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Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

[Image: Starship delivery bots gambol in the Milton Keynes snow Mickila Thomasina Travis/Victoriajane6]

Smart shelves watch you shop, and smart baskets

Last week we looked at checkoutless alternatives to Amazon Go. The Go model probably works well where you’re building from the ground up, putting the smart infrastructure in at the same time as the shelves etc. (So it will be interesting to see if Amazon retrofits any Whole Foods stores with Go.) If you’re a supermarket with an existing estate and you don’t want the capex of all that infrastructure, are there any simpler ways to make your stores checkoutless and unstaffed?

Smart shelves and fridges maybe. Tesco have experimented with this in the past (digital shelf-edge labelling etc). Walgreens are now looking at using smart fridges that watch shoppers to collect demographic and shopping intent data from their purchases, movements, and even their gaze.

“Crucially, the “Cooler Screens” system does not use facial recognition. Shoppers aren’t identified when the fridge cameras scan their face. Instead, the cameras analyze faces to make inferences about shoppers’ age and gender. First, the camera takes their picture, which an AI system will measure and analyze, say, the width of someone’s eyes, the distance between their lips and nose, and other micro measurements. From there, the system can estimate if the person who opened the door is, say, a woman in her early 20s or a male in his late 50s. It’s analysis, not recognition [because face recognition is illegal in some US states].”

Or you might make the shopping baskets smarter. The promise of these is that, unlike Amazon Go, you don’t have to rebuild your shop and put a lot of infrastructure in. Instead, you make only the basket smart. This might constrain how “smart” you can make the shopping experience, but it looks quite triallable.

Elsewhere in grocery, Ocado’s having secret talks with M&S (Ocado’s Waitrose deal is up in 2020).

Do users care about privacy?

Facebook got caught paying teenagers for their data in a market research app. You might argue that they’re collecting data, so it’s fairer for users to get paid for it than not get paid, and that as it the user’s data they should be able to decide whether to sell it. But it’s a bit unclear whether consent was meaningfully given. So the headlines were things like Facebook tricks kids into spending their parents’ money, Facebook Research paid users $20 gift cards for near total access to data on their phones, Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids:

“An internal Facebook survey of users found that many parents did not even realize Facebook was storing their credit card information, according to an unsealed document. And parents also did not know their children could use their credit card without re-entering a password or some other form of verification.

Perhaps even worse, the children didn’t even realize they were spending real money within the game [because] “It doesn’t necessarily look like ‘real’ money to a minor.””

Apple then revoked Facebook’s enterprise certificate, which prevented all of FB’s internal and test apps from running (and it did the same to Google the next day, again over a market research app). The user privacy, or the perception of it, is becoming a higher-stakes game, with increasing friction between the big tech companies.

The wider picture for Facebook is whether privacy and trust is a big deal or not. On the one hand, there are several research studies suggesting that users aren’t comfortable with the data being collected or how they’re categorised. But it’s not clear yet whether that discomfort is changing user behaviour in a way that affects FB’s business performance.

Elsewhere: Facebook’s plan to integrate the backends of its messaging services could be prevented in the EU? And Apple had a horrible FaceTime bug in which you could FaceTime an Apple device and listen in remotely without the call recipient answering the call, which is a baaad thing given that they’re trying to be the privacy champion.

TSB IT meltdown cost 330m

TSB bank’s IT apocalypse last year has now cost it 330 million. To recap what happened: a third-party IT supplier owned elsewhere in the parent banking group provided a poorly-tested platform based on parent bank’s platform which is itself based on an another third-party’s platform, then the bank’s leadership communicated weakly, and so on… Because it’s not a simple story, it will be used as a cautionary case study to justify any manner of competing approaches: the answer is in-house teams and agile methods... or the answer is third-party partners and better planning… or... One answer is don’t do what TSB did.

Another big IT system is unhappy: the Ministry of Justice court systems are falling over a lot. The funding cuts since 2010 have surely played a large part.

Data trusts

The Dept of Culture, Media and Sport is funding the creation of data trusts. The Open Data Institute’s definition of a data trust is a “legal structure which provides independent, third party stewardship of data for the benefit of a group of organisations or people”.

Data needs to be a “first order” entity in the design of organisations and services, so data trusts are a good idea.

DCMS: “Data trusts are one potential way to increase sharing of data and unlock more social and economic benefits from data while protecting other interests such as people’s privacy, corporate confidentiality or, as in the pilot we’re doing on data about endangered animals, our environment.”

Games and children

Some in-game mechanics incentivise gambling in minors and may therefore break gambling regulations.

This newsletter’s humble opinion is that it isn’t a good look for a large games publisher to sue a 14 year-old for cheating.

Magnetic fingers

“The EM vibration is a strange sensation, especially when you first start feeling it. After about 6 months it stopped feeling like a sensation in my finger, and more a sense hooked up in my brain to ‘there’s some EM fields near your hand’”. That might sound a bit transhumanist eyeroll, but consider whether things like this are essentially the modern condition. When you don’t have any internet connection on your mobile, do you feel like an ability - or even part of you - is missing?

Other news

As US computer manufacturing moved overseas, local component manufacturers updated their equipment to handle more specialised jobs, which made it difficult when Apple later wanted 28,000 screws. “He made do with his new machines, although he could not make the exact screws Apple wanted. His company delivered 28,000 screws over 22 trips. Mr. Melo often made the one-hour drive himself in his Lexus sedan.”

Amazon’s Alexa advert for the Superbowl plays with the idea that everything will end up being Alexa-ed. Harrison Ford’s dog orders dog biscuits, a joke that Alexa once turned off the power of the entire Earth (with echoes of accidental AWS switch offs), etc.

New York state has banned the selling of fake followers, “likes” and online views from bogus accounts on social media platforms.

Bank robber caught because he made his escape on an electric scooter. Not because it was a slow getaway, but because the scooter firm tracks where they go.

A cryptocurrency exchange lost the passwords to all of the money, which was careless. 0.1% of Bitcoin’s total money supply lost hints at a way Bitcoin could achieve its former, lofty valuation: increasing scarity due to forgetfulness.

Co-op news

Getting the most out of our community of practice meetings - Victoria Mitchell on how the delivery managers do it.

Events

Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 4 Feb 1pm at Federation House.

Web team playback - Tue 5 Feb 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Health team show & tell - Tue 5 Feb 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Tue 5 Feb 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Data ecosystem show & tell - Wed 6 Feb 3pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

Line managers drop-in clinic - Thu 7 Feb 1pm at Federation House.

Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 7 Feb 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Manchester Data Platform User Group - Thu 7 Feb 5pm at Federation house 6th floor.

Membership show & tell - Fri 8 Feb 3pm at Federation house 6th floor.

Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 11 Feb 1pm at Federation House.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 12 Feb 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

CMO CRM show & tell - Tue 12 Feb 2pm at Angel Square 13th floor.

North West Drupal user group: Interactive Investor - Tue 12 Feb 7pm at Federation House.

Line managers drop-in clinic - Thu 14 Jan 1pm at Federation House.

Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 31 Jan 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Membership show & tell - Fri 15 Feb 3pm at Federation house 6th floor.

More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved and thoughtful readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s flunky @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

Undeniable proof that the walking dead and toy story have the exact same plot....