Nintendo’s Two-Switch Combo Is A Neat Digital Magic Trick
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At an E3 where Nintendo and its partners largely played it safe with big Smash Bros. and Pokémon sequels, the company tucked a clever new Switch development in a trailer for a new Mario Party. Blink and you’d miss it: the sight of two Nintendo Switch screens connected into one oddly-shaped game board.
On the last day of E3, I got to see a quick demo of the two-screen technology. I wasn’t allowed to play the games myself, but in a meeting room bearing the name of the company’s outgoing CEO, I watched the latest Switch concept in action.
Nintendo reps showed off three mini-games that make use of the dual screen.
In the first, a baseball game, allowing up to two players per team, involved propping up a pair of Switches back-to-back to give opposite perspectives of a baseball diamond. One team would pitch and field. The other would get up to bat. This was fine, but not the magic I’d booked the meeting to see.
The other two demos were short but sensational. They each involved using two Switch units’ screens as connectable surfaces.
The first demo involved bananas and two Switch screens. Each screen shows halves of some bananas or banana bunches, each half bleeding off the edge of the system like the edge of a puzzle piece. The player needs to move the screens around on a table until two of the halves are lined up to make a whole, then swipe their finger through it to confirm the connection. (The game was also demoed during Nintendo’s Treehouse Live show and can be viewed 16 minutes into this clip.) The game was timed, and the player has to think quickly. After each successful connection, the screens display more complex banana arrangements, necessitating more fiddling with those Switch screens to line them up the right way.
The second multi-screen game, also from Super Mario Party, involves multiplayer tank combat. Each screen’s battlefield consists of a 5×9 grid, and the screens can be joined in any way that retains some of the seams of that grid. Once the player lines up the screens at any right or straight angle, they swipe their finger to make the connection. The screens reconfigure themselves to ensure there’s an open and contiguous battlefield across both devices. At that point, players can start driving their tanks into battle from one screen to the next.
Nintendo wouldn’t let me try the games, nor talk to me about how they work. Watching the games in action, I gather that the systems may be linked wirelessly but don’t actually communicate their position. The act of drawing one’s finger from one screen to the other appears to be the main (and possibly the only) way that the screens extrapolate their relative positions.
Figuring out how the magic trick is done would make it a shade less exciting, but I’m still enamored with what Nintendo’s done here. I could be wrong, after all. And I wouldn’t put it past Nintendo to come up with wilder, even better ideas for games that use this concept. How about a double-wide view for a new co-op side-scroller?
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s ‘Everything Is Love’ Marks a New Step in the Album’s Evolution
https://ift.tt/2MCFgvX
On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such a unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s ‘Everything Is Love’ Marks a New Step in the Album’s Evolution
https://ift.tt/2MCFgvX
On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such a unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s ‘Everything Is Love’ Marks a New Step in the Album’s Evolution
https://ift.tt/2MCFgvX
On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such a unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
Aside from the new dark mode UI in Mojave, one of the most useful additions to the next version of macOS is Stacks, a feature that automatically sorts and arranges all the files on your desktop into tidy little groups.
It’s a quick and easy way to declutter all the photos, PDFs, random downloads, and whatever else is making your computer screen look like a garbage dump. But in some ways, Stacks makes cleaning up your junk a little too easy, which is why we were so excited to learn that in Mojave, there’s a hidden option that brings back the chaos.
It was first discovered by @ChrisMorrigOG on Twitter, but we were able to replicate it in house as well. First you’ll need to turn off Stacks. That’s in the Finder menu bar. Go to View and then tick off the Use Stacks option. Next right click anywhere on the desktop. You’ll see Clean Up. Now press the Option key and Clean Up will become Mess Up. From there, all you have to do is click, and then revel in the madness as all your previously organized files get scattered randomly across your screen.
And even though I struggle to see how useful the Mess Up option would actually be on a day-to-day basis, with seemingly every new gadget or app so hellbent on improving speed and efficiency, it’s rather refreshing to see a feature that does the complete opposite. Congratulations Apple, you’ve made tech fun again, even if it’s only for a hot second.
P.S. You better not remove this feature before Mojave gets released in the fall.
Facebook’s live gameshows could take a bite out of HQ Trivia
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Instead of creating its own HQ Trivia competitor, Facebook has taken a broader approach and created an entire gaming platform. The company announced polls for Live and on demand videos as well as new gamification features for Live videos. Partners like Insider, BuzzFeed and Fresno can add polls, quizzes and challenges to both individual videos as well as entire game show series.
Confetti by Insider is an interactive pop culture trivia game show that will air daily. Like HQ, Confetti will let you see what your friends answer, but on an every day basis. Cash prizes are on offer if you answer all the questions right; you’ll split the pot if more than one person gets them all. Outside Your Bubble by BuzzFeed News will apparently challenge players to guess what others “across the cultural divide” are thinking, while What’s in the Box by Fresno will let you guess what’s in a closed box. Guess correctly to win prizes.
In addition to these interactive video features, Facebook is adding more content to Watch and rolling out Top Fan badges to more creator communities. There’s also a new video template for Pages that puts video and community more prominently on a Page. Creators and publishers can try it out, and revert back easily, as well. Finally, there’s a new Brand Collabs Manager, which will let brands search and find creators on Facebook to make deals and partnerships.
Verizon and AT&T will stop selling your phone’s location to data brokers
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Verizon and AT&T have promised to stop selling their mobile customers’ location information to third-party data brokers, following a security problem that leaked the real-time location of US cell phone users.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently urged all four major carriers to stop the practice, and today he published responses he received from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint.
Wyden’s statement praised Verizon for “taking quick action to protect its customers’ privacy and security,” but he criticized the other carriers for not making the same promise.
“After my investigation and follow-up reports revealed that middlemen are selling Americans’ location to the highest bidder without their consent or making it available on insecure Web portals, Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off,” Wyden said. “In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint seem content to continuing to sell their customers’ private information to these shady middle men, Americans’ privacy be damned.”
AT&T changed its stance shortly after Wyden’s statement. “Our top priority is to protect our customers’ information, and, to that end, we will be ending our work with aggregators for these services as soon as practical in a way that preserves important, potential lifesaving services like emergency roadside assistance,” AT&T said in a statement to Ars.
Sen. Wyden recognized AT&T’s change on Twitter and called on T-Mobile and Sprint to follow suit.
Sprint told Ars that it has “nothing additional to share.” We also asked T-Mobile for a response to Wyden’s statement and will update this story if the carrier answers. T-Mobile told Wyden that it will continue the data aggregation program but that it has “appropriate controls” in place.
Privacy invasion
It was revealed last month that prison phone company Securus offers a service enabling law enforcement officers to locate most American cell phones within seconds. Securus’ service relies on data from LocationSmart, a data aggregator. It was also reported that a LocationSmart bug could have allowed anyone to surreptitiously track the real-time whereabouts of cell phone users.
“To access this private data, correctional officers simply visit Securus’ Web portal, enter any US wireless phone number, and then upload a document purporting to be an official document giving permission to obtain real-time location data,” Wyden wrote in a letter to carriers on May 8. “Senior officials from Securus have confirmed to my office that it never checks the legitimacy of those uploaded documents to determine whether they are, in fact, court orders and has dismissed suggestions that it is obligated to do so.”
All four carriers told Wyden that they suspended access to Securus. But T-Mobile and Sprint haven’t promised to cut ties with data aggregators that Securus obtained data from. (T-Mobile and Sprint are attempting to merge but are still separate companies.)
The Federal Communications Commission is investigating the matter, and Wyden called on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to recuse himself because he represented Securus as an attorney in 2012.
“Chairman Pai’s total abandonment of his responsibility to protect Americans’ security shows that he can’t be trusted to oversee an investigation into the shady companies that he used to represent,” Wyden said. “If your location information falls into the wrong hands, you—or your children—can be vulnerable to predators, thieves, and a whole host of people who would use that knowledge to malicious ends.”
We contacted Pai’s office for a response and will update this story if we get a reply.
The Obama-era FCC voted to impose privacy rules that would have required carriers to get consumers’ consent before selling or sharing personal data, including location information. But Congress last year voted to prevent implementation of those rules, with Pai’s support. Pai also took action to halt implementation of data security requirements that were part of the Obama-era FCC’s privacy rulemaking.
Verizon ending contracts with two aggregators
Verizon’s response to Wyden said that it “contracts with two aggregators, LocationSmart and Zumigo, in our location aggregator program.” The data sharing is supposed to be used for legitimate business purposes, such as a truck rental company “us[ing] the location data to provide better assistance to customers renting trucks who experience problems on the road,” Verizon said. Credit card companies may also use the data to “approximate a user’s proximity to their home address when applying for a credit card online to help con?rm their identity and reduce fraud.”
But “it appears that Securus and/or its affiliate 3C Interactive impermissibly permitted law enforcement agencies to request location information through LocationSmart for investigative purposes,” Verizon told Wyden. “Use of location information for investigative purposes was not an approved use case in our agreement with LocationSmart.”
The location aggregators receive “the customer’s approximate latitude and longitude, as well as the error radius and other error information for location queries,” letting them locate a customer to within 1,000 meters, Verizon said. Verizon’s deal with the aggregators requires the aggregators to get customers’ permission to access location information.
Verizon told Wyden that it has suspended Securus and 3C Interactive’s access to Verizon customer location information. Secondly, Verizon “decided to end our current location aggregation arrangements with LocationSmart and Zumigo. Verizon has notified these location aggregators that it intends to terminate their ability to access and use our customers’ location data as soon as possible.”
The shutoff is not happening immediately because it “must be completed in careful steps so as not to disrupt beneficial services being provided using customer-location data,” Verizon said.
“In the interim, Verizon will not authorize any new uses of location information by either LocationSmart or Zumigo or the sharing of location information with any new customers of these existing aggregators,” Verizon said.
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint
AT&T told Wyden that it “never authorized the use of its customer data for the Securus Web portal” that provided location data to law enforcement. AT&T did approve the sharing of location information with prison officials through Securus’ prison telecommunications service, however.
Under this approved use, “When a wireless customer receives a call from an inmate, the customer hears an IVR [Interactive Voice Response] message requesting affirmative consent to share phone-location information for investigative purposes,” AT&T said.
But Securus provided further, unapproved services to law enforcement officials and did not seek consumers’ consent for this unapproved use of their location data, AT&T wrote:
We now understand that, despite AT&T’s requirements to obtain customer consent, Securus did not in fact obtain customer consent before collecting customers’ location information for its On-Demand Service. Instead, Securus evidently relied upon law enforcement’s representation that it had appropriate legal authority to obtain customer location data, such as a warrant, court order, or other authorizing document as a proxy for customer consent.
“We are actively investigating the extent to which Securus may have obtained unauthorized access to AT&T customer location data, and we are pressing Securus to provide greater cooperation than they have to this point,” AT&T also wrote. “Our top priority is to protect our customers’ information, and, to that end, we have suspended all access by Securus to AT&T customer location data.”
Sprint noted that it began an investigation after receiving Sen. Wyden’s letter. “We suspended the provision of location data to Securus, and our investigation continues,” Sprint wrote to Wyden.
T-Mobile told Wyden that it sells data to two aggregators, LocationSmart and Zumigo. T-Mobile shares cell tower location information for customers’ phone numbers in response to requests made via these aggregators.
“[R]ecords of customer consent must be provided to the location aggregator (including the time the consent was provided) before the location aggregator provides the service provider with the requested location,” T-Mobile wrote.
Securus’ program for law enforcement “was never approved by T-Mobile and we quickly shut down any transmission of our customers’ location data to Securus,” T-Mobile wrote. But T-Mobile says it will continue to work with data aggregators in general.
“We have also reviewed the program more broadly and, while we believe the program has appropriate controls already in place, we are working with our location aggregators and will be taking additional steps to help ensure that an incident like this one does not happen in the future,” T-Mobile wrote.