The IT Nerd

Today, Google announced a new update to Privacy Sandbox for the Web, reaching  “general availability” on Chrome for the relevance and measurement APIs, a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web. 

Google first introduced the Privacy Sandbox initiative across the web and Android in 2019, collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders — including publishers, developers, adtech providers, consumers, and more

What’s new? 

• The general availability of the Privacy Sandbox APIs will enable advertisers and developers to scale usage of these new technologies within their products and services
• Google has also rolled out new Ad privacy controls in Chrome that allow people to manage how the Privacy Sandbox technologies may be used to deliver the ads they see. These controls allow users to tailor their experience by customizing what ad topics they’re interested in, what relevance and measurement APIs they want enabled, and more. 
• General availability means the Privacy Sandbox technologies are in a stable state, and ready for scaled use by advertising solutions to support key business use cases. Having reached this stage after extensive industry feedback, Google does not plan to make any significant changes to the API interfaces ahead of third-party cookie deprecation. Companies integrating the Privacy Sandbox APIs into their solutions can now scale their deployment and testing to assess readiness for the planned deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024.
• Starting in Q4 of 2023, Google will enable the industry to bolster their testing efforts with the ability to simulate the deprecation of third-party cookies for a percentage of their users. Then, in Q1 of 2024, Google will turn off third-party cookies for 1 percent of all Chrome users, further establishing the environments necessary for testing the effectiveness of the Privacy Sandbox APIs. 

You can learn more about the announcement in the blog post here. 

Today Google announced the 12 startups joining the North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders class of 2023. Among this group is Kingsley Madu, founder and CEO of Hamilton-based startup, Expedier, a Black-led banking platform offering financial solutions to underbanked BIPOC communities.

When emigrating to Canada, Madu was faced with adversity from the onset, challenged with lack of access to financial services, he was unable to apply for a credit card or rent a home.  After experiencing these hardships, he began building the first BIPOC community-focused global banking solution to offer support to the millions of immigrants who come to Canada looking for a new life.

This month, Expedier will join 11 other Black-led startups as part of the North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders class of 2023.  The 10-week intensive digital accelerator provides equity-free technical support and mentorship along with access to the best of Google’s people and technology, to help these startups prepare for the next phase of their growth journey. Now in its fourth year, the Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders program is part of Google’s commitment to leveling the playing field for underserved founders across North America. 

You can read more about Kingsley Madu and his startup Expedier in our Q&A blog here.

Yesterday at Google Cloud Next conference, the company announced new generative AI enhancements to three Duet AI security products aimed to ‘do more with less’ and make it easier to navigate large security datasets simply by asking questions in plain language.

• Duet AI in Mandiant Threat Intelligence helps security teams understand the mass of data they have by providing a summary of a particular threat.  
• Duet AI for Chronicle Security Operations helps teams ask better questions about a particular threat to identify the level of danger and how to respond.
• Duet AI in Security Command Center enables less experienced security analysts to ask questions to understand the nature of the threat by providing analysis of security findings, potential attack paths and possible actions to take.

“AI is enabling security teams to improve their security posture by generating AI summaries to describe threats, by searching for patterns in security data to identify if teams have been targeted or companies have been targeted, and finally, by recommending actions to take both in response to active threats and also to proactively improve security posture,” Steph Hay, head of UX for cloud security at Google said.

Dave Ratner, CEO, HYAS had this comment :
 
   “Generative AI has the ability to both tremendously help and harm the cyber security industry.  Google is highlighting some very positive steps to drive efficacy and efficiency in  battling bad actors, but we can’t forget that criminals will be utilizing AI in nefarious ways to continue to make their attacks harder to detect and more effective, similar to what’s been highlighted by HYAS’ eyespy proof of concept and others.   While Protective DNS systems perform admirably today for business and operational resiliency, continued research into how best to detect and defend against tomorrow’s AI-based attacks is needed across the industry to ensure this same level of resiliency going forward.”

Emily Phelps, Director, Cyware follows with this comment:

   “Using AI is a good step toward aiding security teams to get the context they need to take meaningful actions. Cybersecurity programs often include different teams using disparate tools, lacking a shared taxonomy. This makes it difficult to get the right information to the right people to take the right action, even as insights are automatically distributed. Coupling automation with true collaborative technologies – that have flexible playbooks and defined workflows – will give enterprises the contextual insights needed to move faster and more effectively.”

This is a good move by Google. But security is best done in a layered approach. Which means that you as an organization need to have multiple layers to make sure that you don’t get pwned.

Today at Google Cloud Next ‘23, Google was announcing new customers, partners, solutions and products that showcase how Google Cloud is bringing generative AI across its product stack and helping businesses build new AI-powered services and businesses.

• From startups to enterprises, new customers announced how Google Cloud is accelerating their technology transformations through the use of generative AI. Today, we have a number of new global customer and partner announcements, including AdoreMe, AI21 Labs, Bayer, Canoo, CAPCOM, Estée Lauder, GE Appliances, General Motors, Ginkgo Bioworks, Hackensack Meridian Health, Huma Therapeutics, Infinitus Systems, Runway, Six Flags, and more, in addition to expanded partnerships with Acxiom, Bloomberg, CoreLogic, Docusign, Fox Sports, HCA Healthcare, Meditech, MSCI, NIQ, SAP, and Transunio. 

Google Cloud also made a number of product announcements across 4 key pillars: 

• Modern Infrastructure Cloud: Our AI-optimized infrastructure is the leading platform for training and serving generative AI models – with competitive advantages for training performance & scale, model serving price performance, and not to mention support for the latest ML software compilers – like OpenXLA. We’re continuing to deliver workload optimized infrastructure by announcing GKE Enterprise, updating our Google Distributed Cloud portfolio, launching Cross-Cloud Network while expanding our networking offerings with new enhancements, previewing TPU v5e with soon-to-be GA of A3 VMs, and introducing C3A, C3D, and new SAP workload support.
• Collaboration Cloud: We’re announcing significant updates to Google Workspace that build on recent momentum around incorporating AI as a collaborative partner across our tools. These announcements include:
  • General availability of Duet AI in Google Workspace: Since its launch, thousands of companies and more than a million trusted testers have used Duet AI as a powerful collaboration partner that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster—all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data. Now, we’re introducing more of what’s coming next, including the general availability of Duet AI for Google Workspace, available everywhere Workspace is sold. [Blog post] 
  • Duet AI in Meet: We’re embedding generative AI across the full spectrum of meetings to help them become less fatiguing and more fulfilling.Updates include the new take notes for me and attend for me features; studio look, lighting & sound; dynamic tiles and face detection; and automatic translated captions.
  • The new Google Chat: We’re unveiling an enhanced Chat experience with powerful new features, including Duet AI in Google Chat, a new home view, redesigned search, smart chips, and much more.Chat is not only great at the basics, now with AI built-in, it’s ready for the future. [Blog post]
• Developer, Data and AI Cloud: 
  • A variety of announcements that expand Vertex AI’s capabilities and further empower our customers to easily experiment and build with foundation models, customize them with enterprise data, and smoothly integrate and deploy them into applications with built-in privacy, safety features, and responsible AI. This includes updates to our first party models of PaLM 2, Imagen and Codey, and new third party models with Meta’s Llama 2, TII’s Falcon and pre-announcing Anthropic’s Claude 2. A new digital watermarking functionality for Imagen powered by Google DeepMind’s SynthID. New tools to help enterprises get more value out of our models. This includes Vertex AI Extensions and Vertex AI data connectors. And expanded availability for Vertex AI Search and Vertex AI Conversation. 
  • Expanded preview of Duet AI in Google Cloud with general availability coming with General Availability coming later this year. Duet AI can now provide AI assistance across a wide range of Google Cloud products and services to serve more cloud users — spanning developers, operators, data practitioners, and cybersecurity professionals. 
  • We’re announcing several major product innovations to our Data and AI Cloud portfolios to help customers activate AI with a strong data foundation. We’re extending Duet AI capabilities to databases and data analytics with Duet AI in Database Migration Service to assist with the  journey from Oracle to AlloyDB, and Duet AI in BigQuery and Duet AI in Looker, which lets you use natural language and auto-generate SQL, Python, and LOOKML to access and analyze your data. To help developers build performant and scalable gen AI applications using their operational data, we’re announcing AlloyDB AI, an integrated set of capabilities built into AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, available in preview through our downloadable version of AlloyDB, AlloyDB Omni (moving from technology concept to preview at Next). Additionally, to interconnect data and workloads, we’re announcing BigQuery Studio, a single interface for data engineering, analytics, and predictive analysis to simplify end-to-end data workflows. Lastly, we’re announcing Spanner Data Boost,  which allows customers to analyze their Spanner data via services like BigQuery, Dataflow and more, and delivers high-performance, workload-isolated, on-demand processing of operational data to support analytics, reporting and more.
  • We announced three new APIs to help businesses create climate impact at scale and adapt to a changing world. The APIs apply AI and machine learning to environmental data to give businesses helpful information about rooftop solar potential, air quality and pollen. These APIs can help companies make solar a reality for millions of people, and allow businesses to provide environmental information to people in websites and apps, as poor air quality and increasing pollen affects a growing number of people with climate change.
• Security Cloud: We’re announcing Duet AI in Security across three solution areas for cybersecurity professionals (now in preview): Duet AI in Mandiant Threat Intelligence, Duet AI in Chronicle Security Operations, and Duet AI in Security Command Center. We’re also introducing Mandiant Hunt for Chronicle Security Operations (now in preview), a new managed threat hunting service that integrates Mandiant’s frontline intelligence and expertise with Google Cloud technology to proactively search for undetected attacks. 

You can also read more about our news announcements from CEO Thomas Kurian here. 

Women in tech face disproportionate adversity compared to their male counterparts on the road to success that’s why providing high-quality mentorship opportunities and support for women in the tech startup ecosystem is integral. Today, Google announced the 11 North American startups joining the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders class of 2023. 

Google is thrilled to share that among the cohort are three Canadian women-led startups from Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary – NLPatent, BorderlessHRandMonark– have been selected to join the program this year. 

Recent studies highlight that women in tech across Canada and the US continue to face barriers to access and disproportionate adversity compared to their male counterparts;

• Women account for nearly 50% of the workforce, but representation in the tech sector continues to lag behind.
• In 2001, only 21% of Canadian tech workers were women, and now, over 20 years later, that number sits at 24%, a meager 3% increase.

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS?end=2022&locations=CA&start=1990

Now in its fourth year, the 10-week intensive digital accelerator program leverages the best of Google’s people and technology to provide equity free technical support and mentorship opportunities to incredible women founders from across North America who are looking to scale their businesses. The Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program is an extension of Google’s commitment to leveling the playing field for women founders in North America. In fact, since the program launched in 2020, it has supported 36 women-led startups across North America, who have collectively raised $73.46M USD since graduating from their cohorts. 

The full blog post can be found here along with additional details on the participating North American startups below.  

• Aravenda (Fairfax, VA) is a comprehensive consignment shop software that is leading innovation in the fastest growing segment of retail through resales.
• BorderlessHR (Ottawa, ON) offers global talent solutions for small businesses, providing instant matches to pre-vetted talent and AI-powered interviewers, saving SMBs the cost and time spent hiring the right talent on time and within budget. Borderless HR also offers a free suite of HR products to help manage talent.
• Cobble (New York City, NY) is a platform that helps people reach collaborative agreement with others on ideas. Cobble offers a combination of decision-making tools, curated content and AI-driven social connections.
• Craftmerce (Delaware City, DE) is a B2B technology platform that links African artisans to mainstream retail partners by providing tools for distributed production, enterprise management, and financing.
• Dreami (Redwood City, Calif.) powers data-driven career development programs for the 36 million people in the US who face barriers to employment.
• Medijobs (New York City, NY) offers virtual recruiting for the healthcare industry.
• Monark (Calgary, AB) is a digital leadership development platform, preparing the next generation of leaders through on-demand personalized learning.
• NLPatent (Toronto, ON) is an AI-patent search and analytics platform that uses a fine-tuned large language model, built from the ground up, to understand the language of innovation.
• Rejoy Health (Mountain View, Calif.) is an AI-powered mobile application that uses computer vision technology to deliver at-home physical therapy, enabling individuals to effectively manage and alleviate chronic musculoskeletal conditions like back and joint pain.
• Shimmer (San Francisco, Calif.) is an ADHD coaching platform that connects adults with ADHD and expert ADHD coaches for behavioral coaching.
• Total Life (Jupiter, FL) reimagines aging for older adults through an easy, one-click platform that connects users with a Medicare covered healthcare provider.

Google has announced it’s making its Messages by Google app more secure by making RCS the default for both new and existing Messages app users and end-to-end encryption for group chats is now also fully available to all RCS users.   “RCS is the modern industry standard for dynamic and secure messaging.  And now, all of your RCS conversations in Messages by Google are end-to-end encrypted, including group chats, which keeps them private between you and the people you’re messaging,” Google says.  With RCS enabled, users can take advantage of more advanced messaging features similar to those iMessage users have, like: 

• Sharing high-res photos and videos 
• See typing indicators  
• Get read receipts 
• Send messages over mobile data and Wi-Fi 
• Rename, edit and remove themselves from group chats 
• Use end-to-end encryption 

 Since rolling out RCS to U.S. Android users in 2019, Google has been pressuring Apple to adopt the technology in iMessage by launching a website to explain why RCS benefits consumers, but Apple has expressed in court filings, it has no interest in making a version of iMessage for Android. 

Ted Miracco, CEO, Approov Mobile Security had this to say:   

“Securing the mobile ecosystem is an important focus for both Google and Apple. RCS helps the Android ecosystem by adding some important security features that can help mitigate phishing messages, such as encryption and verified sender information. However, no messaging platform, including iMessage, is completely immune to phishing attempts. It’s still important for users to be cautious and exercise good judgment when interacting with messages. A more secure mobile environment is in everyone’s best interest, so we support this move by Google.”

I’m pretty sure that Apple doesn’t support this move as they have no need to do so. We’ll see how this latest move by Google works out.

Today, Google Canada announced a $2.5 million commitment to NPower Canada, unlocking the opportunity to offer 5,000 needs-based scholarships to underserved job-seekers across Canada, to gain the skills required to access careers in tech.

The grant enables NPower Canada to integrate and deliver Google Career Certificates in both English and French as a core component of its workforce development programs. Google.org has been supporting NPower Canada since 2020, and prior to today, Google has committed close to $5 million to NPower Canada, which has helped over 4,000 underserved and financially barriered job seekers enroll in NPower Canada’s scholarship-based programs.

Here’s two examples of people who benefitted from this initiative:

• Olena Kotelnykova, Financial Clerk, the Town of Berwick- Berwick,Nova Scotia: Olena graduated from NPower Canada’s Junior IT Analyst program in January 2023 after making the difficult decision to migrate to Canada to escape the war in Ukraine. After arriving in Canada, she discovered NPower’s program which gave her the skills and experience to secure a role as a Financial Clerk at the Town of Berwick within three months of participating. The program not only gave her the expertise, but provided her with a strong community to lean on as she built her new life in Canada.
• Han Hyung Lee, Customer Account Specialist, Shaw Communications – Vancouver, British Columbia: Originally from Hong Kong and seeking new opportunities overseas, Han struggled to land a job despite his previous experience. This inspired him to enroll in the program with NPower Canada. With guidance, he was able to overcome barriers in his job search and integrate himself into the IT community in Vancouver. Han graduated from NPower’s Junior IT Analyst Program with a Google IT Support Professional Certificate that helped him land a role as a Customer Account Specialist with Shaw Communications. 

 More information can be found in Google’s press release and blog post.

Online safety and security is always top of mind for Google. Today, the company announced new ways to help users stay in control of their personal information, privacy and online safety, including:  

• Results About You: Last year, Google launched the Results about you tool to make it easy for people to request the removal of search results that contain their personal details, right from the Google app or however they access Search. Tomorrow, Google will announce a new dashboard that will let you know if web results with your contact information are showing up on Search. This tool will be available in the U.S. in English to start, and Google is working to bring it to new languages and locations soon. 
• SafeSearch Blurring Setting: SafeSearch blurring setting is rolling out for all users globally, and will, by default, blur explicit imagery on Search, such as adult, graphic or violent content.
• Personal Explicit Images: Google has long had policies that enable people to remove non-consensual explicit imagery from Search. Now, it’s building on these protections to enable people to remove from Search any of their personal,  explicit images that they no longer wish to be visible in Search.  For example, if you created and uploaded explicit content to a website, then deleted it, you can request its removal from Search if it’s being published elsewhere without approval. More broadly, whether it’s for websites containing personal information, explicit imagery or any other removal requests, we’ve also updated and simplified the forms for users to submit removal requests. 

For more information and details please read the Google Blog post here. 

Since Apple released AirTags, there’s been a glaring hole in terms of how they can be used. Which is that if you’re on Team Android, there is no way for you to detect them unlike those who are on Team iPhone. Today that changes. What Google refers to as “Unknown tracker alerts” is rolling out to Android phones that are running Android 6 or higher. A Google blog post details what this covers. There’s also a video that covers this as well:

This functionality doesn’t require a separate app and will hit your phone sometime this month.