O coronavírus dizimou a indústria de viagens, e o Airbnb, a empresa de aluguel de casas que parecia imbatível há pouco tempo, não foi poupado.

Embora as manchetes tenham se concentrado nas medidas que está tomando para estocar dinheiro para compensar suas perdas, nos bastidores, a empresa de quase 12 anos vem redesenhando seus produtos. Isso inclui repensar sua tela inicial e páginas de aterrissagem de aplicativos para refletir um mundo onde estadias de curto prazo estão fora e estadias de longo prazo – inclusive para profissionais médicos que precisam se colocar em quarentena de suas famílias – estão dentro.

Conversamos com o diretor de design do Airbnb, Alex Schleifer, para saber mais sobre o que está mudando nos bastidores e como. Nosso bate-papo foi editado levemente por comprimento e clareza.

TC: A página inicial do Airbnb de repente é muito focada em três coisas — experiências online, estadias mensais e o que você está chamando de "linha de frente", que é uma área para os anfitriões oferecerem moradia para funcionários de saúde e socorristas. Como foi esse processo de design e quanto tempo levou?

AS: Nossa equipe mapeou em menos de três semanas. Havia algumas centenas de funcionários trabalhando no projeto em qualquer momento – pessoas de operações, produtos, localização, design, política, engenharia. É uma operação complexa (aqui); tudo o que precisamos fazer precisa ser feito em 60 idiomas. Por causa da escala de tudo o que fazemos, a ideia é muitas vezes a peça mais fácil.

A dificuldade foi p[sharpened]orque a crise também estava nos impactando. Todo mundo estava trabalhando em casa. Havia perguntas sobre como fazemos cuidados infantis, por exemplo. Mas ainda havia uma energia imensa, inclusive porque tínhamos milhares de anfitriões nos contatando e dizendo: "Queremos ajudar".

TC: Onde exatamente você começa em uma reformulação como esta?

AS: Você define o escopo dele. Você pode colocar um banner em sua página inicial, ou você pode começar a falar com anfitriões e governos para entender que tipo de ajuda eles precisam e se isso é algo que eles querem, então você começa a construir. Parte disso é olhar para o comportamento dos hóspedes em nossa plataforma em tempo real, o que muda a cada dia. Também é uma questão de conversar com outros parceiros de viagem e ver o que eles estão fazendo.

Em última análise, [decided to take]nós sobre uma grande quantidade de imóveis para que os trabalhadores da linha de frente saibam para onde ir. Eles também usam nossa pesquisa principal, mas queremos ter certeza de que eles têm espaço específico para pessoas que querem doar espaço ou apoiar o programa. Tínhamos uma meta de 100.000 casas que seriam fornecidas, mas batemos essa meta mais rápido do que pensávamos.

TC: Esses espaços estão sendo oferecidos sem nenhum custo?

AS: São doados ou oferecidos a preços reduzidos.

TC: Outra nova seção agora gira em torno de "experiências online". Estes são anfitriões que estão oferecendo suas próprias aulas sobre culinária e outras coisas?

AS: Sim, como "Sangria misturando com Pedro", que é um show de mistura de coquetéis com muito entretenimento. O Airbnb tem tudo a ver com conexão — é construído sobre hospedagem. Mas se nem todo mundo é capaz de viajar, a questão se torna: quais são nossas opções aqui? Discutimos muitas ideias, mas a forma como estávamos trabalhando e nos conectando como uma equip[remotely]e e vivendo online com a família tornou essa ideia mais concreta para nós. Então contatamos os anfitriões, fizemos testes com esses hosts com configurações de m[and everything else required]icrofone e lançamos com 50 pessoas. Agora, temos quase 100 anfitriões oferecendo experiências online e milhares mais que se ofereceram para hospedar experiências. Algumas das ofertas mais populares — que não são uma experiência para muitos onde você está assistindo a um show, mas sim uma experiência interativa — já estão esgotadas.

(Acima, página inicial do Airbnb antes das atualizações.)

TC: Você vê isso se tornando uma parte considerável dos negócios do Airbnb daqui para frente?

AS: Tem apenas algumas semanas de idade, mas mesmo para um produto em sua primeira versão, estávamos realmente gostando disso. Ele superou as expectativas, e eu acho que será um grande negócio para nós à medida que sairmos da pandemia porque permite que os anfitriões hospedem experiências on-line e do mundo real.

TC: Tenho certeza que muitas ideias foram rebatidas. Como você está escolhendo o que circular?

AS: Temos sorte de sentar em um monte de dados, mas você só pode testar muito. Você precisa de uma tomada de decisão muito forte e rápida, para que a liderança e a equipe executiva se encontrem diariamente.

A outra coisa que, como designer, eu aprecio é que fizemos questão de remover camadas abstratas de comunicação. Não bastaríamos carregar um doc do Google, mas tornamos real usando[the collaborative interface design tool] a Figma para olhar todos os designs e rapidamente protótipo e compartilhamento de tela, seja com a equipe de experiências ou[CEO] eu ou [Chesky]Brian, para ver o que os clientes veriam e tomardecisões.

TC: Você menciona Figma. Em que outras ferramentas você tem confiado mais fortemente enquanto trabalha em casa?

AS: Gostamos de usar o menor número possível de ferramentas, mas figma é um divisor de águas porque as pessoas podem ver decisões sendo tomadas ao vivo. O Google Docs é muito poderoso para nós. O Slack também nos permite trabalhar assíncronamente, o que é importante. E zoom tem sido fundamental para todos.

TC: As coisas estão mudando a cada dia. Partes do mundo estão se abrindo enquanto outras permanecem fechadas. Como isso está afetando seu trabalho?

AS: Construímos o produto e o site para ser realmente modular e também segmentável por região porque você está certo, o mundo vai se abrir em diferentes horários com diferentes restrições e permutações e queremos ter certeza de que podemos oferecer às pessoas o que está disponível para elas. Em alguns casos, eles podem esta[hampered by]r viajando a uma certa distância, ou as viagens aéreas podem não estar abertas, então queremos ajudar as pessoas a encontrar coisas próximas.

Também estamos construindo outras peças continuamente, algumas em resposta direta à crise, incluindo um hub que comunica aos nossos hóspedes e hospeda o que está acontecendo com as viagens e o que acontece após a tempestade.

Como uma empresa global, estamos muito acostumado[adapting to change]s. Claro, esta é uma escala diferente.

Next month, Apple and Google will unveil features to enable contact tracing on iOS and Android to identify people who have had contact with someone who tests positive for the novel coronavirus.

Security experts have been quick to point out the possible dangers, including privacy risks like revealing identities of COVID-19-positive users, helping advertisers track them or falling prey to false positives from trolls.

These are fresh concerns in familiar debates about tech’s ethics. How should technologists think about the trade-off between the immediate need for public health surveillance and individual privacy? And misformation and free speech? Facebook and other platforms are playing a much more active role than ever in assessing the quality of information: promoting official information sources prominently and removing some posts from users defying social distancing.

As the pandemic spreads and, along with it, the race to develop new technologies accelerates, it’s more critical than ever that technology finds a way to fully examine these questions. Technologists today are ill-equipped for this challenge: striking healthy balances between competing concerns — like privacy and safety — while explaining their approach to the public.

Over the past few years, academics have worked to give students ways to address the ethical dilemmas technology raises. Last year, Stanford announced a new (and now popular) undergraduate course on “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change,” taught by faculty from philosophy, as well as political and computer science. Harvard, MIT, UT Austin and others teach similar courses.

If the only students are future technologists, though, solutions will lag. If we want a more ethically knowledgeable tech industry today, we need ethical study for tech practitioners, not just university students.

To broaden this teaching to tech practitioners, our venture fund, Bloomberg Beta, agreed to host the same Stanford faculty for an experiment. Based on their undergraduate course, could we design an educational experience for senior people who work across the tech sector? We adapted the content (incorporating real-world dilemmas), structure and location of the class, creating a six-week evening course in San Francisco. A week after announcing the course, we received twice as many applications as we could accommodate.

We selected a diverse group of students in every way we could manage, who all hold responsibility in tech. They told us that when they faced an ethical dilemma at work, they lacked a community to which to turn — some confided in friends or family, others revealed they looked up answers on the internet. Many felt afraid to speak freely within their companies. Despite several company-led ethics initiatives, including worthwhile ones to appoint chief ethics officers and Microsoft and IBM’s principles for ethical AI, the students in our class told us they had no space for open and honest conversations about tech’s behavior.

Like undergraduates, our students wanted to learn from both academics and industry leaders. Each week featured experts like Marietje Schaake, former Member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, who debated real issues, from data privacy to political advertising. The professors facilitated discussions, encouraging our students to discuss multiple, often opposing views, with our expert guests.

Over half of the class came from a STEM background and had missed much explicit education in ethical frameworks. Our class discussed principles from other fields, like medical ethics, including the physician’s guiding maxim (“first, do no harm”) in the context of designing new algorithms. Texts from the world of science fiction, like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, also offered ways to grapple with issues, leading students to evaluate how to collect and use data responsibly.

The answers to the values-based questions we explored (such as the trade-offs between misinformation and free speech) didn’t converge on clear “right” or “wrong” answers. Instead, participants told us that the discussions were crucial for developing skills to more effectively check their own biases and make informed decisions. One student said:

After walking through a series of questions, thought experiments or discussion topics with the professors, and thinking deeply about each of the subtending issues, I often ended up with the opposite positions to what I initially believed.

When shelter-in-place meant the class could no longer meet, participants reached out within a week to request virtual sessions — craving a forum to discuss real-time events with their peers in a structured environment. After our first virtual session examining how government, tech and individuals have responded to COVID-19, one participant remarked: “There feels like so much more good conversation to come on the questions, what can we do, what should we do, what must we do?”

Tech professionals seem to want ways to engage with ethical learning — the task now is to provide more opportunities. We plan on hosting another course this year and are looking at ways to provide an online version, publishing the materials.

COVID-19 won’t be the last crisis where we rely on technology for solutions, and need them immediately. If we want more informed discussions about tech’s behavior, and we want the people who make choices to enter these crises prepared to think ethically, we need to start training people who work in tech to think ethically.

To allow students to explore opposing, uncomfortable viewpoints and share their personal experiences, class discussions were confidential. I’ve received explicit permission to share any insights from students here.

Today marks the conclusion of a years-long saga that started when John Oliver did a segment on Net Neutrality that was so popular that it brought the FCC’s comment system to its knees. Two years later it is finally near addressing all the issues brought up in an investigation from the General Accountability Office.

The report covers numerous cybersecurity and IT issues, some of which the FCC addressed quickly, some not so quickly and some it’s still working on.

“Today’s GAO report makes clear what we knew all along: the FCC’s system for collecting public input has problems,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told TechCrunch. “The agency needs to fully fix this mess because this is the way the FCC is supposed to take input from the public. But as this report demonstrates, we have real work to do.”

Here’s the basic timeline of events, which seem so long ago now:

• May 2017: John Oliver’s segment airs, and the next day the FCC claims it was hit by denial-of-service attacks that took down its comment system, ECFS. (In fact it was merely the sheer volume of people who wanted to share their opinion of the FCC’s plan to kill net neutrality.)
• July 2017: Despite calls for details, the FCC refuses to release any details on the cyberattack, despite congressional demands, saying the threat was “ongoing.” (Its investigations had not in fact determined malicious intent and its official account was in doubt internally from the start.)
• August 2017: Congress calls for an independent investigation of the FCC’s claims and its comment system. (That’s the report released today. Also around this time another improbable “hack” was found to have (not) happened in 2014.)
• October 2017: FCC’s chief information officer, David Bray, who claimed the attacks took place both in 2017 and 2014, leaves the FCC.
• December 2017: The FCC votes along party lines to kill net neutrality.
• June 2018: A watchdog group acquires 1,300 pages of emails, which (though very heavily redacted) show that the DDoS claims were essentially false and known to be so.
• August 2018: The FCC finally admits that it was never hacked, and the next day its own internal report comes out showing that it really was just overwhelming interest from people wanting to be heard. Members of Congress accuse Chairman Ajit Pai of “dereliction of duty” in perpetuating this dangerously incorrect narrative.

Then it’s been pretty quiet basically until today, when the report requested in 2017 was publicly released. A version with sensitive information (like exact software configurations and other technical information) was internally circulated in September, then revised for today’s release.

The final report is not much of a bombshell, since much of it has been telegraphed ahead of time. It’s a collection of criticisms of an outdated system with inadequate security and other failings that might have been directed at practically any federal agency, among which cybersecurity practices are notoriously poor.

The investigation indicates that the FCC, for instance, did not consistently implement security and access controls, encrypt sensitive data, update or correctly configure its servers, detect or log cybersecurity events, and so on. It wasn’t always a disaster (even well-run IT departments don’t always follow best practices), but obviously some of these shortcomings and cut corners led to serious issues like ECFS being overwhelmed.

More importantly, of the 136 recommendations made in the September report, 85 have been fully implemented now, 10 partially, and the rest are on track to be so.

That should not be taken to mean that the FCC has waited this whole time to update its commenting and other systems. In fact it was making improvements almost immediately after the event in May of 2017, but refused to describe them. Here are a few of the improvements listed in the GAO report:

Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who has dogged the FCC on this issue since the beginning, issued the following statement:

I requested this report because it was clear, after the net neutrality repeal comment period debacle, that the FCC’s cybersecurity practices had failed. After more than two years of investigating, GAO agrees and found a disturbing lack of security that places the Commission’s information systems at risk… Until the FCC implements all of the remaining recommendations, its systems will remain vulnerable to failure and misuse.

You can read the final GAO report here.