Last week, I made another quick trip to California. It was a different atmosphere than usual. This time, the focus was on Canva’s first global Create keynote, and the scale was understandable. Normally sunny Los Angeles was a little cloudy on the day, but the 72,000-seat SoFi Stadium and the adjacent YouTube Theater were huge venues. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering the company’s suite of applications is getting its biggest refresh in a decade. This time, the focus is on enterprise, business, and team users. A new chapter begins? But I have to tell you about a conversation Iger had with Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger and Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. Iger’s answer when Perkins asked him about the technology transformation within Disney is interesting.
“As we think about technology as potentially disruptive, something that we really encourage all of us to do is recognize that you can’t get in the way of technology. No generation has ever been able to get in the way of technological advancements,” Iger said, offering his perspective to us all on the tendency to see technology as either an enabler or a complicator. “In my opinion, what we’re trying to do is embrace technology, embrace the changes that technology creates, and basically use technology as the wind in our backs, not the wind in our faces,” he added.
For years, we have looked at Disney acquisitions in terms of content accumulation, but that is a very limited understanding. The addition of ESPN, ABC, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 21st Century Fox gives the company access to technology that will serve it well into the future. With years of success built on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, the Marvel franchise, Friends, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and more, this approach is one to ponder.
Note
Google is (again) struggling to clean up the mess created by its AI. This time, the search results summary of its AI Overview feature for Search contains some pretty bizarre quirks that users have been pointing out on social media. What’s important to note is that although it was officially launched at Google I/O last month, the company has been testing the overview feature for over a year now. Like putting glue (non-toxic, kudos) on pizza to keep the cheese from falling off, or a UC Berkeley geologist suggesting that eating a pebble a day is rich in minerals and vitamins… AI isn’t going to take our jobs anytime soon.
evolution
Let’s go back to Canva’s latest update for a second. It puts it in competition with Adobe and many other tech companies whose apps and services Canva integrates with very well. It’s one or two levels up. Design whiteboards and presentations, edit videos, manage documents, lay out websites, and more, all with a thick layer of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In a way, this is a move towards formalizing Canva’s individual user base, who already use the suite for workplace tasks but are not part of an organizational subscription.
I’m in the same boat, which is why Perkins’ point resonates with me. “Obviously, it’s very expensive to buy different tools, but it’s also expensive for people to learn how to use each one,” she summarizes. This is a problem that generative AI further complicates, especially as organizations will have different tools for text, video, images, code, 3D, and voice. Their data shows that it’s deployed in over 90% of Fortune 50 companies and over 6 million companies worldwide.
- So will Canva be a big target? “Honestly, we haven’t really thought about it. We always want to build great products, we love building new products, and we love hearing about what we have and what our customers love and want next,” Cameron Adams, Canva’s co-founder and chief product officer, told me. But he makes it clear that the focus on enterprise, business, and teams is additive, not diversionary. The core user base has helped the company build a monthly active user base of 180 million, 20 million of which pay for the “pro” tier.
- The problem is, Canva doesn’t want users to switch from the apps and platforms they already use. This strategy involves exploring third-party integrations that broaden the scope of its utility. Highlights for consumer and business users include Microsoft PowerPoint and SharePoint, Google Ads, Dropbox, Meta Design Check, Google Drive, Google Photos, Slack and Later. Alternatively, you can use tools from popular online ad platforms Meta, Google and Amazon to quickly test whether your templates comply with their standards.
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Spyware
This is not a good look for Microsoft. At its annual developer conference BUILD last week, the tech giant showed off its power by showing off a feature called Recall that will be coming to select Windows 11 PCs. Essentially, think of it as your PC having a photographic memory, and later you can ask the Copilot assistant a random question and it will find the answer from that photographic memory. Awesome. The technology is working. Microsoft is great with AI. But if you dig into the details, you’ll find that Windows 11 is busy taking screenshots of your screen at set intervals.
That’s not a good idea.
That means the screenshots could also include details of your online banking accounts, such as IDs and passwords. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “Windows constantly takes screenshots of what’s on your screen, and then uses on-device generative AI models and the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to process all that data and make it searchable, including photos,” said none other than Satya Nadella. Apart from other details in Recall, these screenshots also map the user’s past web browsing history, usage in other apps, files, photos, and emails. The idea is to provide Copilot with visual context, such as what you were looking at, reading, etc., for later, completely random (i.e., absent-minded) searches.
Details of the measures Microsoft is taking seem to suggest that:
- Content collected by Recall is kept locally and stored on your device and, in Windows 11, is encrypted by Device Encryption or BitLocker.
- This data cannot be accessed by other users with Windows accounts on the same device.
I guess the definition of spyware is something that quietly and stealthily runs in the background, taking notes on what you do, except in the Microsoft world this is now positioned as a “feature”. The fact that it’s “opt-out” instead of “opt-in” only heightens my level of suspicion. The contours of Recall and the bluster surrounding it are just ridiculous to me.
Last June, Microsoft settled for $20 million for illegally collecting personal information about children who used Xbox services without parental consent. In July, another lawsuit was filed for collecting user information even in the “private” mode of its Edge browser. Do you believe what Microsoft says about your data and where it’s stored?
Although these screenshots are supposed to be encrypted and remain stored locally, I still find myself (which is very rare) agreeing with Elon Musk. This is definitely a “feature” that I recommend turning off. I myself will never be seen using my Windows 11 machine (specifically the upcoming Copilot+ PC) with this feature enabled. In the back of my mind, I still wonder if it is actually turned off. Either way. This idea, whatever privacy measures it is based on, is as naive as Zomato wanting to color code its delivery vehicles depending on whether they are for vegetarians or non-vegetarians. Whether in Zomato’s case they just invited self-proclaimed experts who often sit in RWA offices or, as in Microsoft’s case, increasingly clever spyware creators, it is often best to avoid pandering to stupidity.
But things are escalating fast. Common sense and concerns about user data privacy are driving this, and rightly so. UK regulators are evaluating Microsoft’s move to constantly take screenshots of users’ PC screens. Someone needs to stop this. And fast.
