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In late September, representatives from the biggest tech companies testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. At almost the same time, Facebook announced that a massive data breach had affected almost 50 million users. This odd fluke of timing illustrates the perilous nature of data protection right now.
Because of data breaches at Facebook and countless other leading companies, consumers are understandably wary about how much of their personal data is being tracked and stored. These fears were stoked after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as it became clear that personal data was being used for far more than just targeted advertising. Better protections are something that consumers are beginning to prioritize and demand, but until just recently big tech has controlled the conversation.
The aforementioned Senate hearing was just the most recent time that companies like Google and Microsoft have had to appear before Congress. Thus far legislators have taken a hands-off approach to data protection, but that position is quickly changing. As more of life has shifted online, the issues of data privacy and protection have become critical to the public good. Congress is beginning to treat them as such.
Additionally, Apple came out in favor of federal data regulations. The company supports giving users the right to control what information is stored, who it is shared with, and why. Considering that consumers, Congress, and now big tech are all in favor of stricter protections, companies need to begin preparing for a cybersecurity and regulatory future that looks drastically different from today. Luckily, an example already exists.
Following in the EU’s Footsteps
The General Data Protection Regulation went into effect throughout the European Union last spring and represented the first major push for data legislation. GDPR lets each member country devise its own specific data protection rules, but they all share the same objectives: giving users transparent control over their own data.
The GDPR rules affect any company that has consumers or does business in Europe, meaning lots of American companies are forced to comply. Some companies are even considering voluntary adoption of these rules — at least in part — to prepare for impending data regulations that are likely coming to America.
California recently passed AB 375, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which gives consumers far more control over their data. Other state regulations (along with federal legislation) will likely also come down the pike, suggesting that compliance will be a complex issue for any business, regardless of footprint.
It will also be consequential. GDPR and other existing rules levy fines based on the size and severity of the breach. Companies are penalized for every record that is compromised, meaning that large-scale breaches can cost millions or even billions of dollars.
There is no clear timeline for when nationwide regulations will take effect in the U.S., nor what form they will take. What is clear, however, is that companies choosing to prepare now will be ahead of their competition in enhancing their cybersecurity.
Preparing for an Uncertain Future
Companies don’t have to wait for new laws to hit the books to begin planning for compliance. They also don’t need to recruit an army of lawyers. Instead, follow these strategies to prepare for whatever happens next at the local, state, national, or international levels:
1. Follow core principles. Rather than trying to align your policies with future regulations, commit to some core principles such as consent, anonymization, and encryption. Making these your ongoing priorities will keep you on the right side of the law more often than not.
2. Evolve your culture. New rules could be right around the corner, and getting prepared takes time. In addition to new policies and protections, companies will need to cultivate an updated culture that respects data and gives preference to privacy. Making those changes meaningfully will not happen quickly or easily, which is why companies should get started sooner rather than later.
3. Treat all data as equal. Stop thinking about data as valuable/invaluable or secure/insecure. GDPR and other rules treat all data breaches equally, no matter what kind of data is compromised. That means rather than securing select information channels and databases, companies will need to take broader approaches to data classification.
4. Practice good governance. A systematic approach is important for preventing breaches, but it’s just as important after a breach. Data rules commonly require companies to disclose a breach within days after it occurs. The only way to prepare for the technical, logistical, and reputational fallout on such a short timeline is to have policies and plans in place.
5. Seek the opportunities. Compliance is an obligation and an opportunity. Companies that make every effort to keep data safe tend to strengthen their customers’ confidence. Treating data protection as an investment, rather than a burden, makes it easier to get compliant and stay compliant.
We are quickly reaching a tipping point when lax data security is unacceptable for everyone. Now that nearly every stakeholder is on board, sweeping change is likely around the corner. Anyone with data at stake should read the writing on the wall and make data protection their next big initiative.
After a years-long pummeling, Microsoft this week surrendered in the browser war, saying that it will junk Edge’s home-grown rendering engine and replace it with Blink, the engine that powers Google’s Chrome.
With Edge pulling code from the Chromium project, the browser will also be able to run on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as well as macOS.
“We intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers,” wrote Joe Belfiore, a corporate vice president in the Windows group, in a post to a company blog.
Belfiore’s announcement was a stunning humiliation for Microsoft, which in the early years of this century ruled the browser world after Internet Explorer (IE) had obliterated Netscape Navigator and achieved market share in excess of 90%.
Although Edge will survive, it will no longer be a Microsoft-made browser: It will exist as a UI (user interface) wrapper around core technologies developed almost entirely by Google engineers, in the same way Opera has existed since 2013, when it ditched its own internal engine for Chromium’s Blink.
Shed share at record rates
Microsoft cast the decision as affection for, and adoption of, open-source software that would, said Belfiore, lead to an application compatible “with other Chromium-based browsers.” That would “make the web experience better” for users, web developers and corporate IT, he argued.
Not surprisingly, Belfiore declined to mention the poor showing of Edge and the years of user share declines that bled IE white. But taking up Chrome’s rendering engine – dubbed “Blink” when it forked from WebKit in 2013 – was an admission of defeat and a move of desperation.
Microsoft’s troubles were largely of its own making.
In 2014, a year before the debut of Windows 10 and its default browser Edge, Microsoft announced that it would require all Windows users to run the most-recent version of IE, and when that requirement took effect, dropped support of the others. That, combined with the glacial development pace of IE, opened the door for rivals. Millions of Windows users, when faced with a change of browsers, decided to change from IE to Chrome rather than go from one version of IE to another.
From January 2016, when the mandate went into effect, to the end of that year, Microsoft lost an astounding 22 percentage points of user share by the tally of analytics vendor Net Applications. That represented nearly half of IE’s and Edge’s share at the time. No other browser had fallen that far, that fast, in just 12 months. Although the losses weren’t as steep in 2017, Microsoft’s browsers lost an additional 35% of their remaining share that year.
Nor did Edge make up for IE’s fall from grace. The former never caught on with Windows 10 users. At its best, the browser was the first choice of about a third of them, but in November 2018, that had shrunk to approximately one out of every 10.
Microsoft had choices: It could pack it in and refuse to bother building a browser. It could keep on keeping on by continuing to watch Edge’s relevance evaporate. Or it could try to get into the mainstream tent by adopting Chrome’s rendering engine. All three smelled of failure, but the third had the least odor.
Chrome extensions and frequent updates
“Our intent is to align the Microsoft Edge web platform simultaneously (a) with web standards and (b) with other Chromium-based browsers,” Belfiore said Thursday. “This will deliver improved compatibility for everyone and create a simpler test-matrix for web developers.”
Microsoft’s move will do more than that.
By replacing Edge’s rendering engine – named “EdgeHTML” – with Blink, Microsoft’s one remaining browser will be able to access the library of Chrome extensions. That will be welcome to Edge diehards, because the browser’s meager library of add-ons has been a serious point of pain.
Joining Chromium and putting Blink inside Edge will also allow Microsoft to again offer a cross-Windows and cross-platform browser. “Microsoft Edge will now be delivered and updated for all supported versions of Windows and on a more frequent cadence,” Belfiore said. “We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.”
Microsoft’s timeline for shifting from EdgeHTML to Blink was vague; the company said it would work on the change “over the next year or so” and that a preview would be available in early 2109. How that timetable, and a Chromium-based Edge, would help Windows 7 users is unclear, since the OS is currently set to exit public support in only 13 months: mid-January 2020. The Redmond, Wash. developer may be assuming that significant numbers of Windows 7 PCs will survive support retirement – a near certainty according to usage data – or is hoping that enterprises that pay to extend support beyond 2020 will run Edge rather than Chrome or IE11.
Windows 8.1, the other now-supported OS, is a non-factor: Only about 6% of all Windows PCs rely on the edition.
Detaching Edge from Windows 10 will have another benefit for users, as it will result in new updates, courtesy of Chromium, every six to eight weeks, rather than the twice-annual tempo Edge now follows. As each new version of Chromium is completed – and Chrome comes out with an update – Microsoft will presumably roll that code into its own Edge, as Opera Software now does for Opera, and launch a refresh.
Google plans eight Chrome updates in 2019, the same number as launched this year. If Edge relied on Chromium now, it would be upgraded in the coming year four times as often as in 2018.
What does Microsoft get out of it?
Belfiore said little about what Chromium does for the company, other than keep Edge alive.
One potential benefit, assuming the move halts the decline of the browsers’ share, would be to Bing and the ad revenue generated by Microsoft’s search engine and site. Even with a shrinking browser share, Microsoft has increased Bing revenue by double digits for five consecutive quarters. Increasing browser share would be the simplest way to pull more profit from search.
By piggybacking on Chromium, Microsoft may also be able to reduce the number of engineers working on its browser. While Belfiore said the firm would “become a significant contributor to the (open-source) Chromium project,” its part will almost certainly be smaller than Google’s.
But will the desperate measure work? It’s impossible to know with certainty, but the odds are against Microsoft reclaiming substantial browser share.
Once in decline, a browser just doesn’t come out of its funk. Netscape Navigator did not. Nor has Mozilla’s Firefox stymied the decline which began in 2010. (In November 2018, Firefox had a 9% share, far below the 25% high-water mark in March 2010.) And Opera, which stood at 1.7% when it joined the Chromium project, didn’t turn things around with the change of rendering engines; the latest from Net Applications was Opera at 1.6%.
If you’ve ever tried to print photos from your computer, there’s a good chance you’ve been surprised—if not, disappointed—by how they came out. Let’s look at where you might be going wrong and why photos often look different when you print them.
What Photos Are You Printing?
The first place you might be going wrong is with the very photos you’re trying to print. To get good results you need to use high resolution, original files. The photos that come straight off your smartphone are fine, but the versions you’ve uploaded to Facebook or Instagram aren’t—social media sites compress and downsize images aggressively.
In my test where I uploaded a high resolution, 2.7MB, 5166×3444-pixel file to Facebook and then saved it from my Timeline, I ended up with a 74kb, 960×640-pixel file. That file has just 2.7% of the original image data. It barely looks good on my screen, so there’s no way it’s going to look good printed. Or at least, printed at any size bigger than 3” by 2”.
RELATED: How Big of a Photo Can I Print from My Phone or Camera?
If you want to print a photo that someone has tagged you in on social media, your best bet is to reach out to them and ask them to send you the high resolution original. If you took the photo, get the original from your phone or camera and print it—not the version you uploaded to Facebook. It’s the only way to get a good print.
How Bright Is Your Screen?
One really common problem with printed images is that, compared to the photo on screen, they look really drab and dark. This is because screens and printed images are fundamentally different things: a screen displays images by directly emitting light while a print reflects the ambient light.
Since a screen is itself a light source, images almost always look much brighter with more vivid colors on screen than they do when they’re printed. Most people have the brightness and saturation cranked up way too high. You have to remember that your screen is only displaying the underlying image data: if your screen is bright it makes the image appear bright but it doesn’t necessarily mean the image is bright in the original file.
Converting what you see on screen to a print is one of the big challenges of high quality photo printing. It takes time and learning from your mistakes to get good at it. I’m still awful at it. A few things you can do are:
What’s Your Printer Setup Like?
Even if you’ve got everything setup perfectly on your computer, if your printer isn’t up to the job you’re still not going to get great prints. Most standard inkjet or laser printers just aren’t designed for printing high quality photos. They’re alright if you want to print off some Powerpoint slides but not if you want something you can actually put on your wall.
The first step is to get a printer that’s actually up to the job. Our sister site ReviewGeek has a great roundup of photo printers for any budget. Next, you’ll need high quality photo paper—it does make a difference. The final step is to make sure your printer is set up correctly with the right drivers and color profiles.
If all that sounds a bit much, then you can get your photos printed professionally, which we’ll look at next.
Who’s Doing the Printing?
“Professional” printing is a pretty big category and runs the gamut from terrible to incredible. At the lower end, you’ve got bad shops that will just print any file you hand them for a few dollars. At the high end, you’ve got master craftsmen who’ll print, frame, and mount a five-foot panorama for a few hundred dollars. As I said, the range is wide.
If you’ve got your photos printed by someone towards the lower end of the range, or using a drugstore machine, then it’s normal to expect the prints to come back a little off. The thing to do is look at the prints, assess what’s wrong with them, and then make the edits to the original files and get them printed again. If the photos are too dark, increase the brightness. If they look yellow, fix the white balance. Keep doing this until you get photos that look how you want. It might take a few goes but, since it’s cheap, you won’t break the bank.
On the other hand, if you’re going with a high-end printing shop, just talk to them; they’re the experts. Ask them to review your file and to make a smaller test print. They’ll normally be more than happy to help.
The best middle ground is to go to a camera shop that also prints photos. The staff will be knowledgeable and happy to help or offer advice.
How to Get Better Prints
So that’s some of the common ways the printing process breaks down and doesn’t give you the results you want. To dodge all the pitfalls:
- Use high-quality original files.
- Make sure your monitor isn’t too bright or too saturated.
- If you’re serious, calibrate your monitor.
- Edit your images using the histogram.
- Get a good printer or use a professional.
- Do test prints and then fix any problems.
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