tv Inside Story Al Jazeera January 4, 2021 3:30am-4:01am +03
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president joe biden responds to the situation in iraq a country analysts say is being politically militarily and economically dominated by neighboring iraq. but the message from these iraqis is clear. that al-jazeera baghdad. this is al jazeera and these other headlines u.s. media outlets have obtained recordings of an extraordinary hour long phone call with president trump and the georgia secretary of state part raffensperger trump can be heard appears to pressure him to recalculate the election results in that state which was won by president elect joe biden trump refuses defeat the people of your you're angry at the people of the country and there's nothing wrong with saying that you know. 2 2 that you've recalculated well mr president
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determines that you have is the data you have is what you should want to have an accurate action and you're a republican we believe that we do have a direct reflection you know i know you know you don't have you don't have not even close you got your own by hundreds of thousands of you know what they did and you're not reporting it that's as you know that's a criminal that's a criminal offense and you know you can't let that happen so all i want to do is as i use one of. $11780.00 loans which is one more that we have because we want to say. and young about the recorded conversation. was certainly the voice of desperation. most certainly than.
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and it was a. case all the abuse of power by the president of the united states. or all of the 10 living former u.s. defense secretaries of warned against the use of the military in any election to speak in the open letter they wrote that such a move would push the u.s. into dangerous territory. in other news an explosion at a fuel depo on the syrian lebanese border has injured at least 10 people lebanon's army says it happens at a warehouse on the syrian side of the border in the lebanese tone of cossar. well those are the headlines to stay with us and al-jazeera inside story is up next .
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facebook and apple at logan heads and it's all about privacy but no way is this fight going to stay private apple says it's changing its software to protect users facebook own views little home small businesses whose right this is inside story. hello and welcome to the program i'm peter told me today it's not david versus goliath it's goliath versus goliath it's being sold as a fight for small businesses and consume a privacy your privacy in reality it is 2 of the world's richest companies going
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head to head in a very public argument one which affects both their bottom lines yup it's all about profits in one corner apple not only the most dominant company in tech worldwide but the highest valued business anywhere on the planet it's devices are in the hands of more than 1000000000 people in the other corner facebook its social media platform is used around the globe by close to 3000000000 people that reach gives it an extremely commanding hold on online advertising and that's the problem because apple wants to change the way previous see is handled on its devices in the coming few months users will have to opt in to allow apps like facebook to gather data that data is essential to how facebook finds the right audience for its ads it's a move which could single handedly. we have the revenue made via those adverts the facebook is calling it an attack on small businesses and says the millions of companies that use its advertising tools will be unable to reach new audiences all
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that led to this ad a full page spread in 3 major u.s. papers facebook says it's standing up for the little guy so does apple. ok let's bring in the panel from new york we have jim anderson he's the c.e.o. of social flow a company that helps media organizations distribute its social content online in berlin we have joined the bryson professor of technology and ethics at the hurty school of governance and here and oh how we have mark owen jones a professor who specializes in social media and the digital humanities been highly for a university welcome to all jim anderson in new york i come to you 1st so apple's going to give us you me everyone else around the world 1000000000 of us more privacy what's the problem. well there's no problem with that and apple definitely has a strong hand here when you go to consumers you say would you like more previously
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most of them are going to say yes i saw one statistic saying 3 out of 4 people would say yes and don't track me i think that's actually low i think it's probably more like 9 out of 10 people the problem is what facebook is trying to say is wow you know that that's really going to impact not just facebook it's going to impact the small businesses who are the advertisers on facebook and they have 10 to 12000000 small business advertisers and that's really facebook's message is what you think is going to protect your privacy and it will and maybe harm facebook and it will is also going to harm those small businesses who reach customers by advertising on facebook well coinsurance here in doha but the reality is that the people that run these these massive 4 global tech companies google amazon apple and facebook they do collect and a stronger shing amount of data every time we hit click on something yeah absolutely i mean i think it's as them said these privacy changes by apple are going to be welcome there's a certain irony here to what facebook doing because it's because of recent scandals
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in the past few years for example cambridge analytics that where it's come for light of how much data being collected by these companies and how it might be misused that's actually raised people's awareness of privacy issues so the fact that facebook now deciding apple and its privacy option it's a tad ironic that facebook in a way a victim of their own success in this regard join a brosnan in berlin is full kind of in one sense or at one level preaching to the converted there was a study in 2018 done by pew in america the pew research group the vast majority of us don't like the feeling that we are in effect being stuart by which ever website we go to. yeah no i think absolutely apple apple has a stronger hand now i mean it has 2 trillion market cap and so it's decided to play the public this direction it is its brand. and i've heard also from nato that they
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have found that people trust for their cyber security. so it's really interesting to me is a facebook is trying to run interference against the governance at the same time claiming that it's in favor of governance and regulation but trying very hard to convince people for example that consumers want to see more targeted advertisements or in this case that they're more concerned about the small and medium enterprises which of course the european commission believes is extremely important part of the european economy and ecosystem so that they're trying to claim that those are the people that will benefit or be harmed as well i suppose there are some you know some proportion of small companies that will be as well as safeguards political campaigns and things like that ok 2 and a can i just ask you to put on your ethics professors head for
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a 2nd is the idea of privacy in shrine or code to fight any place as a human right oh well. yeah that's a great question. which means i'm not entirely sure of the answer that i said no that's from the fundamental rights through the european union. the united nations but let the european union has a say over the g.d.p. our is if you have the capacity to know about the behavior of the citizens of the e.u. then you might be manipulating the citizens of the e.u. and so they are protecting the rights of us who are resident here and as just like they would protect our physical bodies so basically information about you is a part of your person and so by that definition you know i don't i'm not sure if that's been global excepted or if there was a good standard out of human rights law but i do know that in the european union
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it's considered it is a part of your person it is literally a part of your person your data about you jim in new york potentially what might this do to facebook i mean i was stunned a couple of hours ago when i found out facebook makes 98.5 percent of its money purely and only from happy advertisers. yeah you just nailed it i mean if facebook is effectively 100 percent advertising revenue and this will be a significant harm now i will say you what you'll see facebook do is they will move much more rapidly i suspect into e-commerce and making money and diversifying their revenue streams you know and other ways other than simply advertising so it will certainly hurt them at the very worst it will slow their growth potentially it will actually cause their revenue to decline so i think that's a that's a really significant concern but let's go back out joanna said a really interesting thing about advertising and manipulation if you believe that advertising is manipulation which in some regards it is then you're going to
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definitely believe that privacy is more of a right and that advertisers don't have necessarily the right to manipulate you without your consent if you believe that advertising is a question of just surfacing things that are relevant don't surface me advertisements for women's shoes because i don't buy women's shoes it's just sort of common sense to say giving me advertisement for men's shoes is more likely to be effective it's a better use of money and it's more relevant to me that is an undeniably self interested perspective say from facebook or somebody who makes their revenue from advertising but it also from a from just a general comment since perspective makes a lot more sense to users as well monk here in doha staying with the idea of the toys seeing as manipulation in your specialty particularly in this region where you and i live is disinflation in this region is there a corollary flip between manipulation and decision from ation that we can identify attack through the prism of privacy and advertising. i think there's
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a certain element to this i think what we have to be very wary of as times progressed this is how an act whether the state that the private actors will increasingly use manipulates the techniques hidden within advertising we've already seen for example and it's easy things like journalists to try and trick. news websites into publishing false ones that my concern is that social media companies are going to be using. these actors against using social media companies impact them such as facebook to actually initiated censor issues political campaigns we are seeing evidence of that happen already and i think this is a huge problem i think that issues about transparency about who pays the cent and that's when it comes to facebook and i think in this regulatory environment and this is something we have to bear in mind as well is that within the middle east facebook can do really as as they want so there's an issue here jurisdiction about
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advertising and whether it's political or otherwise that we need to pay attention to we're not just talking about northern europe in the u.s. here join a committee about something you were talking about a couple minutes ago when you were talking about the ecosystem when apple does this there is a distinct sense that apple will just press the button it will go live on facebook has to deal with it but does apple also have to change its ecosystem because they make an astonishing amount of money of their development companies the figure is compelling because if they're not developing company makes less than one $1000000.00 of a turnover per year they pay 15 percent to apple if they make a turnover of more than a $1000000.00 a year that figure doubles and 30 percent of that goes to apple as pure profit for them. yeah well i think i think you have to remember that there's something really
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really weird going on here i mean you know the whole thing i can write says it's that in one of those like one of the v.r. companies that facebook bought that was worth more than the entire national basketball association and in the america there's like 14 guidance and they're got a product to market so the amount of money we're talking about both may seem like a really high motivation but don't forget the regulators are coming after these people and maybe they still have decided that rather than actually pay tax which i don't know why they're fighting so hard not to pay taxes they'd rather throw some money under the bus and somehow keep some bubble of liberty i feel like it's some kind of a weird battle for power between people that have too much time on their hands you know. but i you know if i was hoping when facebook was found guilty for some of the . fraud that led to bribes it that they would lose like 90 percent of their market cap and had they done that they would still have been
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a huge company and they still could have done a lot of great program and create really caught products you just can't conceive how much money has gone to these companies in recent years pardon me for interrupting you there jonah jim anderson in new york one gets the distinct feeling that mark zuckerberg has kind of harsh spat the dummy on this one already but realistically what else can facebook do that's going to have to ride the wave from see what happens. why i think you're seeing facebook do exactly what they can which is a p.r. campaign right there taking out newspaper advertisements and otherwise trying to get that message out about small businesses will be impacted i think it's a tough hand for them to play i mean again as we've been discussing it's really hard to be perceived or in reality be against privacy because most people want that so i think they're going to do their best to get that message out and then like you said that you know apple just gets to flip the switch and facebook has to deal with that i think that's probably the next phase of facebook's messaging will be why is apple the one that gets to flip the switch and are we ok with apple being able to
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decide right now you're ok with them flipping that switch and saying privacy is important and we have to deal with it what about next time apple wants to flip that switch and maybe they want to make more money they want to change that 15 or 30 percent to some other number or they want to put some other you know sort of requirement in place this maybe not so popular i suspect you'll see facebook and others start to talk about that as well because apple you know shouldn't necessarily be the gatekeeper to you all of these decisions either mark or does this tell us a pull perceive the customers facebook perceive the uses i mean to me it seems it's almost as if apple sees a couple of cardboard cutouts of apple central wherever they're based and they see a couple of a man or woman with one device in their hand and they perceive that as a very personal relationship between the device and the individual whereas facebook seems to view their client bases you know a very big percentage of 7000000000 people around the world and those people just widgets part of
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a delivery system the system delivering profits to facebook. yeah i mean i think it's hard to be sympathetic in many ways to either of these companies i think of facebook to have a point because that software is obviously used by an incredibly large number of people then getting so is apples to apples apple is you could argue is more an elitist product so they do serve different audiences but i don't think we should be taken in by facebook trying to appeal to the every man defending small to medium sized businesses yes of course this will have an impact on them but i don't expect primary concern is this business or that profits facebook primary concern is its own bottom line and i think what's interesting about these 2 candidates debate is what we're seeing is to in many cases more than that large companies go i think the whole reason we're having this argument or rather facebook and apple having these arguments is because there has been a historic failure to regulate the fact that facebook has managed to profit the
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years of accumulating people's data has led to this point they've they've enjoyed a healthy exploitation of people's data with apple i have a dominant market share they own a lot of infrastructural possibilities that allow it to control people devices and how they consume that data and there's another aspect to that i think we need to mention is that asshole themselves could stand to benefit financially from not having. people take the tracks because this could diminish the amount of revenue brought to advertising through apps it might force at makers to have a paper model which would then benefit apple financially so there is an element of financial war going on here not just affable saying that they're concerned about people's privacy. if i can add on to that to mark's point peter i'll say this is not a david and goliath right facebook and apple are both huge giant companies the other 2 companies you mentioned at the beginning but this stand to benefit from this are google and amazon right so you think about google and amazon have
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a remarkable amount of data about us as well they get it in different ways and they're gonna not going to be affected by apple's changes nearly to the degree that facebook is but that's another thing facebook you know is going to be harmed google and amazon implicitly are going to be helped and of course apple is going to be helped itself as mark was just saying joyner is there may be a bigger fight coming not involving google and amazon per se but involving the little guys i mean both facebook and apple maybe have this bigger fight because there is now this thing called the coalition of up fairness and basically the likes of spotify and a company called match group match group is the umbrella company that owns globally an awful lot of dating apps now that's the that's the ultimate form of advertising i guess but if you've got spotify with old they're quite freaky scary algorithms getting into bed no pun intended with dating apps around the world to square up
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against apple and facebook i mean you know the poke roofie of this system that we all engage in in a year or 2 might be perhaps radically different. yeah i really want to come back to some of the plans that were just made about regulation there isn't enough regulation in the sector and there was just regulation nouns in europe has proved the strongest regulators of the sector the digital services act and the design markets act so i agree that there's there's sort of some of fratricide happening a lot of this is about trying to shape and to be hard for a con i really love this point about who gets to just decide you know twitter decided and i was offended that a lot of people were twitter decided to basically censor the presidents of a g 7 country in the most recent election you know that and not to fully censored or to even have that level of interference twitter we're not even talking about
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twitter anywhere there in the state you know and so the i think it's a great thing just as the european union is a great way to bring a bunch of small countries together i would love to see a bunch of small companies come together so that the representation is not only of these giants you know microsoft has got representation at the un now so that's great they're actually providing some public services there but we need to see that playing ground leveled out but we also really really need to see a stronger regulatory measures taken and so i absolutely see this as an ad for 2 i confuse the regulators and the european commission and i hope that we aren't confused jim would it be fair to say however that as far as these 2 but hemis that we're talking about apple and facebook now i'm not saying either of them corporately or manifesting through individuals when they're up there on the stage talking or talking to politicians i'm not saying your company lies i'm not saying you the company does anything that is explicitly or implicitly illegal however both
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companies do kind of occupy a grey area when it comes to empty trust legislation particularly in the us and particularly in the e.u. and to go back to the point that joanna was making there seems to me that whether it's european commission politicians or senators and congressmen in the states the politicians have been in a time warp because they're always playing catch up 18 months or 2 years behind what the likes of facebook and apple are actually doing with their uses. yeah i think you're being generous on the timing i'm not sure they're 18 to 24 months behind they may be years behind and that's a real problem a regulation i think we all are for responsible regulation but there's 2 challenges with regulation number one is very messy process it's also very local right what happens in the e.u. is very different than what happens in the u.s. which is very different to what happened say in china right and so you know it also moves at a glacial pace compared to technology so i think you're always going to see regulators trying to play catch up with this fast moving technology but antitrust furthermore
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we we need new theories of antitrust historically in the united states it's been all been about price if what a company is doing is causing you to pay more for a service then that might be considered antitrust well how do you how do you put that lens and front of a free product i don't pay to use facebook so i think you're going to see some new theories around antitrust probably beginning in the e.u. and then following along in the u.s. to try to deal with these new types of technology companies and apple is very much in that mix apples and incredibly dominant company and that app store we've been talking about i think it's got some significant antitrust concerns as well ok coming but you here and facebook the kind of go to stance on this either via the head of p.r. or via soccer consoles the go to response to this over the past year or so when it comes to previous see particularly pegged to your area of discipline ation has always been a uses prefer targeted. zuckerberg has said that in congress i've
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spent 2 days trying to find imperial evidence that says if you're a facebook user you like getting targeted adverts can't find any what's going on there. sometimes i think when facebook talk about their own audience they are probably creating the audience that they desire and nobody's that and it's no different from the p.r. stunt that we're seeing here of facebook placing themselves as the defenders of the small or medium sized business they are taken on this mantle themselves without being invited and are exploiting that in order to make them appear that they care about the kind of every man the small business so i think it's a cynical marketing ploy and one thing i'd like to add that was well and we've talked about for example g.d.p. o n e regulation we have to remember as well that even in europe the big big tech companies that are compelling and fighting back and i think this is something that's also alarming it's not just going to be a question of regulators slowly you know for example improving the regulation about
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data privacy these companies are fighting back we've seen recently leaked documents shows that google. and other tech companies are basically increasing their lobbying presence in brussels in order to for example mitigate against these things like antitrust case against apple and other companies so this is something we need to be very mindful of jonah brush and berlin what's facebook's end game here. i don't know if they have an end game except for of course it's like a bird really doesn't have all 8000000000 of us on one of those applications i suppress a point of personal pride. i do think it's much more about relative a concern about. you know it's a concern that doesn't even make sense if you look at the g.d.p. are the big tech fight it tooth and nail and then within 6 months are going to hope wow this is weird we're actually making more money it's like yes the you as a trading block we actually do things to make the digital economy better while also
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protecting our citizens rate so i am i really going back to a couple of things that people are saying to better answer your question earlier yeah there's like 500000000 people in the you know it's true that's not the whole planet but if we got even that segment of customers to have their advertising a little bit more spread back out like it used to be over for the other times of journalism and things like that you know i believe that the only evidence you're going to find and i'm glad you've been having that problem so we are researching some of these market dominance the insight now here at the school. that i've you know they're probably their evidence is when they when they when they use the data they has they get more clicks and so they're happier over the customers they actually want are happier when they find that they've bought more suffered johnson more sites it's like are they happy when there's smoke more cigarettes ok i not sure ok last 15 seconds to you jim pull will not to do a u. turn does that mean the most to suck up or can facebook just have to suck it up and work around it. yes i think they do they really don't have
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a choice as we talked about earlier apple's going to flip that switch facebook can complain and then they'll adapt and they will ok we have to leave it there the clock has beaten us as usual on inside story thank you all very much thank you to our guests jim anderson john bryson and mark owen jones and thank you too for your company can see the program again anytime via the website al-jazeera dot com and for more discussion go to our facebook page yes we do have one that's facebook dot com forward slash a.j. inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter handle at a.j. inside story for me peter toby and everyone here on the team in doha thanks for watching we will see you very soon for the moment.
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for many young adults a coming of age brings greater responsibility. for this young man the responsibility of 800 years of family tradition weighs heavy on his shoulders. the choice to students but the decision must be made soon. by blood college of the viewfinder asia series on al-jazeera. this underwater treasure is a risk of disappearing juice a coral bleaching caused by rising temperatures when we. drain the area heritage its iconic areas of industry base is this we will lose it
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instantly if we have another bleaching event of these movements year if it continues just where the opportunity for the corals to recover in between those mad . scientists a cooling fall strong climate policy from the government to reduce emissions without this the situation on the get worse. teach it strongman is ruining within a fire and faced in the silence from his allies is deafening the us was perfectly happy to trade off the mark for sea for security while western leaders turning a blind eye when even the own citizens have for inventing to his repression executions torture or censorship is not acceptable and you won't hear such strong words from let's say berlin or paris or london man in cairo on al-jazeera.
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al jazeera ready. i mean how to hit an endo how with the top stories on al-jazeera u.s. president donald trump has been recorded telling the top election official in the state of georgia to find enough votes to overturn his election defeat there georgia was one of the battleground states that flips in favor of president elect joe biden trump refuses to concede he's lost repeating unfounded claims of election fraud alan fischer reports from atlanta georgia. from a president who insists without evidence the election was stolen from him pressure on a tough election official to find votes.
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