​Avast has announced it will be closing down its Jumpshot data analytics unit, only a day after launching an internal investigation into data-sharing practices following user complaints.

On Tuesday, the company was accused of collecting customer online behaviour data and passing it on to its Jumpshot unit, where it was then sold to third parties, according to an investigation by PC Mag and Motherboard.

Avast has denied the allegations contained in the report and, according to company CEO Ondrej Vlcek, both Avast and Jumpshot have “acted fully within legal bounds” and have “committed themselves to 100% GDPR compliance”.

However, announcing the decision on Thursday, Vlcek said that a review of Avast’s practices revealed that the “data collection business is not in line with our privacy priorities as a company”.

“Protecting people is Avast’s top priority and must be embedded in everything we do in our business and in our products. Anything to the contrary is unacceptable,” said Vlcek.

“I firmly believe it will help Avast focus on and unlock its full potential to deliver on its promise of security and privacy. And I especially thank our users, whose recent feedback accelerated our decision to take quick action,” he added. “As CEO of Avast, I feel personally responsible and I would like to apologize to all concerned.”

Vlcek also said the decision would impact “hundreds” of Jumpshot employees and customers, but that it was “the right thing to do”.

Avast intends to continue paying Jumpshot vendors and suppliers in full during the wind-down process, and will begin notifying customers shortly. It also added that the closure would not affect its 2019 fiscal results.

Having once led the anti-virus market, Avast is now considered the fifth-largest provider of security software behind Symantec, McAfee, ESET and Bitdefender.​

Google has demonstrated a real time translation and transcription tool powered by AI, that will take lectures and other long-form voice in one language and output it in another. 

Part of Google Translate, the tool will let a smartphone act as interpreter, listening to speech via the microphone and transcribing translated text in real time. So far, the system only supports a few languages, including English, French, German and Spanish. The demo showed English being translated to Spanish. 

“With this, your Android mobile phone will effectively turn into an almost real time translator device for long-form speech,” Google said at the demonstration according to reports, adding it could “unlock continuous speech translations in this world at scale” in the longer term.

However, the transcription and translation won’t happen on your device. Instead, the audio recording will be uploaded to Google’s servers – so you’ll need a decent Wi-Fi connection or solid data package, as well as a willingness to share the audio with Google, to use this tool. 

Google didn’t say when the feature would arrive. 

The Google Translate tool was unveiled as part of a showcase of Google’s AI projects at its San Francisco office, which also included a neural network used to track and monitor whales using underwater microphones, which is now being used in Canada.  

“With this information, marine mammal managers can monitor and treat whales that are injured, sick or distressed,” said Julie Cattiau, product manager for Google AI, in a blog post. “In case of an oil spill, the detection system can allow experts to locate the animals and use specialised equipment to alter the direction of travel of the orcas to prevent exposure.” 

That machine-learning system was trained on 1,800 hours of underwater audio recordings that were labelled and supplied by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

The AI demonstrations come a week after Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a column urging sensible regulation of artificial intelligence to avoid misuse of the technology. 

Google is reportedly gearing up to take on Slack and Microsoft Teams with its own business communications app.

The app will combine its raft of G Suite services, including Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, into a single mobile entity, according to The Information, which cites two people who have used it.

A prototype of the app is currently being tested internally at Google, with the CEO of its cloud division, Thomas Kurian, reportedly sharing details about the project with cloud salespeople and business partners.

The tech giant announced a range of AI and communication-based features at its Cloud Next conference in November, including voice assistant capabilities for parts of G Suite, smart compose functions for Google Docs and a new video chat feature on Gmail.

More recently, it demonstrated a real-time translation feature for Android that will allow users to hear one language and read it in another. 

If the reports are true, the new comms app could see Google in the middle of Slack and Microsoft’s on-going battle for business communications.

Microsoft Teams is currently the more popular service with 13 million active users, according to figures released in July 2019. However, the numbers are boosted by companies using Office 365, of which teams is an integral part. It’s worth noting that Google’s rumoured new app is said to be part of its G Suite service and so could fulfil a similar role.

Slack is also hugely popular, particularly with startups, where it has 10 million daily users according to the latest figures. Despite falling behind Microsoft Teams, the company has called out the tech giant on a few occasions.

In November, Slack tweeted a video suggesting a Teams advert had copied one of its own and captioned the tweet “ok boomer”. The company’s CEO Stewart Butterfield has also criticised Microsoft for its “surprisingly unsportsmanlike” behaviour bundling Teams into Office 365.

Cisco’s flagship collaboration suite, WebEx Meetings, will introduce a voice assistant alongside transcription and translation tools to help customers mine insights from the voice data collected by the platform.

The added tools, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), will allow teams using the platform to streamline the entire meetings process, from automating aspects like minute-taking, and recording actionable items.

In addition to an Alexa-like voice assistant, real-time transcription tools will combine with advanced analytics so businesses can derive insights from the voice data that’s collected internally during all meetings.

This technology, which Cisco adopted following its Voicea acquisition in September last year, generates a word cloud following each meeting, and automates clips and videos that can serve as packaged highlights. The system, moreover, can be trained to learn corporate taxonomy specific to each business.

“Voicea users have reported saving more than six hours per week per user with more actionable and efficient meetings, and we believe Webex users will experience similar results,” said VP and GM for team collaboration at Cisco, Sri Srinivasan.

“We’re excited to bring this and other cognitive features to the 300 million users we already serve with Cisco Collaboration. This technology will fundamentally change how we are able to deliver massively personalised experiences and transform the way we work.”

The company says the added automation, particularly on action points and highlights that can be distributed to absentees or attendees to serve as reminders, will lead to more productive meetings overall. The engine can also determine information such as what the meeting was about and even the tone of the meeting.

The addition of aspects like live closed-captioning, meanwhile, will allow people to tune into meetings remotely while they’re in busy or noisy environments. All users, meanwhile, will be able to read back through a transcript that’s automatically generated to recap on certain points and even search this for particular information.

Cisco’s Webex assistant and voice tools feed into the company’s idea of “cognitive collaboration”, which essentially amounts to giving customers the right information, at the right time and in the right context. This is, as the company sees it, paramount to giving businesses the ability to gain insights from a new pool of data that’s been relatively untapped.

“We think of transcription and the capabilities around it … as the next frontier as information as a currency,” Srinivasan added. “It is the next data quorum – the largest data quorum – that we can create at Cisco collaboration.

“And when you think about 300 million users across calling, across meetings, starting to bring this information forward, we are able to bring that information – that data – and convert that into information. So there’s a number of capability sets that come; for example, analytics at the end of the meeting.”

The firm also moved to quash any concerns from businesses over whether Cisco might itself gather their voice data, suggesting that users can set their own privacy controls, and that all its services are GDPR-compliant. All data is also end-to-end encrypted, which customers can either manage themselves or give Cisco the keys to.

Avast has been caught up in yet another privacy scandal, with a joint investigation by PC Mag and Motherboard revealing the extent to which the security firm is collecting user browser histories and selling the data on to third parties. 

Last year, Avast browser extensions were spotted collecting browsing data to sell to advertising firms, sparking Chrome, Opera and Firefox to pull the add-ons from their marketplaces, though some have since returned.

Avast said at the time that it removed any identifying information from the browsing history. The PC Mag and Motherboard investigation suggested it’s possible to re-identify that data once it’s in the hands of marketers. 

The investigation revealed that Avast sells the collected data via its Jumpshot division to third parties such as marketing companies. The browsing history being collected includes every click, keyword search, and entered URLs, harvested not only from browser extensions but also from users of Avast’s free antivirus software. 

The collected data is “de-identified” by stripping out personal details, and tagged with an identifying code. However, research casts doubt on whether any large sample of user data can be truly anonymised. Jumpshot’s data does not directly identify any specific individual, but when it is combined with other data, it’s simple to see who is clicking what, the investigation claims. 

For example, if a data harvesting company or marketer bought data from Avast and also from a website you’re logged into (for example Amazon), the information provided would make it possible to link the Avast data to your Amazon account, therefore revealing your identity, and tying it to your entire browsing history. The data seen by the investigators includes searches, GPS coordinates on maps, visits to social media accounts, and even what video was watched on a porn site. 

The investigation showed Jumpshot was selling that data to companies that aggregate such information, with customers buying access to that “all clicks feed” for millions of dollars. 

Avast stopped sharing such data collected via extensions after the revelations last year, and in July 2019 started asking users for permission before sharing their browsing data with Jumpshot. It will now also ask all existing users of its free antivirus to opt-in to data sharing in February. 

An Avast spokesperson said the company stopped sharing browser extension data with Jumpshot in December, only using collected information for core security tasks.

“We ensure that Jumpshot does not acquire personal identification information, including name, email address or contact details,” the spokesperson added.

Avast also noted that users have always had the ability to opt out of such data sharing: “As of July 2019, we had already begun implementing an explicit opt-in choice for all new downloads of our AV, and we are now also prompting our existing free users to make an opt-in or opt-out choice, a process which will be completed in February 2020.”

The spokesperson added: “We have a long track record of protecting users’ devices and data against malware, and we understand and take seriously the responsibility to balance user privacy with the necessary use of data for our core security products.”

This isn’t the first data privacy scandal to hit Avast: in 2018, Avast pulled an update to its CCleaner tool over data collection concerns. 

The shift to the cloud is encouraging enterprises to rethink their options on storage. According to a June 2019 study from IHS Markit, 56% of organisations said they plan to increase investment in object storage, putting it ahead of unified storage at 51%, storage-area networks at 48% and network-attached storage at 36%. Most object storage is in the cloud, with popular examples including AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Storage.

But shifting to a new storage architecture at the same time as the cloud move is not entirely painless.

At the beginning of the decade, Moneysupermarket.com, the consumer online comparison and information site for financial services, was using a combination of SQL databases and SAS analytics environment. By 2014, it had moved to AWS for website hosting and data analytics, including use of S3 object storage and Vertica data warehouse. By May 2019, it moved its data and analytics to GCP using the BigQuery data warehouse and Cloud Storage object storage. The website itself remains on AWS.

Harvinder Atwal, Chief Data Officer at MoneySuperMarket, tells Cloud Pro: “One of the good things about the cloud is the initial learning curve is very shallow: it’s easy to start. But then you get to the point where it’s very much steeper and you need to understand some of the complexities involved.”

One example of those complexities is the introduction of object lifecycle policies. The idea is to define policies to manage objects throughout the time the organisation needs them. That might be to move them to cheap long-term storage such as AWS Glacier or to expire them all together. Getting these rules right from the outset can save costs.

“That’s one of the things that maybe we should put a little more effort into from the very beginning,” Atwal says.

Other advice for those moving to object storage in the cloud includes avoiding biting off more than the team can chew.

“I would not do the migration all in one go,” Atwal says. “I think the bigger project and the more money and resources it uses, the more likely it is to fail. I would encourage people to think of their use case and application and build a minimal viable product around that.”

It’s worth getting advice about the transition from independent third parties, which the cloud platform vendors can recommend. For example, Moneysupermarket.com used a consultancy called DataTonic with its transition to Google Cloud Platform.

Lastly, there can be a cultural change in store for the IT department, Atwal says. “The IT function can be very traditional in its thinking around how you use data. They think you must cleanse it, put it into a relational schema and only then can users access it. But with data today, the value in analytics comes from actually being able to use data for many sources and join them together, and IT has to learn to ditch its historic mindsets.”

Nasdaq, the tech stock market, began working with AWS in 2012. It stores market, trade and risk data on the platform using S3 and Glacier. It uploads raw data to Amazon S3 throughout the trading day, using a separate system running in the cloud, converts raw data into Parquet files and places them in their final S3 location. This way, the system is able to elastically scale to meet the demands of market fluctuations. It also uses Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query data to support billing and reporting, and Presto and Spark on Elastic MapReduce (EMR) or Athena for analytics and research.

“Migrating to Amazon S3 as the ‘source of truth’ means we’re able to scale data ingest as needed as well as scale the read side using separate query clusters for transparent billing to internal business units,” says Nate Sammons, assistant vice president and lead cloud architect at Nasdaq.

But getting the scale of analytics solutions right for the problem has been a challenge, he says. “We currently operate one of the largest Redshift clusters anywhere, but it’s soon to be retired in favour of smaller purpose-specific clusters. Some of the custom technologies we developed [in the early days] have since been retired as cloud services have matured. Had technologies like Amazon Redshift Spectrum existed when we started, we would have gone straight to Amazon S3 to start with, but that was not an option.”

The advantage of using S3, though, was that it made the organisation less concerned about individual machine outages or data centre failures, Sammons says. “If one of the Amazon Redshift Spectrum query clusters fail, we can just start another one in its place without losing data. We don’t have to do any cluster re-sizing and we don’t require any CPU activity on the query clusters to do data ingest.”

Rahul Gupta, IT transformation expert at PA Consulting, says those exploiting object storage in the cloud should know that apparent scalability and elasticity does not remove the need to do some basic housekeeping on data.

“A lot of people feel storage is cheap, so they build systems with vast amounts of data and think the impact on cost is not that great. They push the data into S3, or an equivalent, and then once it’s in there, they feel that they can impose structure on the data, which is not the right thing to do,” he says.

He says that by understanding data structure upfront and creating governance such as role-based access, organisations will not have to revisit the architecture once the data grows.

Just because so many organisations are moving storage to the cloud, does not mean they all get the same value from the transition. The considerable investment cloud infrastructure, storage and analytics application will offer the greatest returns to those who understand the storage lifecycle upfront, create some governance rules around access and understand data structure from the outset.

The NHS has migrated two of its national services to the cloud, hoping to cut costs while improving security and efficiency of services.

The NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) and NHS 111 Directory of Services (DoS) are the first major NHS systems to make the migration under the government’s cloud-first policy, with both using AWS.

The aim is to cut costs at both services, but there are other benefits, says Neil Bennett, director of services at NHS Digital. “Costs are lowered, reducing pressure on the public purse, there is better security and reliability, as well as greater flexibility, performance, scalability and availability, to name a few,” he said.

The e-RS is a booking service that handles 18 million referrals annually, letting patients from more than 1,100 GP practices choose clinics, hospitals and dates and times for appointments. It’s now enabled for booking and managing such appointments via the internet, but that won’t be available until later this year when NHS Identity takes over authentication, the NHS said in a statement.

The DoS helps connect patients to the appropriate service for the health concerns, helping relieve pressure on urgent and emergency care. It handles 16 million searches annually.

Migrating such important services without disrupting patient care was key, explained Bennett: “This was a tremendous collaborative effort across many different teams here and with external partners, to migrate such large systems with a minimum of disruption to users, in a reasonably short timescale.” 

Alongside cutting costs and improving services for patients, the migration to cloud is a key part of the NHS’ sustainability strategy, said Ben Tongue, sustainability manager at NHS Digital.

“Large cloud operators like AWS provide significant energy and carbon savings against enterprise and legacy systems,” he said. “We are working with AWS to achieve full transparency on the energy use and carbon impact of the contract, so that we can continue to focus on ensuring that our storage systems are as energy efficient as possible, reducing carbon emissions and minimising environmental impact.”

Last year, the NHS unveiled a cloud framework to simplify procurement, hoping to help migrate more services as part of the government’s cloud-first policy. Patient records stored by EMIS are already making the shift to AWS, while Barts Health NHS Trust is moving its IT estate to the cloud via Capgemini, but research suggests many NHS trusts remain wary of the cloud.