Landing.Tech #15 — Apple, Google ban use of location tracking in contact tracing apps

We may end up in a real-life George Orwell novel. Maybe he is the one watching us now?

Unlocking tech talent stories

May 11, 2020

After two weeks, we’re back! No, we didn’t go nowhere and we weren’t on holiday, unfortunately. We simply had our first-ever Remote Tech Week and it was awesome. If you didn’t watch it live you can still get all the action on this YouTube Playlist we put together.

But back to our usual schedule now and let’s jump right into it:

Technology can be really powerful and these deepfake audio parodies are a really (awesome) example of that. Using AI to impersonate famous voices, a YouTube channel released several examples of known songs being sung by voices like Barack Obama or George W. Bush. This is a really cool use of speech synthesis models based on the speech patterns and really illustrates what AI can bring to the table.

In more AI-related news, IBM announced the launch of a service that uses AI to automate the real-time detection, diagnosing, and remediation of network anomalies. In times where everybody is working from home, the use of the Internet has skyrocketed so tools that help to deal with those consequences are surely welcome. This tool correlates among data sources to localize the root causes of issues and create an explainable diagnosis while recommending the best course of action. Automation is the future.

With some countries in the world starting the post-emergency state phases, lots of discussion regarding what measures to take end up on tracking systems. Knowing where and with whom people contacted may be an option to fight this virus and so politicians and scientists are speaking about it all around the world. This decision by Apple and Google together definitely will end up crushing some of the options that were being discussed, but let’s wait a couple of more weeks. We may end up in a real-life George Orwell novel. Maybe he is the one watching us now?

And just like that, we’re almost in the middle of May, and I’m already dreaming of those sunsets at the beach. But will I be able to enjoy them without having to measure my temperature upon entry? Or will I have access to only a specific area of the beach while passing my location details to the authorities? That’s probably one of the questions that we will see answered in the next weeks/months and all the privacy discussion that will come with it.

The future starts today.
Pedro Saraiva
Event Producer @ Landing.Jobs

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