signals that Android is a platform where podcasts belong, and wraps in the tantalizing prospect of a few AI-powered innovations along the way. Sure took long enough.
Microsoft defended its contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that’s separating families at the U.S.-Mexican border, after a social media uproar over its ties.
“In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border,” it said.
Microsoft didn’t back down from its ties with ICE, whose contract is worth $19.14 million, according to Bloomberg. But the software company said it’s “dismayed” by new actions by the Trump administration to jail immigrant parents who attempt to come to the U.S. without going through legal channels and put their children into detention facilities.
“As a company Microsoft has worked for over 20 years to combine technology with the rule of law to ensure that children who are refugees and immigrants can remain with their parents,” it said.
In a January blog post, Microsoft touted a contract with ICE for its cloud-based software Azure, saying it would help ICE process data faster. The line that resonated with social media over the weekend was Microsoft saying it was “proud to support” the work of ICE in the post.
On Twitter, Microsoft drew outrage in posts that mention how CEO Satya Nadella was also an immigrant and asked Microsoft to take a stand on what’s happening on the border with families being separated.
Microsoft employees chimed in. Larry Osterman, a Microsoft engineer, asked company President Brad Smith how working for ICE jibes with “our ethical stances. … Not cool.”
Agreed. @BradSmi, how on earth does this align with our ethical stances w.r.t. family separation and our public stance on using AI for only ethical purposes. This seems completely antithetical to our public stances. Not Cool.
As a former @Microsoft employee, I’m appalled to see this news. The projects we take on matters, they have real world implications. We can’t hide behind code without thinking about the ethical implications of our work. Do better. https://t.co/PuXQX5oBqS
Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, urged on Twitter for Microsoft employees not to “be complicit” in working with ICE.
If you are a worker building these tools or others at Microsoft, decide now that you will not be complicit. Then, talk to a trusted coworker. Begin building power. If you don’t feel like you know how to begin those conversations, our DMs are open. https://t.co/I6dScfxqlb
— Tech Workers Coalition (@techworkersco) June 18, 2018
Tech CEOs have chimed into the debate as well, decrying the family separations at the Mexico border that have captured national attention with photos and audio of children removed from their parents.
The CEOs of Airbnb, SmugMug and Twilio took to Twitter to speak out against the actions, part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. Through the end of May, almost 2,000 children were separated from adults who said they were their parents or guardians, the Department of Homeland Security said last week.
Tech companies are finding themselves in the crosshairs over government contracts as employees increasingly vocalize their disagreement over the far-reaching consequences of their technologies.
The American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights groups recently demanded Amazon stop selling a facial recognition software tool, called Rekognition, to police and other government entities because they fear it could be used to unfairly target protesters, immigrants and any person just going about their daily business. And Google employees successfully pressured the company to not renew a contract with the Pentagon that some employees feared could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
Microsoft, after being contacted by media organizations about the statement of support for ICE, amended the blog post to take out the “proud” reference. It later updated it to the original statement,
On LinkedIn, Microsoft’s Smith penned a Father’s Day post in which he said the news of migrant children being taken from their families was “especially poignant.”
“When we keep children with their parents, we not only follow in the footsteps of one of the world’s oldest and most important humanitarian traditions, we help build a stronger country,” he wrote.
LOS ANGELES – Google released a new podcast app, Google Podcasts, that it claims will double the size of the podcast listening audience within two years. It eventually will let Google search users see podcasts alongside article and video results when they look up a topic.
Google backs up its ambitions by noting its Android mobile operating system Android has an 85 percent share of mobile. At the start, the mobile version of the Google search app will surface podcast links next to web, image and video links.
“Eight out of 10 smartphone users have an Android phone, and there are over 2 billion Android users,” says Zack Reneau-Wedeen, a product manager for Google. “So the potential to have an impact here is really huge.”
According to market tracker Edison Research, some 50 million people tuned into podcasts monthly in 2017, mostly via the Apple Podcast app on the iPhone. Apple got a head start: Podcasts have been around since 2004 as a vehicle to originally help Apple sell iPods.
Android users have turned to apps such as Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Pocket Casts.
Nick Quah, who writes the “Hot Pod” newsletter about podcasting, says Apple’s market share on most podcasts is 70 percent. “It stands to reason that the overrepresentation of Apple suggests an underutilization of Android,” he says.
Google Podcasts is available for free at the Google PlayStore. After downloading it, start by finding shows and subscribe to them. Google also will make suggestions, based on top listening charts and categories such as tech, news, arts and culture.
Google says that for now, the podcast app is Android only.
Once you start listening to a bunch of shows, Google will sense your listening history and suggest new podcasts for you. Another feature, if you have the Google Home connected speaker: You can listen to a podcast on your phone, pause it, and ask Google Home to play it at home, where it will pick up where you left off.
Reneau-Wedeen says that down the line, Google is looking to add automatic transcription of podcasts to enable better search via its index. So, if a comedian on Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast were to discuss hypothetically slipping on a banana while doing his or her comedy act, and somebody searched for “comedians who slipped on bananas,” the Google mobile app could potentially offer a link to listen.
He notes that more than 1 billion people search on Google daily, mostly via the mobile app on Android.
“When they search, they get articles, videos and images but don’t get audio stories,” he says. “Since there has been an explosion in audio, it’s important we start to treat audio as a first-class citizen throughout Google.”
Google, which makes money based on selling targeted ads to advertisers, is always on the hunt to know more about us and our interests, so the Podcasts app provides another opportunity for sales.
Quah says it’s not inevitable that Google really can double the podcast audience just by using its power. “Simply making something more available within an actively-used platform isn’t any guarantee of greater usage,” he says. It needs to be followed by push from publishers as well, he said.
Follow USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent an email to all employees on Monday morning about a factory fire, and seemed to reference possible sabotage.
Now, CNBC has learned that Musk also sent an e-mail to all employees at Tesla late on Sunday night alleging that he has discovered a saboteur in the company’s ranks.
Musk said this person had conducted “quite extensive and damaging sabotage” to the company’s operations, including by changing code to an internal product and exporting data to outsiders.
In 2016, after a SpaceX rocket exploded while being fueled up before an engine test, Musk and SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell also looked into the possibility of sabotage.
Several employees, from different divisions within Tesla, confirmed receipt of the e-mail to CNBC.
Tesla is currently ramping up production to make its previously stated goal of 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of June. Last week, Tesla announced a broad restructuring, slashing at least 9% of its workforce. Workers who are actively involved in Model 3 production would not be affected, the company said.
Tesla declined to comment on the e-mail.
Here’s the full email:
To: Everybody
Subject: Some concerning news
June 17, 2018 – 11:57 p.m.
I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.
The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move.
However, there may be considerably more to this situation than meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations.
As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don’t love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don’t want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they’re willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they’re willing to cheat in other ways?
Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole. Occasionally, it is much more serious.
Please be extremely vigilant, particularly over the next few weeks as we ramp up the production rate to 5k/week. This is when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us.
If you know of, see or suspect anything suspicious, please send a note to [email address removed for privacy] with as much info as possible. This can be done in your name, which will be kept confidential, or completely anonymously.
Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week!
Will follow this up with emails every few days describing the progress and challenges of the Model 3 ramp.
Thanks for working so hard to make Tesla successful,
If effortlessly paying with your iPhone or Apple Watch easy enough to scare you, don’t worry: This is the normal and healthy response. I, too, was incredibly spooked the first time I used Apple Pay.
The process is much safer than its simplicity would suggest.Tweet It
Fortunately, the process is much safer than its simplicity would suggest. Apple Pay’s inclusion of biometric certification—whether in the form of a fingerprint or a facial scan—is a rock-solid security measure that goes a long way in securing your finances.
When you add a card to the Wallet app using your iPhone’s camera, Apple does not save the photo anywhere on your phone. All of the corresponding information—the card number, expiration date, et cetera—is encrypted, sent to Apple’s servers, and re-encrypted before heading back out to its payment network. In fact, the merchant you happen to be buying from will never actually see your credit card numbers. You can read more about Apple’s dedication to Apple Pay privacy on its website.
Additionally, Apple does not track your purchases, nor does it collect your shopping habits.
Simply put, the security flaws that exist within the Apple Pay ecosystem are on par with the vulnerabilities present in most forms of electronic payment.
— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today’s newsroom and any business incentives.
Happy Tuesday! As we slowly move into the full summer season my mind definitely starts to wander. To distract myself from the fact that I’m not outside right now, I like to do a little online shopping. Each day, Amazon has some incredible deals and price drops, so you can buy the things you actually want without breaking the bank. I sifted through today’s deals and found a few hidden treasures like my favorite blender and a waterproof phone pouch.
1. A robot vacuum for under $200
Vacuuming sucks (pun intended). It’s one of the most tedious chores out there, but if you want your home spic and span, you’re going to have to do it every day. Luckily, robot vacuums exist to do the dirty work for you in between deep cleanings. Typically, the Eufy Robovac 11+ with BoostIQ goes for $250, but right now you can get it for just $180. We love this model because it got a few upgrades from its predecessor with more dirt pick up and more shock absorption, so it won’t be knocking around your furniture. At this great price drop, it’s worth it for some solid cleaning power.
Not to be dramatic, but the NutriBullet changed my life. I couldn’t imagine my mornings without my daily smoothies and this compact blender makes it so dang easy to make them. Not only can I drink straight from the “blending cup,” but it’s super quick to hand wash or I can put it in the dishwasher and be out the door. Right now, NutriBullet Pro is at its lowest price for today only. This upgraded NutriBullet has a higher wattage (900), which makes it even easier to pulverize through fruits and veggies, and it comes with two colossal cups, an emulsifying blade, two flip-top lids, two handled lip rings, two comfort lip rings, and hardcover recipe book for all your blending needs.
Styling your hair can be a real drag and can seem futile in the summer heat. But with the right products, you can get gorgeous locks in no time. Right now, one of the best curling wands we’ve ever tested is down to its lowest price. We love the GHD because it has a subtle taper and a textured finish that helps grip hair in place. Although you can’t adjust the heat from the preset temperature of 365ºF, it only takes 30 seconds to heat up and that temp is great for most hair types.
Whether you’re heading to the beach or the pool, your phone is at an increased risk of getting water damage. To save yourself the trouble of putting your phone in a bag of rice and praying that it will dry out, invest in a waterproof pouch to keep your phone in when you’re near the water. This one from Anker has a watertight seal and you can still use the touchscreen while it’s in the pouch. Plus, it’s less than $10 right now, so you won’t have to spend much to keep your phone dry.
When you have the A/C blasting this summer, you’re going to want a nice down comforter to snuggle up with at night. This one from Utopia is super soft, hypoallergenic, and machine washable. Right now, you can get a queen-sized comforter for less than the cost of a twin-sized one. At this price, it’s perfect to pick up for a guest room or to replace your current comforter, especially if you’re still using the same dirty one from college.
I was already an Apple junkie when HomeKit came out, and its easy setup and Siri control made it a natural fit for my home. But sometimes HomeKit can’t do everything you want it to, or you’ll find a cool product or service you’d love to use but it doesn’t support HomeKit natively. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to get better control of your HomeKit.
The answer to your smart home customization prayers
IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is an easy automation platform for connected devices and social media services. IFTTT uses these things called “applets” to perform an action based on a trigger, which gives you new ways to connect to your devices.
You can find hundreds of already-made applets on the IFTTT website or in the mobile app, and you can even create your own. For example, if you add a photo to Instagram, there’s an applet that will automatically tweet it for you. Apple fans even get some iOS-specific channels of supported triggers and actions to use, such as actions that happen when your iPhone is in a certain location.
And if you own smart home devices like security cameras, smart locks, lights, and more, you may be able to create custom iOS-based applets that help you get even more out of your tech. Here are 7 fun ideas to get you started.
1. Turn an old iPhone or iPad into a security camera
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Put your retired devices back to work.
If you have an old iPhone or iPad that still works but is just collecting dust, you can make it useful by transforming it into a security camera. Just install the Manything app on it, and leave it recording. Then, you’ll want to set up this IFTTT applet, which will email you a video clip when motion is detected.
Bring your iPhone and your Alexa speaker together to get more done.
Lord knows I do not need more to-do lists. Apple’s Reminders app can be a good place for everything to go, because it’s so accessible. You can view and manage reminders on a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and add them by speaking to Siri on any of those devices or the fancy new HomePod speaker, and even send copied text and links to reminders via the iOS Share Sheet.
So if you’re a mostly iOS house but you have some Echo or other Alexa-compatible devices around—and you might, Alexa is everywhere these days—you can speak your reminders to Alexa and have them dumped into your iOS Reminders too. Just use this IFTTT applet to send Alexa’s reminders to iOS reminders, and this one for Alexa’s shopping list.
3. Find your phone without asking for help
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Stop bugging your roommates to stop everything and help you track down your missing phone.
I have a huge, embarrassing problem with losing my iPhone inside my own home. The Apple Watch has a button in the control center that can page the paired iPhone, and after fitness tracking it’s probably the feature I use most. Of course if someone else is home, you could sheepishly ask them to call your phone so you can find it.
But what if no one’s home and you don’t have an Apple Watch? The inexpensive, HomeKit-friendly Logitech POP can be your backup, because it supports an IFTTT applet that calls your phone when you press the POP button. Now only if it could locate the Apple TV remote…
4. Welcome home family members with August
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Create custom routines for everyone that comes to your home.
August’s Smart Lock Pro (one of our favorites) has HomeKit support to let you lock and unlock the door by voice. And you can have Siri check that it’s locked as part of a nighttime routine. Plus, August has an IFTTT channel, and applets can be triggered by specific people unlocking the lock, either with their smartphone or by using the optional August Smart Keypad.
That means different things can be programmed to happen when different people unlock the door, even if they haven’t programmed their own HomeKit scenes and automations. For example, I could have IFTTT turn on my LIFX lights when the dogwalker pops in, while family members coming home from work or school get both lights and climate control.
5. Keep an eye on your home
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Automate your home climate control simply.
This handy little iHome monitor ($49.95 from Apple) has five sensors—motion, temperature, light, sound, and humidity—that can trigger notifications or HomeKit automations. The iHome app can send you push notifications, but if certain people in the house would rather get an SMS text message, email, or even a phone call about a drastic change in temperature, motion being detected, and so on, IFTTT has applets for that.
6. Use Siri to log meals in Apple Health
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Now you have no excuse not to track your calories.
This IFTTT applet lets you log meals into Apple’s Health app by just quickly typing the name of the food and the calories (or just the calories) into IFTTT’s own Note Widget. Better yet, you can do this with Siri, for a hands-free way to add up the day’s calorie count.
You’ll need to download the IFTTT app and grant the applet access to the Health app before you can use this service. You can activate the applet on IFTTT’s website, but to customize it, switch to the mobile app. There, you’ll find the option to enable Siri, and you can even add a button to your iOS device’s home screen.
You can also add a shortcut to your device’s home screen. When you tap that icon, a window pops up where you can type in the name of each food item and the calorie count, separated by commas, or even just the calorie counts. That data will be synced to the Health app as calories consumed.
For Siri control, say, “Take a note with an applet,” and then pause. Siri will ask what the note should say, and you tell it the name of the food, say the word comma, and then the number of calories: “meatloaf comma 200.” Unfortunately, Siri does get confused if you have too many Siri-enabled IFTTT applets, so don’t go crazy.
7. Remember to keep your Arlo cameras charged
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Take better control of your home security.
Arlo, our favorite indoor security cameras, support HomeKit, and like most battery-powered connected devices, they send you a notification on your iPhone when the camera’s battery needs to be charged. But the last mile—from seeing the notification to taking action on it—is up to you.
Luckily, IFTTT has an Arlo channel, and its most useful applet adds a to-do to your iPhone’s Reminders app to help you remember to actually do it.
If you don’t use Reminders, don’t worry—it has its own IFTTT channel. The right applet will automatically sync new Reminders to another IFTTT-supported list, like Todoist, Toodledo, Remember the Milk, Trello, and more.
The World Health Organization says that compulsively playing video games now qualifies as a new mental health condition, in a move that some critics warn may risk stigmatizing too many young players. (June 18) AP
Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version wrongly characterized the timing of the American Psychiatric Association’s position on gaming disorders and the date when it included it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders appendix.
Can someone truly be addicted to video games? The World Health Organization thinks so – but some mental health experts strongly disagree.
The World Health Organization on Monday classified “gaming disorder” as a diagnosable condition, giving mental health professionals a basis for setting up treatment and identifying risks for the addictive behavior. But it’s a stance contested by some mental health professionals.
“There was a fairly widespread concern that this is a diagnosis that doesn’t really have a very solid research foundation,” said Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist and media researcher at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla. Monday
The American Psychiatric Association held to its earlier position that there was not “sufficient evidence” to consider gaming addiction as a “unique mental disorder.” So did the The Society for Media Psychology and Technology, a division of the American Psychological Association, which earlier this year released a policy statement expressing concern about the WHO’s proposal, saying, “the current research base is not sufficient for this disorder.”
The disagreement casts veil of confusion over how to approach a behavior associated with some deaths over the last two decades and as parents grapple with the increased popularity of online gaming.
The Geneva-based WHO said it will include “gaming disorder” in the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases, which is due out this month and is used by professionals across the globe to diagnose and classify conditions. It will describe thedisorder as “impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.”
But some mental health professionals have been fighting this classification, worried that it’s more grounded in moral concerns than science.
The symptoms are not clear-cut and there’s not designated treatment for the WHO diagnosis, Ferguson said.
The WHO’s “gaming disorder” diagnosis would apply togamers with fractured connections to friends and family and who exhibit impaired academics and indifference toward areas of life outside gaming for at least 12 months.
Only a small percentage of people across the world deal with this disorder, according to the WHO. But the number suffering from this mental health condition is enough to study the behavioral pattern and create a treatment program, the organization says.
From 0.3 percent to 1 percent of the general population might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of “internet gaming disorder,” according to a study published in the November 2016 American Journal of Psychiatry and referenced on the American Psychiatric Association blog in May 2017.
The APA included the disorder in the appendix of the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders along with caffeine use disorder and other conditions to stimulate research into those disorders.
Not all experts were critical of WHO’s stance. “I can’t imagine they came to this decision lightly,” said Iowa State University psychology professor Douglas Gentile. “(It) undermines the ability of public health professions to do their jobs if we’re second-guessing them and their work.”
For parents concerned about their child, teen or young adult, some more practical advice involves assessing their kids’ lifestyle and health. Are they giving up their friends or other hobbies for games? “But if they keep their grades up (and their) friends and hobbies, then it’s not an addiction,” Gentile said.
Other signs of concern: Kids not sleeping or having health problems.
“Sometimes gaming overuse can be a symptom that something is going wrong for the child,” said Ferguson, who also co-authored Moral Combat: Why the War on Video Games is Wrong with Patrick Markey. “The likelihood is the problem is bigger than gaming and gaming didn’t cause it.”
Medical professionals are more focused on the reason causing the behavior than the behavior of playing video games itself, said Heather Senior Monroe, director of program development at Newport Academy, which has treatment centers for teens struggling with mental health issues in California, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. “The main characteristics are very similar to substance abuse disorder and gambling,” she said.
“The behavior is like any other self harming behavior – a way to escape reality,” Monroe said. “The treatment is then about why. Why does that person want to escape their reality so much?”
The answer: depression and anxiety, usually, Monroe said.
As interest in online games has risen internationally, there have been extreme cases of death tied to marathon video game sessions. Last year, a 35-year-old Virginia Beach man died after a 24-hour marathon session of the World of Tanks video game, broadcast on video game streaming service Twitch.
China, too, has been hit with deaths from addictive online game behavior with separate deaths in 2007 and 2011. More recently, in 2015, a man died in a Shanghai internet cafe after playing World of Warcraft for 19 consecutive hours.
Other deaths connected to marathon game sessions in the last six years have occurred in Taiwan, Russia and the U.K.
To address the issue, South Korea in 2011 passed a law prohibiting those under 16 from playing online games between midnight and 6 a.m. However in 2014, the country amended the law, allowing parents to lift the ban on their children.
Seven weeks after Iran’s conservative-led judiciary banned the secure communications app Telegram inside the country, Iranians are still reeling from the change. Though Telegram has critics in the security community, it has become wildly popular in Iran over the last few years as a way of communicating, sharing photos and documents, and even doing business. The service is streamlined for mobile devices, and its end-to-end encryption stymies the Iranian government’s digital surveillance and censorship regime. If the government can’t see what you’re talking about and doing, it can’t block or ban behavior it doesn’t like. Telegram’s defenses, combined with robust support for Farsi, have attracted 40 million active Iranian users—nearly half the country’s population.
On Tuesday, the Center for Human Rights in Iran published a detailed report on the profound impact of blocking Telegram, based on dozens of firsthand accounts from inside the country. Researchers found that the ban has had broad effects, hindering and chilling individual speech, forcing political campaigns to turn to state-sponsored media tools, limiting journalists and activists, curtailing international interactions, and eroding businesses that grew their infrastructure and reach off of Telegram.
The report found that many Iranians continue to use the service through circumvention tools, namely VPNs. Iranians tend to be familiar with and adept at using these options, because they also rely on them to access other blocked online services like Facebook. But the Iranian government’s technological capabilities have evolved as well, making it increasingly difficult to maintain usable access to Telegram.
“The only channel of communication that was unfiltered was Telegram. For many Iranians the internet is Telegram and Telegram is the internet,” says Omid Memarian, deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran. “It was like a huge hole in the country’s wall of censorship, so our expectation was that sooner or later they would block that hole.”
‘For many Iranians the internet is Telegram and Telegram is the internet.’
Omid Memarian, Center for Human Rights in Iran
Based in Dubai, Telegram has publicly resisted Iranian government efforts to force it to comply with censorship demands. As Iran has tightened its technological stranglehold on content availability, hardline conservatives within the Iranian government have increasingly blamed Telegram for mounting unrest and resentment toward the regime. Officials blocked Telegram briefly in December 2017 amid widespread street protests over government corruption and unemployment.
“Foreign messaging networks should comply with the policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and should not publish immoral material,” Abolhassan Firouzabadi, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme Cyberspace Council said in November. “If they cooperate with us, there won’t be any problem. Otherwise, we will move towards introducing restrictions against them.”
The recent, long term ban was mandated by Iran’s judiciary, and wasn’t initiated by the government departments that typically oversee technology and censorship policy. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani even criticized the ban publicly in May a few days after it went into effect. It moved forward anyway.
The researchers found that the ban immediately impacted personal communications and businesses—like advertising and marketing groups—run through Telegram with few comparable communication services to take its place. Even the government itself relies on Telegram to function smoothly.
“Email is not widely used. But with Telegram, email has become irrelevant,” says Ahmed, a government employee interviewed for the research. “We send files, reports, letters and office communications through Telegram. When Telegram was blocked in January, it created serious problems for us. Sometimes the ministerial offices could not send letters because of problems with installing circumvention tools.”
Because Telegram subsumes so many web functions, Iranians have actively fought to stay on it. “What we are seeing is even after the ban, using of Telegram has not dropped off as much as you would think,” says Amir Rashidi, an internet security and digital rights researcher at the Center for Human Rights in Iran. “The government has blocked some circumvention tools, and not everyone has access to them, but Telegram is still operating in Iran. The ban has not been fully successful yet.”
‘The government paid a large price by losing the trust of people who used to be considered their supporters.’
Omid Memarian
Iran’s educated middle class and its more affluent citizens have long had at least sporadic access to circumvention tools for defeating the country’s censorship regime. So the government’s information-control initiatives have generally been more successful with disenfranchised groups. But Memarian points out that this population—typically a reliable base for conservative Iranian leaders—was actually fueling the protests in December. And he adds that blocking Telegram, a move meant to limit this population’s access to organizing tools, seems to be having effects the Iranian government did not intend.
“Prior to banning Telegram, the people who could feel the lack of free expression and sense the lack of freedom in general were from the educated middle class, from the civil society—a relatively small group,” Memarian said. “But now for the first time someone had to block something from 40 million people, so people who had no idea what it means to lose your freedom online, they got it. The government paid a large price by losing the trust of people who used to be considered their supporters.”
Though the government ban hasn’t actually eliminated Telegram from Iran and, if anything, has fueled government opposition, the move to block it and the judiciary’s ability to quickly initiate this plan indicates consolidated power and a unified approach within the government. “There is a perception that the government in Iran is a moderate government. Over the past few years the president has made a few remarks that people should have access to the internet and on a few occasions the government has actually prevented the blocking of messaging apps,” Memarian says. “But our research shows that there’s a consensus on blocking Telegram, it seems that it’s one of the major policies within the state. So that perception that it’s a moderate government is wrong.”
With summer upon us, you’re no doubt tending your garden. Which hopefully means you’re composting too.
Using food waste to enrich your soil benefits the earth in a number of ways, including reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and decreasing methane emissions in landfills. And while it’s difficult to recycle things like cans and plastics yourself, composting is something you can do at home pretty easily. Collect food scraps, add some water, stir the mix to provide oxygen, let it all sit long enough to decompose, and voila: Your plants have never been happier.
But not everyone has space for keeping a compost heap, and not everyone’s got a green thumb. Some cities have mandated composting services that collect food scraps from residents and do all the dirty work at a central facility. But until composting is mandated everywhere, you might have to get creative and team up with neighbors to make and share compost.
That’s something the team behind ShareWaste wants to facilitate. Launched in 2016, the app uses a digital map to connect individuals with food scraps to nearby neighbors who have a compost system like a heap or a bin. Users accepting compost scraps can mark their compost site on the map for other users to find. Nearly 6,000 users are currently signed up for ShareWaste across the globe.
To become a user, ShareWaste asks for an email address and a first name. Next, you can add your compost station to the map. Specify if you’d like scraps for garden compost or for a chicken run (many chicken owners use the birds to help process food and yard waste), and whether your operation is for an individual household or a larger community. On the map, sites are represented by three different icons: The chicken icon means a site that uses scraps to feed animals; the flower icon stands for a larger community garden compost; and the most common icon looks like your average wooden compost bin, representing home-run composts.
Clicking an icon shows you a bit more information about that specific site, like the first name of its user, what kind of scraps it takes, and its location. To protect user privacy, the exact address of the host is hidden, so users must message hosts through the app to arrange meeting times and drop-offs.
Compost World
Whether or not you’re dealing with compost, browsing the map is pretty cool. It gives you a little insight into grassroots waste management infrastructure, and tech trends across the globe. In the United States, I counted over 100 compost sites, mostly planted on the East Coast. Some of them are lone dots, but most are clumped together around cities. In Texas, there’s one in Dallas and five others clumped in neighboring towns less than 40 miles away. There aren’t any in New York City, and only one in San Francisco—cities with municipal composting programs in place. (The user behind that San Francisco Bay area site is named Doug. He hasn’t had much luck on ShareWaste, but he does have half a million worms and is currently experimenting with rabbit droppings.)
Head south to Latin America and you’ll see a mere two sites; one in Ecuador and one in Costa Rica, two countries known for their environmental conservation policies. In Africa, you can count four. But scroll over to the UK or the Eastern coast of Australia, and you’ll find heaps of heaps.
Dirt Down Under
ShareWaste was started after founders Eliska Bramborova and Tomas Brambora relocated from Prague to Sydney. They didn’t know anyone, and it’s never easy to meet your neighbors in a new city. Unless, that is, you start bringing them your food scraps.
With a growing pile of scraps, the couple took to a community Facebook page to see if they could find any takers. Within half an hour, they had found a place to bring their waste. Better yet, they got to know their neighbors.
Now they have three compost hosts. One of them, an American guy, occasionally gives them homemade kimchi when they drop off their scraps. In return, they bring him homemade jam. “You know,” says Bramborova, “there’s like, a little economy growing.”
The meetups can be educational too. When users drop off their scraps, they see first-hand the ways a person can compost from home. After enough visits, they might want to start their own garden or their own compost site. And since chickens are frequently the recipients of collected food scraps, people get to learn about keeping those too.
“It’s sustainability,” Bramborova says, “from the people’s side. Connecting communities and encouraging them to take steps (toward) a more sustainable home.”
Speaking of sustainability, the couple is searching for ways to keep their app alive. Managing the online community—not to mention a baby—takes all of their spare time. But Bramborova is optimistic they’ll find a business partner to ease the weight of running ShareWaste. Hopefully, it’s one who shares their vision of turning compost into community, or as Bramborova says, “waste into treasure.”
Sea level rise driven by climate change is set to pose an existential crisis to many US coastal communities, with new research finding that as many as 311,000 homes face being flooded every two weeks within the next 30 years.
The swelling oceans are forecast repeatedly to soak coastal residences collectively worth $120 billion by 2045 if greenhouse gas emissions are not severely curtailed, experts warn. This will potentially inflict a huge financial and emotional toll on the half a million Americans who live in the properties at risk of having their basements, backyards, garages or living rooms inundated every other week.
“The impact could well be staggering,” said Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This level of flooding would be a tipping point where people in these communities would think it’s unsustainable.
“Even homes along the Gulf coast that are elevated would be affected, as they’d have to drive through salt water to get to work or face their kids’ school being cut off. You can imagine people walking away from mortgages, away from their homes.”
The UCS used federal data from a high sea level rise scenario projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and combined it with property data from the online real estate company Zillow to quantify the level of risk across the lower 48 states.
Under this scenario, where planet-warming emissions are barely constrained and the seas rise by about 6.5 feet globally by the end of the century, 311,000 homes along the US coastline would face flooding on average 26 times a year within the next 30 years—a typical lifespan for a new mortgage.
The losses would multiply by the end of the century, with the research warning that as many as 2.4 million homes, worth around a trillion dollars, could be put at risk. Low-lying states would be particularly prone, with a million homes in Florida, 250,000 homes in New Jersey and 143,000 homes in New York at risk of chronic flooding by 2100.
“Unfortunately, many coastal communities will face declining property values as risk perceptions catch up with reality.”Rachel Cleetus, Union of Concerned Scientists
This persistent flooding is likely to rattle the housing market by lowering property prices and making mortgages untenable in certain areas. Flood insurance premiums could rise sharply, with people faced with the choice of increasing clean-up costs or retreating to higher ground inland.
“Unfortunately, in the years ahead many coastal communities will face declining property values as risk perceptions catch up with reality,” said Rachel Cleetus, an economist and climate policy director at UCS. “In contrast with previous housing market crashes, values of properties chronically inundated due to sea level rise are unlikely to recover and will only continue to go further underwater, literally and figuratively.”
The report does not factor in future technological advances that could ameliorate the impact of rising seas, although the US would be starting from a relatively low base compared with some countries given that it does not have a national sea level rise plan. And the current Trump administration has moved to erase the looming issue from consideration for federally funded infrastructure.
The oceans are rising by about 3 mm a year due to the thermal expansion of seawater that’s warming because of the burning of fossil fuels by humans. The melting of massive glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica is also pushing up the seas—NASA announced last week that the amount of ice lost annually from Antartica has tripled since 2012 to an enormous 241 billion tons a year.
This slowly unfolding scenario is set to pose wrenching choices for many in the US. Previous research has suggested that about 13 million Americans may have to move due to sea level rise by the end of the century, with landlocked states such as Arizona and Wyoming set for a population surge.
“My flood insurance bill just went up by $100 this year, it went up $100 the year before,” said Philip Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami. “People on the waterfront won’t be able to stay unless they are very wealthy. This isn’t a risk, it’s inevitable.
“Miami is a beautiful and interesting place to live—I’m looking at a lizard on my windowsill right now. But people will face a cost to live here that will creep up and up. At some point they will have to make a rational economic decision and they may relocate. Some people will make the trade-off to live here. Some won’t.”
