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Now they want the world to know how it works. Without breaking their NDAs. A black and white image of Lady Jjustice The Integrity Institute's goal is to build a network of integrity professionals and work toward a public consensus about the nitty gritty scientific and philosophical questions that integrity teams have mostly tried to answer behind closed doors. Photo: Oleksandr Berezko / EyeEm / Getty Images Issie Lapowsky October 26, 2021 Shortly before he left Facebook in October 2019, Jeff Allen published his last report as a data scientist for the company's integrity team -- the team Facebook Papers whistleblower Frances Haugen has recently made famous. The report revealed, as Allen put it at the time, some "genuinely horrifying" findings. Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook. Combined, the troll farms' pages reached 140 million Facebook users a month, dwarfing the reach of even Walmart's Facebook presence. Not only had Facebook failed to stop its spread, Allen wrote in a 20-page report that was recently leaked to and published by MIT Tech Review, but the vast majority of the network's reach came from Facebook's ranking algorithms. "I have no problem with Macedonians reaching US audiences," Allen wrote. "But if you just want to write python scripts that scrape social media and anonymously regurgitate content into communities while siphoning off some monetary or influence reward for yourself... well you can fuck right off." A Facebook spokesperson said the company has taken "aggressive enforcement actions against these kinds of foreign and domestic inauthentic groups" and was doing so even when Allen wrote his report. Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. He ended his report with a goodbye, saying he was sad about leaving the company because he wouldn't be able "to work on this problem with the level of impact that FB provides." Two years later, Allen is hoping to prove himself wrong about that last part. For the last 10 months, he and Sahar Massachi, another former Facebook staffer who helped build the company's election and civic integrity teams from their earliest days, have been quietly creating an independent organization they hope could help not just Facebook, but also the entire tech industry and lawmakers alike navigate some of the trickiest questions facing integrity workers today. Now, Allen and Massachi, who spoke exclusively with Protocol, are publicly launching the group at a time when those questions are at the white hot core of the international scandal, spurred by Haugen's disclosures. Called the Integrity Institute, its goal is to build a network of integrity professionals who are currently employed or were previously employed by tech companies and work toward some kind of public consensus about the nitty gritty scientific and philosophical questions that integrity teams have mostly tried to answer behind closed doors. The group plans to advise policy makers, regulators and the media about how social media platforms work, publish its own research and serve as a sort of open-source resource for small platforms that lack massive integrity teams of their own. Already, Allen and Massachi have briefed Congress and recruited 11 members, who have collectively worked for nine different tech platforms, to the organization. While they don't define themselves as whistleblowers and are "resolutely not breaking our NDAs," Massachi said, they say Haugen's disclosures have sparked a growing interest in the emerging field of integrity work -- interest they're eager to capitalize on. "Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a conversation about what is the science of how these work, what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in which direction." Another benefit of the Facebook Papers? "My mom finally kind of understands the kind of work I was doing," Massachi said. 'Emerging science' Integrity work only really got its name a few years ago when companies like Facebook began assigning teams of researchers to study all the ways their platforms could be misused. Massachi joined Facebook in 2016 and was one of the earliest members of its election integrity team, working on a dashboard to monitor the Alabama special election in 2017 and, later, on Facebook's election war room. He describes his time working on that team and Facebook's civic integrity team as a career highlight, but says the job of an integrity worker was also full of frustration. "I thought that integrity was heroic, virtuous work that was not getting enough power and attention inside the company," he said. The people whose job it was to make the platform more moral and less messy had to "jump through a lot more hoops than normal product work, and that felt really wrong to me," Massachi said, though he's careful not to bash his former employer as others have. "Our membership has a wide variety of views," he said. In January, Massachi began reaching out to former Facebook integrity workers, including Allen, to see if they were interested in forming something of a super group outside of the company. He sent potential members a memo laying out the problems on social media platforms, as he sees them, and the potential fixes he would propose. "Then people would say, 'Well, I agree with 80% of this. I really disagree with the other 20%.' Then I would say, 'Great. The world deserves to hear our disagreements. Let's hash it out in public," Massachi, who also recently completed a fellowship at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, said. "That was a recruiting tactic." For Allen, now chief research officer of the institute, the concept of an independent integrity body was something he'd been considering himself for years. "I think this is an idea that crosses a lot of integrity workers' minds," he said. "What does it look like to do this outside the company?" Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi Jeff Allen (left) and Sahar Massachi (right)Photos: Courtesy Jeff Allen and Sahar Massachi In July, Massachi and Allen gathered the group's 11 members for a retreat in Washington, D.C. They bunked up together at Airbnbs and spent their days in a coworking space, trying to come to a consensus on questions only a geek could love, but which matter deeply to billions of people's experience of the internet. For instance: If a user doesn't follow a specific account, should they ever see posts from that account in their main feed? On Facebook, that happens all the time. On Instagram, it doesn't. Allen's own research at Facebook had shown how troll farms exploit Facebook's ranking algorithm to get mass exposure in the News Feeds of people who didn't even follow them. At the same time, some in the group argued that, in the best case scenario, this can be a way for platforms to share more high-quality content with users who naturally follow low-quality content. The group compiled the answers they agreed on -- that, as it turns out, was not one of them -- into a running list it expects to build upon as the community grows. "When I was working on an integrity team, it's really important work, it's under tight constraints, you're working long hours, and there isn't much time to step back and think," Massachi said. "So this is just a venue for integrity workers across all different companies to take a step back and think about this emerging science." The Institute has won the support of some leaders in the integrity space, including Samidh Chakrabarti, who led the civic integrity team at Facebook before it was dissolved and has since become an outspoken critic of Facebook. "Given the unprecedented influence that digital platforms have on our lives, it is paramount that we bring together the industry's brightest minds to tackle challenges at the intersection of technology and society," Chakrabarti said in a statement to Protocol. "I encourage all those who work in trust and safety and who take their responsibility to the world seriously to join them in this endeavor and I look forward to supporting this work." Strength in numbers The Institute also includes members who were, at times, on the opposite side of the table from integrity workers at large tech companies. One such member is Katie Harbath, Facebook's former public policy director, who worked at the company for a decade and who Massachi called a "good faith partner in stress testing solutions from the Integrity team." "I do think there's some valid questions about how much what they were saying was being prioritized over other things in some of the conversations," Harbath said of integrity workers inside Facebook. Harbath saw firsthand how difficult it was to balance the integrity team's priorities against the company's larger goals, including growth. "It can be challenging when you have people constantly coming to you, particularly if you weren't on integrity and not working on this, and being told: Your product's going to cause X,Y and Z, and we want to do these things, but that's going to hurt your goals," she said. "It can certainly cause frustration within teams who are like: Wait, leadership told us we had to do these goals, and the integrity team was like: But we were told we have to do these goals." Coming to any kind of consensus on actual decisions, Harbath said, was often a laborious, time consuming process that required buy-in from the very top. "You would have to get pretty high up into senior leadership before those two teams crossed into somebody that could say: I want to prioritize this thing over that thing," she said. In a statement to Protocol, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said. "No single employee should be able to decide as serious an issue as what content is or isn't allowed on our site or what products get shipped. There's a reason we make our Community Standards public and have a deliberative process for developing our policies, involving teams from across the company as well as consultation with external stakeholders, to make those determinations." One goal of the institute is to navigate these tricky ethical and technical questions without having to simultaneously navigate a corporate org chart. Until now, the organization has been funded "out of pocket," Massachi said, "specifically Jeff's pocket." But the group is looking for institutional funding -- as long as it doesn't come directly from the companies. Still, Allen and Massachi say they haven't ruled out taking money from funds that are backed by tech executives. While lawmakers and the media may well be interested in what the group's members have to say, the bigger question is what impact, if any, this group can have inside the companies themselves. Allen and Massachi know better than almost anyone how integrity workers' recommendations can be thwarted or ignored in the face of competing priorities like growth. And through her disclosures, Haugen has also tried to make that point abundantly clear. If integrity workers are struggling to break through inside the companies that are paying them to do this work, will they really have any better luck working from the outside in? Allen and Massachi believe they might. For all the attention it's gotten recently, integrity work is still an amorphous and emerging field that's mostly been developed in private. There's no set of minimum standards to gauge a company's success or failure in integrity work the way there is in software engineering or cybersecurity. Allen and Massachi want to turn integrity work into an established discipline of its own. "You put out the arguments for how to build responsibly or what the actual integrity professional viewpoint is out there, so that people at the companies can point to it internally," Allen said. "So they're not fighting the battle on their own." A MESSAGE FROM NASDAQ [image] www.protocol.com As we come out of the pandemic, consumers will be even more accustomed to highly flexible, customer-centric digital experiences that let them engage with companies on their own terms. Businesses must consider the impact of an even more digital economy with dynamic buyer behaviors and determine how next-generation customers want to consume products and services and interact with them. LEARN MORE Issie Lapowsky Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. facebook papers facebook files integrity integrity institute sahar massachi jeff allen facebook Protocol | Policy 5 things to know about FCC nominee Gigi Sohn The veteran of some of the earliest tech policy fights is a longtime consumer champion and net-neutrality advocate. Gigi Sohn, who President Joe Biden nominated to serve on the FCC, is a longtime net-neutrality advocate. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images October 26, 2021 Ben Brody Ben Brody (@ BenBrodyDC) is a senior reporter at Protocol focusing on how Congress, courts and agencies affect the online world we live in. He formerly covered tech policy and lobbying (including antitrust, Section 230 and privacy) at Bloomberg News, where he previously reported on the influence industry, government ethics and the 2016 presidential election. Before that, Ben covered business news at CNNMoney and AdAge, and all manner of stories in and around New York. He still loves appearing on the New York news radio he grew up with. October 26, 2021 President Joe Biden on Tuesday nominated Gigi Sohn to serve as a Federal Communications Commissioner, teeing up a Democratic majority at the agency that oversees broadband issues after months of delay. Like Lina Khan, who Biden picked in June to head up the Federal Trade Commission, Sohn is a progressive favorite. And if confirmed, she'll take up a position in an agency trying to pull policy levers on net neutrality, privacy and broadband access even as Congress is stalled. Sohn, a longtime telecom lawyer and consumer advocate with decades of connections in Washington, is known in particular for work on net neutrality. Sohn's nomination, together with Biden's nomination of acting chair Jessica Rosenworcel to head up the agency officially, fill out the FCC, which currently has two Republican commissioners and two Democrats, rendering it politically hamstrung in many instances. The full slate would come as Biden's administration hopes to extend broadband service throughout the U.S. and revisit the net-neutrality fight. Here's what you should know about Sohn. She's an FCC alumna Sohn previously served as a top aide to Obama-era FCC chair Tom Wheeler, who took her on despite her criticism of the commission's prior leadership for failing to institute net neutrality. In that role, she was an architect of the commission's 2015 net neutrality order, which banned internet service providers from blocking web content, slowing it down or demanding pay for prioritizing it. Despite playing out in the legalistic context of federal agency rule-making, the FCC's actions at the time were the culmination of a years-long campaign that spilled over into one of the first major grassroots tech policy movements and even took on a certain pop culture appeal. (Remember the John Oliver segment?) Sohn also worked on the FCC's 2016 broadband privacy order. Later FCC leadership during the Trump administration reversed both measures. She has net-neutrality expertise Before her prior stint at the FCC, Sohn worked extensively advocating for net neutrality. She founded the tech policy group Public Knowledge and ran it for more than a decade, and the group was an early supporter of the issue. In addition, she'd spent time at the Ford Foundation as a project specialist in the Media, Arts and Culture unit. Although Sohn left in 2001, the foundation said in 2015 that it had spent "around $4 million a year over the past 10 years" supporting the issue. She has longtime Washington ties Leading Public Knowledge, which also engaged extensively in the 2000s fights over online copyright, meant Sohn worked with or oversaw some of the best-known and earliest tech policy figures. Law professor and open-internet advocate Lawrence Lessig served on the group's board during Sohn's tenure. Mike Godwin, who coined an eponymous "law" about Nazi comparisons on the internet and successfully helped litigate against the non-Section 230 provisions of the Communications Decency Act, served as Public Knowledge's legal director for a time. Sohn's affiliations go broader, though. Before Public Knowledge and the Ford Foundation, she spent more than a decade at the top ranks of the now-defunct Media Access Project, the consumer group that worked on issues such as media diversity and ownership rules. She's also on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the oldest tech policy groups, which has spent years pushing for net neutrality, Section 230 protections, free speech online, strong encryption and privacy. Sohn, who tech policy experts across the political spectrum often see as a mentor and friend, has also done stints as a fellow at Georgetown's Institute for Technology Law & Policy and the Mozilla Foundation. (Biden also named an adviser to the Mozilla Foundation, Alan Davidson, to head up the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration on Tuesday.) There's an ambitious but tricky agenda ahead Because the FCC has been politically deadlocked, it's months behind many other executive departments and agencies in taking action on a Democratic agenda. Biden hopes to spend billions on an expansion of access to high-speed broadband in his infrastructure package -- although the NTIA, rather than the FCC, could end up overseeing much funding for unserved and underserved communities. Net neutrality may still be the ultimate challenge, however. In 2017, under then-chair Ajit Pai, the Republican-led FCC rescinded the Obama-era rules. Although the FCC is an independent agency, Biden spoke for many Democrats when he called for the FCC to go back again and institute the policy. In addition, Democrats may want to reinstitute broadband privacy protections -- an issue recently highlighted by an FTC study on how ISPs collect and use extensive data on consumers. Unlike the net-neutrality rule, however, Congress itself canceled the FCC's privacy regulations, meaning the agency would have to tackle the issue without issuing a substantially similar measure. She's media-savvy Sohn is a frequent commentator on tech and telecom policy in the media. She has also testified before Congress on several occasions, maintains a chatty presence on Twitter and hosted a podcast called " Tech on the Rocks." Typically quick to pick up the phone and crystalize a policy position as a sound bite, Sohn may have to pull back from her most public pronouncements, but she'll no doubt be keeping an eye on translating telecom policy for the masses in her work. From Your Site Articles * ISPs have so much data on you - Protocol -- The people, power and ... > * Biden poised to fill out the FCC with Rosenworcel and Sohn ... > Keep Reading Show less Ben Brody Ben Brody (@ BenBrodyDC) is a senior reporter at Protocol focusing on how Congress, courts and agencies affect the online world we live in. He formerly covered tech policy and lobbying (including antitrust, Section 230 and privacy) at Bloomberg News, where he previously reported on the influence industry, government ethics and the 2016 presidential election. Before that, Ben covered business news at CNNMoney and AdAge, and all manner of stories in and around New York. He still loves appearing on the New York news radio he grew up with. fcc policy sponsored content Sponsored Content Four processes to keep you innovating through change October 25, 2021 Gaurav Kataria Group Product Manager, Trello at Atlassian September 28, 2021 If you've ever tried to pick up a new fitness routine like running, chances are you may have fallen into the "motivation vs. habit" trap once or twice. You go for a run when the sun is shining, only to quickly fall off the wagon when the weather turns sour. Similarly, for many businesses, 2020 acted as the storm cloud that disrupted their plans for innovation. With leaders busy grappling with the pandemic, innovation frequently got pushed to the backburner. In fact, according to McKinsey, the majority of organizations shifted their focus mainly to maintaining business continuity throughout the pandemic. Yet, those who manage to balance innovation and change management generally reap strong rewards. In fact, companies that manage to innovate through a crisis generally outperform the market by 10%. Post-crisis, they outperform the market by over 30%. If your organization wants to belong to that class of innovators during future times of change, there are methods you can use to continue innovating even when the waters are murky. Just like with running, you have to make innovation a daily habit in your company--not just an activity you practice when the conditions are right. Here are four ways you can set yourself up for success. Increase Collaboration Between Teams While 41% of organizations are now home to a centralized innovation team, only 37% of those same organizations say collaboration happens seamlessly across their teams. If cross-functional collaboration isn't happening, chances are your teams are siloed, and innovation is being stifled -- regardless of the presence of a team in charge of innovation. Collaboration is key to innovation -- and since it increases the diversity of opinions in a room, your brainstorming doesn't become an echo chamber. It also allows different backgrounds to inform your ideas and strengthen their overall appeal. Nielsen found that when ideas were developed by teams of three or more people, they had 156% greater appeal with consumers than ideas developed by just one or two people. Over time, that effect stacks up: Research by Forrester and Atlassian shows that large enterprises see an average of $330 million in additional revenue when they increase their collaboration efforts. Increase the day-to-day communication between your teams by opening up viewing permissions across your tools, such as your Trello boards. If teams aren't working with sensitive or proprietary data, make their boards viewable organization-wide -- allowing others to get a better sense of what they're working on and how. You can also build easy ways for teams to share feedback and ideas with one another. For instance, a product development team could decide independently which feature they'll be rolling out next and simply announce it at the next all-hands meeting. Or alternatively, you could set up a Trello board where salespeople, customer support agents and marketers could share ideas and features requested by customers. Using Trello's Power-Up integrations, users could also attach relevant support tickets, social media posts or emails to make a case for those features. Each employee could then go in and vote for the features they see requested most often. If your organization wants to belong to that class of innovators during future times of change, there are methods you can use to continue innovating even when the waters are murky. Just like with running, you have to make innovation a daily habit in your company--not just an activity you practice when the conditions are right. [image] Trello's Voting Power-Up can be a simple (but powerful) way to crowdsource employee opinions. When this kind of open communication happens regularly across teams, they're more likely to see innovation in their day-to-day work. Strengthen Your Customer Feedback Loop While increasing collaboration helps diversify the opinions and knowledge in the room, there's still one key voice that's missing: your customer. Innovating in isolation means that your teams may not be getting customer feedback until they launch a product or change a feature, which could lead to making incorrect assumptions about your customers' needs. "The mistake is adopting what I call the 'science fair' mentality," says Vicki Huff Eckert, founder of PwC's U.S. and Global New Ventures organization. "Encouraging employees throughout the business to innovate freely but without much, if any, direct contact with the very customers these innovations are intended for." To truly drive innovation at scale, you need to make it habitual for teams to seek customer feedback at each stage of the innovation journey, from the initial ideation phase to getting product feedback post-launch. For instance, when the marketing team is brainstorming ideas for a new promotion, have them send a survey to several loyal customers in exchange for a gift card. After the promotion wraps up, the marketing team should have the customer support team flag any feedback on the roll-out to learn what went well and what might go better next time, which can be critical data for the product team to lean on for their next iteration cycle. To make sure seeking customer feedback becomes a habit, bake it into teams' processes. Add a feedback column to your existing ideation boards in Trello, or create an Advanced Checklist item on each Trello card in a brainstorming sprint to run each idea past a company champion. Doing so will help ensure that you're bringing your customer's voice to the table every single time you innovate. Make Information Easy To Access When employees can't easily access information, it wastes valuable time and restricts collaboration. And this inaccessibility is more widespread than you might think. According to a study by Wakefield Research and Elastic, over 50% of American office professionals today say they spend more time searching for files and documents than they do answering messages or emails. Of course, no organization intends to make internal information difficult to access. But when the average enterprise uses 175 apps across teams, it's easy for information to fall into silos. Forrester reports that one of the top collaboration challenges organizations face when trying to increase innovation is having data restricted or not easily accessible within their organization. A work management platform can solve that problem by keeping information centralized across the different tools individual teams use. Trello Enterprise integrates with dozens of best-in-class solutions, allowing you to pull information from various apps onto Trello cards. For instance, your design team can embed live design files directly from Figma onto a Trello card, the sales team can easily attach contact details from Salesforce to a card and marketing can attach relevant Confluence documents or Google Docs to project cards. [image] Trello's Confluence Power-Up makes it easy for users to keep information centralized. That way, teams can share relevant information in one central location -- even if they don't have access to the same apps -- to reduce wasted time and streamline communication. Free Up Time For Innovation With Automation Did you know the average information worker spends three hours a day on routine tasks that could be automated? Extrapolate that over a week, and that's nearly two full weekdays wasted. In a year, that's more than a third of the average person's working year spent on recurring tasks like project updates, sending emails or organizing data. That's valuable time that could be spent on innovation if companies automate these cumbersome tasks. Forrester predicts that intelligent automation services will support a quarter of remote workers by 2022, allowing them to spend more time on strategic initiatives and innovation. No-code automation -- like the type leveraged by Trello's Butler automation tool -- can send automated project updates to customers or coworkers, pass off work between teams or schedule recurring tasks and deadlines. [image] Say goodbye to typing out updates to clients or coworkers -- Trello's Butler can take repetitive communication tasks off your plate. Successfully leveraging automation won't automatically make you more innovative, of course. But what kind of innovative projects could your teams prioritize if over 35% of their daily tasks were wiped off their plates? With that kind of time savings, you could even consider building out a 20% time rule, the methodology popularized by Google. A 20% time rule allows employees to spend 20% of their work time exploring work-related creative projects that may not necessarily have immediate results to team goals, but could make a longer-term impact to the greater company. Boost Your Innovation Engine With The Right Tools Creating a culture of innovation that can weather tough times isn't easy. There's not a one-size-fits-all app that will instantaneously transform an enterprise overnight to prioritize innovation. But, you can take the first step by leading your teams and putting innovation-stoking processes in place for your employees. By building systems that make innovation a daily habit among your teams rather than just a fair-weather activity, you can ensure your business is continually improving -- no matter what crises come your way. Keep Reading Show less Gaurav Kataria Group Product Manager, Trello at Atlassian sponsored content sponsored Protocol | Workplace Adobe wants a more authentic NFT world Adobe's Content Credentials feature will allow Creative Cloud subscribers to attach edit-tracking information to Photoshop files. The goal is to create a more trustworthy NFT market and digital landscape. Adobe's Content Credentials will allow users to attach their identities to an image Image: Adobe October 26, 2021 Lizzy Lawrence Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She's a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school's independent newspaper. She's based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com. October 26, 2021 Remember the viral, fake photo of Kurt Cobain and Biggie Smalls that duped and delighted the internet in 2017? Doctored images manipulate people and erode trust and we're not great at spotting them. The entire point of the emerging NFT art market is to create valuable and scarce digital files and when there isn't an easy way to check for an image's origin and edits, there's a problem. What if someone steals an NFT creator's image and pawns it off as their own? As a hub for all kinds of multimedia, Adobe feels a responsibility to combat misinformation and provide a safe space for NFT creators. That's why it's rolling out Content Credentials, a record that can be attached to a Photoshop file of a creator's identity and includes any edits they made. Users can connect their social media addresses and crypto wallet addresses to images in Photoshop. This further proves the image creator's identity, but it's also helpful in determining the creators of NFTs. Adobe has partnered with NFT marketplaces KnownOrigin, OpenSea, Rarible and SuperRare in this effort. "Today there's not a way to know that the NFT you're buying was actually created by a true creator," said Adobe General Counsel Dana Rao. "We're allowing the creator to show their identity and attach it to the image." Thomas Smith, CEO of AI-driven photography agency Gado Images, said this is a crucial step in addressing the issue of verifying NFT creator identities. The blockchain aspect of NFTs easily confirms the minting of an NFT, but confirming the artistic value of the NFT has been difficult thus far. "I could download an image someone else took, mint an NFT from it, and pretend it's mine," Smith said. "That erodes the value of NFTs." Now creators can tie their crypto wallet to their Photoshop. Scott Belsky, chief product officer, spoke with The Verge about Adobe making it easier for NFT collectors to see both who created the NFT and who minted it on the blockchain. NFTs are all about authenticity, and with Content Credentials, people can embed their identity directly into a file. Belsky compared it to the verification badge on Twitter: "Imagine a world where you favor buying NFTs from artists with a cryptographic signature that you know that they actually made it, as opposed to one who doesn't have that cryptographic signature," he told The Verge. Adobe will launch Content Credentials in public beta, along with a wave of other new features, at today's Adobe MAX conference, an annual event complete with a plethora of famous speakers and informational sessions for creatives. Another release in Adobe's Creative Cloud suite is the extension of Photoshop and Illustrator to the web. Anyone, not just Creative Cloud subscribers, can view and comment on these files through a URL. Subscribers can make light edits right within the browser. Other new features include a collaboration and whiteboarding tool called "Creative Cloud Spaces and Canvas," the acquisition of video-collaboration platform Frame.io, updates to video and photo editing and more monetization options for creatives using Behance, Adobe's social media platform. Creative Cloud subscribers can offer Patreon-esque subscriptions without Behance taking any of the pay. Content Credentials are a part of the Content Authenticity Initiative , a partnership Adobe announced with Twitter and The New York Times in 2019. The goal is to make records of ownership and authenticity a norm when creating and sharing media online. Rao said the 38-year-old company is uniquely prepared to address this problem. "As we stared at the landscape, we really felt like the piece that was missing was transparency," Rao said. "If you're using our tool, we're able to share with people who took that photo and where it was taken and when, and we also know what edits were made." When a creator decides to apply credentials to their image, that metadata is secured and encrypted with the image. For example, it would record any imported images or artificial intelligence tools that were applied to the file. Rao emphasized that no encryption is completely invulnerable, but if someone did try to tamper with an image and its credentials, users would see a clear gap in the recording of edits. Creators can turn on credentials in Photoshop, and they are attached to Adobe's Stock images by default. Anyone, even those without a Creative Cloud account, can check out credentials on Verify, a tool that analyzes images. They'll also be visible on Behance. Rao said Adobe's partners in the Content Authenticity Initiative, like Getty Images, are building credentials as well. "It's an open standard," Rao said. "Anyone can build an implementation, not just Adobe." The idea is to make Content Credentials a standard across platforms, so people truly understand the origins of images and videos. Smith is excited by this first step into a more trustworthy digital landscape. He's a part of the Content Authenticity Initiative through the Digital Media Licensing Association, and like Rao, believes strongly that credentials should be adopted at every step of the image creation/publication process. "The ultimate vision is to bring everyone in literally from the hardware level all the way up through publication," Smith said. "I snap the photo on my Android phone, it's signed in the image the second I take it." Standardized content credentials could have huge implications for media, politics and human rights. Smith pointed out that verifying where and when an image is taken can be useful in documenting abuse, or even linking medical imagery to patients. "This is very important outside of NFTs and the creative industry," he said. Creative Cloud subscribers have to opt in to include credentials, mainly for privacy reasons. Adobe doesn't want to force people to disclose their identity or specific circumstances behind their image. The necessary outcome of this is "if you want to be trusted, you're going to go through this process, and if you're someone out there trying to deceive people, you're not going to show them what you did to the image," Rao said. But it's a start, giving creators a tool to protect the integrity of their image. The next milestones will be building something similar for video and audio, and spreading the word so an average person knows that credentials exist -- something Rao believes should fit into a larger, government-sponsored digital literacy campaign. "We want to show everybody that this thing works," Rao said. "The next step will be part of this education piece." Keep Reading Show less Lizzy Lawrence Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She's a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school's independent newspaper. She's based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com. productivity workplace dating apps Protocol | China Why another Chinese lesbian dating app just shut down With neither political support nor a profitable business model, lesbian dating apps are finding it hard to survive in China. Operating a dating app for LGBTQ+ communities in China is like walking a tightrope. Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images October 26, 2021 Zeyi Yang Zeyi Yang is a reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick. October 26, 2021 When Lesdo, a Chinese dating app designed for lesbian women, announced it was closing down, it didn't come as a surprise to the LGBTQ+ community. It's unclear what directly caused this decision. 2021 hasn't been kind to China's queer communities; WeChat has deactivated queer groups' public accounts and Beijing has pressured charity organizations not to work with queer activists. On Oct. 8, Lesdo published an in-app announcement that it will terminate operations after the end of this month, saying all user data will be erased by May 1. The same announcement was published on the app's WeChat public account on Monday, prompting discussions and eulogies. Political pressure aside, lesbian dating apps in China have always struggled to scale and make a profit, even though similar apps for gay men have grown much larger: Blued, a gay dating app launched in 2012, has gained over 60 million registered members and is among the biggest gay dating app in the world. Sandwiched between a hostile political environment and an indifferent audience, lesbian dating apps, which serve an estimated audience of 10 million people within China, have yet to find a path to success. In an official statement to Protocol, BlueCity, the parent company of both Blued and Lesdo, said Lesdo's discontinuation was due to business realignment, and that "the Company will tighten its focus on the steady growth of its core business." BlueCity acquired Lesdo in August 2020. While neither the announcement nor the official statement mentioned regulatory pressure, it immediately came to mind for some observers. "My first reaction was, hadn't it already been closed down?" said Liu, a young lesbian woman living in Beijing, who used Lesdo until two years ago and gave just her surname. There have been too many news stories about queer apps or communities being censored in recent years, to the point that Liu says she can't tell one from another. Operating a dating app for LGBTQ+ communities in China is like walking a tightrope. In theory, it is not illegal. But if such a product crosses any red line -- if it becomes too high-profile, too political or too careless about inappropriate content -- the result can be immediate termination. Zank, a gay dating app with over 10 million registered users at the time, was taken down by regulators in 2017 for hosting pornographic content. Rela, a lesbian dating app with over 12 million users, was removed from app stores twice before it rebranded to "The L," removed all mentions of "lesbian" in its app store description and just called itself "a diverse community for women." Even though gay and lesbian dating apps are navigating the same heavily-censored environment, the former have outperformed the latter by a huge margin. Blued has grown into a Nasdaq-listed company and expanded into livestreaming and health services. But lesbian dating apps like Lesdo haven't figured out a feasible business model that makes the regulatory trouble worthwhile. In March, one of Lesdo's founders told Chinese media that activism wasn't going to singlehandedly keep the app growing: "If you want to influence more people, finding a feasible business model will be the most important thing." This phenomenon isn't specific to China. Around the world, lesbian dating apps are rarer and less prominent than their men-facing counterparts. A story in Mic outlined reasons that include insufficient financial backing, limited dating pools and the exclusion of nonbinary people. There's also the fact that dating apps like Blued and Grindr offer the possibility of casual sex. Apps, especially those with location-based technologies, provide unprecedentedly convenient access to it. Lesbian dating apps appear to serve a different set of needs. A Chinese ex-manager at a lesbian dating app told Protocol that a far smaller percentage of its users are coming to the app for immediate sex. They are looking for connections and community, but those don't have to come from lesbian-only platforms, as some of China's largest lesbian groups are actually sub-forums on mainstream sites like Douban and Baidu Tieba. And when relationships develop in real life, the need for the apps disappears. The need for queer women to socialize and date will never go away. On Weibo, new apps serving lesbian users are already promoting themselves under the news of Lesdo's closure. Other lesbian groups on mainstream platforms will also continue to exist. But before someone figures out how to solve for both the political and profitability sides of the equation, the notion of a thriving lesbian dating app in China will remain just that. From Your Site Articles * These ByteDance apps stored US user data in China - at least until ... > * Apple takes down several religious apps in China - Protocol -- The ... > * Apple China is censoring 27 LGBTQ+ apps, report shows - Protocol ... > * Meet Maimai, the app Chinese tech workers love -- and their ... > Keep Reading Show less Zeyi Yang Zeyi Yang is a reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick. censorship dating app lgbtq social media dating apps wearables The Oura Ring was a sleep-tracking hit. Can the next one be even more? Oura wants to be a media company, an activity tracker and even a way to know you're sick before you feel sick. Over the last few years, the Oura Ring has become one of the most recognizable wearables this side of the Apple Watch. Photo: Oura October 26, 2021 David Pierce David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editorial director. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones. October 26, 2021 Oura CEO Harpreet Rai swears he didn't know Kim Kardashian was a fan. He was as surprised as anyone when she started posting screenshots from the Oura app to her Instagram story, and got into a sleep battle with fellow Oura user Gwyneth Paltrow. Or when Jennifer Aniston revealed that Jimmy Kimmel got her hooked on Oura ... and how her ring fell off in a salad. "I am addicted to it," Aniston said, "and it's ruining my life" by shaming her about her lack of sleep. "I think we're definitely seeing traction outside of tech," Rai said. "Which is cool." Over the last couple of years, Oura's ring (imaginatively named the Oura Ring) has become one of the most recognizable wearables this side of the Apple Watch. The company started with a Kickstarter campaign in 2015, but really started to find traction with its second-generation model in 2018. It's not exactly a mainstream device -- Oura said it has sold more than 500,000 rings, up from 150,000 in March 2020 but still not exactly Apple Watch levels -- but it has reached some of the most successful, influential and probably sleep-deprived people in the industry. Jack Dorsey is a professed fan, as is Marc Benioff. Now, with its third-generation ring, Oura is attempting to go big. The new model looks virtually identical to the last, but has more temperature sensors and memory, and includes new features like period prediction and ongoing heart-rate monitoring that will appeal to people who care about more than just their sleep. It also comes with a new library of content, meant to help users make more sense of all that data and actually live a little better. "When we talk to customers," Rai said, "we have to boil it down. One, is this stuff accurate? In the early days of wearables, activity tracking wasn't really accurate. It's gotten better. But the more important thing is, OK, what do I do with all this data?" He cited Larry Page's famous Toothbrush Test, which says a great product is something you use twice a day that makes your life better. But not everyone cares about the same things, so Oura's working on expanding its feature set. "We think wearables are moving from activity and steps into health," he said. The COVID-19 pandemic was something of an inflection point for Oura, which spent much of the last year or so working on studies to see if its rings could be a tool for early detection of the virus. "Most people are seeing they're getting sick two, three days before they feel symptoms," Rai said. He said the same is true for tracking periods and fertility. In this carefully regulated industry, he's careful not to use words like "diagnose" or "treat," and instead likens the Oura Ring to a check-engine light. "It doesn't say you have a flat tire, it doesn't say you can't drive," he said. "It's a warning light." Still, over time, Rai said he hopes to be more proactive and more helpful. Even without diagnosing or treating anything, Oura's working on turning that data into action. The "so what?" question has plagued activity trackers for years, as they've struggled to be useful beyond telling users what they largely already know. For Oura, that starts with content. "We have some meditations and sleep sounds" in the Oura app, Rai said, "but you're going to see that library expand dramatically." Oura has a content team now, and is working with partners on everything from guided walks to straightforward educational videos. "The half-life of caffeine is eight hours, right? " Rai said. "So let's tell you what that means, and why drinking coffee after 2 p.m. is a bad idea ... your heart rate is jacked, and you're not going to sleep." Rai would like Oura to ultimately be even more prescriptive, to tell users exactly what to do and when to be healthier. Every health and wearables company wants that. But until the data and algorithms are good enough -- and crucially, in that early stage where users are still deciding whether to commit to using a device long term -- educational content can bridge the gap. Increasingly, though, Rai said he's finding that people are willing to do the work to be healthier. "I think better health matters for all of us, you know?" he said. COVID-19 made personal and public health front of mind for virtually everyone, while also changing many people's routines and lives for good. With the new Ring comes a new business model for Oura. Its service now costs $5.99 a month, though buyers will get six free months with their purchase. (Existing owners get free memberships for life.) This is an increasingly common approach, both in the industry in general and in wearables in particular: Amazon's Halo comes with a $3.99 monthly subscription, Fitbit Premium is $9.99 a month, and Apple's Fitness+ is $9.99 a month and requires an Apple Watch. Rai said this approach means Oura doesn't have to rush to put out new hardware, and can focus on the whole experience. "I don't think of us as a hardware or software company," he said. "I think of us as a health company enabled by technology." Sleep tracking is still the thing Rai and Oura care most about, and the thing the new ring purports to do best. But as more people begin to understand how health affects their life -- and how their life affects their health -- Rai thinks Oura has a chance to put a ring on many more fingers. He has long believed that the ring is better, both aesthetically and functionally, than a wristband. The last ring won design awards, and for Rai's money there's still nothing better out there. Now the question is how much Oura can do with it. From Your Site Articles * The future of staying healthy is sitting on your wrist - Protocol -- The ... > Keep Reading Show less David Pierce David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editorial director. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones. wearables oura ring health tech Latest Stories See more Most Popular Here are all the Facebook Papers stories A lawsuit tests who controls the stock market The services being layered onto data lakes and warehouses How Apex Fintech Solutions is powering the rise and growth of digital consumer trading platforms It's Frances Haugen's world. We're all just living in it. Everything you need to know about the Allbirds IPO Bulletins October 26, 2021 17:14 EST Robinhood shares drop on crypto trading dip October 26, 2021 14:42 EST Stripe and Klarna partner on 'buy now, pay later' services October 26, 2021 14:01 EST Facebook's next billion-dollar idea? Clothing in the metaverse. About UsCareersContact UsRSS feedsManage Account Privacy StatementDo not sellTerms of Service Unlock more from Protocol (c) 2021 Protocol Media, LLC To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. 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