Trans women and non-binary femme tech entrepreneurs have a new legal resource

Transgender and gender non-conforming people are at risk of injustice and discrimination in education, housing, healthcare, public accommodations and employment. As a result of such widespread discrimination against trans and gender non-conforming people, they can be subject to exclusion from spaces that offer tools and resources around entrepreneurship and business development.

Through FEMPRENEUR.XYZ, trans women and non-binary femme entrepreneurs will be able to access pro-bono in-person or web-based services to help them incorporate their businesses and legally change their names. This is all thanks to a partnership between Pipeline Angels, a network of women investors, law firm Goodwin and Riley Hanson of Inclusion Through Innovation.

“A name is a signature of who a person is,” Hanson told me. “For trans people, having their correct name on their documentation, and being able to use it in all situations where a name is normally used, can prevent them from being misgendered and it’s a way to say ‘this is who I truly am’ to the world.”

Meanwhile, it can be dangerous to have a legal name that could out someone as trans or non-binary. When trans and gender non-conforming people were required to present their IDs that did not match their gender identity/expression, 40 percent of those surveyed reported being harassed, 3 percent reported being attacked or assaulted and 15 percent reported being asked to leave, according to a 2011 transgender discrimination survey conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

It also can be costly to change all of the appropriate documents, contracts and licenses after incorporating a business. That’s why FEMPRENEUR.XYZ wants to make sure that when trans or gender non-conforming entrepreneurs incorporate their businesses, they are registering the business under the name they actually go by.

“If we’re helping [participants] to incorporate businesses with their legal name, which is misgendering them, they’d have to redo all the paperwork,” Pipeline Angels founder and CEO Natalia Oberti Noguera told me. “It’d be great if we could help them get the correct legal name before they even do any of the business incorporation so they can have their papers from day one with their correct name that is legal and doesn’t misgender them.”

Another goal of FEMPRENEUR.XYZ is to try to get more trans women of color to participate in the Pipeline Angels pitch summit. Through the pitch summit, Pipeline Angels has invested more than $2 million in more than 30 companies.

“I’m passionate about activating local capital for entrepreneurs,” Oberti Noguera said. “When the whole anti-trans bill happened, I took a moment and was like, as a cis ally, what should I do. This is where I had my aha moment. How amazing would it be if most, if not all entrepreneurs who applied to Charlotte’s Pipeline Angels summit were trans women or non-binary femme entrepreneurs.”

That’s when Oberti Noguera reached out to Hanson. Hanson, a non-binary femme, said they didn’t feel like they were eligible to apply for Pipeline Angels because of how they identify. So, Oberti Noguera decided to update the pitch summit criteria with more inclusive language.

Through FEMPRENEUR.XYZ, Oberti Noguera and Hanson hope to reach at least 40 people through the in-person launch event in Charlotte, an in-person event in New York and even more people via a webinar hosted on AerialSpaces, an online events platform founded by Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler and Tiffany Mikkell. Anyone who is interested in participating in the FEMPRENEUR.XYZ entrepreneur workshop can sign up here.

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Snowden docs link NSA to Equation Group hackers

A group calling itself the ShadowBrokers dumped data online last weekend that it claimed to have stolen from a hacking team widely believed to be linked to the NSA. The data contained vulnerabilities affecting major firewall products and ignited speculation that the NSA had been hacked.

Expert analysis of the data suggested that the NSA and the Equation Group are one and the same, but confirmation came today from The Intercept, which found references to the dumped malware in its trove of documents provided by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The Intercept reports:

The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public. The draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific 16-character string, “ace02468bdf13579.” That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers leak in code associated with the same program, SECONDDATE.

The Snowden documents show that tools were used in spying operations against Pakistan and Lebanon. The data posted by the ShadowBrokers marks the first time NSA hacking tools have become publicly available, causing concern that the tools could be used more widely.

The Intercept published the documents that reference these Equation Group tools so you can read them for yourself.

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Paving the way for the autonomous truck

Google has long held the spotlight in developing driverless technology; however, with the emergence of Otto and Elon Musk’s announcement of a Tesla Semi, “driverless trucks” are coming to the forefront of the autonomous vehicle conversation.

One major reason the trucking industry is so interested in driverless technology is a chronic shortage of truck drivers, which is threatening to get worse as the Baby Boom generation hits retirement age.

But despite the increased spotlight on autonomous trucks, the reality is that trucking technology still has a long way to go before we see trucks on the road without drivers.

In the meantime, many new technology advances are already helping with the driver shortage by expanding the impact of today’s drivers — while also making trucks and highways safer.

These advanced technology systems, collectively referred to as “Advanced Driver Assistance Systems” (ADAS), begin with simple convenience tools, like power steering, cruise control and automated gear changing. These tools are so common in passenger cars that most of us take them for granted, but they are crucial stepping stones toward higher degrees of vehicle autonomy.

Tools like traction control and anti-lock braking systems (ABS) go beyond mere convenience, and are especially helpful for truck drivers. They act as skill compensators, making it easier and safer for drivers to address challenging road conditions.

The same goes for advances in electronic stability control (ESC) — the computerized technology improves a vehicle’s stability by actively assessing road conditions to adjust vehicle handling in order to reduce potential skidding and roll overs. Radar and digital-camera technologies further elevate ADAS by compensating for drivers’ blind spots and detecting lane departures.

Even more impressive is what happens when these tools work together. The combined technology is capable of detecting objects in the truck’s path, alerting the driver, then automatically braking the vehicle — if necessary — in advance of a potential collision. Adaptive cruise control also uses laser- and radar-based systems to help trucks maintain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead.

In the trucking business, beyond the obvious importance of assisting the driver in safer vehicle operation, risk mitigation is also a powerful motivator. Because trucks and the cargo they carry are significantly bigger than passenger vehicles, truck accidents can carry major price tags. By reducing the kinetic energy of an accident, such systems can mitigate both personal injury and property damage. Ultimately, the goal is to convert most accidents into near-misses — or better.

In addition to an end goal of autonomy, risk avoidance is a powerful incentive for trucking companies to adopt such technologies. Combining these tools enables vehicle platooning — the ability to line up trucks in a row and automatically brake and accelerate them as one. Demonstrations of this technology in Nevada, and most recently in Europe, shows how close the industry is getting to fully autonomous trucks.

This technology is continually being perfected through initiatives like Mcity, a public-private R&D partnership at the University of Michigan that is working to develop a commercially viable ecosystem of connected and automated driverless vehicles in urban and suburban environments.

Frankly, there’s never been a more exciting time to be part of the trucking industry. Innovations in vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-anything communication will push the envelope beyond even these advances. By improving the flow of traffic, such systems can enable today’s highway infrastructure to be used more efficiently.

As a result, beyond improved productivity for drivers, we’ll also see a reduction in the number and severity of accidents, greatly improved fuel economy and significant environmental benefit. While there is still time before on-highway driverless trucks are the norm, there are still several technologies available today that augment drivers’ skills to make the road smoother and safer.

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Developing a global financial architecture

An odd paradox exists in the way capital moves around the world — or doesn’t — from developed to developing countries.

A few specific technology hurdles halt the flow of money, at the personal level, from transferring wealth to and investing in emerging markets. Issues with ledgers of exchange, unique identifiers, transfer costs and points of access all impact capital flows across borders.

Innovative firms have made strides developing solutions for each, but a comprehensive technology answer still remains to be found.

“A World Awash in Money”

On a global scale, western economies are awash in cheap investment capital chasing anemic returns. Capital in the global financial economy is so plentiful that central banks in countries like Sweden, Switzerland and Japan now offer negative interest rates on deposits. This means that investors essentially have to pay to “park” the funds that they can’t invest — and choose to do so en masse because the nominal losses from negative rates outweigh the potential significant losses from investment.

Over time, capital pools up, and when attractive investment opportunities do come up, they’re quickly oversubscribed — look at the late-stage Silicon Valley venture capital market in 2015 for evidence.

Emerging markets, meanwhile, generally offer more lucratively priced investment prospects. A corporation based in Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, might offer higher interest rates when it issues debt to raise capital than would a similar company in the U.S. But that debt is priced to account for the increased risk of operating in a country without a well-developed “trust architecture,” which slows the flow of assets from advanced to emerging markets.

The lack of trust architecture is the defining stumbling block that keeps money from moving more easily to the developing world. In their Insights article A World Awash in Money, Bain & Company define trust architecture as strong property rights protections, reliable legal systems and institutional depth. What this really boils down to is safety and transparency: People want to see that the money they send across borders is going where it is supposed to. Though the examples Bain uses detail larger foreign direct investments, these architecture problems persist even at the peer-to-peer level.

(One thing to note: The World Bank recently started recommending against the use of the “developing” and “developed” distinction, because countries are stratified between so many levels of development that it’s tough to break them into two distinct groups. For this article, let’s assume that developing or emerging economies are those that are the net recipients of remittances, while developed or advanced economies are net remitters.)

In the U.S., anyone can deposit a check to a checking account with the snap of an iPhone camera, pay a friend using Venmo and Facebook or buy goods online with PayPal, which provides fraud protection and arbitration. The trust we place in these systems doesn’t necessarily exist in countries without the institutions to support them. It’s harder to send remittances to family members in foreign countries, or make personal loans to friends across borders.

To take the Bain analogy further, if you think of capital as a large reserve of water pooling up in advanced economies, the missing elements of trust architecture pile up to build a dam that stops the water from flowing downstream to emerging markets.

Undamming the river

So what obstacles does technology need to overcome to create a reliable infrastructure to move money to emerging economies?

Creating a reliable, distributed ledger of exchange

In his insightful article, When Bitcoin Grows Up, British journalist John Lanchester dives into why, historically, banks came about in the first place. When we spend money or get paid or give a loan, what we’re really doing is making an entry on a register. That entry says “this thing of value is being transferred.” Before the invention of common currencies, people would barter goods directly, or keep informal “IOUs” to log debts. The creation of banks allowed people to log their transactions in a centralized, authoritative ledger — the banker’s.

Much of the developing world has a ledger problem. Unsurprisingly, checking account penetration is significantly lower in developing countries, where only 41 percent of the population have accounts, than in the developed world, where 89 percent do. The differences are even more stark when you look at adults with only primary education (10 percent) or credit card holders (7 percent) in the developing world. Though it’s difficult to paint heterogeneous markets in such broad strokes, the trend is clear — poorer people have less access to banks. This makes it hard to store and transact money.

One solution, which Lanchester evaluates thoroughly, is that of digital currencies based on technology such as blockchain. Blockchain provides a distributed database that records every transaction users make of currencies, such as Bitcoin, based on that database. This allows people to exchange money peer-to-peer, instead of having to rely on a trusted intermediary like a bank. It also has the added benefit of insulating people from fiat currency fluctuations, which are more prone to volatility in developing markets such as Zimbabwe and can make money essentially worthless to the note holder.

A reliable, stable crypto-currency is still a dream to many, but the Bank of England has recently undertaken pioneering research into making the dream a reality. It may be one day soon that both emerging and advanced markets transact in one global currency, which isn’t dependent on banks and states to guarantee its value.

Compiling robust credit files and using unique identifiers

Another problem for the developing world is the failure of many countries’ trust architecture to provide reliable personal identification and credit underwriting. Would you cut a check and send money overseas if you couldn’t verify the recipient? How do lenders ensure that people will pay loans back if there is no data available on them in the digital sphere? These questions, salient in the developed world, are especially difficult in less-data-rich markets.

To solve this problem, the Indian government has famously rolled out an initiative to give a digital identity to its 1 billion+ residents using biometric identification. Now, following its critical success, Russia, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are all exploring similar programs. These identification programs, though not incorruptible, deliver the same value that social security numbers do in the U.S.: the ability to tell who is on the other side of your transaction and whether you can trust them.

Another novel approach to creating credit files comes from Kenya, home to the wildly successful Safaricom startup M-Pesa. In 2013, 43 percent of Kenya’s GDP flowed through M-Pesa. The tech is built on a radically simple idea: If you have access to someone’s cell phone account, you have a way to identify them individually and a history of payments to tell if they’re creditworthy.

Now, startups like eLoan (an Israeli peer-to-peer lender) and Branch (started by a Kiva co-founder) are rolling out programs in emerging markets to let banks lend to people based off their phone subscription history, while companies like InVenture go a step further by creating a global, fungible credit score for anyone with a phone.

In sum, these identification solutions could provide the trust needed in advanced economies to reliably lend to and invest in the “bottom of the pyramid” available in emerging markets.

Lowering cross-border transfer costs

One of the more prohibitive elements of remittances, which adversely affects poorer users, is the high cost of sending money across borders. The lack of infrastructure in the developing world makes it prohibitively expensive in many places to receive money from friends and family overseas. The World Bank estimates that the global average cost of remittances is 7.5 percent — and has been trending up in 2016.

For all its stumbles, the now-defunct payments startup Clinkle was built with an idea that was radical for its simplicity: You shouldn’t have to pay to use the money you already own (an idea that has perennially eluded credit card and remittance companies). Exchange rates only complicate the problem.

The idea of liberating people’s access to their own money led companies like TransferWise and WorldRemit to create platforms to dramatically reduce money transfer costs, display fees transparently and guarantee fair currency exchange rates. Since its founding, TransferWise has helped people send $4 billion across borders to those who need it, and inspired regional remittance companies like Istarem, which helps overseas workers transfer money in southeast Asia, and Bitso, which facilitates bitcoin remittances in Mexico.

Facilitating points of access and storage

Once the issues of identifying a recipient, controlling for currency fluctuations and fees and recording a transaction have been solved, recipients still face a vital problem: where to store and access their money? Point of sale technologies that work with smartphones, or even credit and debit cards, do not exist across vast swathes of the developing world. Getting one’s money is not meaningful if that money is irretrievably locked in its digital form.

The issue of converting digital to paper currency is remarkably similar to that of transfers: ATMs, check cashers and exchange kiosks may charge exorbitant fees. Moreover, carrying large sums of paper money can be inherently less secure than accepting cash digitally.

One firm tackling the “point of access” challenge is Abra, a newer bitcoin startup that bills itself as “the world’s first peer-to-peer digital cash money transfer network.” Though bitcoin and digital transfers are nothing new to the payments technology world, Abra introduces a new feature: people who act as “tellers” on the sending and receiving end. Using the Abra platform, any “teller” can accept paper currency, charge a discretionary fee (part of which is split with Abra) and then transfer full funds to a corresponding “teller” across borders, who receives the funds and hands the paper equivalent to their end-recipient.

A world of money, connected end-to-end

The movement of capital around the globe is of paramount importance to an increasingly globalized society. As companies, workers and jobs become more fluid across permeable borders, it will become increasingly necessary to move money freely without arduous costs or constraints. Yet no comprehensive solution exists today that resolves the issues damming the flow of capital across borders.

Innovative technology firms, well-versed in the challenges of the developing world’s financial trust architecture, stand to revolutionize the way money is sent and lent globally. These solutions could also “trickle up” from the personal level to larger-scale investments, as transfer risks are smoothed across geographies. The inertial build-up of capital pools in the developed world creates an almost limitless opportunity for those platforms that can overcome the hurdles damming it.

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The reality of VR porn

Tech and porn are intimately connected. The porn industry has been an early adopter of new tech time and time again, and virtual reality is just the latest tech star the industry wants to get into bed with.

Investment bank and asset management firm Piper Jaffray estimates that by 2025 porn will be the third-largest VR sector (after video games and NFL-related content). In a racket like this, the guiding doctrine must be: The more realistic, the better, right? But in virtual reality, maybe caution is advisable.

Several prominent psychologists have raised concerns about the implications of adult entertainment becoming more and more like the “real thing.”

And therein lies the first misperception: The kind of sexual activity portrayed in pornography isn’t all that realistic to begin with. “Because it’s professed as becoming increasingly like the ‘real thing,’ porn literacy is more important than ever,” Marty Klein, author of, His Porn, Her Pain: Confronting America’s PornPanic with Honest Talk About Sex, told me. “Consumers of porn — and their partners — need to understand how it’s made, and how what’s portrayed is not what real sex is like.”

Won’t somebody think of the children?

VR porn may still be new, but it is quickly moving mainstream, thanks in no small part to companies like Samsung and Oculus Rift (owned by Facebook) developing more affordable headsets that work with the VR video content being provided free of charge on adult sites such as PornHub.

It is without question a more intimate pornographic experience than the traditional voyeuristic perspective from a magazine or DVD.

Using a Homido VR headset with my iPhone 5 clipped to the front, I “sampled” various online VR porn videos. The number of options still seems fairly limited, especially when you consider a site like PornHub carries more than three million videos alone. But the experience, even on a VR smartphone headset, was still pretty impressive.

UCLA’s Professor Neil Malamuth has been studying the effects of pornography for decades. He recently sampled VR porn for the first time, too. “I was most surprised by the extent to which the video felt more personal than any conventional porn I’d viewed before,” he told me. “You get a far greater sense that you are in the room with a woman and she is talking directly to you and looking you straight in the eye,” he said. “This naturally appeals on a more personal level than traditional videos, which have a voyeuristic quality.”

But all that eye contact and direct communication is a one-sided transmission. And when fiction gets that close, you start hoping it’s real — or at the very least like a “choose your own adventure” story.

Such a convincing level of faux-intimacy, therefore, couldn’t be without some psychological or social implications.

In an interview he gave earlier this year, Malamuth compared the effects of porn with alcohol. “If you asked me, ‘Is alcohol good or bad?’ the answer is, well it depends. For some people it’s really bad — people whose lives have been ruined by alcohol consumption. For others, it’s neutral or it might allow them to de-stress, and make their sex life more interesting. I think the research shows similar conclusions for pornography depending on the cultural context, the individual factors, the amount consumed, and other features of a person’s life.”

Following on from this logic, the impact of VR porn will also vary between individuals. As the experience becomes more realistic and certain elements are accentuated, there could be negative side effects, particularly for men already at risk of committing sexual aggression. “For this substantial at-risk minority, porn tends to add fuel to the fire,” Malamuth said.

On the flip side, the illusion of intimacy portrayed though VR may in fact lead to more satisfying sexual experiences for others, without necessarily having negative effects. “For some it may become a preferred form of sexual experience that is more physically and psychologically satisfying than having sex with a real partner,” he added.

Society has a long history of wild, groundless speculation when it comes to assessing the merits, or otherwise, of any new tech on the horizon. (At the turn of the 20th century, many in the medical profession believed bicycles turned women into lesbians).

So not everyone agrees that VR is any more significant a medium than the postcards, magazines, videotapes or DVDs that came before it. “I believe the fear of VR porn is simply more technophobia as we’ve seen so many times in the past,” clinical psychologist Dr. David Ley, author of Ethical Porn for Dicks: A Man’s Guide to Responsible Viewing Pleasure, told me. Just like the fear that bicycle seats would turn women into lesbians, there have also been concerns over vibrators and how they could make women lose interest in men. People in Utah believe internet porn will herald the end of the institution of marriage entirely.

“It’s doubtful that many people will pursue VR porn who don’t already pursue adult videos more generally,” Ley added. “In fact VR porn may flop as it requires viewers to be more active in situations where many are actually seeking a passive sexual experience.”

There is one pretty novel aspect to this technology, however, which does separate it somewhat from porn’s more primitive guises of days gone by. VR technology can enable users to switch roles so they can view things from the perspective of their sexual partner. For example, a man may switch his viewpoint to have a woman’s body or vice versa. “You look down and suddenly see what is your pretty vagina and beautiful legs,” explained Malamuth. “It’s a totally new experience, which could be very disturbing for some people. Others, however, might appreciate it for opening up brave new dimensions to their own sexuality and sensuality.”

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SEC looks into Hampton Creek’s mayo buy back scheme

The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into Hampton Creek after it was accused of running a secret project to buy up its own mayonnaise product from stores.

Bloomberg, which first reported the news of the buybacks, now says the agency is looking at whether the startup inappropriately counted revenue from these purchases made with company money.

The scheme is said to have started in 2014 and was played out by undercover contractors hired by the company to buy up large quantities of Just Mayo – a mayonnaise product made by Hampton Creek that uses pea protein instead of eggs.

The SEC could not be reached at the time of publishing. However, the inquiry does not necessarily mean Hampton Creek will face formal charges. The agency’s inquiry is just an initial step to look into the matter.

“We’re aware of the informal inquiry and we’ll be sharing the facts, as opposed to the inaccuracies reported by Bloomberg,” Tetrick told Bloomberg in an e-mailed statement.

The news comes just days after founder Josh Tetrick revealed to employees the company was about to join the unicorn club at a $1.1 billion valuation, telling them the startup had raised a previously undisclosed $100 million in funding and that several more investors from Asia, the U.K. and Germany would be adding to the round, which would put Hampton Creek in the same category as other startups that have reached the one billion valuation mark. Though Bloomberg, which first reported the unicorn valuation story, also pointed out the startup stood to lose up to $63 million this year.

Hampton Creek has not returned our email over the SEC inquiry at the time of publishing but Tetrick has explained on his own site the buybacks were for “assessing the product from the customer perspective.”

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Amazon launches a dedicated shop for items featured on Product Hunt

Amazon has teamed up with Product Hunt – the San Francisco-based startup that helps curate and surface the hottest new apps, websites, gadgets, tech creations, and more – by offering a collection of products for purchase that have previously trended on Product Hunt’s website. This new collection, called “Featured on Product Hunt,” is available as a part of Amazon Launchpad online store.

Launchpad is Amazon’s newer home to products from startups, including things like smart home devices, wearable technology, children’s toys, health and beauty products, and other items. The platform debuted last year as a means of tapping into consumers’ interests in buying new hardware and physical goods from younger companies.

To curate this online collection, Amazon works with VC firms, accelerators and incubators in order to source the products for the site.

Product Hunt had ties to Amazon already, by way of the relationships the retailer had with the wider tech community with regard to Launchpad. Amazon had been working with Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Product Hunt, as well as  Y Combinator, where Product Hunt had been in residency.

Amazon also recently partnered with Kickstarter, for a similar collection of selected merchandise – in that case, successful, crowdfunded products across categories like electronics, books, home and kitchen, movies and TV, and more.

In the new Product Hunt collection, products displayed a “Featured” badge which indicates how many upvotes it had on the Product Hunt website.

For example, the Star Wars BB-8 Sphero shows it was upvoted by 114 people, while the Bellabeat LEAF wearable received 302 votes. But as these numbers indicate, the number of votes is not necessarily a direct correlation to the product’s overall popularity – a wearable gadget for women is probably not more than twice as popular as a toy from the latest “Star Wars” movies.

Rather, these badges are more of an indication that a certain crowd of tech tastemakers have given the item their seal of approval.

The partnership between Amazon and Product Hunt goes two ways – Product Hunt will also now offer a way for its site’s users to buy products from Amazon through a drop-down option on the product’s page, when it’s a part of the Launchpad section. Plus, Product Hunt users can follow a new collection called The Launchpad list, where you can buy the products directly from Amazon.

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It’s time to publicly shame United Airlines’ so-called online security

Dear executives of United Airlines, I have some advice for you. 1: Fire whoever is in charge of your online security. 2: Burn down the building in which they worked; it may be tainted. 3: Salt the ground so nothing ever grows there again, to be safe. 4: Hire somebody competent who will not infuriate your users while simultaneously compromising their security.

I know I probably sound like a disgruntled passenger who just had an unpleasant airline experience. Not so! I am actually fond of United, have flown hundreds of thousands of miles with them, and have upper-tier status with them. But I’m also an engineer who writes about security.

It was bad enough when they replaced their free-form password security questions with drop-down selections — I am not making this up — for “Your favorite artist,” “Your favorite pizza topping,” etc., citing — I am still not making this up — the threat of keylogging malware.

This has already been appropriately eviscerated by Josephine Wolff in Slate, and, in fairness, it’s a kind of idiocy that seems to be common to large organizations. Citibank UK did the same thing for years, before they realized how dumb it was.

The thing that bumbling bureaucrats like United’s security team never seem to realize is: you don’t make your systems more secure by making them hard to use. They will react by trying to make it easy again — by, for instance, picking the first answer in every option, rather than trying to remember both questions and answers that they did not devise and have no resonance for them.

(Similarly, you should not force your users to change passwords frequently, or their passwords will grow weaker, they will write them down in multiple places, etc. I’m looking at you, AOL-which-owns-TechCrunch.)

But even that was merely bad, eyeroll-provoking, frustration-inducing; whereas this week’s compounding sin provoked something more like righteous fury. This week they sent me an email saying:

         Your security questions will also be used as part of upcoming two-factor authentication to further protect your account — you’ll be asked to answer your security questions the first time you sign in from a device that we don’t recognize.

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The Pokémon Go influence on new tech

Pokémon Go has changed the trajectory of the world on a scale just slightly smaller than Google Search and Facebook, but still to a magnitude that will be felt through all industries in the coming years. To many, it looks like a very simple game that incorporates a few unique and compelling features. But this game has taken technologies from niche research and gaming communities and thrust them into the world’s consciousness.

Suddenly everyone understands what “augmented reality” means and how an artificial digital world can be mapped onto the real physical world. Neither of these is new, but they garnered little attention until they appeared in a concrete, compelling and simple free game for every cell phone in the country.

Augmented reality is a technique for layering data from one or more virtual worlds onto the real physical world. It has been demonstrated and used in military situation awareness and aircraft maintenance applications for years. But it has barely escaped these kinds of niche communities.

Overlaying virtual and physical worlds seemed like a plaything for nerds until it was coupled with the ubiquitous cell phone. Then it became a way of enhancing how we interact with everything on the planet, from entertainment and emergency response to education and healthcare, to name but a few.

The mapping of virtual and physical worlds is exactly what Google Maps and all similar apps already do. But those limit themselves to layering information about objects, businesses and buildings, which actually have an almost identical physical presence. We are accustomed to the digital map knowing the route to our destination, the location of traffic jams and the operating hours of a company, as well as and providing customer experience reviews. Each of these comes directly from our older experience with paper maps, telephone directories and newspaper reviews. But creating entirely new and artificial information like PokéStops and PokéGyms is a revelation to most people. This begs the question: “What else can be mapped to the real world?” and “What value can be created by doing so?”

The game app displays Pokémon floating on your phone’s screen and overlaid on the real world immediately in front of you. This seems to be a very clever, though not difficult, trick to use in a game. It creates the simple perception that the digital and physical worlds are not really that separate. They may be just a thin veneer away from merging or interacting in some way. In this initial game foray, any interactions are illusory — but in the future, that might not be the case.

Does any of this matter beyond entertaining mobile games? Can it be applied to fields that impact the way we are educated, protected, served and healed in the real world?

Obvious entertainment apps

A Disney version in which guests find virtual Disney characters while walking around a theme park is one obvious and compelling application. Guests will be enticed to explore new areas of the theme park, enter new restaurants and navigate the gift shops as they pursue a virtual Mickey, Minnie or Donald character appearing on their phone.

The entertainment giant can decide when and where these virtual characters appear, contributing to crowd control, restaurant business, gift purchases and a richer experience in the theme park. The daily parades may be augmented with character capture and even virtual performances that occur on the floats and in sync with the live characters.

Certain characters and assets may appear only at specific theme parks, motivating guests to purchase multi-park tickets so they can capture everything that is available. When coupled with the company’s wristband technology, certain characters, power-ups and valuable digital objects can be made to appear only for guests who are registered at one of the resorts. The ownership of a digital object might also convey a discount at a gift shop or enter the player into a drawing for a character dinner.

Theme parks currently organize wildly popular food and wine festivals. They could similarly organize dedicated Peter Pan days in which all of the characters from those stories appear, to be followed the next week by Pirates of the Caribbean or The Jungle Book. Because these are virtual, the cost to change them out is significantly decreased from physical venues.

Movies can extend their reach beyond the theater and television. Audiences can walk the streets of New York City or Chicago encountering an overlay of their favorite movie at the same location. They can play the mysteries of The da Vinci Code while visiting The Louvre. Augmented reality can display the buildings of Star Fleet Academy on the streets of San Francisco. Or view the rubble of the destroyed city of Chicago in the Divergent series while you walk the Miracle Mile. See virtual characters rappelling down the sides of real buildings, just as they did in the movie.

Video games can also be navigated via the real world. Build your Minecraft world directly on top of your real house, in your own backyard, or augment your school building with the characters of your own choosing. Imagine a quiet school hallway which, when viewed through your cellphone game, is actually teeming with dozens of crazy animals that were created and placed there by the students themselves.

Museum displays can come alive, showing the painter creating the work from the beginning right in front of you and overlaid with the location of the actual finished painting. Or view Italian sculpture as it appeared when it was new and standing in the original courtyard in which it was displayed.

The number of entertainment and education applications has almost no boundary. So little has been done that everything lies in the domain of the possible future.

Compelling healthcare apps

When a guest at a hotel, restaurant, mall or theme park collapses with a heart attack, can you find the nearest defibrillator device? They are everywhere in our society, but completely invisible in an emergency. Open your Emergency Services app and see a local map with the location of every AED, fire extinguisher, fire alarm and emergency phone clearly displayed. The app will guide you quickly to exactly what you need.

You are 80 years old and can’t remember where you left your prescription bottle. With a smart bottle and the Pokémon Go map technology, simply open your phone and it will guide you straight to the bottle. But, did you take your pills today? The same smart bottle places a floating poké-pill in your phone and you “capture it” by taking a pill out of the bottle and making the motions to ingest it. If you do not take your pills for several days, there are multiple poké-pills floating on the bottle’s location.

But the app is smart enough to know that the solution is not to take them all at once to catch up. Instead, it encourages you to take only 1.5 or 2 doses to catch up (or whatever is medically appropriate). Then the game servers keep track of your mistake and notify a care provider if there is a potential problem developing. Using a telemedicine app, a nurse practitioner can call you directly to discuss the situation.

If you have home care monitoring equipment, you can take your temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, weight and even blood chemistry. That data can be overlaid on the face-to-face video call so the healthcare provider can maintain direct contact with you while also viewing all your vital statistics.

A cell phone can become the most important piece of healthcare equipment in the world.

All of these possibilities have been unleashed by the reboot of a 20-year-old Japanese card game targeted at children. There is really no question about whether some of these applications will be created. The real question is how fast will they appear and how many it will take before this technology touches 100 percent of the population of the country.

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The IoT threat to privacy

As the Internet of Things becomes more widespread, consumers must demand better security and privacy protections that don’t leave them vulnerable to corporate surveillance and data breaches. But before consumers can demand change, they must be informed — which requires companies to be more transparent.

The most dangerous part of IoT is that consumers are surrendering their privacy, bit by bit, without realizing it, because they are unaware of what data is being collected and how it is being used. As mobile applications, wearables and other Wi-Fi-connected consumer products replace “dumb” devices on the market, consumers will not be able to buy products that don’t have the ability to track them. It is normal for consumers to upgrade their appliances, and it most likely does not occur to them that those new devices will also be monitoring them.

After an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist tweeted about the unsettling similarity of the Samsung Smart TV privacy policy — which warned consumers not to discuss sensitive topics near the device — to a passage from George Orwell’s 1984, widespread criticism caused Samsung to edit its privacy policy and clarify the Smart TV’s data collection practices.

But most people do not read privacy policies for every device they buy or every app they download, and, even if they attempted to do so, most would be written in legal language unintelligible to the average consumer. Those same devices also typically come with similarly unintelligible terms of use, which include mandatory arbitration clauses forcing them to give up their right to be heard in court if they are harmed by the product. As a result, the privacy of consumers can be compromised, and they are left without any real remedy.

Increased corporate transparency is desperately needed, and will be the foundation of any successful solution to increased privacy in the IoT. This transparency could be accomplished either by industry self-regulation or governmental regulation requiring companies to receive informed and meaningful consent from consumers before collecting data.

Generally, industries will respond if their customers demand more privacy. For example, after surveys revealed that new-car buyers are concerned about the data privacy and security of connected cars, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (a trade association of 12 automotive manufacturers) responded by developing privacy principles they agreed to follow.

Businesses can self-regulate by developing and adopting industry-wide best practices on cybersecurity and data minimization. When companies collect user data, they must take responsibility for protecting their users; if they do not want to be responsible for the data, they should refrain from collecting it in the first place.

Some companies, such as Fitbit, embed privacy into their technology. The benefit of industry self-regulation is that each industry can create standards specific to the needs of their customers and the sensitivity of the data they collect.

Layered privacy policies should be a best practice adopted by many industries, and Creative Commons licenses could serve as useful models. Those licenses have a three-layer design: the “legal code” layer, the “human-readable” layer and the “machine-readable” layer.

The “legal code” layer would be the actual policy, written by lawyers and interpreted by judges. The “human-readable” layer would be a concise and simplified summary of the privacy policy in plain language that an average consumer could read. The “machine-readable” layer would be the code that software, search engines and other kinds of technology can understand, and would only allow the technology to have access to information permitted by the consumer.

These best practices would make tremendous progress in protecting the privacy of consumers, but they are not enough. Companies must be legally bound to the promises they make to their customers. The use of pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses in terms of use have become standard in many industries. These clauses deny consumers their right to pursue a remedy in a court of law, usually without their knowledge, because they are buried in indecipherable fine print.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that arbitration clauses’ bar on class actions further hurts the public interest because lawsuits often generate publicity about a corporate practice, and, without them, consumers may not have access to that information. The agency has therefore proposed prohibiting mandatory arbitration clauses for most consumer financial products and services.

The Department of Education has also proposed a rule that would prohibit the use of pre-dispute mandatory arbitration agreements by for-profit schools, giving students who have been exploited the right to sue their schools. The Federal Trade Commission should consider proposing a similar rule that would prohibit the use of pre-dispute mandatory arbitration agreements by companies that sell IoT products.

Because this is such a complex problem, involving countless industries and implicating various privacy concerns, an adequate solution will require participation by consumers, businesses and the government. Consumers must demand to know what data is collected and how it is used. Industries should develop best privacy practices that match their customers’ expectations.

The Federal Trade Commission should bring enforcement actions for deceptive practices against companies that do not comply with their own privacy policies, holding them accountable to their customers. It should also consider prohibiting pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses, so that consumers can have a cause of action when their privacy is violated.

But before this can happen, consumers must demand to know what data is collected by their devices in the Iot.

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A prescription for preventing 3D printing piracy

In the year 2000, the music business was still strong. Record companies produced albums and shipped these physical objects to the stores that sold them. The internet was slowly becoming a system of mass consumption and distribution, but most consumers still purchased physical media. And while the record industry was aware of piracy online, the threat seemed minimal.

Then came Napster.

The music industry tried to stop this large-scale piracy by pursuing both the platforms and individual downloaders — including poor college students. But public opinion turned against the industry. After all, stealing digital music is intangible; it’s different than physically swiping actual CDs or tapes from brick-and-mortar stores. And while today many people access their music legally, it’s safe to say that music industry revenues have yet to recover.

What do pills have in common with MP3 downloads? More than you might think

3D printing, another revolutionary and disruptive technology, makes it cheap and easy to produce physical objects. And just as home copying has changed the copyright industries beyond recognition, 3D printing is poised to do the same to patent-based industries.

That means practically any business that makes physical objects will potentially face a Napster scenario. It may not happen to everyone, but as printer technologies improve and more materials — such as proteins, specialized polymers, metals and other chemicals — become available for printing, it will happen to many.

Take the pharmaceutical industry. Just like a musical recording, where most of the costs are incurred while producing the initial release (hiring the musicians, booking the studio, editing and the like), the bulk of the cost of developing a new pill goes into the front end: research and development, clinical trials and getting through the FDA approval. In fact, the raw ingredients may cost only a few pennies. And 3D printing — or digital manufacturing and distribution, as it’s also known — will make reproducing and delivering these pills, lawfully or unlawfully, much easier.

Houston, we have a (patent) problem

If people felt sorry for those poor college students being picked on by the big music industry, imagine how the public will feel about patients with inadequate insurance availing themselves of necessary but pirated prescriptions.

Digitally manufactured pills are not far off. In 2015, the FDA approved the first 3D-printed pill, Spritam levetiracetam, an epilepsy drug manufactured by Aprecia. The manufacturer claims that the 3D-printed pills are actually more effective, because their layered structure is more easily absorbed by the body, courtesy of the way 3D printers work. With 50 patents on its unique proprietary process, the company also claims that its IP is protected. Aprecia may be the exception today, but it has proved that medicines can be printed.

The pros and cons of a DIY maker culture

Despite the potential for threats to IP, 3D printing promises a wealth of benefits, like customization, both to consumers and, if they handle things right, manufacturers. With 3-D printed pharmaceutical medications, doses can be readily tailored to the needs of each patient, much like when pharmacists compound ingredients to make a custom pill for each individual. Likewise, prosthetic limbs are being created to fit each patient exactly.

That is not the only positive aspect of 3D printing. As printers get cheaper, they’ll no doubt begin to appear in pharmacies, which will print pills only as needed, cutting down on costly waste, spoilage and storage. That’s terrific news for the pharmaceutical industry, but there’s a darker side, too. In time, nearly anyone will be able to make the components for almost anything — patented or not, protected or not, dangerous or not.

If a 3D printer in every home sounds a bit far-fetched, a forecast by Gartner predicts that 3D printer shipments will more than double every year between 2016 and 2019, and notes that lower-end models, like those costing less than $2,500, are expected to grow to 40.7 percent of offerings by 2019. Gartner also predicts upwards of $100 billion loss a year in intellectual property worldwide because of 3D printing, because of not only pirating, but industry disruption.

Planning strategically now for a 3D-printed future

Much can be learned from how various industries have dealt with new technology. For the music industry, Napster met the effective end of legal exclusivity in copyrights. When distribution channels shifted and everyone with a computer could download and reproduce songs, copyright became hard to enforce. As soon as a record company sued one infringer, another popped up, like a nightmarish game of Whac-A-Mole. As a result, the value of the copyrights quickly degraded.

However, as we have also seen, not all IP or the products it protects will go down in value. Some things will become more valuable — and that’s where today’s executives should prepare.

There are numerous ways companies can proactively plan for the impact that 3D printing technology will have on their business. By investing in quality control and supply chain protection now, pharmaceutical companies, for example, can protect their patents and their market share by ensuring that their supply chain is pure, that their quality is guaranteed and that their customers are getting a safe medication, even when that reassurance costs more. This will appeal to consumers who want to be sure they are getting the real deal when it comes to medication — FDA-approved and quality controlled — not an illegitimate knock-off.

Preparing for the ways that 3D printing will affect the market doesn’t always have to be costly or go against the grain. For example, appliance or automobile manufacturers may encounter sales loss if third-parties 3D print replacement parts at a lower cost than those that are manufacturer-issued. Instead of fighting against this likelihood, manufacturers would do well to adopt the third-party business model of 3D printing spare parts to order. This reasoning can apply not only to heavy manufacturing, but also to medicine, bringing down the costs of so-called “orphan drugs,” those currently not manufactured because of their low potential for profit.

Alternatively, manufactures could skirt similar issues by creating a design that requires a specific type of material, one not compatible with 3D technology. Materials and shapes that have to be mixed or joined in certain ways, for instance, do not easily lend themselves to digital manufacturing technology. Remember, though, that when financial incentives combine with evolving technologies, these types of plans may be short-lived.

Even with the advent of 3D printing, we will still live in a world where legitimate businesses are engaged in the licensed manufacturing and distribution of copyrighted works and respect intellectual property. Patent owners could license manufacturing rights to legitimate 3D printing companies — the official 3D printer of Nike products, say — in which only authorized entities could make the official products. That way, patent owners would get income, 3D printing companies could develop new markets and buyers could get legitimate, quality-controlled products.  This could be done with branded and lower-cost white labelled options.

Along with all the good that digital technology can bring, a major challenge to patents and other forms of intellectual property may be in the offing. Major industry disruption will soon follow. Only this time, with changes perhaps as long as five to 10 years down the line, manufacturers have time to prepare for it and pivot.

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