Google's name game gets the Trump treatment
Hi everyone, welcome back to Trending, Business Insider Prime's weekly newsletter of the latest tech industry developments. I'm Alexei Oreskovic, Business Insider's West Coast bureau chief and global tech editor.
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This week: A Google by any other name...
When Donald Trump declared one month ago that Google was building a website to screen Americans for the coronavirus, he took a lot of flak for overstating what appeared to be a limited (read, a handful of California cities) project and for attributing the effort to Google instead of Verily, a biotech firm owned by Google parent company Alphabet.
As it turns out, Trump's Google conflation may not have been so far off the mark. That's because in order to register for the Verily test screening site, a person must sign-in with a Google account. And that's not an accident.
As Hugh Langley reports, Verily has told five US Senators that it will not remove the Google sign-in requirement, despite the senators' concerns that it could present a barrier to using the service. According to Verily, a Google account is the only reliable way to authenticate people's identities. Verily also assured the senators that it has no plans to use the data for commercial purposes.
There's something striking about Verily's insistence on using the Google user logins, especially given all the trouble Alphabet has gone through in arguing that its portfolio of companies are separate, independent businesses. Separate, with benefits?
It's not just semantics. If the delineations between Alphabet companies are a fiction, you might not feel the same way about entrusting your personal health data to the same for-profit company that has your email, search and maps data - even if the company promises it will keep the data in separate buckets.
Or maybe we won't care. The need to stop the spread of coronavirus has a lot of people rethinking privacy. Last week's partnership between Google and Apple to create OS-level contract tracing capabilities would have been unthinkable until two months ago. The privacy implications of that Apple-Google partnership are being debated right now, but it's happening on a relatively muted level for something so significant.
Post-pandemic notions of personal privacy are impossible to predict. But if you're looking for hints, pay attention to what happens with the Verily-Google and the Google-Apple relationships today.
Read Hugh's full story on Verily here:
Verily told 5 US senators that it has run more than 7,000 tests for COVID-19 and plans to keep the mandatory Google sign-in - here's the letter it sent
Microsoft's long goodbye to 1991
Do you remember what you were doing in 1991? If you were even alive at the time, you might have had Nirvana in your Walkman and big pockets on the sides of your trousers. And if your tastes turned to the technical, you might have messed around with something called Visual Basic.
Microsoft's programming language - launched that year - was one of the first efforts to make computer coding easy for novices. Amazingly, as Rosalie Chan reports, it still exists. It even has 700,000 monthly active users.
But after nearly three decades, Microsoft has decided it's time to move on. The company will stop adding new language features to Visual Basic, leaving the ancient language frozen in time.
Rosalie spoke to Microsoft's Scott Hunter about why the company finally decided the time was right to abandon Visual Basic and what will happen to the language's grunge-era holdouts (hint: it has something to do with .NET).
Read Rosalie's story here:
A Microsoft director explains why it's finally ending language updates for Visual Basic, a programming language launched in 1991 that 700,000 developers still rely on every month
The sound bite:
"This is a crisis. If anyone leverages this opportunity to do marketing, to do sales, to attack others, history will tell the truth: which company is doing the right thing, which company is doing the wrong thing."
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan when asked by BI's Paayal Zaveri about competitors capitalizing on Zoom's recent security and privacy problems.
What would Webvan say?
Until recently, ordering groceries online was a mainstream activity. But the virus has changed everything.
According to estimates from Business Insider Intelligence, the number of Americans who buy groceries online is set to jump sharply in the coming year. And depending on how severe the pandemic continues to be, the numbers could get even higher.
Recommended readings:
Not necessarily in tech:
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- Alexei
